Ever wonder what $6 billion worth of smoke looks like?

You’ll see on until Tax Day April 15 at the president’s Space “Summit”.  Skip the moon we’re adding some pocket change to the funding to zoom right out there to the…well, to the moon! And, oh yes, the asteroids, because that’s a spacey sounding word.And then evennnnntually…back to Mars. Mm hm. It would be back to Mars because as I’m sure the administration’s crack space advisers have told the summit organizers, Mars’ orbit is closer to Earth’s than the Asteroid Belt. 

The President’s ambitious new strategy pushes the frontiers of innovation to set NASA on a more dynamic, flexible, and sustainable trajectory that can propel us on a new journey of innovation and discovery.

Catch that? Pushing the frontiers of innovation to propel us on a journey of…innovation!

And of course it all must be sustainable. A word that is already has the early lead as the decade’s most meaningless.

Is it political at all? You bet your retro rockets it’s political.

Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, like Houston’s Johnson Space Center and Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center, face thousands of threatened layoffs from Obama’s decision to end space shuttle operations at the end of the year and scrap NASA’s $108 billion back-to-the-moon Constellation program.

But it is the swing state of Florida that is getting the president’s attention, not perennially GOP states like Texas and Alabama.

“The Obama administration could care less about offending Texas politically,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

Review Shutter Island: A Disappointing Leo-fest

Shutter Island, Uncle Marty’s mash-up of Jurassic Park and Gothika is long on length and short on intrigue and would have been much more interesting if it had turned out that….oops, never mind. This will be short because you can’t talk about this film too much without stepping into spoiler territory.

Many folks will be seeing it one way or another and will not be warned off by a mixed review. I’ll limit it to one semi-major spoiler below the warning at bottom. Leonardo gets all the screen time you’ll expect if that’s your pleasure. He’s not my type and acting-wise I don’t think he’s ever come up to the level of his performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. If he ever gets a few lines or scars on that baby face maybe we can buy him as a suspense lead. Mark Ruffalo delivers a fine understated performance while dodging Leonardo-chewed scenery. In fact it would have been a better movie if Ruffalo had the lead. And the whole cast seems to be slipping in and out of some kind of accent, whether Boston or Fifties, or foreign or whatever, except for Max Von Sydow. Master that he is he manages to maintain the gothic accent he’s had in every movie in which he’s ever been called upon to speak English since the turn of two centuries ago. I mean, he was old already in The Exorcist. and that was 1973!

Scorcese will draw auteur-loving cineastes thinking he’s the greatest director since Hitchcock and though he’s had flashes of storytelling brilliance (Casino) we would not go that far. Here he’s too obviously stepping into a suspense genre that he may not fully grasp, or which he allows to slip from his grasp.

Technically it was extremely hard to believe that there could be so many distracting continuity blunders. Head turned this way – cut – now it’s turned that way. Hand on arm – cut – hand off arm. It’s not that big a deal if it happens occasionally buy the movie is rife. Also the cinematic atmospherics promised in the trailer did not materialize.

Well reading over this maybe you should stop here to avoid all spoilerish material.

***Mild Spoiler Section***
There are some set-piece eerie scenes and some jump out scaries that anyone who’s been to two horror movies in their life will be able to anticipate. There’s some gore and plenty of unnecessary profanity. And just too much Leonard DiCaprio.

In and among all the serial implausabilities are long stretches of exposition and pontification that could easily have been cut and not be missed. The ending comes with one mighty final — and flat, if you ask me — twist that amounts to a deux ex machina of the sort that novice screen writers are warned direly against (I should know!)

So in general it’s a so-so- story with workman-like acting (except for Leo!) and directing, but not paced like a good thriller and not a masterwork of suspense by any stretch.

***Spoiler Section***
Well two semi-spoilers. At one point Leonardo speaks a line that implies his character does not know what a lighthouse is. “What is that tower?’” he says. What? Are you kidding? It looks like…well, just exactly like a lighthouse, Leo. Duh. Rubbing too close to super-brain Leo’s actual intellectual capacity kind of dropped the Fourth Wall for me and it was hard to overcome the rest of the way.

Also, for two and a half hours you’re exposed to some annoying equivalence in the whole brain-tampering sphere between the US and various oppressive tyrannies, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia to North Korea. HUAC is invoked and is IDed as the funding source for the island and the whole Red Scare is brought in. None of these associations are satisfactorily resolved away. A blank-slate viewer will retain much of it. But the most outrageous slander concerns the liberation of Dachau concentration camp at the end of WW II. That this complete and horrific fiction portrayed in the film and the indictment of US fighting men that goes with is not directly and completely refuted is reprehensible and has nothing to do with dramatic license to skew historical events just a bit. The crime depicted is impactful and the camera lingers on a striking image. Some viewers will come away from this movie thinking that’s what happened.

If you see it and want the real story. come back here and click on this link. be sure to check out the picture of the GIs as they encounter a surrendering German officer at the camp’s gate.

Concentration camps were horrible, their liberation plenty grim, but warped depictions such as in Shutter Island borders on desecration of the memories of the inmate and their liberators, as well as mental cruelty to the descendants.

The beginnings of Sheila’s search tech

In Kite Mason Dash sends Sheila on a search similar to the one used as an example in this story about a new artificial intelligence method for mega-fuzzy deep-topic searching, to be used to strip anonymity on the net.

Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld, volunteers as assisted suicide test case

He has a rare form of Alzheimer’s and not much hope, it seems. The Alzheimer’s  Society’s comment  here. Pratchett’s own post on the matter is here. In the picure he looks like Windle Poons, the undead wizard from Reaper Man. Could be intentional.

Göbekli Tepe: Recasting the origins of human culture

It may not have been farming that brought the first people together into proto-cities says archeologist Klaus Schmidt. The first “big thing” may have been…

“Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that ‘the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,’ and Göbekli may prove his case.”

Earth from Space: Images from 1946 to present

NASA releases the clearest composite picture of Earth ever taken. Assembled from images taken by the Terra satellite. The Daily Mail story includes a retorspective of Earth images from outside the atmosphere, included the first, taken from 65 miles up by a camera on a captured V-2 rocket.

Space Shuttle a blunt instrument, but an impressive one

Here’s NASA’s STS -130 ascent video. It’s  merely awseome. Hard to believe it still gets lit off like a Roman candle. It’s old tech, yes – Earthlings should be long past it by now -  but as far as manned space vehicles go, it’s still the highest rung on the ladder for getting people into space and back in a more or less civilized manner. (The tiles, though. Never could quite get on board with the tiles.) Be sure to watch it on the a screen.

And here’s a mission video,

ISS’s Picture Window

The latest module added to the International Space Station has a cupola with as much glass as has ever been fitted to a space structure. The hexagonal blister allows a wide of the station and Earth below.  The article implies that it could be the start of a trend. Well we’d sure hope so.

Civ V: First Contact

Three screenshosts available at the first official inkling of fifth iteration of the number one all-time great strategy game, Civilization. We’ve had every one and every add-on and only the second was somewhat of a disappointment. Just…one…more…turn…

Constellation: Sloppy Birth of a Dead Project

There are space fans out there who’re unhappy with the cancellation of the Constellation program, but I’m not one of them. Here’s an account at HobbySpace of how its inception was botched…by self-interest and cronyism, sounds like.

And Transterrestrial’s one-word subject on this post succinctly captures the midset of a key congressional committee’s chairperson.  Clearly the advantages of private sector investing their own money and competition is is completely opaque to the supergenius big brains who’ve somehow landed in the US government.

It’s time for NASA to back out. Space cannot be left to the modern equivalent of the WPA.