regards,
mcduck

I've often wondered why South America isn't more represented. I've been to Lima, Peru and Santiago, Chile. Both are urban cities/regions of millions to tens of millions of people. They're smart people too. They take Algebra in high school, Calculus in college. At least the ones I know. Why is such a large group of people so uninterested in space flight?

I'm from South America and I know we aren't many. I'm exactly from Brazil (you can see me in the world map ).
We brazilians have an yahoo group with 26 members and a orkut group with 24 members. There're only 9 brazilians in the world map.

So just about 37.5% of the brazilians are in the world map. I have good reasons to think that there're more than 26 brazilians playing with Orbiter, because some of then doesn't like orkut and yahoo groups, or even don't know about them.

I expect about 50 brazilians at all.

Now, aswering your question. I think the main problem in Brazil (I can't talk about the other south america's countries) isn't the space flight, but the "default" english language. We're highly influenced by the spanish language, because we're surrounded for countries that speaks spanish. Just Brazil speaks portuguese. It makes our language aproach to the spanish language every day. Conclusion: We can understand spanish without need to study it. I can talk to a spanish without have ever studied it, and the spanish problably will understand me. I speaking in portuguese, and he in spanish, but we'll understand each other. (However it's harder to a spanish speaker understand our portuguese, than the brazilians understand spanish). But it doesn't mean that our portuguese is very diferent from the Portugal's portuguese. The written form is practically the same, just the accent is diferent (and some words changed).

English is very diferent from our language, and it makes it harder to a brazilian. The fact that english has a "free" (too free I think) pronounce to a given written form makes it even harder.

For example, the words "boot", "book", "blood" and "brooch" have the "oo" with 4 different sounds. In portuguese, we don't have "oo" just "o" and only 2 sounds for it. But the 2 sounds can be differentiated because of the accentuation ("ô" and "ó") (if you can't see the accent, change to unicode, it may work).

English has about half phonetic symbols per unit of meaning than portuguese. It means our words are bigger. We talk more to say the same thing, but if we miss a sound because of noise or something we can still understand.
Its like a redundant language (like the reduntant system of spacecrafts to avoid problems :D).

In portuguese a syllable has just a few, or even none, sound. For example, "comer". There're 2 sounds for "o" and 2 sounds for "a" so we can read this word in 4 ways. But, knowing that closed pronounciation is the standard one (without need to accent) we know that there's just one pronounciation. Consonants have always just one sound. (exeption: h at the start of a word isn't speaked).

Conclusion: Lot's of amateurs astronomers just don't know english.

Conclusion 2: It's the post that I most spended time written it. Almost 1 hour I think! I needed to find some numeric data to make it more precise.

Of course, there're other problems, like the price of a computer. It's too expensive here, but it's not because we don't like spaceflight .

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-**MentePC**-
Still a Newbie. Member since February 2005.

Just so you would know the japanese language is called "nihongo"

Hehe yeah, i guess there are many more people using orbiter, but they havnt added themselves to the map. I would love to know someone from Puerto Rico that uses it..

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Visit my Orbiter cockpit project page: http://www.angelfire.com/planet/orbitsim/Home.html

Last updated: November 12, 2006

How do I add myself to the map?

edit: nevermind, found it (it's getting late )

edit2: now I added myself, but I'm not on the map? (I'm in moscow, and the name bar should be in location 5, to the left of my dot)

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http://nowarforisrael.com/

yeah, i just tried to add a dot on Moscow and ended up somewhere in Phillipine sea =\ and Artlav got put somewhere by Omsk... something is definitely off about it.

i would suggest trying to manually adjust the dot coordinates in the appropriate fields, and give it a few previews before you confirm it for good

ps мне вот интересно, для кого ты этот стишок в подпись повесил?

pps


you mean, like separate wards for loonies of feather?

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...we move in space with minimum waste, and maximum joy... (Sade)

да это-то я понял. только тех кто его сможет прочитать, на этом сайте можно пересчитать по пальцам. вот мне и интересно. написал бы просто большими буквами - РАШЕН ПАТРИОТ... а то гимн александрова... не поймет ведь никто, не оценит... впрочем твое дело конечно

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...we move in space with minimum waste, and maximum joy... (Sade)

it serves its purpose better, i would say

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...we move in space with minimum waste, and maximum joy... (Sade)

Personally I think that would be a terrible idea, half the people wouldn't be able to understand the other half and we'd all end up annoyed at it. Also, if you start asking Orbiter questions in, say, Russian, you are limiting the number of people who can respond - but if you ask in English (even if you aren't very good at English) you will likely be understood and responded to fairly quickly.