According to Colwell

Ocean’s 13 is Ocean’s 11 part 3, but the 13 in the title could just as easily refer to the number of cons the eponymous gang of lovable thieves plans to simultaneously put over on Al Pacino’s evil hotel magnate. The Sting set the standard for cool con movie. Imagine cramming 13 Stings into one two-hour movie and you might get an idea of what doesn’t work in Ocean’s 13. There are so many gimmicks and plots that none of them is particularly engaging, let alone suspenseful. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and company are simultaneously rigging craps, blackjack, roulette, the hotel ratings guy, the high rollers, the slot machines, and some domino game whose role in the movie I didn’t even understand, but by the time Bernie Mac started pushing it on Pacino, I had pretty much given up hope of keeping track of the various schemes. The problem is that it is hard to get too worried about the success of Plan A, when there are also Plans B-M, and they don’t depend on Plan A. Clooney and Pitt have a cute way of finishing each other’s sentences that grows wearying when they are speaking in con game code speak. Don Cheadle is stuck for most of the movie directly underneath the Las Vegas Strip operating not one, but both boring (as in drilling) machines that dug the tunnel under the English Channel. Yeah, no one will notice that. The actors are fun to watch, and Steven Soderbergh nicely puts all the pieces together into a coherent whole, but there are so many pieces that the fun suspense and intrigue that should go with the movie ends up being spread too thin.

My daughter just told me about blackle.com, a customized google page that uses a black background instead of a white one to reduce the amount of power consumption on computers. Of course the first thing I check is to “blackle” myself. That gave me, buried amongst the top hits, was the transcript of a telecon/powerpoint presentation I gave to media and science outreach reps on Saturn’s rings last year. I found it strange to read a transcript of my ramblings for a solid hour, complete with “you know”s and various other particularities of my spoken speech. Anyway, here it is. The PDF of the powerpoint presentation as well as the audio recording of the telecon is available from this page, along with all the other so-called CHARM presentations. Mine was in April 2006.

I found the previews for Knocked Up to be as uninteresting as those for The 40 Year Old Virgin. Both movies from writer/director Judd Apatow, however, are far better than their superficial premises make them appear. Steve Carrell, who starred in Virgin and has a cameo in Knocked Up accurately described the former as a romantic comedy disguised as a sex comedy. Knocked Up follows in that same vein. Following a drunken one-night stand, gorgeous TV entertainment reporter Alison (Katherine Heigl) finds herself pregnant from slacker and stoner Ben Stone (Seth Rogan). Ben and his housemates, when they aren’t high, spend their time watching R-rated movies to document the nudity for their planned entry into the dot-com game. But the obvious mismatch between Ben and Alison is just the window dressing on a movie that goes unflinchingly but humorously to the anxieties, compromises, tensions, and occasional romance at the core of most relationships. Alison’s older sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd) provide the example for what could await Ben and Alison. Superficially, Debbie and Pete have the American dream: two adorable kids and a nice house in the suburbs. Apatow’s script shows the day-to-day grind underneath the facade as Debbie struggles with her perceived lack of sex appeal and Pete struggles with finding a balance between family and job obligations and his desire to hang out with his buddies.

Like Virgin, Knocked Up is an adult comedy, not so much because of the R-rated language, but because the humor is aimed squarely at those who have the adult experience of a long-term relationship or marriage. Some scenes where Debbie and Pete struggle with the accumulation of stress from their family life reminded me of Judy Davis’s and Kevin Spacey’s acerbic verbal sparring in The Ref. I didn’t laugh as much at Knocked Up as at Virgin, but in the ways it deals with men and women coming to terms with each other it is a more satisfying movie. Next Apatow movie, I’ll ignore the previews.

Now that Cassini’s extended mission is established (though we’re still waiting for final budget approval), the planning phases for what to do with Cassini after the extended mission (XM) are not too far away. Science requirements will be needed in early 2008 for the extended-extended mission (XXM). The exciting discovery of geysers spewing water vapor from Enceladus’s south pole made that small moon a prime target for the XM. Recent observations show that others of Saturn’s large family of icy satellites are also getting into the act. If Enceladus’s geysers are the “steaming gun” (as UVIS co-investigator Candice Hansen phrased it) responsible for Saturn’s E ring, recent measurements by the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) have identified Tethys and Dione as radiating guns (okay, I’m probably pushing the smoking gun metaphor way too far here), spewing electrons into Saturn’s magnetosphere.

The difficulty with getting follow-up observations of the moons is that, for all intents and purposes, moons are points in space while the rings, for example, are a plane. That makes it much harder to get good observation time of a moon. Cassini’s orbit has to be tuned to provide a “targeted flyby” and even then the prime observing period is less than a day long. Most of these flybys are best achieved from equatorial orbits. That contrasts completely with observations of the rings which require inclined orbits to make the razor-thin rings visible, though once the orbit is inclined useful observations of the rings can be had virtually continuously. (Saturn’s faint E and G rings, and for some purposes its bizarre F ring, can be best observed from un-inclined equatorial orbits, however.) A conflict looming for XXM planning will be the inclination of Cassini’s orbit. Equatorial orbits favor observations of Saturn’s atmosphere (at least at low to mid latitudes) and satellite flybys, while inclined orbits favor ring observations, observations of Saturn’s polar regions and aurorae, and are generally more favorable for magnetospheric observations. In the meantime, we are going through the incredible amount of excellent data returned by Cassini’s dozen instruments to find the next smoking gun. There must be one hidden in the rings somewhere….

After the Cassini PSG in Athens the UVIS team convened in Goslar, Germany, for the semi-annual team meeting. Every fourth meeting is held in Germany, hosted by our German colleagues who supplied one of the four instrument channels on the UVIS instrument. Goslar has a very picturesque old town, with buildings dating back to the 12th century. But the last stop on our tour tonight was the shot I just had to post. Punishment for debtors in medieval Goslar were humiliatedwas humiliation by being forced to sit, with no pants, on a stone beneath this statue mounted on the corner of an administrative building in the town square. That’s a coin protruding from the statue.

The temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion south of Athens is at a beautiful location. The marble is much brighter than that on the Acropolis, and there is a spectacular vista of the Aegean. The temple dates to the 5th century B.C. Like the Parthenon, this temple existed not as a place of worship but as the house for a statue of a god, in this case, Poseidon.

After almost 17 years working on Cassini it is hard to believe that we are now starting to talk about the end of the mission. At the Cassini Project Science Group meeting in Athens this week the segmentation of the extended mission (called the “XM”) was nearly settled, and work on integrating the XM will start in August. Segmentation is the allocation of different phases of the XM to the different Target Working Teams (TWTs, or “twits”, as they are affectionately known). Each twit is responsible for integrating different segments of the XM tour. I work on the Rings twit (and yes, this is what we actually call these groups), and starting in August our weekly telecons will resume where integrate our segments: we hash out between the different instrument teams what observations will be made at each time during our segments.

It took us about a year and a half to get to this point on the two-year XM, so we will need to start working on the XXM - the phase of the mission after the XM - next January with the science objectives for the period after June 2010 when the XM ends. The complicating factors are that we will not have as much maneuvering fuel to work with for the XXM as for the XM, and there are also “end-of-mission” considerations that have to be taken into account. What should be the fate of Cassini? NASA has a Planetary Protection Officer whose duty is to insure that we do not contaminate any object that may or might have harbored life with terrestrial organisms. No determinations have been made yet on the protection requirements for the Saturn system. Possible scenarios for Cassini include a plunge into Saturn like Galileo’s end at Jupiter, a long-term stable orbit that has no chance of impacting anything for centuries, escaping the Saturn system and crashing into Jupiter itself, escaping the Saturn system and going into a long-term heliocentric orbit, crashing into a small icy satellite of Saturn, or perhaps escaping Saturn toward Uranus. Some of those options require significant amounts of fuel, so the determination on the end-of-mission will affect the science options for the XXM.

I managed a quick dash up the Acropolis yesterday after the meeting and before a reception (and thunderstorm).

I’m in Athens, Greece, for the Cassini Project Science Group meeting. Most of the work this week will focus on the extended mission planning.