Returning to the Moon?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10347397-23.html

I was mostly in agreement with this article until I got to this line: "And if we needed to, we could put the Saturn V rocket back into production, along with the old Lunar Module. NASA still has all the plans for these vehicles on file."

Drawings mean nothing. Conceptual engineering is fairly cheap compared to manufacturing. I doubt any of the Saturn V tooling is around anymore, and all of the expertise is definitely gone.

And now that I go back and read what he actually said, it just makes me more angry. Yes, we have the Atlas and Delta, but it takes a lot of money and effort to man rate a launch vehicle. SpaceX isn't man rated either, as far as I know. Cutting NASA's budget will not do anything, and it's ridiculous to propose that they could continue to function as they were on half as much money. He wants higher risk? You can't have higher risk in spacecraft. It's unacceptable. Save your judgement until after you've worked in the industry, or at least done more research than looking up the names of launch vehicles. Hmph.

100 Years of Visual Effects

The other day I was talking with one of my friends about how far movies have come in the last ten years in terms of special effects. The CGI improvements are particularly noticable in series such as Harry Potter or Pirates of the Carribean. LoTR set the bar with their realistic costumes and sets by WETA workshops and with Andy Serkis playing Gollum, but you don't see a change between the films because they were all done at once.

Compare Harry Potter and Half Blood Prince (2009) to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). The Quidditch scenes alone - in SS they look like a computer game, in HBP they look *real*. They were able to take footage of the actors on brooms and incorporate it into the scenes. Also look at how much better they integrate creatures into the scenes - Dobby (Chamber of Secrets, 2002) and Buckbeak (Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004) to the Inferi in HBP and the entire final scene.

Davy Jones in Pirates 2 and 3 is amazing CGI as well. Bill Nighy (you may remember him from Love Actually as the naked rock star) plays Davy Jones. Like Gollum, they use a lot of his facial expressions, but the really cool thing is that all those tentacles have AI. It seems like facial CGI is going to make huge improvements in the next few years, the aging done in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is just the beginning.

I think it's a pretty exciting time for special effects in movies. :)

Anyways, this post was inspired by this video - Visual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration. Check it out! And if you like the music, it's Blue Man Group and you *must* see their show.

I'll add some pics and clips to this later tonight :)

Reading Rainbow Draws to a Close

Sadness.

Time Traveler's Wife

The movie The Time Traveler's Wife came out this past Friday. It's an adaptation of the book by Audrey Niffenegger which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm a little hesitant about the casting - I don't think I would have chosen Rachel McAdams or Eric Bana for the leads, but I can't figure out who I would cast so I guess I don't really have an argument. Hopefully I'll be able to see it soon and give a review.

Critics haven't been totally pleased with the movie, but physicists have. :) The Science and Entertainment Exchange just posted about how the time travel in the movie follows the 'rules' of time travel. Check out the post here.

Ugh!

You know what really grinds my gears? How much the media focuses on the marital and dating status of women like Jennifer Aniston. Like this article, calling her a spinster?! Why does it matter? A woman's marital status should not be her defining characteristic, and yet, that's all that the media reports on. I can't wait for when they don't even bother with this nonsense and all they worry about is her career.

Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

As you probably know, July 20 is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. There have been plenty of events to celebrate this, including the LV campaign with Buzz Aldrin, as I blogged about before.

Something else that my good friend KJ showed me is this website: http://wechoosethemoon.org/ where they're doing a 'live' webcast reenactment of the Apollo 11 launch and all of the stages. Go check it out! As of right now, we have 36 hours until launch.

Girls, Math and Movies

Here's another mixing of two of my favorite things: a blog about science in movies! The X-Change Files is the blog of a collection of scientists associated with the National Academy of Sciences, and their goal is to help the movie industry get science right in their films. So they provide experts in just about every field and facilitate communication between the two. Pretty cool, huh!

Recently they posted about girls in math and how the differences in scores between genders is not genetic, it is cultural. They used the movie Mean Girls as an example of the environment young women have to deal with and how movies can show that being good at math and being popular don't have to be mutually exclusive.

As a woman with a math and science background, I can attest to how having a positive and supporting environment is important in order to develop those skills. I can see the difference between me and my sister - I went to a math and science high school, where the importance and value of these subjects were emphasized and appreciated, and there were basically no gender stereotypes I had to deal with. She's going to a public high school, and while her test scores are just as good and better than mine, she claims that she hates math and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. I wonder, if she didn't have the social pressures to be cool, or if more (popular) girls around her were also good at math and enjoyed it, if she'd feel the same way.

I hope that someday our society can get to a point where we don't have to wonder whether girls aren't reaching their potential because of peer pressure, and we can focus on helping them become exactly what they want to be, no matter what it is.

Okay, enough preaching from me... but one more thing! If you know a young girl who is good at math or science, encourage her! Help her believe that she doesn't have to be dumb to be popular. :)