According to Colwell

Not surprisingly, the titular smart people of this movie aren’t so smart. Or to be more accurate, they’re smart about some things (Victorian literature and whatever you need to know to get a perfect SAT score), and incredibly dumb about just about everything else, especially how to get along with other people. What is surprising, and disappointing, is that they are also not very interesting. Dennis Quaid plays Lawrence, a curmudgeonly professor at Carnegie Mellon desperately trying to get his book published and just as desperately trying to become head of his department, even though he dislikes everyone else in it. Ellen Page plays Vanessa, his 17-year-old daughter who has learned how to be a pompous ass intellectual from her father. Her mother is dead, and her brother is at college and is the token normal person in the family. An accident in the opening act sets up Lawrence with Janet, a young doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker) and brings his “adoptive brother” Chuck into the household. Thomas Hayden Church brings the only funny moments with his deadpan observations, but they are scattered too thinly throughout the movie. Quaid plays the grump so convincingly that it is hard to believe Janet’s interest in him. She was a student of his long ago, so perhaps she remembers a kinder, gentler Lawrence. But no, we are told that he was just as pompous then as now and was even responsible for making her change her major from English to Biology. That obviously worked out for her, but as Chuck points out, “if you tell someone they’re stupid they’re probably going to hate you.” Lawrence spends his life telling everyone but Vanessa exactly that. Vanessa is a high-strung overachiever who doesn’t know how to have fun. Chuck tries to show her, triggering another bizarre and unbelievable relationship. I wanted to like this movie and found much to like about it. The performances are solid, and I was rooting for Lawrence and Vanessa to turn their lives around. But the script is thin and the pace slow. Interesting conversations are begun and then abandoned, giving the movie an incomplete feel.

NASA has formally approved a two-year extension to Cassini’s mission at Saturn. While not a surprise (we’ve been planning the extended mission for nearly two years, and are a significant way through the process of the detailed observation plans for that time period), it is welcome news. The nominal mission ends June 30 of this year, four years after Cassini arrived at Saturn. The extended mission takes Cassini through Saturn’s equinox and nearly doubles the number of orbits or “revs” of Cassini around Saturn. Each rev brings close observing opportunities for Saturn’s atmosphere as well as its retinue of moons. Ring observations will be particularly hectic at the beginning of the extended mission (which hopefully will soon be known as the Equinox Mission), and then again around equinox as Cassini observes the thermal response of the rings as the Sun moves from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere of Saturn. The equinox period is also when shadows cast by small vertical warps in the rings will be longest and easiest to observe, providing new measurements of the dynamics of the ring system.

Coming up: further discussions of what we can learn with an extension of the mission after the two-year Equinox Mission.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter with its powerful HiRISE camera onboard came within 6000 km of one of Mars’s tiny moons, Phobos, providing some of the best images yet of this moon.

The Stickney crater on Phobos imaged from MRO. Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona.

The large crater on the right, called Stickney, is comparable to the size of the moon, suggesting that had the impactor that formed the crater been a little more massive (or traveling a little faster) it would have shattered the moon, leading to a debris ring around Mars. Phobos survived that impact, but its fate is sealed. Because Phobos orbits Mars in less than a Martian day (only 7 hours and 40 minutes compared to the Martian day of about 24 hours and 40 minutes), it races ahead of the tidal bulge that its gravity produces on Mars. This tidal bulge then produces a torque that, unlike that of the Earth on our Moon which is causing it to move slowly away from the Earth (because the Moon orbits the Earth much slower than the Earth rotates, causing it to lag behind the tidal bulge it raises on the Earth, expressed by the ocean tides) retards the motion of Phobos causing it to spiral inward toward the planet. This will cause Phobos to hit Mars in less than 100 million years. Before that happens it is likely to be torn apart by tidal forces making a debris ring around Mars which itself will quickly decay into Mars’s atmosphere.

Phobos, like Mars’s other moon Deimos, is likely a former asteroid, captured into orbit around Mars through a combination of tidal dissipation and perhaps atmospheric drag from an earlier, denser Martian atmosphere. Although Phobos orbits quite close to Mars, its small physical size means that it is not able to fully block the Sun as seen from the surface of Mars. Nevertheless, the Mars rover Opportunity took this series of images showing Phobos transiting in front of the disk of the Sun. Phobos’s aspherical shape can be clearly seen in silhouette.

Phobos transits the Sun

Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.

Ken and Ray are a pair of hitmen cooling their heals in Bruges, Belgium, on the orders of their boss following their latest hit. Ray (Colin Farrell) is wound-up, nervous, and acts like a kid being dragged around a museum by his parents in the person of Ken (Brendan Gleeson). Ken looks and acts like a friendly uncle to the squirming Ray, scolding him when he misbehaves and trying to calm him as Ray complains about being stuck in Bruges. It’s rather quaint until we are reminded of the gruesome business the pair have just completed back in England and the psychopath, Harry Waters, who sent them there. This dark comedy definitely comes down on the dark side of the spectrum, but there is something sweetly naive and endearing about Ray, even as he decks an American at a restaurant for complaining about Chloe’s (Ray’s date) cigarette smoke. The American (who actually is Canadian (just his luck)) wonders why he and his wife should have to die because of the (smoke-blowing) arrogance of Chloe. Ray points out that’s probably what the Vietnamese thought before decking the pair and escorting Chloe home. Ray is frequently very much like a five-year-old with no impulse control and fierce fighting skills, but a childish sense of right and wrong. It falls to Ken to help Ray grow up before it’s too late.