If at first you don't succeed, revise your definition of success

[j4]

This was emailed to webmaster:

I'm a sudanees man graduated from sudan
university of scince and technology department
aircraft engineering deploma. My dream is
travelling by high speeds throug glaxies, and my
idea by using protons. the problem here in sudan
i can not try my idea so i hope to help me please
and sory for my bad languege.

We didn't reply, of course. We then got a followup email (quoting the RT ticket number that the original message had been allocated, which is more than most users manage) from the same person two days later:

In fact it's not faster than light, but it may be more than 10,000Km/s.

Comments

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll try to show you where I'm coming from. If you look closely at his grammar, it indicates someone who is translating from Arabic to English in his head - he isn't operating in English as second language, he's speaking English as a foreign language. He says he's an engineer which may mean that he's not very good at languages in the first place.

Secondly, if you research the University he says he comes from (which I had heard of before), you come up with this (http://www.sustech.edu/). This is similar to the sort of University that my dad had a hand in creating in the Arabic world, and is a reputable place. It teaches in Arabic, mostly, and in the engineering departments while they may access English text books, mostly they'll be following numbers and engineering speak, so he wouldn't have learnt any more English there. If you look at the introductory wotsit to the college of engineering, here (http://www.sustech.edu/faculty_en/index.php?coll_no=9&chk=a7b751cd18a66f8cd84b301f24267aab), you'll see that the English style is similar. I haven't tracked down the department in the engineering department that offers an aircraft engineering qualification, but given the shaky command of English shown in the rest of the post it may well be that what he means by diploma is 'degree'.

So, if he is not lying about his qualifications, he comes from a reputable institution, if not a rich one.

I suspect that he may actually be asking about how he could apply to study further in Oxford or Cambridge, because he has this, as you say, 'crazy' idea that just isn't being pursued in Sudan because they have, well, more pressing problems to deal with.

And actually, it's not necessarily a crazy idea. I mean, he's not saying 'travel at high speeds through galaxies using the power of thought', for example, and a plasma fusion drive (which would involve protons) is certainly not something totally crazy (only of course we have no way of holding the plasma, which is a big problem, but energy release involving protons is certainly something that engineers and scientists would like to crack).

He's got a computer, so he could certainly have looked this next bit up for himself, if that's what he wants, so that's a negative, but he needs to go talk to the British Council about ways that he could apply to study in England, at Oxford, that University he has heard so much about.

So send him here (http://www.britishcouncil.org/africa-chevening.htm) and suggest that he goes talks to someone in the British council about what he needs to do to get one of these scholarships.