According to Colwell

With a daughter who has read each book in the Harry Potter at least five times each and has versions in both Latin and Greek, it is remarkable that it took more than two weeks for me to get to the latest movie in the series. I read book 5 when it came out, and it was my least favorite of the series. My recollection of the book was that there were several hundred pages of Harry being harrassed at school while all the action took place elsewhere, followed by a rousing battle in the last hundred pages or so. I liked the movie significantly more than the book. The pace was fast, and I found the smear campaign of the Ministry of Magic against Harry more convincing in the movie than in the book. This was the only Harry Potter movie thus far that I actually wish had been longer, and it was indeed the shortest one so far. Harry’s romance with Cho is left hanging when a short scene would have resolved things and brought the movie’s treatment into line with that in the book. In addition, Snape’s role as a member of the Order of the Phoenix is not developed or explained to the point that it is in the book, where again a simple scene or even a few lines of dialog would have made things clearer. All in all, though I found the movie entertaining and engaging, and it got me interested in reviewing the series to date.

One of the benefits of living in Orlando is that we are only a 45-minute drive to Cocoa Beach and prime public viewing of launch sites at Kennedy Space Center and Canaveral Air Force Station. Our first opportunity (since moving back here; I witnessed many shuttle launches and a few Apollo launches in my first Florida life which ended in 1985) comes with the scheduled launch next week of the Phoenix mission to Mars. I have a couple of interests in the launch: the first is that it’s a cool mission in more ways than one. Phoenix’s destination is the northern polar region of Mars, around 70 degrees north latitude, where water and carbon dioxide ice intermingle with the martian soil. While not mobile, Phoenix will use a robotic arm to dig a few inches into the ground and examine samples of the soil for the content of ice and carbon compounds. The second is that for the few days after launch Phoenix will (deservedly) be getting the lion’s share of data downlink through the Deep Space Network as it gets set for cruise to Mars. That means other missions, like my personal favorite, Cassini, will have to make do with less data downlink. This is known and planned for, but what we don’t know is if Phoenix will launch on time or not. The last week or so, Cassini operations planners have been drawing up contingency plans for what observations will be cut in the event the launch of Phoenix is delayed by one, two, or three days.

At any rate, I’ve never seen a Delta II launch, and this one is before dawn, offering the prospect of a nice nighttime launch followed by sunrise over the Atlantic. Phoenix will arrive at Mars next May 25 and will proceed directly to landing, via the old-fashioned retro-rocket method instead of bouncy airbags. The nominal mission is 150 Martian days (similar to that of the rovers, which have far outlasted warranty, but are now suffering from dust deposition on their solar panels). Phoenix, at high northern latitudes, will have a hard time lasting much longer than advertised once Mars enters northern winter, although that won’t be until well into 2009.

Why did I go see this movie? It’s actually a long story, but one factor was advertising that made it look more like The Terminator than like a cartoon. The combination of cool special effects and a monumental battle between the forces of good and evil with some jive-talking 30 foot robots with names like Optimus Prime and an opening narrative that begins “Before time began, there was… the cube. We know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create worlds and fill them… with life. That is how our race was born.” I know not why Optimus Prime speaks like that, and I care not about the cube.

I thoroughly enjoyed this relatively simple animated picture from Pixar/Disney, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why. Perhaps, at the beginning of our preparations to move from Colorado to Orlando, a fun and engaging bit of escapism was the perfect prescription. In any event, I found the story of a rat that wants to be a chef consistently smile-inducing. The animation was strikingly three-dimensional and textured. I liked the compromise the movie took with the issue of a talking mouse: Remy the rat can read and understand people, but speaks rat-ish to his fellow rodents and cannot be understood by humans. This created a neat divide between the human world of Linguini, the incompetent would-be chef, and the rat world of Remy, the culinary rodent genius. I also felt like the movie didn’t follow all the standard plot devices for a kid’s movie: while there is a villain, his role is almost incidental. The main problem for Linguini and Remy is the obvious one of their circumstance: Remy is a rat.

The Cassini imaging team announced today the discovery of Saturn’s 60th known natural satellite (going along with the one man-made satellite). This little fellow, provisionally known as S/2007. That’s up from 18 known moons when Cassini was launched in October 1997. The moon is about 2 km in diameter and orbits between Mimas and Enceladus (and between the tiny moons Methone and Pallene discovered earlier in Cassini images). That is fairly close to the rings and raises anew the question of the lifetime of such small moons. The problem is that interplanetary meteoroids (small comets in this part of the solar system) would have a fairly easy time blasting such a small moon to smithereens. Based on estimates of the flux of such comets near Saturn, such moons would not be expected to survive longer than a tiny fraction of the age of the solar system. So, where are these small moons coming from? Or, are our estimates for the (so far unseen) small comets way too high? This moon is in a resonance with Mimas, making it likely that tidal forces caused its orbit to migrate to its present location from somewhere else. Perhaps this is a chunk off the old block, where the old block is one of the more massive nearby moons. If it is part of the debris of a disrupted moon, then we face the unsatisfying proposition of having to assume that we arrived on the scene at Saturn just in time to see these final few fragments. The more we see, the more questions we have.

An essential ingredient, in my view, to the success of a movie like Live Free or Die Hard, is the knowing wink at the audience that lets us know the movie isn’t taking itself too seriously. This is usually accomplished with the goofy sidekick, and when it works, it can transform an absurd movie (save “transform” and “absurd movie” for the next movie) into a fun romp. (An aside: one of the best wink-at-the-audience characters, though, was a main character (rather than a sidekick) in the person of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters who relentlessly made fun of the silliness around him, even as it threatened to kill him.) The sidekick in Live Free or Die Hard is played by Justin Long, famous for representing the Mac computer in Apple’s wickedly funny TV commercials, and for the most part he hits the right notes to go along with Bruce Willis’s tough-as-nails gritty New York City detective John McClane.

Once again, the so-called terrorists are actually just high-tech and deadly thieves. Somehow it is refreshing to face villains whose motive is as simple as greed, perhaps because we can relate to greed a little easier than the desire to transform the world back to the 7th century. This time around the evil mastermind conducts a “fire sale” attack on the entire country’s electronic and power grid, wreaking havoc with everything from traffic lights to the New York Stock Exchange. All of this is ultimately meant as a distraction for the big heist which McClane and Matt Farrell (Long), a hacker of sorts, are uniquely positioned to thwart. The movie has the cliche of the one supervisor smart enough to let McClane do his thing, surrounded by ignoramus higher-ups. It felt tired and was completely unnecessary. For once can’t all the law enforcers be reasonable and competent? Being so doesn’t mean they will automatically beat the bad guys, after all. For the big stunts I happily suspended disbelief until a fighter jet hovered like a helicopter and maneuvered between two levels of an interstate interchange. But for the most part I found this an enjoyable romp.

Here we are, at the Panera in Orlando near UCF checking e-mail because our DSL modem got fried by the daily lightning storm within the first hour. Another should arrive tomorrow. The weekend was spent unpacking a tiny fraction of an unreasonably large number of boxes. Movie reviews of Live Free or Die Hard (liked it: a guilty pleasure), Ratatouille (liked it surprisingly much), and Transformers (um, whatever) coming shortly. Unfortunately too many things to do with unpacking and with finishing a proposal due this Thursday to post much more at the moment. I feel like we’re just now getting plugged back into the world after two weeks in a strange sort of limbo.

The Bad Astronomer had a link to this cool illusion. Interestingly, I have a very hard time seeing her spin clockwise, while the description on the site indicates that it is usually the other way around.

Today is the first day of our last week in Boulder before making the cross-country trek to Orlando for my new job at the University of Central Florida’s Physics Department. With two dogs and a cat making the trip with us, we’re going on the road. Internet connectivity may be sparse for the next 10-12 days.

It’s hard for me to believe that Cassini’s four year nominal mission is three-fourths completed, but exactly three years ago today I was hosting a packed house at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics to witness the successful arrival of Cassini into orbit around Saturn. The Cassini web site at JPL has a slide show of the highlights of the third year in orbit, and lo and behold my own false-color rendition of the rings from our stellar occultation data is featured in the show. Go here to see the link to the slide show, and here for the picture. Speaking of occultations, our final stellar occultation of the rings of the current phase of the mission was successfully completed last week and we now have a break until early next year to digest and analyze the data we have on the ground.