Patrick, I have a question arising from your column:

Why do you keep lying to us and insisting that airline pilots are highly trained professionals who are fiercely devoted to maintaining the safety of their passengers?

Actually, that's not my question - though I would suggest to some of your readers to dislodge their heads from their personal colonoscopies long enough to ask themselves why they are under such an impression.

In any case, my question is regarding cabin pressure. You say that cabin pressure is maintained in flight at an equivalent of between 5,000 and 7,000 feet above sea level. In the unlikely event that this is true, and not part of your grand scheme to deceive the public into the mistaken belief that flying is based on an extraordinary amount of science and engineering, how is cabin pressure dealt with when flying in and out of high altitude airports? For example, if the plane were pressurized to 7,000 feet for most of the journey to La Paz, and then it landed at the airport there at 13,325 ft. above sea level, when do you change the interior pressure to match the mountain air?

As always, keep up the good work.

DLF is absolutely right, the place where the interview broke down was when the English-speaking interviewer asked whether Obama's grandmother was "present" when he was born.

In Swahili (which was used for part of the translations, and was spoken by the grandmother when she is audible on the tape), you would ask some version of the phrase, "Ulikuweko alipozaliwa?" - were you there when he was born? The problem is that *there* or *present* is completely ambiguous in this sentence - were you there in Kenya? were you there in Hawaii? were you there in the room? were you there on Planet Earth?

A good translator would have phrased the question differently in order to elicit a specific answer - which is what occurs moments later in the conversation. This is the transcript and my translation of what is said, starting about 5:20. (Bits are inaudible due to microphone noise that I think is on the US end of the conversation based on the relative volume.)

Man: "Anauliza aki(inaudible)... kijana huyu miaka mingi sana (inaudible) kumlea anauliza aki, anataka historia kidogo kwake. Wakati alizaliwa, alizaliwa..." [He asks if (inaudible)... this young man many years ago (inaudible) to raise him asks if, he wants a short history of his. When he was born, he was born...]

Grandmother says something in the background that I can't pick up.

Man, reporting what the grandmother said: "Alizaliwa Marekani." [He was born in America.]

English speaking man: "Ooohh! Yeah, no, Obama was not born in Mombasa, he was born in America."

It's also worth noting that the original question, "Was she present when Obama was born," was not translated and posed to the grandmother - it was answered immediately by the English speaker on the line, who waded right into the ambiguous issue of "present" (in Kenya, at the birth, or on the planet). It was only when the section that I've transcribed and translated above occurs that the question was posed to the grandmother, and it is at that moment, when she finally has the chance to understand what specifically is being asked, that she answers in no uncertain terms.

For what it's worth, my day job involves creating dictionary and learning resources for African languages, including Swahili, at kamusi.org.