Posted 10/02/2006 05:44:00 PM by Douglas

For those of you on the edge of your seats as to whether or not Neil Armstrong's first words spoken on the surface of the moon on GMT 02:56:15 July 21, 1969 were, in fact, inspiring, you can sleep easy tonight.

Now, after almost four decades, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert has rediscovered the missing “a” in Mr Armstrong’s famous quote. Peter Shann Ford ran the Nasa recording through sound-editing software and clearly picked up an acoustic wave from the word “a”, finding that Mr Armstrong spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds — ten times too fast for it to be audible.

Mr Ford’s findings have been presented to Nasa officials in Washington and to a relieved Mr Armstrong, who issued a statement saying: “I find the technology interesting and useful. I also find his conclusion persuasive.”

I can't beat Althouse on this one:

Now, if somebody could figure out some halfway plausible method of establishing the absence of "ein" in President Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner," we could finally be free of the indefinite article problems of the 1960s.

If only the greatest problems of the 1960's could be redressed by historical revision of the indefinite article.