What was this video, at the Science or Natural History Museum?

I'm trying to remember / find info about a short video that was part of an exhibition at either the Science Museum or the Natural History Museum in London. It would have been somewhere between 1985 and 1995 I think. It had a woman dressed and painted as an alien (she had deeley bopper type things on her head) and she spoke a piece to the camera, addressing the viewer in her alien language, aka incomprehensible gibberish.

Moments later she repeated the exercise but this time she accompanied the piece with gestures, pointing to things and of course suddenly the spoken text made perfect sense. The viewer now knew her name, how to greet people and how to count to three (she had 3 deeley boppers and pointed to each 'one', 'two', 'three' in her language). 

I don't remember spotting the phrase "comprehensible input" in the video or accompanying text but that must have been what the exhibit was about, something I realised later when watching an interesting video about the topic as it applies to language acquisition (subconsciously, naturally) as opposed to learning (conscious effort / rote learning). 

Small children learn language by surmising meaning from sentences - in general they're not taught explicitly that X represents or means Y or how tenses work. Their brains can work out the underlying relationships between words, tenses and meanings from the information they're given, reinforced by repetition and variety.

Anyone who has no idea what a 'cow' is could work it out from someone pointing at some and saying "Look, cows".  

I think the alien was called 'Mim' and that she called her deeley boppers something like flumes or flunes but I can't remember anything else. She might have used 'Borag Thungg!' as 'hello' - but at the time I didn't know that that phrase came from Tharg the Mighty and it's possible I'm mis-remembering that.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

 

What is all this crap Google adds to my search URLs?

I am a habitual URL hacker* - tinkering with the bits in a web address to try and find a page that I want. For example if I'm on website.com/section/interestingpage.html I might prune off the bit at the end and see if there's anything at website.com/section - it's often brought up loads of great stuff (not always, sometimes you don't get permission to view intermediate bits).

Whenever I run a search on Google and share the results with someone else I've noticed that I always paste the results URL into notepad and clip off all the stuff at the end that appears to be completely irrelevant to the search. I've only just started noticing that I do this although I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. I do it for everything though - if I'm sharing a link to an article on a news site and it has a bit at the end that mentions the referrer link (something like utm=twitter I think) then I prune that out too. I'm not exactly sure why, unless it turns out that I'm a purist and only want to share the minimum of alphanumerics needed to direct someone to the right page on a site.

The URL clipping itself is the work of seconds as I always have a notepad document open for that sort of thing and use keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste and Alt+Tab to ping into the notepad window.

I've just searched on my work website for info about 'diabetes networks' using this exact search:
site:www.diabetes.org.uk "diabetes networks" - the site: bit means it just searches within our website and the bit in "" marks means it searches that exact phrase.

Wanting to send the results to someone else I copy the URL from the address bar and, as always, note with surprise the random string added to the end - what is all this guff that Google adds to my search string?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.diabetes.org.uk+%22diabetes+networks%22&oq=site%3Awww.diabetes.org.uk+%22diabetes+networks%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=337562l337562l0l337807l1l1l0l0l0l0l87l87l1l1l0&gs_l=serp.3...337562l337562l0l337807l1l1l0l0l0l0l87l87l1l1l0.frgbld.


The URL above contains a duplicate of the search string (in dark red) and a whole load of apparently non-contributing filler (in green).

Deleting all of that pares it back to this much smaller web address: https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.diabetes.org.uk+%22diabetes+networks%22 - which works fine. The %22 is the way web addresses render ", so you need to keep those (%3A = : - the colon between site and www).

The aqi / aql / gs_sm stuff is occasionally useful - if you click on the image search for example, you're given in return an address that looks a bit like this and removing these bits of text from the URL just resets it to the regular web search (meaning if you send the amended link to someone else they'll just see the regular results, not the image results).

But what do all those numbers and letters in green mean?

*solely for benign purposes!