Read Any Good Books Lately?

Yes. Yes I have.

Visions of Mars - Olivier de Goursac

A coffee table book, I suppose, although I don't have a coffee table, and have instead had to squeeze it into my bookcase. It is a pretty big book, as this abbreviated scan of its cover testifies. De Goursac has worked processing images for several of NASA's Mars missions, and here he presents some of the best of the lot, including some computer images generated from Mars Global Surveyor's nifty laser altimeter doodad, and some images that have been lovingly (re-)colourised or corrected.

With the emphasis on large, glossy images, the text takes a back seat. Some of it is either badly written or badly translated (from both French and metric - this being an American version of a French book), and much of it is presented very matter-of-factly, without actually discussing how certain we are about any of this stuff or even what the evidence is. I've always found the whole "We know this because..." way of writing to be the most compelling part of any science book, and finding the 'because' part missing in this book leaves the text feeling strangely empty. Still, the images are the purpose of the thing, and they are plenty, vivid and gorgeous.

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

After my positive reception to the film adaption, of course I had to read the book. The film is a very faithful adaption, in terms of plot, dialogue, themes and tone. Obviously, the book is able to cover much more ground, and go into things more deeply, but a few decades of reflection and a couple of world-class actors have enabled the film to have a few snappier lines in places. As with the film, this is great stuff: high-brow and low-brow, funny and tragic, often all at the same time.

Lost at Sea - Bryan Lee O'Malley

Another great Canadian graphic novel, another gorgeous comic from Oni Press. Gorgeous, both in terms of its outstandingly cute, black-and-white artwork, and its sensitive, compassionate soul. It's also frequently very funny, which I think, paradoxical as it may seem, is an important part of any work that hopes for you to take it seriously.

On paper, Lost at Sea's story of a confused and socially awkward 18 year old girl on a road trip with three people she hardly knows, where she will experience the necessary existential discoveries, sounds completely unoriginal. In fact, the entire plot is pretty much given away on the back-cover blurb. But the plot doesn't matter. It's not about what happens, but instead how the characters interact, and how it all feels. On both those counts, this book is right at the top of its game: very touching, and slightly deranged.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami

I love Murakami, and his works have had a not insignificant influence on my own writing. The most important thing I learned from him, is that you can put any crazy shit you want into your stories, as long as you don't make a big fuss about it. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories, published at various points throughout Murakami's career, some of which later developed into novels. I wasn't that big on Murakami's first such collection, The Elephant Vanishes, while I did quite like some of the stories in the slimmer collection After the Quake. On the whole, I've always felt that Murakami's peculiar, unconventional stories benefit from being longer and having more character development, so that you can actually get a feel for where you have ended up at the end of it all. But Blind Willow has pleasantly surprised me, and I think most of the stories are very good, even if only two or three moved me as much as one of his novels might.

Reading through these stories took me a long time, as each one seemed to demand its own space and rankle if pressed too close up against another. One story might be a light and touching vignette, while the one after might be a disturbing tale of Kafkaesque nightmare. In one story, a cute, quirky tale took a sudden turn for the worst, while in another a character faces up to what seems like a horror story, only to grow to accept things as they are. But, while I found most of the stories 'great but not earth-moving', as with After the Quake, I found the very last story so touching that it brought tears to my eyes. After saying that, I feel I should perhaps elucidate, but I can't. It's impossible to see where the story goes from where it starts, and I think it should remain that way for those yet to read it.

Inspiration

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today, and the reality of tomorrow.

Robert H. Goddard

The First Step

In March of 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts, USA, a moustachioed, 43-year old man wrote the following in his journal:

The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie's farm.

What started here, in a cabbage patch at Aunt Effie’s farm, continues today as footprints on the moon, rovers on Mars, and a probe on its way to Pluto (via Jupiter). This man did not bring us to this place single-handedly, nor were all his ideas original, nor can we say that his original ideas would not have later been thought of by someone else. But in spite of that, when we consider modern space flight, we can't help but feel we owe a debt to him. Rightly so, I think, because although it might be difficult to say why exactly it was him and not someone else, it was him, and he did a lot of work when it was hardest: at the beginning.

Inspiration

The man in the cabbage patch was a physicist by the name of Robert Hutchins Goddard, a man who marked every 19th October in his diary as ‘Anniversary Day’, in memory of an event that occurred when he was 17. Not a physical event, but, far more significantly, an internal, emotional one.

On the afternoon of October 19, 1899, I climbed a tall cherry tree and, armed with a saw which I still have, and a hatchet, started to trim the dead limbs from the cherry tree. It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England, and as I looked towards the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive.

In his early life Goddard worked hard, in the face of serious illness, to lay the theoretical groundwork for the rocket flight in the cabbage patch - including conceiving the basics of the modern rocket motor and patenting multi-stage and liquid-fuelled rockets. Goddard detailed his theories in a paper entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. This paper secured Goddard funding from the Smithsonian, and, late in 1919, it was published.

Ridicule

Although A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes was mostly about Goddard's theories and research, it did include a small discussion of some of the greater potentials of the technology. In particular, Goddard suggested that it might be possible to launch a rocket carrying an explosive payload so that it would impact on the moon and create a visible explosion, proving that it had arrived.

The New York Times (which regular readers will know has a habit of rubbing me up the wrong way) took particular offence at this suggestion, singling it out for a derisive editorial which accused Goddard of "intentional mistakes or oversights":

[A]fter the rocket quits our air and and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.

While I shall leave the reader to draw their own conclusions about the integrity and scientific knowledge displayed by the editors of the NYT in January of 1920, it should be noted that they did print a retraction on 17th July 1969, the day after Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.

More Work

Although Goddard was at first hurt by the public criticisms levelled at him for his work, he continued unabashed, focusing on liquid-fuelled rockets - launching one in 1926, launching another carrying a camera and barometer in 1929 and in 1932 developing modern methods of orienting and controlling a rocket. Five years before the NYT editorial, Goddard had also demonstrated, in a practical experiment, that rockets could indeed provide a propulsive force in a vacuum, as one expects from Newtonian - let alone Einsteinian - physics.

Conclusion

Although Goddard had started his work from a sudden desire to ascend to Mars, he died in 1945, 12 years before Sputnik orbited the Earth, 24 years before Apollo 11 landed on the moon and 24 years before Mariner 4 flew by Mars. He did however, live long enough to see the Nazis deploy the V2 ballistic missile, and the Americans detonate nuclear weapons.

As Carl Sagan mused, spaceflight is, in the long term, necessary for continued human survival; but in the short term, rockets carrying nuclear warheads are our quickest route to destruction. Wherever this situation may lead us, and however else we might have ended up here, it is strange to think that such an important thread of the human experience, upon which the whole thing may well pivot, includes as one of its most important events a 17 year old boy climbing a cherry tree and day-dreaming.

Read more stories of inspiration here.

References:
A NASA fact-sheet on Goddard.
A Biographical Essay
A description of Goddard's contribution to rocket technology
The NYT Editorial in full
Robbert H. Goddard at Wikipedia

"Forget it, Nicholas. It's Sandford."

I've finally seen Hot Fuzz. If The Queen can be said to represent the Britons of two generations ago, then Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are definitely the voice for my generation. Here they've made a film of two halves: the first demonstrating why no British action films are made, and the second half being a British action film.

Both parts work well. The film starts out as an alternately quirky and atmospheric murder mystery/police procedural, as model London cop Nicholas Angel is reassigned to sleepy Sandford and resolves to get to the bottom of a series of mysterious (and gory) deaths - in between capturing escaped swans and picking the winners of a raffle at the church fête. At the same time, his naive partner Danny - played by the third portion of the Wright-Pegg-Frost trinity, Nick Frost - tries to draw out his human side, apparently under the illusion that Angel is some sort of gun-toting Chow Yun-Fat figure.

Of course, in the end, Angel discovers a threat that his Metropolitan Police Vocabulary Book (it's a car collision not a car accident, as the word 'accident' implies that no-one is to blame) can't handle, and he is forced to start blowing shit up as the movie changes track to 'action movie logic', where throwing yourself around firing wildly is the solution to any problem, and even the village vicar has a pair of spring-loaded pistols hidden up his sleeves.

I don't think that Hot Fuzz quite reaches the giddy heights of Shaun of the Dead, but it is a lean, good-looking film with a strong sense of humour and some real dramatic intensity to it. I can only look forward to Wright and Pegg's next collaboration - and dream of the day that this is the kind of British movie winning Oscars.

Meagre Contribution

Source with more information and larger version

Saturn isn't the only planet in the solar system with rings. New Horizons captured this image of Jupiter's faint ring system - one of the clearest ever taken - while stealing momentum from the giant planet.

New Horizons has started sending back the main bulk of information it collected, so new pictures should start appearing on the homepage - hopefully including some dazzling colour photos of Jupiter and its moons.

My Cat Smells of Pizza

A few weeks ago there was an unfortunate incident which resulted in a pizza landing on my cat - wrong side up, naturally. Even now he still smells faintly of tomatoes, between his shoulder-blades, where he can't really wash himself.

Friday Game Over Blogging

This death is from classic RPG shoot-em-up platformer Front Mission: Gun Hazard.

Don’t Forget Saturn

While I have always been a big fan of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, I have to say that Cassini has really swayed my opinion. With its breathtaking rings and numerous strange moons, the Saturnian system is easily equal to the Jovian in terms of beauty and intrigue.

Our robotic emissary, flying high above Saturn, captured this view of an alien copper-colored ring world. The overexposed planet has deliberately been removed to show the unlit rings alone, seen from an elevation 60 degrees, the highest Cassini has yet attained. [Source with more information and much, much larger, higher quality version]

And yet… Saturn does have one thing pulling it down, or so many have thought. “Saturn is a much blander world than Jupiter” is a sentiment expressed by many (in this case I’m quoting Patrick Moore). But I think this line of thinking needs to be nipped in the bud. Certainly, Saturn’s pastel clouds are more muted than those of Jupiter, but that doesn’t make them any less attractive. And, in its own quiet way, Saturn does interesting things. For example, suddenly turning blue.

Scientists studying Saturn are not yet sure about the precise cause of the color change from north to south. NASA Voyager spacecraft flybys witnessed a more evenly painted planet in the early 1980s, when Saturn was closer to equinox. However, the bluish color was readily apparent upon Cassini's approach to the planet in late 2003, when Saturn was just coming out of its northern hemisphere winter. Scientists have speculated that the color is due to seasonal effects on the atmosphere.

Words from the caption for this image, which nicely shows the patterning in Saturn’s cloud-tops from north to south:

Image source with more information

A Story Tangentially Related to Superstition

I'm not feeling so well today. This is the dream I had last night. If you are superstitious, you may take it as a warning of the fate that would befall me if I ever ended up on a pirate's ship. It is also perhaps a warning about what happens to those who are not superstitious enough: they displease the monster octopus.

Looking back at this now, I think it was cool that I had such an involved, imaginative dream. But at the time it was pretty scary and all too real.

Obviously, certain parts of this story don't make sense. That's dreams for you.

The Octopus Town
(A Dream)

After forging an uneasy truce with the pirates, I was able to catch them unawares and push them overboard, into the mouths of some hungry sharks. Now I was on the ship by myself, sleeping in the captain's cabin as the waves rolling beneath me grew more turbulent and the skies darker.

As I slept fitfully, a great monster rose from the dark depths of the sea: an enormous octopus with thick, gnarled green skin. It latched onto my ship with its long tentacles and started to drag it slowly but inexorably down into the roiling ocean.

As the deck started to pitch, I awoke and left my cabin. The black sea was already spilling onto the deck - the ship was sinking fast. I was practically in the sea.

And then, from the stormy waves, squirmed some soft-bodied creature, larger in size than me: a cyclopean octopus, with metal hooks on the ends of its arms. It viciously clawed its way up on deck and looked around. I hid beneath the stairs to the quarterdeck, and it fumbled its way up them without noticing me.

Looking around for some way to escape, I approached the side of the ship. There was nothing in any direction but the ocean - dark and angry. Rain beat down from the sky. I had no chance against deadly sea creatures. My world had been invaded by water. It was no longer hospitable to the likes of me.

The first, much larger, octopus - the one still pulling the ship down into the water - grabbed hold of me then, and I was drawn deep into the cold, black depths of the sea.

*

I awoke, lying on the ocean floor, to find a young woman standing over me. Her hair was tied up into an austere bun and she wore a long, high-necked dress. It might have been white in colour, but an endless stretch of murky water separated the sun from us, painting everything a sickly shade of greyish-green.

She checked that I was okay and helped me to my feet, introducing herself as Anthea. Around us were dreary wooden buildings, like something from some dilapidated American prairie town. People stood around, doing little, showing no emotion. The men wore grey suits, the women long, high-necked dresses like Anthea's.

The light grew dimmer, and I looked up to see the immense octopus high overhead, blotting out what little light filtered down to us with its grotesque, writhing silhouette. I was afraid, but none of the townspeople seemed bothered. Not that they seemed pleased to see the octopus, in fact they obviously feared it themselves. It's just that their fear was a hopeless one. This creature was so huge and strong, like a mountain with multiple arms, and so much more at home at the bottom of the sea than frail humans, that they could clearly see they had no way to oppose it or escape.

Anthea tried to explain to me about the town. She seemed to say that it was a town full of people who had murdered close relatives. Murderers! I looked around at the limp, vaguely sinister people around me. No wonder they lived in this town, at the mercy of a demonic octopus.

But I had misunderstood. Anthea explained again, patiently: in the country these people once lived in, there was a ritual whereby people were expected to sacrifice someone they loved. The people in this town were those vilified heretics who refused to participate. The only place in the world they were accepted was in this town, relying on the sufferance of a carnivorous monster.

*

I lived in the town from then on, with nowhere else to go, not willing to risk the ire of the monster by trying to leave. Anthea's kind family took me into their home. It was dry inside and after entering from the slimy deep-sea water, it was polite to wipe one's feet.

*

The first time it happened, I was terrified. The octopus above descended upon the town, its arms spread wide, whirling slowly around and creating a formidable current. The townspeople tramped lifelessly onto a small hill by the town and stood in a circle, the monster directly overhead, coming closer and closer until it blotted out the whole ocean above, stupefyingly vast and fearsome.

Anthea took my hand and led me into the circle. It wouldn't be wise not to go, she said. The townspeople always went. If they didn't, who knew what might happen?

When everyone was present in the circle, the octopus reached down with a tentacle and snatched up one person, devouring them. Then we all tramped back down to the town.

This happened once every week, Anthea told me. You just stood in the circle and hoped that this week it wasn't you.

*

I think it was probably my fault. I didn't take well to the town - to the million little things that you had to do - or could not do - lest you upset the giant octopus. One night, the octopus descended on Anthea's house. It broke into one of the bedrooms and killed the woman sleeping in there - and not in a way that was at all quick or painless. The people in the room next door chose to break down their wall and drown rather than risk experiencing the fate she met. The father ran into the kitchen, hoping to swim up the fireplace and escape, but the octopus had already reached down the chimney. It grabbed him and pulled him up, out of the house, and into its beak.

With people dying and the house creaking and collapsing around us, it seemed that all was lost. The monster wanted to pull us all to pieces and eat us, and we didn't stand a chance. But Anthea saw a way out. After snatching her father through it, the octopus seemed to have neglected the chimney. We swam quickly up through the fireplace, not daring to look up at the monster above us, so close to the roof, and so huge. We swam down the side of the house, hoping to hide from its huge, bulging eyes as they roamed the town hungrily.

And then we ran. Ran across the ocean floor as fast as we could, not looking back or slowing down. Eventually we reached the shore and crawled out of the sea and onto a desolate, rocky beach.

Wet and bedraggled we held one another tightly. For a short while, we could feel relieved. But the memories of the townspeople who had been killed - and were yet to be killed - would weigh on us heavily. And worse still, we knew that the octopus could always come for us, reaching out of the sea with its long, grasping arms. Unstoppable.

Yay Jupiter!

So, New Horizons has successfully completed its Jupiter flyby, stealing a tiny weeny bit of the giant's momentum to speed itself to Pluto all the faster (learn more). New Horizons has snapped lots of pictures for us lay-people to gawp at, but it won’t start sending them back for a while:

That's it for the close-encounter downlink. Now we have to be a little patient and wait for the real data stream, which begins in about a week and will last through April. There will be lots more Tvashtar plume pictures, because it's near the north pole and so big that it rises above the pole itself, so every Io image we take will have that plume in it! We'll have color data and maybe even infrared pictures too, though detecting the plume in the infrared will be tough. The flyby is over, but the fun is just beginning.

John Spencer, New Horizon's science team member, writing here.

In the meantime, there are a few black-and-white images to look at on the New Horizon’s image page, here, including this one of three volcanic eruptions on Io (featuring the immense plume that Spencer was so excited about above):

Image source with more information

"I can too read!"

He's starting with the picture books, one notes.

A Box of Space Snakes

You are a space snake. You live in a box in space. If you are pushed out of the box, you will explode. If you use your gun to push other snakes out of the box, your tail will grow and you will score points. The longer your tail is, the bigger your scores will be, but you will also be an easier target.

Mu-cade.

My current high score: 258510

The trick, I think, is knowing when to cut your tail off. And also being able to quickly disentangle yourself from it. As in life, so too in games, it seems. When you are reincarnated as a space snake, you will thank me.

Mars out the Window

Stunning image taken by the CIVA imaging instrument on Rosetta's Philae lander just 4 minutes before closest approach at a distance of some 1000 km from Mars.

A portion of the spacecraft and one of its solar arrays are visible in nice detail. Beneath, an area close to the Syrtis region is visible on the planet’s disk.

Credits: CIVA / Philae / ESA Rosetta

News item at the ESA here.

The Rosetta Homepage can be found here. Rosetta is a mission to, among other things, put a lander on the surface of a comet. It was actually the lander that took this image.

Emily Lakdawalla writes about the coolness of this image here.

5 Filmmakers

Five filmmakers I love. Not a comprehensive list - there are many others - but these are the ones I feel reasonably confident talking about. They are also people who seem to be on roughly the same wavelength as me. There may be others who make 'better' films, but these guys make stuff that I like.

Each image is of a selected film for each director. Mouse-over to see the title.

5. Wong Kar Wai


Wong Kar Wai pretty much flies in the face of mainstream cinema - making films without a script; shooting two films at the same time; throwing in sad endings along with the bittersweet and ambiguous. You can never tell what he's working on, or what's going to be next. But you do know that when he makes it, it will be bold, beautiful and undiluted.

4. Jean-Pierre Jeunet


Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a director that makes weird-looking films full of weird-looking actors getting into weird situations. And yet, what makes Jeunet stand out so much is that he is not a self-consciously weird or 'zany' director - instead he draws out what is peculiar about everyday life in a way that is striking, familiar and believable.

Jeunet also makes very sensitive films: we are not presented with all this strangeness to laugh at it or be shocked (well, not entirely), but instead in the hopes that we may recognise ourselves.

3. Tim Burton


Tim Burton is the quintessential outcast filmmaker, making films almost exclusively about oddballs struggling against arbitrary social standards. Given that this subject is arguably one that underpins a huge portion of human suffering and conflict, it's a relief to see Burton handle this theme with equal dollops of black humour and compassion - not to mention his unique and powerful visual style.

2. Hayao Miyazaki


Hayao Miyazaki's films perhaps embody all the various qualities that fawning Hollywood stars like to imagine you can find in those films that win Oscars. Well, one of his films did win an Oscar. But all that nonsense about making you feel a broad range of emotions - excitement, fear, hope, laughter - and taking you to strange new places in space and time, making you believe in magic...

Yes, Miyazaki's films have all of that. But more importantly, as well as producing aching moments of emotion, they are also largely subtle and understated. As well as featuring sweeping vistas and thrilling action, they have quiet, simple moments of touching humanity. Miyazaki's favourite themes of environmentalism, pacifism, and humanism are strengthened by a frank understanding of the difficulties of those paths. His dramatically strange new worlds are fleshed out with the plain, the ordinary and the everyday.

I think it's this combination of incredible vision and simple heart that makes Miyazaki so revered by all who come into contact with his work.

1. Buster Keaton


The films of Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton Jr. are great evidence that cinema was pretty much born fully formed. Working without CGI, stunt men, ninety years of accumulated cinematic craft, or, for that matter, sound, Keaton was still able to produce films that seem startlingly comparable in technical quality to modern fare. And when you take into account the content of the films, Keaton easily stands shoulder to shoulder with the great filmmakers of any later period.

Like his contemporary (and one-time collaborator) Charles Chaplin, Keaton had his own visually distinctive cinematic personality: a clumsy, unsmiling fellow in a flat hat who, though repeatedly at the butt-end of the Universe's jokes, still dusts himself off to save the day from stampeding cows, improbable storms and hungry cannibals. Probably the chief appeal of this character, even today, is that he doesn't look like a man who should really be starring in a film. Short, expressionless, slightly embarrassed to be in this situation, would clearly much prefer it if no-one looked, uncertain what to do, but trying his best - every one of us has been this character ourselves at some point (some of us more often than others).

It's this combination of simple, unflinching humanity and Keaton's own cinematic innovation - conjuring up images that are more convincing than some of today's dodgy CGI - that allows Buster to live on today like no other filmmaker of his era.

Mimas in Shadows

Image source with more information

Mimas, photographed by Cassini against a striking backdrop: blue clouds on Saturn's northern hemisphere, the rings casting dark bands of shadow.

(In other words: don't have enough time to blog fully today, so pretty picture instead!)

Banks: See Hear

After this incident Mum drew my attention to this:

Thursday 15 February - Programme Information - See Hear, Saturday 17th February, BBC2 @ 12pm.

In this week's programme, presented by Memnos Costi and Elizabeth Young, we look at the problems facing deaf people trying to access banks and building societies.

The item looks at how banks and building societies deal with issues such as contact via third parties; TypeTalk and textphones; lost or stolen cards and the provision of interepreters. Underpinning many of the stories featured in the film is the conflict that arises between banks and their deaf customers over what 'reasonable adjustment' to goods and services, as laid down in the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), actually means.

That final sentence sums up the message they tried to shoehorn in - a nice balanced message - explicitly stating that banks are trying hard to cater to deaf people but are being held back by concerns about confidentiality and security. And yet the segment seemed to show that that's far from the truth. After trying over two days to contact ten leading banks by textphone, they got only two to answer - on the second day. Although the talking head for banks assured us that banks are happy to accept typetalk calls, it wasn't much work to find someone who had had their typetalk call refused. Similarly, the talking head told us that banks are happy for a third party to be used to inform them that a card has been stolen. Except that the same person had been refused in this respect as well. To me, this looks like not even trying at all.

Certainly, the segment did make the argument that banks are interpreting the clause 'reasonable adjustment' to do as little as they can. For one thing, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable adjustment just to answer your fucking textphones. For another, most of the 'reasonable adjustments' quoted were with respect to internet banking, which isn't being created with deaf customers in mind. When it comes to making adjustments solely for deaf customers, the banks simply aren't doing it. This isn't a conflict of opinions. It's clear evidence that the DDA is failing.

Thought of the Day

Freedom of speech is exactly the opposite of freedom from criticism.

It is spectacularly hypocritical to claim that someone who criticises your views should shut up because they're infringing on your right to freedom of speech. You have a right to espouse whatever offensive, racist, misogynistic, homophobic or merely incorrect crap you want - and others have a right to call you out on it.

Minutes from the End of Civilisation

I like to make crazy shit up when I write stories, except when it's science fiction.

The five NPT-recognized nuclear weapon states have failed in their obligation to make serious strides toward disarmament--most notably, the United States and Russia, which still possess 26,000 of the 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world. By far the greatest potential for calamity lies in the readiness of forces in the United States and Russia to fight an all-out nuclear war. Whether by accident or by unauthorized launch, these two countries are able to initiate major strikes in a matter of minutes. Each warhead has the potential destructive force of 8 to 40 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. In that relatively small nuclear explosion, 100,000 people were killed and a city destroyed; 50 of today’s nuclear weapons could kill 200 million people.

While the possibility of launching these powerful weapons may seem remote, experts in Russia and the United States are concerned about command and control systems that depend on complex electronic communications and information. Past incidents suggest that technical failures, misperception, and miscommunication happen in even the best-maintained systems. Such errors could lead to an accidental launch already programmed in the event of attack. Experts have documented four nuclear false alarms--in 1979, 1980, 1983, and 1995--where either the United States or Soviet/Russian forces were placed on the highest alert and missile launch crews were given preliminary launch warnings.

Sixteen years after the end of the Cold War, following substantial reductions in nuclear weapons by the United States and Russia, the two major powers have now stalled in their progress toward deeper reductions in their arsenals. Equally worrisome, the United States, in its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, declared that nuclear weapons “provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats,” including chemical and biological weapons, as well as “surprising military developments.” In early 2004, this new concept, which espouses the quick use of even nuclear weapons to destroy “time urgent targets,” was put into operation. That the United States--a nation with unmatched superiority in conventional weapons--would place renewed emphasis on the need for nuclear weapons suggests to other nations that such arsenals are necessary to their security.

In the face of the major powers’ continued reliance on nuclear weapons, other nations are following suit. Since the end of the Cold War, three countries have announced the possession of nuclear weapons--India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel possesses weapons but chooses not to declare them. The director of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, believes up to 30 countries have the capacity, and increasingly the motivation, to develop nuclear weapons in a very short time span.

Read the rest at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A Story About Goodbye

This week's prompt at Sunday Scribblings is Goodbyes. It chimed with various things I've been thinking about, in particular, at the forefront of my mind was a colourised version of this image, as presented in Olivier de Goursac's Visions of Mars (although this particular image is a vision of Earth). To see the colours of a Martian sunset, look at this image.

Evening Star

The sky is a murky, ruddy pink and the sun sits on the horizon: small and blue. Descending with it, imperceptibly, down beneath the world, is the bright evening star.

"Does it look any different?" a voice asks softly.

I stop looking over my shoulder, turn from the small window to the dim, electric-lit room around me. "I woke up sitting here," I say. "It wasn't a dream, was it?"

Yelena shakes her head and slams the door closed, checking that it seals properly. Now more than ever, it feels like we live in a soap bubble. Bulging with air and ready to pop.

The television, fixed to the paint-scabbed metal wall, shows nothing but static.

Yelena sits next to me on the couch and picks up the remote.

"Don't," I say suddenly. "Turn it off. I've had enough of it."

She nods and stabs the remote with her thumb. The screen blinks to black. "Is he okay?"

I look at Michael. Sitting on the couch opposite, head thrown back, staring at the low, domed ceiling. He lifts his head, looks first at Yelena, then at me. "I'm fine," he says flatly.

"Does it look any different?" Yelena asks me again.

"Does what look any different?"

She gestures out the window, at the setting sun and the evening star. "Earth," she says.

"It looks about the same. How's Abel?"

"Sedated. Chen is staying with him."

Like a powerful magnet is pulling on me, my head turns until I'm looking back out of the window. "I thought it might get less blue," I say. "If the ocean's are getting covered with dust and smoke."

"Maybe it will," Yelena says matter-of-factly. You can't really be anything but matter-of-fact in this kind of situation.

"We don't know that it was nukes," Michael chips in.

Yelena shakes her head unenthusiastically. "What else would it be?"

"Bio-terrorism," Michael says, slowly, if parcelling out its import into more manageable monosyllables. "Some lethal disease cooked up in a terrorist's basement. I bet it spread across the world in less than a day, on airliners."

"You're an American," I tell him. "Someone sneezes and you see bio-terrorism."

"Well, yeah. You say that, but I bet they were sneezing."

"It wasn't bio-terrorism or bio-anything else," Yelena says firmly. "We'd have heard something about people getting ill. And look at the logs: we lost Baikonur, Kennedy and Jiuquan within minutes of one another. A virus wouldn't do that."

"Al Jazeera's still broadcasting every hour," I chip in. "They were talking about mushroom clouds and radiation sickness. It's pretty unequivocal."

Michael grimaces, as if literally having difficulty swallowing the idea. "But who would nuke us?"

I laugh mirthlessly. We three are all wearing the same uniform but for the flags on the sleeves. "What makes you so sure that 'we' didn't nuke anyone ourselves? If not to start with, then in retaliation?"

"But why did it start?" Michael asks.

Yelena sighs. "I doubt anyone actually wanted it to happen. It probably started as a mistake, but once it got underway, they were fighting for their lives. No-one would stop."

"That's bullshit," I snapped. "You're saying that because they started killing everyone they had to keep going, or else - or else what? The other side would kill everyone instead? It's bullshit."

"It's those Russian missiles," Michael muses. "A wire sparked or a program crashed or something and the missile was launched. No offence, Yelena."

"Check your own house is in order before you start throwing accusations like that around. You've got that nuclear place in America that's always catching fire and worse."

"That's not a nuclear facility."

"It is a-"

"That's not a nuclear weapons facility," Michael interrupts, correcting himself.

"What does it matter?" I ask. "I don't care who started it. It happened. And Baikonur, Kennedy, Jiuquan: they're silent."

Michael rubs his unshaven chin. "Maybe they're still there."

Yelena stretches, creakily. I notice that her eyes are red. "Even if they are," she says, "you think they care about us right now? Not their families? The people dying right in front of them? You think they have enough food to stuff it into a rocket and send it to us?"

Michael clicks his tongue. "I guess the space programme's going to take a bit of a back seat over the next few years, huh?"

"Decades probably," Yelena says. "If human civilisation on Earth can even crawl back up from this."

I finally say what's been on my mind all this time: "We're pretty fucked."

Michael just shrugs.

Yelena turns to face me, fixes her eyes on mine. "We are not fucked. We're lucky. Would you rather be in London right now?"

"If it was a full nuclear exchange, I'd have died instantaneously last night."

"Right," she says, as if that settles it.

"But instead, we, Yelena, Michael - all of us - we are going to starve."

Yelena slides forward, to better face me. I think this is turning into another argument, and I'm not sure I can be bothered. "I don't think so," she says.

I shrug. "We eat more than we grow. Food is the problem. It's the only thing we can't get from Mars. I don't see how we can be more fucked than that."

"Food is the problem," Michael agrees.

"We would be more fucked if food wasn't the only thing we don't have here," Yelena says. "We have water from the ice, we have oxygen from the water, we have fifty years of power from the reactor - more than enough time to find more uranium, I might add - from the power we get heat, light-"

I look down at my crumpled uniform. "And yet, if we starve, all that oxygen and water and power and heat and light won't make us less dead."

Yelena shakes her head vehemently. "We're not going to starve any time soon. And in the meantime we can try to find ways to increase our food production. We've got the material to build more pressurised glass houses. Chen thinks we may even be able to use cling film, tent poles and old heaters, if we keep the partial pressure of nitrogen high and the overall pressure low. We got some Frankenstein seeds in the last supply, part of an experiment - they might grow in Martian soil, with a few added chemicals."

"None of us are old, Yelena. We could live another forty, fifty years. Do you honestly think we can consistently produce enough food in all that time, with cling film greenhouses? It's going to be a constant battle."

"I didn't say it would be easy. But we don't have any choice but to try. We've got better odds than certain death. We've got better odds than the people back home."

"In the short term, yes. But when the nuclear winter passes, those that survived - eating rat meat or one another, whatever - they'll still have a world with liquid water, one bar of air pressure and food."

"Contaminated food."

"As opposed to our sickly, half-starved crops. Chen's still finding those bloody aphids lurking around. Now he thinks they're adapting to the lower gravity."

Michael laughs unexpectedly. "Chen says they come to him in his dreams and taunt him in Mandarin."

I had something to say, something angry and powerful that would leave Yelena's argument shattered into pieces, but Michael's comment, his laughter more than anything, has interrupted my flow. Yelena just raises an eyebrow and ignores him. He covers his mouth with his hand to stop the incriminating sound: laughing while everyone is fucked.

Yelena sighs. "Look, we've been split in two. Pockets of people on Earth and one on Mars, we're all going to be struggling for the next few years, perhaps for the rest of our lives. I guess a lot of us won't make it. But we have to try."

"I'm not saying that we shouldn't. I agree with you, it's hard but we have to try. It's just…."

She leans forward, resting her elbow on the back of the couch. "What?"

I look out of the window. The sun has set, and the blue evening star is low on the rocky hilltops. Soon it will be gone too. "I just wish this hadn't happened. It's going to be really hard. We need the people at home."

Yelena reaches over to squeeze my shoulder. "I know," she says. "I feel the same way. There's nothing to say, except, I feel the same way."

The conversation has deflated. Michael gets up then, says he needs to check the pressure sensors. We're leaking again, he thinks, losing precious air from our little soap bubble. Yelena follows after him, squeezes my shoulder once more in parting.

I stay staring out the window until the evening star sets. Best to get back to work after this, I think. Back to the business of staying alive.

"Goodbye," I tell the little star, under my breath.

Friday Physicist Blogging

Richard P. Feynman.

DVD Review: A Scanner Darkly

Banksy once opined, "I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me." There's a shade of that sentiment to A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater's rotoscoped, philosophical science fiction stoner movie, based on a story by Philip K. Dick. Do the government have a right to choose what drugs you do or do not use? And should they hold you responsible for the things you do as a result of addiction and altered states of mind? Either way, do you want them watching you while you're in bed?

In the America of A Scanner Darkly, the concepts of open democracy have been completely reversed: every aspect of your life is available for scrutiny by the authorities, while they remain anonymous even to one another. This leads to the strange situation of an undercover narcotics agent with the codename of 'Fred' (Keanu Reeves) being assigned to investigate a shady character called Robert Arctor, even though Arctor is actually Fred's own undercover identity. Fred takes the opportunity to invasively monitor his own home because he doesn't want someone else to end up doing it, and also because it may help him get to the bottom of the psychotic scheming of his friend and housemate Barris (Robert Downey Jr). At least, that's what Fred tells himself in his more lucid moments. You see, Fred has become addicted to the dangerous drug he's supposed to be tracking down, and he's starting to genuinely have trouble understanding that Arctor and Fred are not actually two separate people.


A Scanner Darkly curves to an interesting arc - essentially following the course of drug abuse from hilarious highs to tragic self-loss. Much of the movie consists of Arctor and his friends getting up to all sorts of drug-addled high jinks in downtrodden suburbia, before the turning point when Fred discovers that his drug abuse may have caused irreparable brain damage. It's a strange feel to the film really, as it slowly transitions from light-hearted to bittersweet, while the whole time producing quick-fire, witty dialogue that veers between the high-brow and the nonsensical and various mixtures of the two.


Downey Jr's Barris deserves special mention. If I never thought of Downey as an especially good actor before, I do now. Barris is a character who's extremely charismatic in his thoughtlessness and strangely brilliant in his stupidity. We see many different sides to this man, for example when informing on Arctor to Fred, or when making "for approximately 61 cents of ordinary household materials, the perfect home-made silencer" which actually succeeds in making the gunshot louder, or when idly watching a friend almost choke to death before lecturing him:

Alright, I'm gonna give you a little feedback since you seem to be proceeding through life like a cat without whiskers perpetually caught behind the refrigerator. Your life and watching you live it is like a gag-reel of ineffective bodily functions. I swear to god that a toddler has a better understanding of the intricacies of chew-swallow-digest-don't kill yourself on your TV dinner! And yet you've managed to turn this near death fuck-up of yours into a moral referendum on me!

A Scanner Darkly is certainly not everyone's cup of tea. But if you're looking for a psychedelic combination of the clever and the dumb, the low-key and the world-changing, the humorous and the serious - and let's face it, who isn't? - then look no further.

A Fantasy

I'm planning on trying to tighten up my story writing with a tale featuring an actual plot - including escalating tension and well thought out character motivations. Until then, there is this:

The Terrapin Piratess

I dreamt of soaring through the sky and awoke on the see-sawing deck of a wooden ship. I was lying on a towel with a pillow under my head. A parasol cast its shadow over me, a translucent white disc against a bright blue sky.

I sat up and put a hand to my head. I didn’t feel any different than I normally would of a morning, except I normally woke up in my bed and not on the deck of an old sailing ship. The prow lay ahead of me, rocking against the sky, the horizon invisible. A tall wooden pole thrust out of the deck to my right - the mast, I supposed. A few figures were about on the deck, sweeping with mops, moving heavy objects. They seemed to glitter eerily in the bright daylight.

“You’re awake then,” a woman asked. I turned to face her approaching footsteps.

All I could think to say was the most obvious question that came to mind. “What the fuck?”

“Surprised?” she asked.

“You could say that.”

She was a piratess, without a doubt: she wore baggy pantaloons and a frilly shirt. Bandoleers criss-crossed her chest, stuffed with flintlock pistols; a cutlass hung by her hip. Smoky black hair spilled out from her bandana, curling through the air like ink through water. Her left eye was covered by a patch with a smiley face on it.

“How did I get here?” I asked her. I was reasonably certain that this wasn’t a dream.

“Abducted,” she said, savouring every syllable. “Scared?”

“Annoyed,” I answered curtly. “I’ll be late for work.”

“I’m sure you recognise me,” she said, ignoring my comment and raising her nose, turning her head to display her - admittedly not disagreeable - profile. “If you’re not scared, it must only be because of an entirely understandable infatuation with my public persona.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re that piratess.”

She cleared her throat. “Which piratess?”

“The really nice one legendary for taking men for a brief ride in her ship and then giving them a lift to work.”

She gritted her teeth. “You don’t recognise me.”

Best to stay on her good side, I thought. “Of course I do. I’m just not very good with names.”

“But you know of my many nefarious and dashing deeds? My romantic conquests and impossible escapes?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping to leave it at that.

“Which did you most enjoy hearing about?” she said, feigning disinterest and again presenting her profile to me.

“Um, well…”

She examined the mast casually, at the same time resting her hand on her cutlass and angling the hilt in such a way that I could read the name engraved on it.

“The time you stole Captain Reno’s sword… Or received it as a gift…”

“Stole,” she whispered.

“Stole it from him in a… such a daring, dashing, um, nefarious fashion. In fact,” I added, getting bolder, “when I first heard of it, I was with a gentleman of lesser constitution who swooned.”

“Really?” she said, stifling a look of surprise. “I have that effect on some men, I must admit.”

“And, although it’s hardly a dashing conquest or impossible deed, I must confess that although I could never put a name to it,” I lowered my voice as if sharing a shameful secret, “I have always enjoyed hearing about your beautiful profile.”

Her cheeks reddened. “It has been said that my profile has corrupted many a gentleman.”

“So I hear. Anyway, if it’s not too far out of your way, could you drop me off at my workplace? You’d think they could survive more than a few hours without me, but you just can’t trust those guys not to open strange email attachments.”

She rested her hands on her hips - satisfied with my flattery, it seemed. “It’s a lot of effort to turn a ship around once she’s underway. If I catch a fish I don’t want to keep, I usually just chuck it over the side…”

“I can’t swim.”

“Ha!” she barked.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me up and over to the side of the ship. I resisted a little, but I didn’t think she‘d throw me over.

“Ta-da!” she exclaimed.

I peered timidly over the side. “What kind of ship is this?”

“The best kind of ship,” she said proudly. “The kind mounted on the back of a giant terrapin.”

“So where are we?”

“The Great Desert.”

What I had taken for the rocking of a ship at sea was in fact the swaying of the terrapin’s scaly green legs as it crossed vast dunes of sand. Now I was no longer under the parasol, the sun seemed to be cooking my skin. “Is there actually much to plunder in the middle of the Great Desert?” I asked.

She went quiet. “So,” she said, “you really don’t know my name?”

I took a deep breath to give me time to think. “To be honest, I don’t know the names of any piratesses.”

“What,” she scoffed, “not even Sawbone Kate?”

“Well, okay, obviously it would be a bit much to imagine that I hadn’t heard of Sawbone Kate, but she’s the only one I’ve heard of. Hey, you’re not Sawbone Kate yourself, are you?”

She gritted her teeth. “No. I am most definitely not Sawbone bloody Kate.”

“Well, I’m afraid that you and all the other non-Sawbone Kate piratesses will have to just tell me what your names are.”

“My name is Annabel Lovelock,” she said, as if certain that I wouldn’t care.

“Annabel Lovelock. That’s a beautiful name for a piratess,” I told her earnestly, even if my thoughts were mostly focused on how to get home from the Great Desert.

She said nothing.

“Also,” I began, “can I ask you about this piece of jewellery I seem to have acquired?”

She peered down at the shackle around my ankle and the chain connecting it to the mast. “Merely a safety precaution. It’s a long way down to the ground from here.”

“Right. So, if I can’t leave, can I get something to eat?”

*

“I’d love to know what you think you’re going to catch.”

“I told you,” Annabel said, “it’s a surprise. You’ll find out when I catch one.” She jiggled the fishing rod, as if that would make the lure a more inviting target to whatever passing desert creatures might survive in the wake of a giant stomping terrapin. I couldn’t even look down, it gave me vertigo.

We sat like that for a few minutes more, our legs hanging over the side of the ship, our arms resting on the railing. I had to break the silence to bring something up that had been bugging me. “Your crew are strange.”

“They’re clockwork drudges.”

“Oh. Like robots.”

“Yeah, but analogue is the way to go. I don’t know why digital ever caught on.”

“The one in the crow’s nest?”

“Yeah?”

“It keeps shouting out, ‘Land ho!’”

“Well, it can see land, can’t it?”

“Oh, right. I guess it’s supposed to do it then.”

“Yeah.”

“So, have you always used drudges?”

She seemed to answer only reluctantly. “No.”

“You used to have a crew of human piratesses? What happened?”

She sniffed. “None of your business.”

“It didn’t work out then?”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. And then: “I think they were intimidated.”

“By you?”

“Sure,” she said, holding her head high, “by my…”

She fixed her eye on me and I realised she wanted me to finish her sentence for her. “By your smouldering beauty and sharp wit,” I suggested.

“Yes,” she said, weighing my words carefully. “I expect that was it.”

“And your giant terrapin.”

She shook her head. “No, they have a dragon. It’s much bigger. And it can fly.”

“Well, I doubt they’re as good company as you are.”

She sighed. “Okay, you can stop flattering me now. It gets tiresome in the end.”

“Oh. I actually meant it that time.”

The fishing rod twitched. “I don’t believe it,” Annabel muttered, clearly as surprised as me.

“What is it?”

She reeled it in.

“What is it?” I asked again.

She didn’t answer.

“Is it really edible?” I asked, dubious.

She pitched the rod over the side of the ship. “Let’s find a supermarket.”

*

“Not that I should really be pointing things like this out, but chaining me to a shopping trolley is hardly going to stop my escape. In fact, you really don’t have to chain me to anything. I’m hungry and I don’t have any money.”

“It’s just so you don’t forget that you’re my booty.”

“I’m your what?”

“My booty. You know, my stolen treasure. What did you think I meant?”

“Never mind. This floor is freezing.”

Annabel started to pull fruit and veg into the trolley indiscriminately. I followed by her side. A dreary PA announcement played, like so much white noise.

“The other customers are all looking at us,” I said quietly.

She smiled at that. “They’re probably paralysed with fear at the sight of such a fearsome piratess.”

Two women pointed at Annabel and me and whispered to one another, covering their mouths. “Or,” I suggested, “they’re laughing at the guy in his pyjamas standing chained to a guest from a fancy dress party.”

Annabel stopped shovelling potatoes into the trolley. “Is this enough vittles?”

“Excuse me?”

“Food.”

“How big is your fridge?”

“Don’t have one.”

“It’ll do then. Annabel, the checkouts are over there.”

She kept pushing the trolley towards the exit. “I’m a piratess,” she said. “I don’t pay for things.” A burly security guard moved to stop us, but thought twice when Annabel drew her cutlass.

Outside, the terrapin was sitting straddling a dozen parking spaces, and the drudges lowered down a platform from a crane.

Annabel pushed the trolley onto the platform and unfastened my shackle from it.

“Are you letting me go?” I asked.

“Ha! No, I just don’t want you to fall off if the trolley rolls away,” she said, adding: “It’s actually rather dramatic to watch when that happens, and the destructive side of me revels in it a little.”

I nodded silently, and wondered just how often she was successful in her desert fishing.

“Whoops!” Annabel exclaimed, before dropping the chain clumsily.

I got on the platform with her.

She cleared her throat. “That was your cue to run away.”

“Why?” I asked, a little hurt. “Are you bored with me already?”

“No, I’d catch you.”

“I thought as much - so why bother running away at all? Besides, I’m hungry.”

She gestured to the drudges peering over the edge of the ship and the platform began to lift up. “It would’ve been a bit of fun,” she muttered. “You’re a pretty rubbish prisoner.”

“You’re a pretty rubbish piratess. Nice giant terrapin, though.”

“Thanks.”

It was chewing on a nearby bus shelter, twisting the metal framework into a strange, organic shape with its reptilian beak.

“Careful,” Annabel said, putting her arm around my waist and pulling me close. “Don’t fall.”

“You’re subtle, aren’t you?”

She just smiled.

“Why do you want me as your prisoner, anyway?”

“No reason,” she said, giving me a little squeeze. “Why don’t you want to escape?”

“I’m just hungry.”

She lifted her chin, presenting her profile to me proudly. “You know, there’s no shame in having fallen in love with me. When it comes to me and men, it just seems to take the drop of a hat.”

I laughed that suggestion away, feeling strangely awkward as I did so, as if caught in a lie. “There’s no shame either,” I said, “in feeling lonely, with only clockwork for company.”

“Oh, they’re more fun than you’d think,” she answered, as we came level with the deck and its attendant crowd of androgynous brass bodies. “Right, boatswain?”

“This unit has encountered an error,” it said, helping to swing the platform over the ship, “and must be restarted.”

“See?” Annabel continued. “Always making jokes!”

The platform touched down on the deck, and drudges came to secrete away the trolley and its bounty. Annabel led me onto her ship, her arm still around my waist.

I squirmed in her embrace. “You don’t fool me,” I told her firmly, trying not to be unkind. “You’re not dangerous or frightening. And I doubt you’ve ever sunk a ship or duelled at dawn or buried treasure.”

“Nobody would bury treasure,” she retorted. “You spend it. Or invest it in the stock market.” She stopped and turned to face me. “And while we’re at it, you don’t fool me either.”

I laughed. “I’m not trying to.”

She leaned closer, and for a moment I thought she was going to kiss me. I held my breath and didn’t dare move. “I think you are,” she whispered. “So we’ll just carry on not fooling one another, shall we?”

I looked deep into the eyes of the smiley face on her eye patch. “Um, what?”

She laughed and pulled me to her side again. Beneath our feet, the terrapin began to move.

“Where are we going?” I asked her. “I mean, where are you going, even though I will reluctantly accompany you there?”

“Off to find further adventures and plunder, I think,” she said. “To woo you with the riches of the world and my own courageous feats.”

“Well,” I mused, “I have some things to do which are better than being wooed by a one-eyed, cutlass-wielding woman with her own giant terrapin, but I’ll put them on hold. Speaking of the eye, wasn’t the patch on the other one earlier?”

“Of course it was. If I left it on the same one all the time, I’d probably go blind in that eye or something.”

“Oh, right. I guess that makes sense.”

She just shrugged and smiled.

She took my hand and lead. I followed.

Jupiter, Saturn: Pretty Pictures Soon

From the Planetary Society Blog:

New Horizons approaches Jupiter.

Third great portrait of Saturn being assembled by Cassini imaging team.

The Never-Ending War on Inertia

I wrote a 2000+ word vignette for this week's Sunday Scribblings, but I've become stuck on the final part. I am experiencing considerable inertia in general at the moment, but hopefully I will be able to post it tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a calming picture of the majestic pearly nautilus:

Image source

Comet Halley

Image source

The nucleus of Halley's Comet as imaged by the ESA probe, Giotto. The nucleus is the bit on the far right, a dark and irregular (Arthur C. Clarke called it peanut-shaped) chunk of primordial ice and dust. Comets are believed to exist in vast numbers in parts of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, but when some event sends them careering through parts more local to us, they react pretty badly: coming to pieces as their ice sublimes away and forms a conspicuous cloud.

The picture above is a great example of robot bravery - Giotto was seriously knocked around by debris from the comet, including one impact that put it into a spin so that its Kevlar dust shield was no longer constantly protecting its sensitive bits. The camera that took this image was eventually destroyed by another impact.

The Future... in SPACE

While your tin-foil-suited life in a moon bubble may still be a long way off, there are some very exciting unmanned missions coming up over the next decade. All of the missions listed below have either already been launched or are launching this year.

Phoenix

Image source with more information

August 2007: Launch
May 2008: Land on Mars

Phoenix is the latest rover lander mission to Mars, and it's heading to a radically new environment from the ones we've seen from landers so far. Phoenix will land on Mars' northern polar region, looking to understand the history of the ice there (and thereby also the history of Mars' climate) and also to search for microbial life. On top of that it has a really nifty set of fan-like solar panels.
Phoenix homepage

New Horizons

Image source with more information

February 2007: Jupiter gravity assist
July 2015: Arrival at Pluto

New Horizons is the first mission to Pluto, and our first proper look at it. Next month, New Horizons will also become the latest mission to Jupiter, where it will hopefully do some science and get some pretty pictures. In the long run, New Horizons may also go on to visit other Kuiper Belt Objects.
New Horizons homepage

Dawn

Image source with larger version

Summer 2007: launch
March 2009: Mars gravity assist
September 2011: Arrival at Vesta
February 2015: Arrival at Ceres

Dawn is a spacecraft I find it easy to get excited about: a mission to Ceres and Vesta, the two largest bodies in the asteroid belt. Vesta seems to be a pretty standard potato as asteroids go, but Ceres is round enough to qualify as a dwarf planet and seems to have some interesting features, although we have no detailed images of it.
Dawn homepage

MESSENGER

Image source with more information

June 2007: Venus gravity assist
March 2011: Mercury orbit insertion

The only spacecraft so far to vist the Sun's innermost planet was Mariner 10, probably because not only is it really hard to get to, so far into the Sun's gravity well, but once you're there you have to worry about intense heat and radiation. MESSENGER looks set to give us a good look at a planet that's been off the guest list for too long.
MESSENGER homepage

Pushing Ice - Alistair Reynolds

I'm a huge fan of physicist-turned-science fiction novelist Alistair Reynolds. To many of the writers who choose to set their stories in space and in the future, the realities of the Universe are hindrances to be ignored or dismissed. Reynolds, on the other hand, sees them as a ripe source of conflict, tension and surprise. And I think that he's never got this across quite so well as in Pushing Ice.

The trick, I think, is the way that the novel centres on a group of people in the near future - which, since no-one, not even Reynolds, actually knows what's going to happen in the near future, basically means a group of people recognisably of our own time - and then subjects them to extremes of space and time the likes of which none of Reynold's more exotic characters have ever experienced. A strong thread in all of Reynold's books - but this one especially - always seems to be to ask, 'but what would it really be like?' What would it feel like, what unexpected and disorienting things might we encounter, in deep space, moving at great speed, separated from our loved ones, faced with exotic civilisations? What challenges would we have to overcome?

Reynolds has a great knack for answering these questions in a dramatic and interesting fashion. Throughout Pushing Ice Newtonian and Einsteinian physics conspire together with international tensions, corporate irresponisibility and baffling alien intelligences - not to mention the sheer scale of space and time in the Universe - to throw up lethal problems that force a cast of everyday spacemen and women to re-evaluate their certainties and priorities.

The book isn't perfect, of course, the first part has a serious case of white-room syndrome that only fades in later parts of the book; I'm left with little picture in my head of what should be an iconic spacecraft. Reynolds also continues to show a slight difficulty in introducing the diversity of perspective and passage of time that he likes to use. But aside from that, Pushing Ice is a poweful, atmospheric book, full of compelling characters and situations that are both highly imaginative and very believable. Its central theme is also, while hardly original, extremely well conveyed by the span of the story: all existence is fleeting, even that of whole civilisations and species - so STFU and enjoy it while it last.

Friday Propaganda Blogging

Created by WPA War Services of LA, between 1941 and 1943

Further Calendrics

Stop! Put that calendar down! Right. Now.

Are you qualified to use that thing? Do you know the difference between a sidereal and solar day, for example? If not, Phil Plait will fill you in here.

Space Round-Up

Scientists report definitive evidence of the presence of lakes filled with liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan in this week's journal Nature cover story.

Read more at the Cassini homepage.

Emily Lakdawalla summarises the paper and its background here.

Did bodies of liquid water shape the Martian landscape? Are reservoirs of liquid water driving the plumes on Enceladus? Here's a drier explanation for Mars and one for Enceladus too.

Do you tend to think of the moon as a flat disc? Watch it wobble here.

What will the solar system be like after the sun has gobbled up all of its tasty, nourishing hydrogen? Astrophysicists in exotic Warwick have improved our understanding. Find out what they have to say here. (Via)

So far we've only been able to detect two extra-solar planets anywhere near the size of Earth (5.5 and 7.5 times the Earth's mass, respectively). This should change thanks to COROT, a mission by the French space agency, CNES. [cf Beagle 2.]

And what about America? How about that base on the Moon?

The NASA plan endorsed the idea of a permanent base on the Moon, but did not offer a purpose for such a base: no scientific or military or practical application was identified. Instead, proposals for lunar bases have come from those who want to build the base, not from those who might use it. The goal of permanence suggests a never-ending, money-consuming program.

Louis D. Friedman has written another of his excellent critiques of NASA policy; read the whole thing here.

Friday Fossil Frog Blogging

Image source and license.

A frog from the Oligocene epoch.