Search This Blog

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Rocket Science

The brilliant web comic XKCD explains the Saturn V heavy-lift rocket, using only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language. Besides being funny, it's not a bad approximation of the challenges inherent in communicating in Chinook wawa (which functionally has only about 500 words), and it's also a surprisingly good tutorial on basic rocket design. Not sure how he derived "up goer" for the Roman god Saturn; probably "time god" or "time lord" would have been better, but then it might have been mistaken for a tardis.

No comments:

Post a Comment