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* What's a good BlaBla Meter result?

High-quality journalistic texts are usually in the range of 0.1 and 0.3

* Are there any texts with an indexof 0.0?

This is rare, but occurs. Too low of an index is rather suspicious though, and might also indicate stilistical deficits.

* What is the highest index value?

Thile the BlaBla Meter was designed for index values between 0 and 1, but in rare cases the scale can be exceeded. The highest measured values so far have been over 2.0 even.

* Does Google use a similar algorithm?

We don't know, but if we were Google, we'd probably try! Our samples for highly competitive search terms show that highly ranked sites often show good index values.

* How does BlaBla Meter work?

BlaBla meter checks texts for various linguistic traits, e.g. it checks for exceeding use of Nominalstil[1]. In addition, the text is checked for various phrases [buzzwords] with a certain weighting. We don't want to reveal the secrets though ;)

[1] Heavy use of "nominal style" is a German particularity. You can replace most verbs by nouns, adding suffixes like '-ion' or '-age', and transform the sentence into passive. This is often found in legal texts, where the author doesn't want to appear as a suject.

* Why does my scientific text have such a high index?

Nominalstil has crept into scientific language at large. This often serves to 'beat around the bush' - in this regard, there are analogies to typical PR tongue.

* My mindless text gets a good score, why?

BlaBla Meter can't really understand the topic, it looks after linguistic traits. While rainbow press can be attributed all kinds of substantial weaknesses, their language is usually short and concise.

* My text is wrongly devalued!

As every computer algorithm, BlaBla Meter might be at fault - in doubt, human beings must decide of course. Generally the hit rate is quite large, so you should usually tweak the wording upon receiving high indices.

* But humans read texts completely differently ...

When BlaBla Meter crys havoc, one can usually assume that a human reader is alerted too. People are trained every day to tell authentic messages from artifical advertising messages - it'd be naive to belive they couldn't!

* What happens with entered texts?

Texts are private matter of course, and are neither saved nor processed in any way or shape.


One of my blog posts got a .16 so you have my seal of approval ;-)


I am not involved with them by any means.

Yeah, personally I also score around .16 to .18 on my internet texts. Long papers get around 0.2, so I'm probably losing momentum after the fourth page :-/


As far as I know 1920x1200 does not require DL-DVI; normal DVI should be sufficient.


You are right... Moreover I see now there are motherboards with display port :)


So I'm European and everything, and not so much used to credit cards everywhere ... but is it really so hard to pay cash for a day?


Not really, but you have to estimate how much cash you'll need. You also run the risk of that cash being stolen.


And there's also the convenience thing of not having to withdraw in advance


It won't go bad after this day.. (but theft is a valid point)


If you don't live in the UK, having a fistful of sterling when you get home is not really the ideal situation. It's not far from it going bad, in a sense.


Ah, yes, if you go home the next day.. good point.


For values of "going bad" approaching "losing 2-4% of its value." The horror.


Well yes, but you have to go to a bank and exchange it, and they do their best to charge more - the last time I asked about selling €50, the bank wanted a $5 fee...

Anyway, it seems reasonable to me that people might want to avoid that when they have a perfectly good Mastercard which has always worked in the past.


So what's the percentage where it's acceptable to be truly annoyed at Visa?


13.7%.

I was responding to the "going bad" claim.


It really depends on the currency. The odds of Euros, say, going "bad" on a scale of months to years are fairly nonzero. Similar for currencies with high inflation rates.


You're not supposed to hang on to it for years. Surely you have to pay for transportation to the airport at least?


That depends. The last international flight I took, I walked to the airport in the origination country. ;)


Where was that? Here you're lucky if the airport is closer than 50km.


Toronto City Airport, in my case.

But yes, it's not a common situation.


When you don't have cash on your person? Yes, it is.


I had the impression that the whole "control" room was nothing but show. Estimating the travelling times of a radio wave, nobody on earth could have had any control about the spacecraft, and none of the engineers in the control room could have done anything other than watch.

So if anybody is more involved into the mission than I am ... is my impression correct, or were there actual fallback mechanisms that these people could have decided upon?


What did you expect them to do? Go home and go to sleep and come back in the morning to check the logs? Come on. They'd hardly close their eyes for a second with all the excitement.

They're all there monitoring the various systems because they're all responsible for various components of an incredibly complex piece of equipment.

Assuming the landing goes well, they all still need to be there to continually monitor the operation of the systems they're responsible for and provide feedback if things don't like how they expected - it's not just about landing there.

This is normal even when releasing a tiny piece of software; it's hardly surprising NASA do the same for a multi-billion dollar project.


For the landing process, they were watching it unfold automatically and irreversibly on the 14-minute relativistic delay, just like us.

But I don't think that means their assembly there was "just for show". That's the best place to see every detail of how well things matched plans: to see discrepancies, in context and with collaborating peers, as soon as possible.

And now that it's down, there could be info that requires adaptive action. Even though interpreting such new data, devising a plan, and sending instructions would take hours or days, it's still a "control" function, just a slow and deliberate one.


It was acknowledged that they didn't have any direct control over the landing. However, there's lots of work to be done immediately after and most obviously, it's incredibly exciting to see the data as soon as it is available and to know that years and years of hard work executed successfully.

Additionally, watching a room full of engineers "do their thing" does a lot to get the average layman excited about the research and science and may get schoolkids excited about the possibilities of space travel, STEM, etc.


They committed ("non-reversible changes" on the livestream) to the landing about 20, 30 minutes prior to entry.


Ugh. If you've ever worked on a project with more than 1 person, you'd understand why... it's about the team and the work they'd done over the last few years. Even if they had no direct "joystick" control over the procedure, there was plenty of work happening immediately after the landing. I'm sure most of those people didn't have to actually be there for that work, but anybody working on the project wants to be there...


EDL is scripted, but there has been activity before tonight, and as another poster said, there is activity after landing. As the cruise phase comes to an end, there have been more and more tweaks to get the landing ellipse as tight as possible. In addition, there are system checkouts, and coordination of the orbiters that relay telemetry, in advance of the landing. It was not at all certain that the images could be produced right away.


They made it very clear in the press conferences earlier in the day that they have no more control during EDL than the viewer watching it at home.

I don't think the control room was "nothing but show." They certainly could have all gone home, but given the time and energy invested in this mission over the last decade, It was importent to monitor the event as it happened even if it cannot be controlled.


I think they were there in case of problems. Plus the post landing checklist, which they are doing now.


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