According to Colwell

In this highly foreshortened view from Cassini, the moons Mimas and Epimetheus appear to loom over the rings. Mimas, the larger of the two, is in the foreground in this view. Its orbit around Saturn is tilted relative to the plane of the rings by one and a half degrees. While that’s a small angle, it’s the largest tilt or inclination of any of the inner moons of Saturn. As a result, Mimas’s gravity exerts perturbations on ring particles pulling them upward (or downward, depending on which side of the rings the Moon is on and which way you want to call up) out of the ring plane. These vertical perturbations are particularly strong at the location of vertical resonances where repeated perturbations add up in phase launching bending waves in the rings.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Click the picture to go to the Cassini imaging web site and see the picture in full resolution.

The outermost ring separate from the others is the F ring. This picture was taken from slightly above the ring plane, and the Sun is below the ring plane, so dusty rings like the F ring are particularly bright. The rest of the image shows the outer third or so of the A ring. Towards the very outer edge of the A ring is the narrow Keeler gap. The tiny moon Daphnis orbits within the Keeler gap and is barely visible together with ripples in the edge of the gap that it is producing that shows up as a bright arc. Further in is the broader Encke gap with two faint dust rings visible within it. The series of dark marks between the Encke gap and the edge of the A ring are density waves, mostly caused by the moons Pandora and Prometheus. Interior to the Encke gap (closer to Saturn) are two strong wave signatures. The outer one is a density wave and the inner one is the Mimas 5:3 bending wave (I’m 95% sure - I haven’t measured the positions on this image exactly).

So. Beowulf, the medieval epic poem written in a precursor to English in the 10th century has been brought to the screen by Robert Zemeckis with a cutting-edge technology. Eschewing the combination of the live action and computer generated imagery that marks most science fiction and fantasy movies these days, Zemeckis uses the motion capture technique first showcased in Final Fantasy and The Polar Express where actors performances are captured, digitized, and repainted in the purely digital realm of the rest of the movie. The juxtaposition of 21st century moviemaking technology against a 10th century poem is not as odd as it might seem given the fantastical nature Beowulf’s exploits in the poem. Beowulf’s epic battles against sea monsters and destruction of the creature Grendel defy realistic depiction. But then again, so does The Lord of the Rings, and they did pretty well using real actors. The most interesting aspect to me of the motion-capture animated actors in Beowulf is how immediately obvious it is that they are not images of real people. If you look at a still frame image of Beowulf, it is difficult if not impossible to identify any particular aspect of the images of the people that is not a perfect representation of a human. However, the faces are clearly not human faces. It says something about the remarkable ability of the human mind to identify real human faces and not be fooled by what appear to be perfect simulacra. The characters move jerkily and their contact with each other and with props does not have the heft of real people. I find it distracting and prefer to see actors rather than digital conversions of their performances.

So, after all that, how is the movie? It’s entertaining and has a lot of cool-looking stuff, though it’s not emotionally engaging at all.

Yesterday I attended a short speech given by former Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell at the University of Central Florida. Mitchell presented a scholarship to a UCF Engineering student and then gave a brief description of his career as an astronaut culminating in two 5-hour sojourns on the lunar surface as part of the Apollo 14 mission. Mitchell, with a Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Aeronautics and Astronautics, then expressed his concerns and hopes for the future of humanity: concerns that we will destroy ourselves as our technological capabilities advance faster than our sensibilities, and hopes that we will survive these dangers to continue exploration of the cosmos. They are good and noble sentiments, and I appreciate him expressing them and pointing out that when the Earth is viewed from afar, as only he and a handful of other men have done, national boundaries evaporate and the precarious and unique status of the Earth as home to all life becomes painfully clear.

In response to questions, Dr. Mitchell expressed that aliens have visited the Earth, and while he wasn’t explicit, implied that they are living among us and concealed from us by a vast cover-up. He also affirmed that he had successfully communicated through ESP while on the surface of the Moon and that quantum mechanics now explained how this could happen. And this brings me to the criticism from “Object Reporter” on my post a couple of days ago in which I expressed dismay in a new call for government-funded research into UFOs. Object Reporter says I am uninformed on the topic of UFOs and accuses me of spouting nonsense. I stand by my statement that aliens are the least probable explanation for UFO sightings. While it is physically possible for aliens from another planet to visit Earth, there is no compelling evidence that that has ever happened. And compelling evidence is required for such an extraordinary claim. It is an extraordinary claim because the amount of energy needed for interstellar travel is huge, and a visit to the Earth by aliens would represent a huge investment of resources. For them to make this investment and then hide, but hide poorly, does not make sense. They hide poorly because somehow, while they escape detection by the vast network of aircraft and spacecraft tracking systems as well as the vast majority of the population including people like me who would be thrilled to meet them, they apparently occasionally make themselves plainly visible to some casual observers. Other explanations are more likely because in the vast majority of UFO sightings, ordinary terrestrial explanations for those sightings have already been demonstrated to be the case. If one hundred UFO sightings are demonstrated to be due to weather balloons, military aircraft, meteors, ball lightning, camera flares and other mundane explanations, then it’s likely something like that is the explanation for the one hundred and first. The claim of evidence for extraterrestrials carries the burden of proof. I, happily, do not have the burden to debunk each UFO sighting, anymore than if I claim that there is an underground civilization on the Moon someone else has the burden to prove me wrong. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I would be thrilled by the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, but so far there is no evidence, and the most likely evidence we’ll get would be an extraterrestrial radio signal.

The idea of a vast cover-up is also extraordinary. Forget for the moment that it is difficult to imagine a motive for a cover-up. The power of people in government is always enhanced by engendering fear in the populace, and fear is presumably one consequence of discovering aliens. NASA has as its mission to look for life elsewhere in the universe, and nothing would boost its budget more than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, even microbial in form. In short, lots of people in government have a self-interest in seeing extraterrestrial life proven, not hidden. But the biggest problem I see with the cover-up idea is how consistently miserable people are at keeping secrets. The most powerful person on the planet, the President of the United States, could not even keep a hotel break-in secret or (in a different incarnation) oral sex. The idea that, for decades, hundreds or thousands of people in the military and government could hide the existence of alien visitors defies reason. As for Dr. Mitchell’s demonstration of ESP, James Randi has a million dollars waiting for anyone who can demonstrate ESP or other paranormal phenomena. No one has succeeded, and by the way quantum mechanics, which beautifully describes the behavior of electrons and atoms, offers no explanation for ESP. Finally, in response to the comment on my previous post that “I wasn’t aware that the three doctors, half a dozen ex-military officials and a former state governor were supposed to be taken lightly…”: it is the claims of these people that aliens are on Earth I take lightly because they do not meet the burden of proof. And by the way, George W. Bush is a former state governor, and I take almost everything he says lightly. It’s the only way to avoid depression. Live long and prosper.

When I was a kid and first saw the two-part episode of Star Trek (the original series) called “The Menagerie”, it made a major impression on me. There is a certain weightiness to the story about Spock’s mutiny to give some semblance of a life to his crippled former Captain, Christopher Pike. Gene Roddenberry wrote the episode when Star Trek was falling behind on original scripts in the first season and he found a way to incorporate the footage from Star Trek’s original pilot, “The Cage”. Here we see for the first time the depth of affection and self-sacrifice in Spock normally hidden behind his cool Vulcan exterior. It is fascinating to see how much the effects evolved in between the filming of “The Cage” in 1964 and “The Menagerie” just two years later. Spock is the only character to have survived from that first pilot to the ultimate Star Trek series, though the Spock of “The Cage” is almost unrecognizable. Grinning goofily at the sight of quivering plants on Talos IV and barking reports on the bridge of the Enterprise like someone who is overly emotional, rather than the converse, the early Spock bears little resemblance to the character who anchored Star Trek. Pike is moody and reflective in comparison to the upbeat and impulsive Kirk. The second and successful pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, is better than “The Cage”, but the meta-story created by Roddenberry in “The Menagerie” makes for a seminal episode in the collective works of Star Trek.

The original series has been digitally remastered in High Definition, and exterior effects shots have been replaced with new computer generated images. Overall it is brighter and more detailed than we’ve seen Star Trek before. My only technical complaint is that the remastered sound is piercingly shrill. In this special showing in a movie theater, that was only exacerbated.

Seizing on a comment by Dennis Kucinich about a UFO sighting, UFO believers have renewed a call for government resources to be wasted on investigating things that people see in the sky and cannot identify. The Reuters story does not identify the members of the “international panel” other than to say they are former pilots and government officials. 9/11 is invoked (of course) as a reason why somehow now we really have to pay attention to UFOs. I’m not exactly sure how that works: are aliens going to crash into our building? Or will we misinterpret an alien spaceship as hijacked airliner or foreign bomber? Our money would be much better spent educating people about the things that are in the sky rather than investigating the least likely explanation (aliens) of all possible explanations. The Air Force sums it up concisely: “Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations.”

You know those big, friendly, and relatively uncomplicated families that have annual reunions in Mom and Dad’s spacious, rustic house, where everyone comes whether they want to or not and end up enjoying themselves regardless of the family turmoil of the moment? Me neither, but they’re a great set-up for some kind of subset of romantic comedies. Family Reunion Comedies, perhaps? Dan in Real Life is better than some in this genre, thanks in large part to Steve Carrell’s humorous but heartfelt turn as Dan, a widower with three daughters who meets the perfect woman (Anne-Marie, played by Juliette Binoche) only to find out that she’s his brother’s new girlfriend. While this movie may be following a recipe for cuteness, it is, actually, cute.

Lars (Ryan Gosling) retreats from human contact and interaction. He lives in the garage of his dead parents’ house now occupied by his older brother Gus and his wife Karin (Emily Mortimer), goes to work in a cubicle where a friendly nerdy woman flirts with him to no avail, and studiously avoids people at all costs. Then, in the gimmick of this awkward-loner movie, he orders a custom-made life-size sex doll, names her Bianca, and proudly introduces her around as his girlfriend. He has (one-sided) conversations with her and wheels her around in a wheelchair because of her poor health. Advised by Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), the doctor in the small isolated town in the northern midwest, to play along with Lars’s delusion, the rest of the town shows remarkably consistent patience. He takes her to church and social gathering and not once does anyone crack wise about his artificial companion. At least not to his face. There are some laughs associated with this make-believe, and Ryan Gosling does a good job at portraying an honestly tormented man with a child inside still haunted by childhood abandonment issues. But even at a relatively slim hour and three-quarters, I found my patience with Lars was less generous than that of his town. They play along with such gusto and emotional investment that it’s almost as if they’re delusional as well. At some point, as Lars inevitably begins to let go of Bianca, I couldn’t help wondering if they were going to have to keep this charade up for the rest of their lives. Would Lars at some point look back and joke about the time he was in love with a doll?

Michael Clayton is one of that rare breed of movies that is not easily classified into genre and not easily summarized in a thirty-second preview. Part of the fun of the movie is the gradual unfolding of the plot and, in fact, the gradual realization of what the story of the movie really is. George Clooney plays the title character, a self-styled “janitor” at a high-powered New York law firm. A former litigator, Clayton has found his niche as a fix-it man, the guy you call in the middle of the night when a wealthy client of the firm has committed a hit-and-run, or, at the heart of this movie, the guy you send to bring your top litigator back under control after he goes brilliantly and publicly berserk. But though Clayton excels at making problems for his firm disappear, he has a number of problems looming in his personal life that hang over him like a cloud. Clooney gives a convincing performance, his face showing the cumulative weight of the problems of others he must routinely deal with. Tom Wilkinson is brilliant as the top litigator for Clooney’s firm who is representing UNorth, a multinational agricultural conglomerate that is being sued (think Erin Brockovitch). Tilda Swinton is chilling as the ambitious chief counsel for UNorth who seems to live her life on a knife edge between the corporate stratosphere and complete catastrophe. Tony Gilroy (the “Bourne” movies) wrote and directed this movie with a somber pallet of gray winter city colors, making the atmosphere as oppressive as the corporate world. It’s a tense, fascinating, and very well-acted movie where almost all the characters are under extreme duress of one form or another. If it’s about any one thing, it is about how these characters respond to pressures they are under.