Ring Angle

Image source with more information
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This image is, I am narcissistically going to declare, my birthday present from Cassini, appearing on the internet, as it did, on the 21st November. It's a rather nifty shot of Saturn, it's rings and a few of it's smaller moons.

One interesting thing to note is that Mimas is almost directly to the left of its shadow on Saturn's northern hemisphere, meaning, if you think about where the sun must be, that this photo accurately portrays Saturn's tilt relative to the ecliptic.

Probably. My brain isn't working so well right now.

Grrr

Blogger have now changed so that commenters from other blog hosts can no longer leave a URL, something I consider to be pretty basic functionality. Coupled with their simply broken support for .gif and .png images, the only reason I'm still with Blogger at the moment is because of their huge image allowance (of which I am using only 1%) and because I'm a stubborn bastard.

Until Google reinstate the 'other' commenter option (don't hold your breath, they're Google, they don't have to listen to anyone), please feel free to sign off your comments with something like:

-Pacian
http://spacecatrocketship.blogspot.com/

Friday Monotreme Blogging

Image credit: Kookr
Some rights reserved

The Echidna.

Martian Potato Moons

Credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL
Image source with more information

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides these two colour views of Mars' moons Phobos (above) and Deimos.

Phobos orbits Mars in a period shorter than a Martian day, so would appear to an observer on the surface to rise in the west and set in the east several times a day. Little Deimos is somewhat less interesting, but at least, unlike Phobos, it won't be smashing into its mother planet in about 100 million years.

Robot Story

No, not that Japanese robot.

Emily Lakdawalla reports that JAXA, the Japanese space agency, have released a strange and wonderful little CG movie telling the story of their Hayabusa probe. It's the tale of a lonely robot, tumbling through space after a difficult encounter with an asteroid, trying to remember how he got there, complete with a semi-original* jazz soundtrack and subtitles providing a bittersweet monologue from Hayabusa himself.

As Emily mentions, this is not something we could ever imagine being produced by the ESA or NASA. But you know what? I think it's great to see one of the space agencies promoting unmanned space exploration in artistic and emotional terms.

Watch or download the movie here.

*The music was composed for the mission, but before it launched. As such there's no, "I've damaged my fuel-lines and can't aim my antenna at home" tune.

Tentacle Girl

Tentacle girl...
She'll entangle you
In her tentacles...
Her tentacles
Of loooooooove
Oooh-ooh-ooooh...

Friday Interactive Fiction Blogging

Masquerade by Kathleen M. Fischer.

From the dark depths of the Space Year 2000 comes this nice demonstration of one way to create compelling, (mostly) puzzle-less IF: by placing the emphasis on making difficult decisions rather than on unlocking doors or navigating dialogue trees.

Cold

It is so cold that even extremely furry cats are wrapping themselves up warm. Or, more accurately, getting their opposable thumbed friends to wrap them up.


"Huh? What are you doing? I'm trying to sleep..."

Earth by Night

Credit: ESA MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Image source with larger version

The image above was beamed back to Earth (as you can see, from not all that far away) some time last week, but I was too busy to post it at the time. This mysterious planet was photographed by our comet-chasing robot friend Rosetta, who was borrowing a tiny bit of momentum from it.

I recommend viewing the high resolution version to appreciate the full beauty of that thin crescent of daylight at the bottom of the image.

Getting There... Again

Back on planet Earth, I've been working on my mute cowboy game. I've done a lot of stuff, but there's still a lot more left. Mostly, though, what's left is decoration. In IF, unlike in static fiction, you can't just mention something tangential and then forget about it. You have to anticipate that the player may try and interact with that object in logical (and not-so logical) ways.

And IF isn't just implementation, it's writing as well, with its own unique challenges. When you have a program that spits out text, it can be hard to tell what sentence is going to end up next to what, so, for example, the code that produces the description of the saloon front ends up using the word 'sit' twice in succession (once for the tractor, once for the late deputy - I'm gonna have to change that) even though those two sentences are in completely different files on my hard drive (one for locations, one for characters). The text above should be considered a first draft of the text that'll make it into the final game.

Anyhoo, this is what I've been up to while I sent you lot off to Mars for the week. 'x' by the way, is shorthand for 'examine', if you didn't already know that.

Peering at Rocks

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image source with more information

As it finished its second Martian year on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was beginning to examine a group of angular rocks given informal names corresponding to peaks in the Colorado Rockies. A Martian year -- the amount of time it takes Mars to complete one orbit around the sun -- lasts for 687 Earth days. Spirit completed its second Martian year on the rover's 1,338th Martian day, or sol, corresponding to Oct. 8, 2007.

Exploring Mars on the most human scales yet: the Mars rovers are still going strong. NASA recently (hopefully not too optimistically) extended their mission into 2009.

You can read the Planetary Society's latest update on the rovers here.

What happened here?

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Image source with more information

From orbit, the latest addition to the robot party at the Red Planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, gawps voyeuristically into Martian nooks and crannies with its powerful High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Here it snaps a photo of a feature with the characteristics of water-carved channels, further evidence supporting a wet past for Mars.

Giant Flat Mountain from Orbit

Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
Image source with more information

Olympus Mons is a mountain of mystery. Taller than three Mount Everests and about as wide as the entire Hawaiian Island chain, this giant volcano is nearly as flat as a pancake. That is, its flanks typically only slope 2° to 5°.

Another image here from the late Mars Global Surveyor.

The Grandest Canyon

Credit: NASA/USGS
Image source with larger version

From the Viking mission of the 1970s comes this staggering image of Valles Marineris: the largest canyon in the Solar System at over 3000 km long and up to 8 km deep.

The other notable canyon of immense size - that we know of - is, of course, Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon Tethys, at 2000km long and 3 to 5 km deep. Earth, by comparison, only sports a small crack of 446 km in length somewhere on its northern hemisphere.

Mars from Orbit

Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
Image source with more information

With the advent of space travel, our picture of Mars radically changed. No longer were the most memorable features of the planet bright or dark patches like Syrtis Major, but actual geological formations such as Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris.

This particular picture of Mars is from Mars Global Surveyor, which sadly passed into Robot Heaven about this time last year.

Red Pearl

Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: J. Bell (Cornell U.), P. James (U. Toledo),
M. Wolff (Space Science Institute), A. Lubenow (STScI),
J. Neubert (MIT/Cornell)
Image source with more information

Moving further from Mars, but looking at it with more powerful eyes (the Hubble Space Telescope to be exact), we see a world of ruddy plains, dusty skies and bright polar caps.

You know, I wonder how many people actually have a map of Mars to hand when they need one? I do, anyway, so I can tell you that the bright region is Arabia Terra, while the dark nubbin on the right side is Syrtis Major.

Mars from 80 Million Km

Credit: ESA / MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / RSSD / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA
Image source with larger version

The Cassini Imaging Team make it easy to fall in love with Saturn, but let's not forget that Mars has almost half a dozen robots studying it at the moment. I think we're going to have a bit of a Mars Week on Space Cat Rocket Ship, to try and give the little red planet a chance to catch up with the big ringed one.

This particular image was taken almost a year ago by the ESA probe Rosetta. I posted an image from Rosetta's closest approach here, but this is an equally stunning view from 80,000 times further away (I'm using the distance quoted in this post at the Planetary Society Blog). Mars is the big red blob, slightly fuzzed-up by overexposure.

Rosetta was only using Mars for a gravity assist, of course, and its ultimate goal is to place a lander on the surface of a comet. I'll post some images from less fickle robots over the next few days.

Friday Buster Keaton Blogging

Buster looks through the wrong window in The Goat and winds up in the mugshot of a notorious criminal. This 27-minute 1921 film is out of copyright and available for download here.

For those of you in the UK with TVs, Paul Merton's documentary on Buster is showing on BBC2, tomorrow (Saturday 10th), 6.30pm-ish.

Update: Having now seen Merton's documentary, I can heartily recommend it. I should add that the last half hour consists of a Buster Keaton short in full - its title: The Goat. Huh.

Satellite Canyons

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with more information

Dione's bright canyons lend it a beautifully scarred appearance in this recent Cassini image.

Also: read this.

Aristotle's Incline

Trying to understand how to make a plot.

Abe Lincoln Must Die

Episode 4 of the first season of Sam and Max is now available for free. Go download it if you don't already know why a dog in a hat is the greatest thing ever to happen to the world. Or just mess about with Sybil's matchmaking questionnaire. "An elbow that can connect to the internet!"

And now I feel really guilty for not having finished episodes 5 and 6 yet. Something else I'm supposed to be doing.

Via: this piece of garden furniture.

DVD Review: Russian Ark

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great purchased a considerable collection of Western European artwork, the act that would lead to the creation of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersberg. One of the largest museums in the world, it centres on the Winter Palace, the historical home of the Russian tsars.

What am I going on about? Well, imagine someone said, “Hey, let's make the State Hermitage Museum into a movie!” Huh? Make a museum into a movie? Books, yes, plays, TV series, comics, radio shows, poems, historical events, even (no, please don't) computer games – but a museum? And yet, that is perhaps the best way to explain Russian Ark: that it is the cinematic adaptation of a museum: its history, its exhibits, its atmosphere, its purpose. Hollywood did something like that, and it was a trite kids' film starring Adam Sandler and Robin Williams. Russians did it, and it was visual poetry.


Following an accident, a contemporary Russian finds himself adrift in time and space. Outside the Hermitage in the 18th century, he wanders inside, finding each part of the museum at a different period of history. A ghostlike presence in these events, his only constant companion is a cynical marquis from Western Europe (Sergei Dontsov). Refined and reserved, the marquis is quick to put down Russian culture and its unrequited obsession with Europe, but he is also a deeply sensual man, unable to resist the delights of high culture.


Russian Ark takes the form of a continuous point-of-view shot from the, well, point-of-view of this drifting Russian, as he follows the marquis through three-hundred years of history, moving from the private moments of royals, to the silence of a communist museum, to opulent balls, to the Siege of Stalingrad. On the way, we pause to look at the paintings and sculptures, suffer the marquis' frequent distraction by 'unescorted' women, and get thrown out of a historical ceremony. I say 'we' because, although this lost (probably either dreaming or dead) Russian often shares his thoughts with us and the marquis, the style of the film unequivocally puts the audience into his shoes. I said this was a continuous POV, and boy did I mean it. Russian Ark was filmed in a single unedited take on a digital Steadicam. At no point do we cut away, spoiling the illusion of our guided tour through the history of the Hermitage Museum. As a result, a cast of two-thousand costumed actors and three live orchestras must perform perfectly, and an unfortunate German Steadicam operator (Tilman Büttner, responsible for the iconic shots of Lola running in Run, Lola, Run) is half-killed by having to lug his equipment on a journey of almost one and a half kilometres.


Russian Ark has no real story, plot or drama. It really is as if someone decided to make a film adaptation of a historical museum. The pleasure in watching, assuming you can do without the aforementioned story, plot or drama, comes from experiencing the history of the Hermitage: discussing paintings with the marquis, chasing Catherine the Great through the snow, watching an officer try to steal a dancing partner at a Winter Palace ball. Russian Ark feels as real as any dream - compelling, surreal and evocative.

Classic Game: Tetris

In a recent issue of Retro Gamer, Stuart Campbell wrote with great nostalgia of the era when games magazines would simply take photographs of television and handheld screens, producing ethereal optical effects. So, the image above isn't a bug, it's a feature. In other news, I now have a headache and a few dozen really blurry photos of my old Gameboy.

I never really notice Halloween, so I didn't think to swap this entry with Resident Evil 2 earlier, but even if I had, is there any terror quite like that of Level 9, High 5?

Happy Cat

This cat is happy.

Classic Game: Resident Evil 2

"What's going on in this town? "
"I don't have a clue, darlin'. By the time I noticed something was wrong, the entire city was infested with zombies!"

Well, it's a classic to me.

Attempt yawn capture!

Yawn capture fail.

Classic Game: The Chaos Engine

Sometime in the last century
an experimenter with
time, space and early computers
created a bizarre machine...

I was never any good at this game, but the strong aesthetic had a big effect on me. There'll always be a part of my imagination labelled: 'inspired by The Chaos Engine'.

Friday Uniform Blogging

Image source

El uniforme de la Guardia del Congreso Nacional de Chile.

Classic Game: Wing Commander

A scan from the famous 'Claw Marks' manual. My copy now smells strange, probably because the staples are rusty.

I'm wondering whether Maniac was my least favourite wingman. He was at least my second least favourite, always biting more off than he could chew and often ending up dead, but at least he didn't turn tail and run at the first scratch on his armour like the mind-bogglingly inappropriately nicknamed Knight.

There is a cat on my feet

Also, what is that on my shelf?

Classic Game: UFO: Enemy Unknown

Lyudmila is the best soldier in my latest attempt at this game. You really would think I'd have finished it after playing on and off for over 11 years. The (SS) suffix, I should add, is my way of highlighting my best sharpshooters, rather than denoting any relationship with the Nazi Schutzstaffel.

Uncertainty

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.

Richard P. Feynman in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

Friday Mime Blogging

Image credit: katiew
Some rights reserved

This mime is breakdancing.

Run, Fatboy, Run

Run, Fatboy, Run is a peculiar, but ultimately satisfying romantic comedy, marking the second collaboration (that I know of) between star/co-writer Simon Pegg and director David Schwimmer. Schwimmer surprises by achieving an evocative, naturalistic tone for most of the film, but still can't resist occasionally slipping in some dehumanising Hollywood gloss.

There's a point in the middle of the film where Pegg's character sits on a hill, having a quiet moment with his son. In the background is a sprawling view of London that would never make it on any postcard: grimy tower blocks, age-blackened redbrick houses, an eroded Gothic church. It's a landscape of the kind I find deeply moving in its uncompromising display of life, warts-and-all. Of course, later on Schwimmer has to treat us to an oil-painting perfect view of Tower Bridge that made me want to projectile vomit across the cinema, but I'll let it slide.

Despite the odd bit of unearned sentimentality, Run, Fatboy, Run still manages to be funny, touching, and occasionally even understated. There's a strong supporting cast in the form of Thandie Newton as Pegg's jilted bride, Hank Azaria as the slick American character who is actually the bad guy for once, and comedian Dylan Moran in typically unkempt and misanthropic form. This is also a film that acknowledges the flaws in a story about a man trying to 'win back' his ex, making this a story more about someone trying to improve himself than about any kind of macho pissing contest over a passive woman.

In a perfect world, Run, Fatboy, Run would eclipse the less-obviously but more insidiously Americanised British rom-coms with Hugh Grant (you know the ones I mean), but I won't hold my breath. Anyway, go watch it if it turns up in a cinema near you.

B-Game Competition Ends

Poizoned Mind places 9th out of 29 entries with 15 votes. I was telling myself, "I'll be happy if I get higher than 20th place!" Mission successful. Outside the competition, PM has also acquired some vocal fans here and here - even appearing on indygamer.blogspot.com courtesy of that last writer.

Now let me just link back to the Poizoned Mind page and my monstrous B-game mosaic, before discussing my own favourite entries - all of which you can find in the competition thread. First up, here's the three games I voted for:

Cottage of Doom (1st Place)


B-movie inspiration, B-game implementation, Cottage of Doom is certainly unbalanced and buggy, but it's also enormously fun. Re-enact the end of Night of the Living Dead as you barricade windows and doors in a vain attempt to keep out an endless stream of zombies. This absolutely deserved to place first in the competition - it's the only entry I just can't stop playing.

Hickbilly Bride (5th Place)


A retro-style offering with pixellated graphics and a low frame-rate. You control a gun-toting redneck out to stop his sister marrying his cousin, facing rabid possums and chomping crocodiles en route. Weirdly, Hickbilly Bride turns out to be a puzzle game of sorts, where it's never immediately apparent what you need to do to reach the other side of the screen, but always fun to find out.

Dump Jumper (Joint 17th Place)


A game which in many respects can be considered pretty much broken, it's also got a strong, provocative concept and lots of neat little touches that show the author was really interested in fully developing the idea of pooping on things. To me, that's what this competition was all about (big ideas roughly developed, not pooping - although there was plenty of that too).

---

I was pretty sure that I'd be voting for Cottage of Doom and Hickbilly Bride, but picking out that third game to vote for was really hard. In the end I chose Dump Jumper for its pure B-gameyness. But here were the other games I almost voted for instead:

Betasuppe (8th place)


A platform game controlled by text. A brilliant idea, implemented with a lot of character; it manages to be relentlessly cheerful even when the main character is dying over and over again. There are only about three puzzles to solve, though, even if they did seem to give some people trouble.

Toadzilla (Joint 17th place)


A mutant toad is destroying the city, throwing people into the air, eating them, demolishing their homes... You are that toad! Great fun, well done, but in the end, not quite my cup of tea.

Mario Inna Space (Joint 13th place)


The only fan-game of the competition, this is also strangely the most beautiful. Or perhaps that should be 'the most strangely beautiful'. Iconic video game character Mario is on the moon. Unfortunately this means that his incredible jumping ability is now an enormous handicap, and he spends almost all of his time off the ground, floating through space and (apparently) listening to "Across the Universe" by Fiona Apple.

The combination of music (especially the way it reacts to your actions) and visuals (including a lovely NASA image of Earth) is, well, strangely beautiful, as I said. The incongruently typical Mario-style game over is the icing on the cake. Still, it's almost more a screensaver than a game, and completing it would require hours of trial and error.

---

Once again, you can find all these games here, and my own entry here.

Happy Birthday Cassini!

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image source

Cassini rode into space Oct. 15, 1997, atop a U.S. Air Force Titan IVB. Its mission: to orbit and study the Saturnian system for four years and to put the European Space Agency's Huygens Probe in position to parachute down to the frozen surface of Saturn's Earthlike moon Titan. Since entering orbit around Saturn, Cassini's scientific instruments, powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, have returned immense amounts of new information via NASA's global Deep Space Network to the international team of scientists working on the mission.

Read the rest.

Presumably as a birthday present of sorts, the Cassini team have released quite a number of colour images onto the Photojournal, in particular this gorgeous portrait of the Saturnian system as it appears from out by Iapetus (click to enlarge):

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with more information

The little (and not so little) specks around Saturn are, from left to right, Dione, Enceladus, Mimas, Rhea, Tethys and Titan. Quite the family portrait. No Iapetus, because it's on the wrong side of the camera. (This image is a surprisingly small file size for such a huge vista (~75kb), however Blogger has seen fit to shrink it down a bit. Blogger, you cheeky monkey! Click the source to find the 3400 x 1000 version and answer the question, "Where's Mimas?")

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image source with larger version

This one's a view of Saturn from 'above', with the rings appearing slightly dim in order to avoid over-exposing the planet itself. It's an image that's big on both beauty and file size, so, once again, click the source for the high-resolution version if you like it.

Finally, as a reminder that Cassini is our robotic photographer out by Saturn, often as interested with art as science, here's a little optical effect it sees from time to time while looking at the rings:

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with more information

The effect is 'real', which is to say that if you were orbiting Saturn yourself, you could see it with your own eyes, however the variety of colours it shows here are a byproduct of the way Cassini takes colour photos: by taking red, green and blue images in quick succession and then combining them. Here this process has turned a mere spot of light into a beautiful rainbow smear. (The optical effect itself is explained here.)

Time was nuclear-powered robots were only figments of our imaginations, and usually fearful ones at that. Perhaps atomic automata will one day stride through our cities blasting us with their death rays. If it comes to that, I hope we'll remember that one of the first of their race was the quiet sort, mostly interested in pretty pictures and scientific measurements.

Friday Cetacean Blogging

Image source

Monodon monoceros - the narwhal.

Walnut Crescent

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with larger version

And here, also in enhanced colour, we see Cassini's view of Iapetus as it approached for its recent, closest and final flyby of the moon. Since the other side, as seen in the previous post, was fully lit, that means that this side must be shrouded in darkness - a peculiar property of these space orbs that you may have noticed from the one you live on.

As before, you can find a high resolution version at the image source.

Iapetus in Colour

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with larger version

Well, enhanced colour. The brown parts of Iapetus are in reality that kind of very dark brown that seems black if you don't look closely enough. (Click the source of this one if you like it, as there's a 4100 x 4100 pixel version available from the NASA photojournal.)

Saturnian Greyspace

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image source with more information

I don't often post monochrome images from Cassini, but something about the lines, shadows and banding in this image lends it a noirish, sci-fi atmosphere. Or perhaps a dark chocolate, liquorice deliciousness, I'm not sure which.

Rhea transits the disc, while if you click for the full view, Mimas is a small speck visible over the edge-on rings towards the right of the image.

50 Years of Orbits

Image source

Orbiting a planet is about falling so that you miss the ground. It's strange when you think about it, and not all that surprising that we haven't been doing it ourselves for long - though the big ball of rock we live on has certainly been in an orbit of its own for billions of years.

Anyway, Sputnik, the first human-made object to orbit the Earth, was launched on this day, exactly 50 years ago. Celebrate by messing around with Orbiter, why don't you.

Begin Cat Feet-Protect

I can always tell when it is getting cold at night, because my furry cat starts sleeping on my feet, obviously purely with the selfless intention of keeping them warm.

I can also tell when it is getting cold at night because, uniquely, I have been born with the ability to feel hot and cold.