Spiderman 2

4/5 stars

This second Spiderman movie is one of those rare examples of a sequel being just as good (and possibly better) than the original. The story was strong, the villian was fun, and the direction and acting quite good. The effects were better than the first movie, with a more seamless blend between the CGI spiderman and the background scenery.

It struck me how frequently the prideful scientist becomes the villian in comic book movies. I suppose I knew it prior to this movie, but the movie served as a reminder. I don’t actually know very many scientists who are that arrogant, and very few work comepletely alone as Octavius, so it’s a bit unbelievable that someone like him would be permitted to conduct his experiments without extensive checks from other scientists. But, this is not real life, and I was more than able to push my “I believe” button, and get caught up in the story.

Cabaret

2.5/5 stars

I didn’t actually know much about this film when we rented it, though I did know it was set in Berlin in the 30s and that it was a musical (originally a play, I assumed). Sally is a performer at the Kit Kat Club in Berlin — an American with dreams of becoming a famous actress. Brian is an English student in persuit of his PhD from Cambridge, in Berlin as part of his research. They meet when he rents a room at the same boarding house as Sally.

Ostensibly, this is a love story, with oddly placed comments about the Nazis. Frankly, it was just plain weird. I’m ready to rent a few “normal” movies for a change….I need a break from all the weirdness we’ve been renting (i.e. The Great Escape, James and the Giant Peach, and now this).

Not underwater, but still basket weaving

I took my second-ever basket making class today. Last year I made an Adirondack market basket, and it turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.

This time, we were making a double-walled cathead basket. This one didn’t take quite as long as the Adirondack basket, but it turned out just as well.

James and the Giant Peach

2/5 stars

Hmmm….this is not at all what I was expecting. Rather than coming across as a fanciful, fun children’s movie, it was creepy and nightmarish. I confess that I haven’t read the book, so perhaps I could have been more prepared, but still, the previews did not prepare me for what I saw.

News from the Universe: 07/16/04

A few random items from the world of astronomy:

• Shortly after achieving orbit around Saturn, Cassini started returning spectacular pictures of Saturn and it’s rings. This is just the beginning of it’s 4-year mission to study the gas giant. in December, the Huygens probe will be released into the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
• New Scientist reports that Hawking cracks black hole paradox. In 1976, Stephan Hawking caluclated that while a black hole can emit radiation, that the radiation contains no information about the matter inside the black hole. The result was in direct conflict with quantum physics that states that such information is never lost. This has been referred to as the black hole information paradox. Hawking argued that the intense gravitational fields inside a black hole somehow broke down the laws of quantum physics. Now it seems that he has changed his mind — information can be retrieved from a black hole. The results will be presented next week at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, after which, I’m certain, there will be a lot of noise from physicists as to the merit of Hawking’s solutions.

Why Send a Manned-Mission to Service Hubble

Robert Roy Britt, on Space.com, wrote a commentary on the latest push to use a manned mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, Commentary: On Saving Hubble, NASA Chief Listens with One Ear. I nearly stopped reading the piece when I read this:

Astronomers depend on it to investigate the most fundamental questions of astronomy and cosmology. It is often the best tool for the task, and sometimes the only tool. No replacement is on the drawing boards.

Britt should know better. He’s been writing for Space.com for a while, and should be aware of the James Webb Space Telescope, which was originally known as the Next Generation Space Telescope. It is a replacement for Hubble that has been under development for years. The problem is that JWST will not be launched until 2011, assuming it’s schedule doesn’t slip. If Hubble is left to die, it will likely not operate beyond 2007, which will leave a 4-year gap in space-based optical astronomy. Astronomers don’t want to lose that time if they don’t have to…Hubble is just too valuable to let die.

I continued reading, and while I agree in principle with Britt’s point that a manned-mission should be performed, I do not agree with the primary reasons he puts forth.

In defending the manned-mission, he writes:

Robots are great. But they lack, well, human drama. No reality show would seize public attention like a risky, vital, televised journey into the black void to rescue a great American treasure.

Which makes the manned-mission sound like a publicity stunt. The reason for a manned-mission is not to create a great TV opportunity for NASA. Rather, it is preferred by astronomers because astronauts will be more likely than robots to perform all of the planned service for Hubble.

The minimum job of any servicing mission to Hubble is to arrange for a save way to de-orbit the satellite, this part is mandated by Congress and would not be terribly difficult for a robotic mission to accomplish. The next level of the servicing mission is to replace the gyros and batteries, which would extend Hubble’s operational lifetime. This task could be difficult for a robot, but is certainly within the realm of possibility. The final level of the servicing mission is to install new instruments. It’s this last bit that would be fairly unlikely to happen with a robotic servicing mission, which would be a pity, too, since these instruments have already been constructed and represent exciting science possibilities. A manned mission would be able to accomplish all of the tasks, where there’s much uncertainty that a robotic mission would be able to do more than just ensure a save de-orbit of the satellite.

Britt also comments:

Robots are fearless. They face risk with nary a thought. They might save Hubble, and astronomers are overjoyed that O’Keefe is seriously considering a robotic mission to do the job. It might even lead to a technological leap in space robotics.

But the larger question O’Keefe must answer right now is whether humans, too, can stare down danger for a noble cause.

We are not going to get the American public (and more specifically, the congresspeople and NASA muckity-mucks) behind a manned-mission to Hubble with a play-ground-esque dare for NASA to jump back into spaceflight. We’ll accomplish more by arguing that when NASA is ready fly shuttles again that the science (and, yes, public-relations) benefits of a fully-functioning Hubble is worth the risk.

Fahrenheit 9/11

4/5 stars

This movie just made me mad. Not at Moore (though I was quite pissed at him after his little tirade at the Academy Awards in 2003), but at our government. I’ve already been mad at the government for allowing Bush to bully his way into Iraq, and then for not admitting that they made a mistake and that they have not planned far enough in advance to have enough troops to take care of Iraq with a minimum of lives lost. I’m still mad that they keep telling us that Iraq is better off today than before they ousted Hussein. That’s just not true, and anyone who believes it does not have their eyes open to what’s going on over there.

But the movie made me even more angry that Bush is able to get away with all of this all for the purpose of lining not only his friends’ pockets, but his family’s as well. I don’t understand why Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair, but Bush is able to get away with high level corruption and murder of our troops for the love of money. I can only hope that after the next election we will have a strongly Democratic governement that will not be afraid to prosecute Bush for his crimes.

It’s hard to say that I “enjoyed” the film, but it was well done. There are some complaints that it sprinkles scenes that are too light-hearted in amongst the carnage. I almost think that it was necessary, though, because I certainly couldn’t have sat through scene after scene of mamed and destroyed people. I’m not going to write a full review of the film — others have done that, and better than I could do: Pharyngula, Preposterous Universe, Scaryduck, Salon.com, “pro” review, Salon.com, “con” review, Salon.com, G.I. perspective.

Moving on, though I’ll have to look back

I set aside my work with the Crab data, since I was just getting frustrated instead of making any progress. I’ll need to go back and figure out how to deal with the deadtime correction in the light curves, but that will wait until next week.

In the mean time, my work with MCG-6-30-15 has shown that there is a definite difference in results when extracting flux-resolved spectra versus time-resolved spectra. So far, my data pipeline has only done time-resolved spectra, but we’re not sure anymore that this is the right approach.

My project the last week has been to add flux-selected spectra extraction to the pipeline. I thought it would be difficult, and I do have some more tweaking to do that might turn out to be harder than I’d like, but my initial implementation did not take as long as I thought it might.

Currently, the pipeline treats each “observation” (as defined by the RXTE data) separately. It cuts the lightcurve into 0.25 cts/second slices, and then bins those up until there are at least 100,000 net photons in a bin. This ensures that there is enough signal to get a decent fit of the spectra to various models, but hopefully minimizes spectra that cut across flux states.

I’d like to improve this by making all of the flux bins equal across the entire data set (i.e. so that the flux bins from observation to observation are taken from the same count rate ranges). I can’t currently think of any way to do this easily, but I’ll ponder it for the next week or so, and maybe something will come to mind.

Creating Characters Class, Week 1

I’m enrolled in a community education writing class, and the first class met tonight. It should prove quite interesting. The teacher is Elaine Raco Chase, who has written many books including romances, mysteries, non-fiction, and women’s fiction. She is the kind of person that I’d like to just sit down with and let her talk for hours and take notes. She wrote the first romance novel that made it to the New York Times’ Bestseller’s List. She wrote for one episode of Saturday Night Live during the first season, but was the only one not on drugs, so only lasted the one episode. She currently suffers from short-term memory loss, due to an accident with a drunk driver, after which she was in a coma. Her husband was involved in creating closed-captioning for TV. She had interesting stories about other authors (like Clive Barker’s fans coming up to him and pricking their fingers so he could sign their books in their blood).

Anyway, our assignment for the week is to pick a character-driven TV show, and observe the different characters, taking note of their age, description, body type, etc. We’re also supposed to start awakening our senses — paying attention to all sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. Finally, we need to find a picture that resembles a character that we want to work with for the next several weeks.

Grad Life: Christmas Baking

One fun tradition that I started for myself during grad school was to do Christmas baking early in December. Anyone who has been in college will probably recall that early December is generally a particularly busy time. It marks the last two weeks, or so, of regular classes, when the professors realize that they have not nearly covered the amount of material they’d been planning to cover. This means that in addition to the normal end-of-the-semester papers , exams and prep for finals, the amount of material and homework presented during each class increases by 50-100%.

This was the time of the semester that I wanted to do my Christmas baking.

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