[X] My Assistant

[Pando]

Enjoy that one...

http://www.msnfound.com/MetaGenerator.ashx...backlot_p_h.wmv

(Doug, please move this outta here if it doesn't belong, don't know where else to put it...)

[Phil Stooke]

A great discussion. If only the people who need to read it were reading it...

If anybody has not read Pale Blue Dot, it's well worth it. Too bad about the cover, though - it would look much better with one of "our" pictures on it.

Phil

[chris]

A great discussion.  If only the people who need to read it were reading it... 

If anybody has not read Pale Blue Dot, it's well worth it.  Too bad about the cover, though - it would look much better with one of "our" pictures on it. 

Phil

I found Andrew Chaikin's book "A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts" to be utterly captivating. The descriptions the astronauts gave of being on the moon were so vivid that I don't think any fictional account could possibly compare.

Chris

[ljk4-1]

I think it is very important that the science, events, and languages of our world be preserved for the future. The Long Now Foundation is doing something about this.

http://www.longnow.org/

To put this in a space perspective, the Rosetta comet probe has a copy of their language disk on the vehicle, to be found some day either by our descendants or someone else:

http://www.rosettaproject.org/live

And the two Voyager probes have the famous Interstellar Records with snippets of 55 human languages, along with various sounds and carefully selected images of our world and species. It is estimated they will survive at least one billion years in interstellar space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Regarding the discussion on science and religion, this guy named Hippocrates summed it up quite well about 2,500 years ago:

"People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates

[um3k]

Regarding the discussion on science and religion, this guy named Hippocrates summed it up quite well about 2,500 years ago:

"People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates

Was he a time traveller or something?

[chris]

Was he a time traveller or something?

No, just a rationalist. An inverse way of putting his statement is Arthur C Clarke's observation that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Chris

[ljk4-1]

I learned one sad thing from this paper: More people saw Elvis on TV in 1973 than the Apollo 11 mission.


Paper (*cross-listing*): physics/0508183
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:41:44 GMT (341kb)

Title: The Road Less Traveled: Non-traditional Ways of Communicating Astronomy
with the Public

Authors: Michael J. West (University of Hawaii)

Comments: Invited talk to appear in Communicating Astronomy with the Public
2005, eds. E.I. Robson and L.L. Christensen, 2005, ESA/Hubble Publishing, in
press; 10 pages, 5 figures, pdf only
Subj-class: Popular Physics
\\
In an age of media saturation, how can astronomers succeed in grabbing the
public's attention to increase awareness and understanding of astronomy? Here I
discuss some creative alternatives to press releases, public lectures,
television programs, books, magazine articles, and other traditional ways of
bringing astronomy to a wide audience. By thinking outside the box and
employing novel tools - from truly terrible sci-fi movies, to modern
Stonehenges, to music from the stars - astronomers are finding effective new
ways of communicating the wonders of the universe to people of all ages.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0508183 , 341kb)

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

ljk4-1,

good concern, but I shall read the paper later.

In my country France, there are some science astronomy TV programs; but they are usually late the evening so that only leisure (rich) people can really follow them. This subject is deemed non-interesting...

Once in Toulouse there was a science feast with a green laser shooting at the sky at night, many people noticed it and went to see what was happening. Other interesting moments are Moon eclipses, and Sun eclipses too. I remember in 1998 the path of the centre of the shadow was overcrowded.

There is something more in astronomy than for instance in physics, something that astronomy shares only with paleontology: our origins, our home planet, the universe in which we are living. Personnally I find these concerns really moving, as the great love affair in my life.


Sci-fi movies can be good as movies, but usually they are bad or very bad in a science point of view. Pity, great pity, as if one day somebody makes a great science movie, people will be disapointed not to see hyperespace or plastic clones, or to see spaceships needing thousands of years to reach a star.

[ljk4-1]

Does Magnificent Desolation give Apollo Moon Hoax conspiracists some inadvertent ammunition?

New U.S. Release

Posted: Wed., Oct. 5, 2005, 5:33pm PT

Magnificent Desolation: Walking On The Moon
(Docu -- Imax)

By JOE LEYDON

Arguably the most avid space buff and NASA booster among contemporary
pop culture icons, Tom Hanks enjoyed significant commercial and critical
success through his involvement with Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" and his
own "From the Earth to the Moon" HBO miniseries. But his third time
isn't a charm: "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon" is an
earnest but insubstantial Imax 3-D spectacle that, even at 40 minutes,
seems unduly padded. Obviously aimed at schoolchildren likely to be
bused in for matinee screenings, docu offers grown-ups very little that
is fresh or insightful, and too much that is facile or hokey.

Pic comes off a hodgepodge of breathless hero worship, cutesy history
lessons and melodramatic re-enactments, with a side order of vocational
guidance for impressionable youngsters. During an early montage of kids
being grilled about NASA history, it's meant to be hilarious that most
of them know little about the history of U.S. space exploration. (At
least one confuses Neil Armstrong with Lance Armstrong.)

At the end, however, narrator Hanks sounds a dead-serious note of
inspirational encouragement when he asks: Who will be the next explorer
to walk on the moon? "Maybe that person is watching right now," he says.
"Maybe the future walker is you."

"Magnificent Desolation" pays heartfelt tribute to 12 Apollo astronauts
who visited the moon between 1969 and 1972. But the actual missions are
represented mostly in fuzzy TV news clips shown in tiles that
sporadically "float" across the massive Imax screen.

Director Mark Cowen places greater emphasis on aggressively dramatic
re-creations, which are used to illustrate Apollo mission highlights --
and, not incidentally, fill the entire frame with striking 3-D imagery.
(Tech values are undeniably impressive.)

And while pic does include a few key recordings of actual astronaut
dialogue, well-known actors (including, most effectively, Morgan Freeman
and Bill Paxton) are employed to read salient quotes by the real-life
moon men throughout pic. The unfortunate result is, the slick artifice
tends to overshadow the real astronauts.

Ironically, verisimilitude of the Imax-size re-enactments indirectly
lends a kind of credence to long-circulated conspiracy theories
(mockingly acknowledged elsewhere in pic) that the Apollo voyages didn't
really occur, but actually were faked on a Hollywood soundstage.

And speaking of fake: Hanks takes a shameless approach to revving aud
interest by dramatizing a "What if?" scenario involving unforeseen
catastrophe during a moon mission.

Title refers to Apollo astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin's description of
lunar landscape.

[dvandorn]

Does Magnificent Desolation give Apollo Moon Hoax conspiracists some inadvertent ammunition?

I don't think so. The kind of computer graphics necessary to do such realistic re-creations of Apollo lunar surface operations simply didn't exist in 1969. They did exist in 1997, when Hanks' "From the Earth to the Moon" was produced, but were too expensive for a TV-miniseries, and so the effects on that former work, while good, were nowhere near as accurate as those in this latest effort.

I'm not just talking about needing to hook up a LOT of 1969-era computers -- I'm saying that the primary ability to manipulate images digitally did not exist then. Anywhere. The *only* way to do special effects back then was entirely optical, cutting and reprojecting images into composites. There wasn't a system available, anywhere in the world, that could digitally manipulate images to the extent necessary to even produce a single still frame from the new IMAX film.

Of course, if you're so steeped in self-doubt that you cannot allow yourself to believe the actual facts, then this fact, too, can be easily dismissed. I don't see my arguments changing the minds of any of those who believe in this conspiracy fantasy. But I also don't see this film swaying anyone with half a brain away from the side of factual rationalism, over to the "dark side"...

-the other Doug