Time and Lots of Space

Conditions: Frosty cool.

Where in the World is... Oh.

Scientists this week announced that the Voyager 1 space probe had almost maybe-possibly had kind of exited the solar system, due to the instruments on board reporting some cool stuff.

On Thursday, scientists reported that, no, Voyager 1 still had not reached interstellar space, but it had entered a region that no one expected and no one can yet explain, a curious zone that is almost certainly the last layer of our Sun’s empire — technically speaking, the heliosphere. Three papers published in the journal Science describe in detail the sudden and unpredicted changes encountered in the surroundings of Voyager 1, which left Earth about three months after the original “Star Wars” movie was released and is heading for the cosmos at 38,000 miles per hour.

Scientists had expected that Voyager 1 would detect two telltale signs as it passed through the heliosheath, the outermost neighborhood of the solar system, which is thought to abut the heliopause, as the actual boundary is known. Happily, the key instruments on Voyager 1, as well as those on its twin, Voyager 2, are still working after all these years, and its nuclear power source will last until at least 2020.

Last summer, one of the two events occurred, but not the other, leaving scientists perplexed. Scientists had predicted that at the boundary between solar system and interstellar space, the solar wind — a stream of charged particles blown out by the Sun — would fade away, and that Voyager 1 would no longer detect it. That happened.

They also expected that the direction of the magnetic field would change as Voyager 1 emerged from the Sun’s magnetic bubble. That did not.

- nytimes.com/

So we continue to wait for the day we can finally boast that a man-made object has finally passed outside the solar system. Intentionally, that is.



Film Review: World War Z

It’s the zombie apocalypse again, with your host: Brad Pitt. But this time the zombies have been cleaned up (no gore, for the kiddies) and sped up – able to sprint across open spaces in a giant zombie horde as they pursue Brad and his photogenic family. After escaping the initial sudden zombie attack and making it to a military ship Brad has to leave the family in order to go off and try to find a cure. This is the heart of the film as we go on something of an apocalypse travelogue as Brad seeks answers to how the global outbreak began, taking in such places as a bunker in Korea and a walled in compound in Israel before crash-landing near a research installation in Wales.

And here we have the big finale, which was originally a giant battle sequence in Russia but has been instead switched to a tension-filled sneak through a medical laboratory. I thought it worked pretty well actually, with Brad having to tiptoe around trying to find a way to combat the zombies. But while the nuts and bolts of the movie are sound; the plane crashes, the zombie swarms, the sense of desperation, I think the problem with this film is that it’s kind of empty. There are various clues Brad learns as the film rolls along, like how the initial victims took longer to turn zombie, or how they’re seemingly attracted to loud high pitched noises, but nothing is actually done with these clues at all, which is weird because I thought we were detecting things here, like it was important for something.

We’re basically disconnected from the actual zombie infestation in this zombie infestation movie. It starts elsewhere, and Brad gets swept along in it, and then suddenly he’s washed out of it once he’s found a way to combat them. It’s an apocalypse seen only through the eyes of this one guy, whom we don’t really know all that well, and who doesn’t really know what’s happening. So by the finish all we know is... zombies bad? Family good? When the best part of the movie is that part where Brad tends to a soldier who’s had her hand severed (after he severed it), you know that the film has somehow failed to engage you with the characters, who they are and what they’re worth. The ins and outs of the plot have been constructed well. But the actual focus of the movie is fuzzy and unfulfilling. Three braaains out of five.



- Peace out