Seeing Through It.

Conditions: Cold, Dewey.


Cooking The Space Books.

Launched in 2004, a space craft called the Gravity Probe has been using some very sophisticated gyros to try and prove Einsteins theory of Relativity correct by measuring if the Earth slightly warps time due to it's weight. Unfortunately, the gyros being used were apparently not machined entirely correctly, which meant the data being returned from the craft was 'bad'. On a tight budget anyway, Director Dr Everitt and his team came up with a Earth-based "solution" to the problem.

The Stanford team collected 11 ½ months’ worth of transmissions from Gravity Probe B, but tiny unforeseen drift in the gyros fouled the results. Dr. Everitt had to ask NASA for extra time and money so his 11-member team could figure out how to scrub the data.

Scrub the data, you say? A light polish? A shine job?

The niobium coating on the gyros and their housings was slightly uneven, causing tiny unpredictable electrical torques that made the gyros drift. The mission ended in 2005, but since then the Stanford team has been mapping niobium anomalies on each gyro, finding the patterns of distortion and subtracting the noise from the data.

NASA had budgeted money for a year’s worth of post-flight data analysis, but Dr. Everitt needed a lot more time, and NASA financed the project through 2007. That, it seemed, would be the end.
[...]

The team has forged ahead. In August, graduate students made a breakthrough in data analysis to bring the frame-dragging deviation within 15 percent of the predicted result. Dr. Everitt hopes to get it within 3 percent by mid-2010. The geodetic effect is currently within 1 percent of the predicted result and is expected to go even lower.

- www.nytimes.com/

Wait a minute, so the data the probe is sending back is apparently 'not right', and the supposedly-warped gyros are to blame, and now so you have a team hard at work, for years now, busy warping the data the probe is sending back in order for it to line up with the predicted data? Is this still science? Because it sounds like it stopped being science as soon as the craft took off and turned into some kind of statistical book-fixing exercise. How can you trust any of this after spending so long cooking it to match what you expected? I mean, why measure the Earth at all if you're just going to twist the data to match what you predicted would happen?



Overlooking The Obvious.

I'm sure you've all seen the horrific story in the news about the corrupt cops who killed a little old lady during a botched drug raid. The cops planted evidence on one guy to get him to give up another guy, and they used someone else in order to get a search warrant. Then...

In November 2006, the officers -- all members of Atlanta's narcotics squad -- gunned down Kathryn Johnston inside her home. The police claimed to be acting on information they received from a confidential informant that drugs were being sold from the house. That allegation turned out to be false.

From the beginning evidence showed the officers manipulated a highly suspect system to justify an assault on Johnston's home.

As AlterNet first reported in April 2007, the cops began by planting evidence on a known drug dealer to solicit information about narcotics being sold out of Johnston's home; they then used fabricated testimony from a separate confidential informant to obtain a search warrant.

A terrified Johnston fired a single shot from a gun she kept when the police entered her home on a "no-knock" warrant; she hit no one. The cops responded with nearly 40 shots, killing her instantly.

The Johnston tragedy shined a spotlight on the cavalier use of informant information to obtain arrest and search warrants.

And the officers involved have now been sent to jail, and rightly so. But there's a small part of the story that catches my attention.

A terrified Johnston fired a single shot from a gun she kept when the police entered her home on a "no-knock" warrant; she hit no one. The cops responded with nearly 40 shots, killing her instantly.

- www.alternet.org/

A "single shot"? That "hit no one"? This 'little old lady', a grandmother, responded to cops entering her home by grabbing a gun and firing off a shot at them? What the hell? I realise the cops were corrupt and all, but still it seems to me her reaction was kind of harsh in the extreme.

Why isn't that part of the story? Where was the gun? Where did she get it? What reason did she have for thinking these guys were not cops, or worthy of getting a bullet?




Film Review: My Bloody Valentine 3D.

It's funny how new technology is frequently used to mask over the same old crap. Usually the whitewash is very thin, so you can see how tired it is from the start. My Bloody Valentine, however, is a tired old cliche wrapped in a shiny new box: It's filmed in 3D. My, what a wonder the 3D realm is. From the startling open credits to the mundane closing ones, MBV is a visual feast in the third dimension, ranging from delectable shots of landscapes rushing toward you and various instruments hurtling toward you, to cardboard cutout-type effects of flat objects of people standing a few feet in front of a flat background. But when it works, it really works, and most of the time it works, albeit with the odd fuzzy shot.

The downside is that the tickets cost twice as much. Which I guess might almost be acceptable if it was a really good film, which sadly MBV is not. This film is in fact quite bad, telling the old tale of a miner who goes amok and kills a lot of people after a mining accident, then ten years later seemingly coming back and running amok yet again. The point of these films I guess is to try and figure out who the masked killer is, and I was pretty sure I had it pegged, until a very specific scene showed that it couldn't possibly be the guy. So then at the end when it turns out to be this guy after all, despite the very specific thing that prevented it from being him, I was quite disappointed. But not only did the film cheat, it was predictable, cliched, obvious, shallow and old-fashioned. It's fairly normal to have at least one female "tough" character these days, this is the 90's, girls can be and are just as tough as boys. Not in this film. The characters are blank, the story was dumb, the gore lacked any dramatic impact. Perhaps (hopefully) it's this last point that caused my fellow audience members to laugh out loud at each and every kill, no matter how grisly. I thought the point of horror movies was to be anything but roaring with laughter at each kill?

The only redeeming feature is the refreshing lack of shaky-cam. I assume this was due to the nature of shooting a film in 3D, it must be difficult to shake a giant, heavy, multiple camera rig around like it's a handy cam. The upshot of this is that the film is shot very well, professionally and smartly. The 3D effects are quite amazing to behold. A couple of sequences are quite good(...). But the flat plot and the flat characters are not redeemed by the 3D picture. Two pointy objects out of Five.



And Finally.

- Danziger

- Peace Out.