According to Colwell

This lake business on Saturn’s giant moon Titan is getting pretty cool. In the last Cassini flyby of Titan the RADAR instrument captured this radio-wavelength image of one of the large lakes in the north polar regions of Titan. Click the picture to go to the full-res version.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

This one shows a large island, about the size of the big island of Hawaii, near the border of a hydrocarbon lake in Titan’s northern arctic region. The imaging team, somewhat hampered by Titan’s dense smog, captured this image of a northern lake (not the same one shown in the RADAR image above). Go to CICLOPS for more information.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Although these lakes are not water, there is something tantalizingly familiar about the landforms. It is a landscape that begs to be explored on the surface or perhaps from unmanned balloons deployed by a future mission to Saturn.

I’m as happy with the way the Academy Awards turned out this year as I have ever been (which is to say: moderately happy). Of the major awards I would have liked to see Little Children get the Adapted Screenplay award, but The Departed was also excellent.

Little Children is a literary movie in the best sense of the term. It has a fatherly narration that at times is reminiscent of the narrative voice of a children’s book mixed with John Irving. The movie is populated with people who are lonely in the midst of apparently normal suburban life and are searching for some kind of connection or reaffirmation of their existence. Kate Winslet plays Sarah, who feels disconnected from both her husband, a branding (as in advertising) executive, and her pre-school daughter. In the movie’s opening scenes she sits apart from three other suburban moms at the park where their kids are playing while the voice-over explains that Sarah has decided to treat this as a sociological experiment. She does not really belong to the group of moms, in fact, she doesn’t even feel like the same species. She observes them with a mixture of disdain and perhaps a bit of envy for their self-contentedness.

At the park she meets Brad, the handsome young dad the other women fantasize about but are too timid to approach. Brad (Patrick Wilson) takes care of his pre-school son during the days while his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) makes documentaries. At night he is supposed to study for the bar exam, which he has twice failed, but he has no interest in studying and instead spends hours watching teenagers do skateboard stunts. One night he joins a football league with an acquaintance, Larry, a former cop who now spends his time harrassing Ronnie (Jackie Earle Hayley) and his mother. Ronnie has just moved in with his mother after spending two years in prison for indecent exposure to a child.

Both Brad and Sarah are disconnected from those around them, including their families, and neither is sure what to do next in life. Ronnie acknowledges that he has a psycho-sexual problem that prevents him from having a normal relationship with anyone. Larry, harboring his own demons from the past, is similarly adrift. Their struggles to find meaning and connection are all the more poignant because of their plausibility and because, as in life, there are no easy solutions. In fact, it is not clear that there are any truly satisfactory solutions. The script, co-written by director Todd Field with Tom Perrotta who wrote the book the movie is based on, is excellent and gets my (meaningless) vote for Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. The acting is equally compelling, making this a powerful, moving, and at times disturbing film.

The different look for the blog is so I can have the pages links arranged across the top rather than along the side. This is something I’ve been procrastinating on for a while, but have wanted to do so I can put some of my essays on-line outside of the blog chronology. I’d like to try to get my trademark UV image of the rings in the banner at the top, but that is also a matter of procrastination. If you see it there, either I figured out how to do it with this Word Press theme or reverted to the old theme. In the meantime I started the Essays page with one I wrote a year ago after meeting Kate Winslet. Having just seen her most recent movie, Little Children (review to appear shortly), it seemed like as good a time as any to post it. Many of my other essays are either obscene, profane, or both, so I’m not sure I want those on-line.

It was more than 23 years ago that U.S. President Ronald Reagan directed NASA to build a space station within a decade. It will take another three or four years before NASA pronounces the space station complete. Today John Glenn lamented that we will be losing a major investment in the space station.

I have mixed feelings about the space station. In 1992, when its future was in doubt (and no hardware had been launched, 8 years after the initial directive to NASA), I wrote Congress against the space station arguing that a return to the Moon would be a more sensible effort for the manned space program. The Moon has some major advantages over the space station as a permanent manned outpost, the most obvious one being that it is permanent itself. Low-Earth-orbit, which is only marginally easier to access than the Moon, has the disadvantage of the Earth’s upper atmosphere which causes orbits to decay. Furthermore, the infrastructure of an orbiting space station is not exactly rock solid, while the Moon is exactly rock solid.

At any rate, the congressional debate on space station funding in Congress in 1992 was cast in terms of support for the space program as a whole, rather than the space station versus some other ambitious manned space program. Such initiatives obviously require presidential backing. Although Bush the 41st had proposed human exploration of Mars, it did not have the specificity or urgency of Bush the 43rd’s exploration initiative of January 2004. So the space station got the go-ahead, and now there actually is something up there. Along the way, however, plans for a permanent crew of six were dumped when no one felt like paying for a new lifeboat vehicle that would guarantee a safe return to Earth for six residents of the station. The lifeboat for the space station is therefore a Soyuz capsule with a capacity of three. One problem with this is that it takes almost all the manpower of three astronauts just to take care of space station housekeeping and maintenance, leaving virtually no astronaut time available for scientific research, ostensibly the reason for building the thing in the first place.

A second problem is that once the station started to take form and Bush 43 stated that we would instead go to the Moon, all money for research on the space station was redirected to the new exploration initiative. Here is where my mixed feelings enter the picture. Once it was clear that we were going to build a space station I decided I might as well take advantage of it. I received significant funding for two microgravity research projects, one on the origin of planets and one on the behavior of dust in the solar system, which seemed to be heading toward experiments on the space station. However, the lack of funding, access to the station (virtually every pound of payload going to the space station is allocated to hardware to build the thing), and crew time resulted in cancellation of those projects and indeed the entire microgravity research program.

So, in the end, as Senator Glenn points out, we will have invested some tens of billions of dollars in a giant orbiting infrastructure and then direct our attention to a new giant piece of infrastructure, namely the Orion/Ares system for going back to the Moon. What to do with the Space Station? It basically looks like ESA and the other international partners are going to inherit it, so the scientific utilization of the facility, as well as the continued maintenance, may well become primarily a European and Russian operation. Europe has recently expressed renewed interest in developing the capability to launch astronauts, and the space station may be an attractive orbiting asset for them. I have European colleagues still working on experiments that they hope to fly to the station in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping they get the chance.

There is an idea in the community of space scientists that the manned space program is a budgetary adversary to less-costly and more scientifically productive unmanned missions. I’ve supported the manned space program, and my colleague Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini imaging team, has an Op-Ed in the New York Times that captures a lot of the reasons I do support it.

From the opening scene, a 1980’s music video from the fictitious pop group “Pop!”, Music and Lyrics sets a comic tone that is as infectious and lightweight as the pop music that pervades it. Hugh Grant plays Alex Fletcher, the “has-been” half of the creative force behind “Pop!”, now relegated to singing his past classics at high school reunions, state fairs, and Knott’s Berry Farm. Fletcher claims to be content as a has-been, having comfortably settled into a life where he is as happy to see his adoring fans, now forty-something soccer moms, as they are to see him singing Karaoke-style on the local stage. A potential break comes when modern teen pop star Cora (Haley Bennett) solicits Fletcher to write a song in three days that she might include in her next album. Fletcher is a melody-writer in a need of a lyricist which is where Drew Barrymore’s Sophie Fisher gets thrown into the mix.

Grant brings his usual charm to the role of Fletcher, bringing a touch of English wit and humor to a role where he also gets to sing and gyrate his hips with the trademark Pop! moves that made girls swoon twenty years ago. Barrymore is equally charming as a would-be writer with some emotional issues that are just serious enough to provide an opportunity for her and Fletcher to build a relationship, but not serious enough to weigh the movie down. She is not the stereotypical ditz that romantic comedies sometimes rely on for simple comic relief. Her performance is warm and subtle, plus she looks very much like my darling daughter, Aylia.

The last third of the movie gets weighed down a bit by the various plot elements that need to be resolved, but I found this to be a surprisingly enjoyable romantic comedy, perhaps especially for someone who remembers the pop groups of the 80’s. The contrast between Fletcher’s sequined sportcoat and classic 80’s moves and Cora’s incarnation of the modern hot-bod pop star also provides numerous comic opportunities. The movie is not complex or sophisticated, but it is fun, catchy, and diverting, just like a good pop song.

I saw some of the House debate on the resolution that condemns the addition of 21,500 troops to the forces fighting in Iraq. Representative Randy Forbes (R) from Virginia made the analogy that has been used over and over again with the Iraq war anytime the war has been criticized. Forbes and others said, basically, “if you crazy critics had been in charge during world war 2, Hitler would have won.” There are too many logical flaws with this argument to go into, so I’ll just pick two:

(1) That argument could be invoked anytime anyone wants to go to war with anyone for any reason. Say I’m the president and I decide that we must invade, oh, I don’t know, Canada. My reasons are that we must make a preemptive strike because I am convinced that Canada is about to become a grave threat to the United States. People rightly criticize this argument for war. I can simply say, “people didn’t want us to invade Europe during world war 2 either, and think what would have happened if we hadn’t.” The Normandy analogy has the same legitimacy in this ridiculous scenario as it does for the Iraq war: none at all.

(2) In world war 2 we were in a state of war with other countries. Today we are not. We are not at war with Iraq. Or any country.

There was one argument made against the resolution that, while I don’t agree with it, was at least a rational and reasonable argument against it. It was made by Jim Marshall (D) from Georgia’s 3rd congressional district, and he is voting no because the congress does not have power or authority to manage the operation of the armed forces, and as a purely symbolic gesture he worries that it might have a negative impact on some of the armed forces while having no impact on the administration’s execution of the war.

I supported Wesley Clark in his brief presidential campaign in 2004, and I’m inclined to support him again in 2008 (which apparently begins in February 2007). He may not have the party support or money-raising prowess of Clinton or Obama, but I’ve liked everything I’ve heard him say. Here’s a recent post by Clark on our disastrous dealings with Iran. Clark’s PAC website is here.

I think I’ve enjoyed every Pedro Almodovar movie I’ve seen, and Volver (”return”) continues that winning streak. Starring Penelope Cruz in an Oscar-nominated performance (but not likely to win against Academy favorite (and excellent actress) Helen Mirren, in my opinion) as Raimunda, an overworked, overstressed mother who rediscovers her mother and her daughter in a touching and funny story. Almodovar transports us between the sometimes harsh urban reality of Madrid where Raimunda struggles to pay the bills and deal with a deadbeat husband and the almost mystical village where the aunt who raised her lives.

Augustina is the blind and senile aunt’s next door neighbor who keeps an eye on her, aided, so she claims, but the ghost of Raimunda’s mother. An incessant wind keeps not only the giant windmills on the road between Madrid and the village turning, but is also a scapegoat for the apparent battiness of the residents of the village. It is also a metaphor for the cleansing change in Raimunda’s life that the movie portrays.

Raimunda’s sister, Sole, her dead mother Maura, and her daughter, Paula, round out the main characters who are all women. Almost all of the supporting characters are also female, like in most of Almodovar’s movies. I can’t say much more about the plot without revealing some essential points that are best discovered when seeing the movie. Suffice to say that this is a warm and touching movie with excellent acting and the deft touch of Pedro Almodovar.