US Flight Information and Airport Status

~Courtesy of ResourceShelf, I've found a very useful and interesting website, which displays current US airport information and live flight data. You can use it to track expected flights and see when travelers will arrive and if there flight has been delayed. The information is not real-time, but it is up-to-date within a few minutes. The initial display shows all flights in the country, but you can zoom in and select a specific flight to see its number and status, or you can enter information into the boxes on the left to get more specific data.

Check it out here: http://www.helloflight.com/

This pun is *UNACCEPTABLE*

~If you thought my word play was bad, you haven't seen anything. But is this pun an "epic win" or an "epic fail"??

Friends of the Carrboro Branch Library Webpage

~As part of my scholarship from the Friends of the Carrboro Branch Library, I was supposed to construct a web page for the library. However, a few months ago, I learned that Orange County authorities had decided to standardize the web pages of their library system, which meant that I would no longer be making the "official" library page. I'd already put some work into it, but I was able to pass this work on to the person who is in charge of making the library page.

As an alternative project, I made a web page for the Friends, which I recently completed. You can behold the fruits of my labor if you are so inclined: http://www.ibiblio.org/cbl/. As you might notice, it still needs a bit of work, but at least it validates!

Barackula!

~I just finished the novel Fledgling, by the late Octavia Butler, which is one of the books assigned in my Popular Materials class for the Spring semester. Fledgling is a science-fiction story about modern vampires (known as Ina), and in particular, one young vampire who has lost her memory and must discover who is hunting her and her family.

While it was initially enjoyable, I felt that it jumped the shark when I realized, about halfway through the book, that it was all about racism. See, the main vampire character is black as a genetic experiment allowing her to resist sunlight, but some racist vampires don't like her being black!! Seriously, I like my metaphors a bit less obvious. Also, there was entirely too much weird sex going on with human "symbionts" bonded to the vampires; for example, the main character is 57 years old, but appears to be only 10...you can probably guess where that's going.

Speaking of vampires, I recently stumbled across the website for the musical Barackula, and...well, here's the description from the website:

"Barackula is a short political horror rock musical about young Barack Obama having to stave off a secret society of vampires at Harvard when he was inducted into presidency at the Harvard Law Review in 1990. Obama (Justin Sherman) finds that he must convince the vampire society that opposing political philosophies can coexist or else the society may transform Obama to the dark side. Reminiscent to Michael Jackson's Thriller and a slight infusion of Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

Of course, some people feel that Barack is already on the dark side (*coughmomcough*), but from the above description, how can you not watch Barackula? Besides, the film manages to take potshots at both the Clintons and Mrs. Obama. If you have a few minutes and need a laugh, it's well worth watching. You can see the whole thing online (it's about 12 minutes long). If nothing else, it shows how much fun we're going to have making jokes from the new President's endlessly-adaptable first and last names.

Moonwalking Bird

~If there was an avian dance contest, the male of this bird species would win hands down:

Meterorite Fragments Located

~The remnants of the meteorite from the previous post have been located near an area with the wonderful name of "Buzzard Coulee", on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. The meteor is now believed to have been a roughly ten-ton asteroid fragment, most of which disintegrated while falling to Earth. No large chunks of it have yet been located, only small fragments.

Incoming!

~A few days ago, the dashboard camera of a police car caught this incredible footage of a meteor over Edmonton, Canada:



^ If I saw something like that, my first instinct would probably be to duck and cover! Astronomers now hope to recover the pieces of the meteor that may have landed on the ground. You can read the story here.

Book Review: Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians

Fellow Librarians:

It has come to the attention of the Librarian Council that fugitive oculator Alcatraz Smedry has recently published a memoir of his early life titled "Alcatraz versus Evil Librarians", under the absurd pseudonym of Brandon Sanderson. Said volume is an EXTREME THREAT to the hegemony of global librarian domination, and it is our task to deal with the fallout caused by its unfortunate publication.

Presented as an exciting coming-of-age story, Alcatraz follows the orphaned title character as he receives a mysterious package in the mail on his twelfth birthday, and soon learns the truth about the conspiracy of librarians that secretly rules most of the world. He has the audacity to infiltrate, with the assistance of a motley band of his relatives from the Free Kingdoms, one of our regional headquarters (disguised as a public library as per standard protocol). Along the way, he confronts sword-wielding librarian guards, miniature talking dinosaurs, laser-firing glasses, a powerful Dark Oculator, and magically-animated death-dealing romance novels.

Young adults will surely enjoy this seditious book, cunningly disguised as "fiction" to entice ignorant readers. While some members of the Council argue that this book should be immediately banned and destroyed on sight by librarian operatives, I believe the opposite approach is in order. Read this book, recommend it to patrons, and extol its virtues! They will surely love it and thank you for the recommendation. Of course, they will believe that "Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians" is merely a work of fiction…which is exactly what we want them to think.

Sapare Aude,

~DJD~

Dark Oculator 1st Class

Inner Libraria

Connecting With Friends and Family

~For my class in Young Adult Literature, my group set up a website titled "Connecting with Friends and Family":

http://familyandfriends.weebly.com/

From the main page, you can select the tabs at the top for sections on friends, family, and family-friendly places; from within each section, there are link on the bottom of the page to subsections with books, movies, music, and magazines relevant to each section.

Along with finding pictures for the website, my job was to locate relevant movies and television shows about family and friends, as well as fiction and nonfiction books. I managed to include some of my favorite novels from when I was younger, such as Invitation to the Game, The Machine Gunners, and The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm.

Phoenix Down

~The Phoenix lander on Mars has stopped communicating with Earth, after five months of scientific exploration on the red planet. Originally planned to last only three months, Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, 2008, setting down on the northern polar area of the planet.

The main objective of the mission was to analyze the history of water in the polar areas, which was known to exist from the observations of previous satellites but of which nothing was otherwise known. Some of its findings include:

• Verifying the presence of water ice and salts in martian soil
• Taking over 25,000 photographs, including some at the atomic level using a powerful microscope
• Analysis of the martian climate and weather patterns, including snow and whirlwinds
• Analysis of martian soil through Phoenix's on-board chemistry lab

Phoenix will be missed, but it was an important part of martian space exploration. By detecting water ice and providing humanity with information on the weather patterns of Mars, we know more about the planet that will be useful in an eventual manned landing in the future. Right now, I'm just glad that Phoenix wasn't hit by the Mars Curse. By the way, here's a link to a blog with some of the best pictures taken by Phoenix.

Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe

~NASA astrophysicists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland recently reported some astounding results during a large-scale survey of galaxies in the universe. Simply put: rather than the galaxies all moving away from each other as expected according to the Big Bang Theory (no no, not that Big Bang Theory), much of the matter in the universe seems to be moving in the same direction: towards some massive object(s) beyond the boundary of the visible universe, pulling at everything like an immense magnet.

The study was an analysis of information from a previous study, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped out the intensity of cosmic microwave background radiation throughout the visible sky. The cosmic background radiation, assumed to be a byproduct of the big bang, contains temperature fluctuations which also reveal the velocity of distant galaxies. The expected result of the new study was that the farther away distant galaxy clusters are from us, the slower their motion would appear to us on Earth.

However, what the scientists discovered was quite different: rather than an apparent slowdown, the galaxy clusters (such as the Bullet Cluster pictured above, some 3.8 billion miles away) are all moving at the same speed, about two million miles per hour, and more importantly, they are moving in the same direction.

The phenomenon has been nicknamed "dark flow" by Alexander Kashlinsky, the lead scientist on the study (apparently because if you can't account for something in astronomy, you just add "dark" in front of it). The tentative hypothesis to explain the phenomenon is that the rapid inflation of the early universe just after the big bang pushed large amounts of matter beyond the cosmological horizon; as the inflation of the universe slowed to what it is today, the matter continues to be pushed "outside" of what we can see. Another theory is that some as-yet-undiscovered curvature of space results in the apparent movement in one direction.

Still, if these controversial findings hold up, the cosmological implications would force us to reevaluate key aspects of Big Bang Theory, which is currently the leading cosmological model. The current theory assumes that space has near-identical properties everywhere in the universe, but if matter (and therefore space) exist beyond the visible universe, they have to be accounted for somehow in our model of cosmology.

The complete study was published in the October 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed astrophysics journal. You can look at the published article in PDF format here, but be warned that it's heavy on physics.

My theory is that the galaxies are all very hungry, hence their movement towards a certain restaurant.

Farewell Mike

~Michael Crichton died unexpectedly yesterday of cancer at age 66. He was the writer of many novels (most famously, Jurassic Park) most of which were made into films. He was also a screenwriter, and was the creator of the long-running hospital drama ER.

This is especially sad for me, because Crichton was one of my favorite writers when I was younger. I still remember the first book of his that I read--it was a paperback copy of Sphere, which I ordered from the Scholastic book magazine when I was in Mr. Post's 5th-grade class at Fishkill Elementary. I've read it at least a half-dozen times since then, and I've also read most of Crichton's other thriller novels. As for the film adaptions...well, with the exception of "Jurassic Park", they were lacking, to say the least. I'm still waiting for Jurassic Park 4: Dino-Riders:



I've not enjoyed Crichton's most recent novels. He seemed to become increasingly bitter in his writing, and his novel "State of Fear" is widely viewed as an anti-environmentalist screed (Crichton once famously pronounced that "environmentalism is a religion", angering many). The last book of his I read (and the last one published prior to his death) was Next, about genetic engineering. While it raised some very interesting issues, as a novel it was a failure, with disconnected plot lines that never linked to each other.

Still, I'll miss Crichton's novels; I may not have enjoyed his more recent books as much as his earlier works, but I would always read them and look forward to the next one. He was a master of taking controversial, modern issues and working them into the plots of his books. For example, he has tackled such diverse issues as genetic engineering (Jurassic Park, Next), sexual harassment (Disclosure), cultural clashes (Rising Sun), psychological horror (Sphere), nanotechnology (Prey), vikings (Eaters of the Dead), killer viruses (Andromeda Strain)...you get the idea. His most recurring themes were technology-run-amok, the breakdown of organized systems, and a calm, well-educated protagonist that solved the problem though rational thinking.

Naturally, Crichton's death immediately launched an epic pun threat on reddit based on the titles of his novels:

Don't worry. He'll be buried in amber and one day ...

He fell Prey to The Andromeda Strain...too soon?

Don't get into a State of Fear that you'll be ostracized. It only Congo well for you.

Hes reached the end of his personal Timeline - R.I.P Michael

He literally was The Terminal Man

He's phear of technology was well known.

In the interest of full Disclosure, let's not forget his accomplishments.

Accomplishments that can be seen in the light of the Rising Sun.

What else can we say? What's Next?

Next? There Sphere we'll see Eaters Of The Dead.

He was such a great writer... I feel like his death was a Great Train Robbery. Did he die in the E.R.?

Things You May Not Have Known About Michael Crichton:

• The man was gigantic: 6'9''!!
• He was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, so we should be calling him Dr. Crichton, thank you very much.
  
• He had a dinosaur named after him ("Crichton's ankylosaur", a small, armored plant-eating dinosaur that dates to the early Jurassic Period, about 180 million years ago).
• The lead character of the science-fiction show Farscape, John Crichton, was named after Michael Crichton
• When he was in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names "John Lange" and "Jeffery Hudson", both of which are subtle references to his unusual height.
• He once wrote a textbook about computer programing titled Electronic Life.

Crichton may be gone, but he won't be forgotten: his last novel will be published posthumously next year. Perhaps you should get yourself down to the library and check it out.

Fair Trade Expo

~Last Saturday, I helped out at a Fair Trade Expo held at the Carrboro Century Center. The event was part of "The Big Read", a program run by the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Central Piedmont Literacy Collaborative. The idea of this region's Big Read is to get as many people as possible to read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, so people will better understand what migrant farm laborers (of which there are many in North Carolina) go through in difficult economic times.

The expo was being run by the staff of the Carrboro Cybrary, and since I work nearby at the Carrboro Branch Library, I decided to help out.

^ The information table of the Fair Trade Expo. Learn all about Fair Trade!

Fair Trade is a market-based social program designed to empower producers in developing countries and ensure sustainability, typically for agricultural trade items such as coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea, etc. To be certified as "Fair Trade", a product must reach certain standards of ethical production, ensuring that the producers are paid a fair wage, have good working conditions, and have a stake in the business (for a much better explanation, look at the Fair Trade Overview at fairtradeusa.org).

This might sound hopelessly idealistic, but it's a market-based business approach (like micro-lending), not a pie-in-the-sky hippie scheme. The amount of Fair Trade products produced and sold is increasing rapidly, and it has helped millions in developing countries achieve not only better standards of living, but a sustainable business model that will continue to produce income for them. On the buyers side, we get the benefit of high-quality, pesticide-free products, and an increased market for U.S. exports as consumers in developing nations are able to buy more.

^ Representatives from the Open Eye Cafe were at the Expo, selling delicious, freshly-brewed fair trade coffee. Or at least, it smelled delicious; I haven't drank coffee since I got back from Japan.

^ My job at the expo was to run a quiz about fair trade; the display on my left has facts about fair trade that help with the quiz.

^ Good luck, girls! 5 out of 8 correct answers won the quiz-taker a prize (a magnet, button, or sticker). The rare person who got them all correct (and believe me, it wasn't easy!) won a fair-trade chocolate bar.

^ This dad got a little help from his backseat driver.

^ There was also a representative from Ten Thousands Villages, a chain of shops that sell fair trade handicrafts such as ornaments and toys.

^ This guy from Weaver Street Market had plenty of fair trade items for sale, including coffee, tea, cooking cocoa, and chocolate bars. He also had free chocolate samples...

^ Another game at the expo was this "Pin the Fair Trade Food on the Country", along with information on which countries the products come from.

We ended up with perhaps thirty people stopping by the expo. It wasn't a tremendous turnout, as I don't think it was advertised enough. There was a reporter from the Chapel Hill Herald who interviewed me and wrote an article about the expo for the paper. Still, I'm glad that a few dozen people got a chance to learn what the "Fair Trade" label means, so they'll understand when they see it in stores. Hopefully, if given a choice, they'll buy fair trade.

Enceladus Up Close

~Click here to see some amazing pictures of Enceladus, a satellite of the planet Saturn, taken by the Cassini space probe. It's the third satellite in the solar system in which internal geologic activity has been detected, after Io and Triton.

Oopsies!

~Can you spot what is wrong with the picture below? (Hint: somebody made a truly asinine mistake.)

^Yes, that red-white-and-blue scarf with the word "VOTE" being worn by Governor Palin does indeed have donkeys on it, the symbol of the Democratic party. I guess it must be hard for her to keep track of the $150,000 spent by the Republican National Commitee to buy expensive clothes for her entire family (ironically, a likely violation of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law). Yessir, the RNC is putting your donation money to good use!

My suspicion: the person in charge of Palin's wardrobe is actually an Obama spy.

The Successful Launch of IBEX

~NASA's latest science satellite, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (or IBEX) was successfully launched today. Its purpose is to detect and examine particles from the termination shock, which is where the solar wind blasting outward from the Sun begins to slow down and eventually cease. It will also study galactic cosmic rays, which may pose a health hazard for astronauts operating beyond Earth's orbit.

Aside from its scientific value, an interesting thing to note about IBEX was its unusual launch method. Rather than blasting off from the surface of the Earth or being released by a space shuttle in orbit, IBEX utilized the Pegasus launch system, which is a rocket released from an aircraft in flight. Imagine a large plane firing a missile, which is powerful enough to go into orbit. This is useful only for small payloads; fortunately, IBEX is about the size of a bus tire. You can see a video of the IBEX launch by clicking here.

"I am here to clear these mines, sir!"

~Coming this holiday season: a Hollywood mega-blockbuster, from the creators of: Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Pokemon: The Movie, Wing Commander, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, Doom, Bloodrayne, and Silent Hill:

Minesweeper: The Movie

Indiana Jones and the Ring of Death?

~I spent most of Saturday at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and the North Carolina Museum of History. While I would have enjoyed the museums in any case, I was there as part of an assignment for a class I'm enrolled in, on the subject of how libraries and other institutions can be places of lifelong learning for adults. The professor scored us free passes to see the Dead Sea Scrolls traveling exhibit, which I was looking forward to.

At first, I thought the Scrolls exhibit was a bit of a letdown: the scroll fragments were tiny, and most of the exhibit was there to establish context for them, with information on ancient Israel and the cult that created the Scrolls. The room with the scrolls was dark and had ethereal music playing, theatrical effects which I found irritating rather than awe-inspiring. After pondering the exhibit for a couple of days, however, I've decided that I like it more than I did while I was there. After all, I did walk away from it knowing more than I did when I entered, and there were some interesting dioramas and other displays. Of course, the fact that I wasn't charged $22 certainly helped.

The most interesting thing I saw on my day of museums was actually not the scrolls, but rather a mysterious silver ring located in the military history exhibit of the History Museum. The permanent exhibit is titled "A Call To Arms", and documents the involvement of North Carolina soldiers throughout the history of the state. New since my visit to the museum last year was an expanded section on North Carolina soldiers in Iraq.

The ring that interested me, however, is in the World War II section. Take a look:













Creepy, isn't it? Notice the SS lightning bolts on either side, and the date "1946" on one side and "DACHAU" on the other. The history behind this object is brief but fascinating. It was handmade by a Nazi SS guard who worked at Dachau, the first of the infamous concentration camps where tens of thousands of prisoners were gassed or worked to death. The camp was liberated by Allied forces in 1945, and the SS guard was captured and later put on trial for crimes against humanity.

He made the ring while incarcerated, and gave it to an American soldier (from North Carolina) who had been guarding the German prisoners awaiting trial; apparently, the SS guard felt that the American had treated him humanely. What a story! In the words of a friend of mine, "This is how action movies begin." A mysterious ring, passed down through the family for generations, holding a terrible secret...I can almost hear the late Don LaFontaine in my head.

Unfortunately, details about the ring were frustratingly lacking while I was in the museum. What were the names of the SS guard and the North Carolinian solider? How did the ring get to the museum? Why was it donated? I wished there was a way I could find out at the museum, but I had little to go on. Later, I searched through the museum website, hoping for more details, and found the page for the ring...but it has even less information than what is actually written at the exhibit. So I emailed the head of collections, asking for more information. This morning, I received a reply (links added and spelling corrected by me):

"Mr. Dusto—this ring was donated by a North Carolinian from Scotland Neck in Halifax County who served as an enlisted solider in the US Army 1944-1946. While part of the Army of Occupation in Germany, he was selected to assist the judges at the Dachau War Tribunal Trials as needed. As such he often escorted the prisoners. This ring was made by one of the former guards at Dachau who was on trial who was later executed. The donor could not remember the name of the prisoner. The prisoner made it while in jail and gave it to the donor in appreciation for the humane treatment he received. Hope this information helps. Regards, Tom Belton, Curator of Military History, North Carolina Museum of History"

So, there was more to the story, as I suspected, but Mr. Belton's reply leaves a great deal out. What does he mean, "the donor could not remember the name of the prisoner"? Why not? Did the prisoner and the guard barely know each other, and the Nazi just gave it to him one day? Was the ring found in the soldier's estate after his death, without him saying much about it? Or perhaps...the soldier didn't want to remember the person who gave him the ring, and just wanted to get rid of an object attached to such hideous memories of what was done in the camps..?

I have the sudden urge to write a screenplay. In the meantime, to learn what Indiana Jones thinks of Nazis, click here.

The Communist Threat!

~"Investigative Reporter" Stephen Colbert has exposed a Red Menace lurking in society, one different from the massive socialist bank bailout from "Comrade Bush". This new threat is slowly but surely destroying America's free market system by lending books to the public for free. Watch this video, as it is essential that you be able to recognize this Marxist threat lurking in nearly every town in our nation:



^ Looks like things are looking up in my profession! Actually, I really have noticed a significant increase in library use since the mountain range that was the Dow Jones suddenly eroded into a canyon. I think library use will only increase in the coming years. At libraries, you can (among other things): check out books, DVDs, and audio books; use computers and the internet; read newspapers and magazines; and even take your children to storytime and other events. Best of all, there's no individual charge for any of this. Libertarians need not apply.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention that the week of September 27 was Banned Books Week, which celebrated books that are banned or challenged for removal across the United States. The SILS library at UNC displayed a collection of challenged children's books and had a banned books reading. It's sad that books like "Huckleberry Finn" are still challenged. In my opinion, the most amusingly pathetic attempt to challenge a book was a parent who in 2006 wanted to remove "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury from the reading list of his daughter's school.

Yeah...let's ban a book about book banning! While we're at it, let's have a public book burning! We'll party like it's 999!

Impact in 3....2....1....

~Lurking in the depths of space, a piece of material left over from the formation of the solar system has orbited the sun for billions of years. Hurtling through the void, its path has now brought it to its final destination: Earth!

No, no, it's not that bad. However, for the first time, astronomers were able to accurately calculate the location that a small asteroid would explode in Earth's atmosphere.

The meteor, designated Asteroid 2008 TC3 (or 8TA9D69), was between 3 and 15 feet in diameter, and was discovered by astronomers at Mount Lemon Observatory, which is operated by the University of Arizona. It entered Earth's atmosphere and subsequently exploded in a 1-kiloton fireball at 10:46 pm EST over northern Sudan, moving eastward towards the Red Sea (which is northeast of the Horn of Africa).

The meteor was predicted to explode in the upper atmosphere, and therefore did not cause any damage on the ground (although I imagine it might have given some uninformed pilots in the area quite a shock). I think it's amazing that astronomers were able to detect and predict the fate of this asteroid, and it gives me hope that larger and potentially dangerous space objects could be detected before they impact Earth.

Of course, even if we did know that a killer asteroid was headed our way, there's not much we could do about it at this point. Our only realistic option would be to assemble a team of roughneck oil drillers led by Bruce Willis to land on the asteroid and destroy it. Bruce, the survival of our civilization is in your hands!

There's No Place Like Home

~Check out this alternate ending to "The Wizard of Oz", which reveals what Dorothy was *really* thinking towards the end of the film:

The Wisdom of Dr. Losee

~On Mondays and Wednesdays, I attend a required class in "Research Methods", which is a prelude to completing a master's thesis. My instructor, Bob Losee, occasionally throws out gems of wisdom on various topics. Here are a few of his sayings:

Dr Losee on research sampling:

• "There's nothing magical about samples."

Dr. Losee on causation:

• "Causation is best done by English majors."

Dr. Losee on money:

• "You can get fancier if you've got money."

Dr. Losee on sex:

• "Guess what? Sex is a whole lot in your head."

And my personal favorite, Dr. Losee on variables:

• "Independent variables are variables that can vary independently."

Comet Pathfinder

~On my UNC web site, I've posted a pathfinder on the topic of "Cometary Science". I made it as part of a class assignment, so feel free to take a look if you want. It's located here. There's also a summary of why I arranged it the way I did, located here.

Pirates Hit the Jackpot

~Avast, ye scurvy sea dogs! On Thursday, pirates seized a Kenya-bound Ukrainian ship off the coast of Somalia. Since Somalia fell into anarchy in 1991, piracy has become a serious problem in the busy shipping routes around the Horn of Africa; for example, last year a French yacht was captured, and before that a cruise ship was approached by pirates.

Currently, over a dozen hijacked ships are being held by pirates in the town of Eyl, and the pirates collect over $100 million annually from ransoms. The pirates are said to operate out of large "motherships" which lurk off of the Somali coast, dispatching pirate-filled speedboats to surround and seize passing ships.

The seizure of this ship, the Faina,was different, because the cargo hold is crammed with grenade launchers, ammunition, machine parts, and 33 Russian-made T-72 tanks! Details of the cargo soon emerged. The tanks were acquired and refurbished by Ukrainian state-owned armed company Ukrspetseksport, which then legally sold them, the parts, the ammo, and the grenade launchers to Kenya for about $30 million.

Although the pirates may feel as if they've hit the jackpot, the tanks may be more trouble than they're worth. Even unloading them will be difficult without large cargo cranes. Even worse for these modern-day buccaneers is the response that the seizure has drawn: both the U.S. and Russian navies have dispatched heavily-armed warships to recover the cargo ship and patrol the area.

Still, I hope they get the tanks back, otherwise U.N. or Africa Union troops dispatched for peacekeeping duties in Mogadishu may find themselves confronting more than AK-47's. The piracy situation in the area has gotten out of control, with over 50 ships attacked this year and 25 successfully captured.

I have a suggestion for solving the problem: bring back Letters of Marque! Rules for granting them are actually in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, paragraph 11), so we might as well use them. Arrrrrr!

"Don't Move, Or the Tenor Gets It!"

~I laughed so hard watching this video (warning: contains language and some violence):

^ In case you understood none of that, it was a parody of this PBS game show, based on the educational geography game of the same name. Each episode of the show would be narrated by Rockapella, who would sing events as they happened. Contestants were called "gumshoes" and the game show host was "The Chief". It was a fun show, and if there were any justice in the world, Rockapella would still be singing "She put the mis in misdemeanor when she stole the beans from Lima!"

Click on the play button below to hear the full theme song, which was parodied in the video:

Introducing.....Haumea!

~Please welcome the most-recently designated object in our solar system family: the dwarf planet Haumea!

^ Haumea (named for a Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and fertility) was actually discovered in late 2004, and was designated 2003 EL61 (nicknamed "Santa"). The above image is an illustration of what Haumea might look like; no pictures have yet been taken of the planet, as its average distance from the sun is fifty times greater than that of Earth.

The most striking feature of Haumea is its unusual oblong, cigar-like shape. This shape may be a result of its fast rotation, as it rotates once every four hours or so, tumbling end over end as opposed to spinning like a top.

The two moons of Haumea are named Hi'iaka and Namaka, for daughters of the goddess Haumea.

^ Haumea is the fifth object in the solar system to be officially designated as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (after Ceres, Pluto, Eris, and Makemake). Personally, I'm hoping Orcus will eventually make the cut.

^ This diagram shows Haumea's orbital path. The gray circle in the center is the orbit of Neptune. The red circle is Pluto's path, while Haumea is in yellow (the Q's are the points of aphelion, when the planets are farthest from the sun). To see where Haumea is RIGHT NOW, check out this orbital tracker from NASA (give it some time to load up).

With all of these "dwarf planets" and "plutoids" and new comets showing up, it seems that the solar system is much more crowded than we thought it was just a few short years ago. The idea of a hypothetical "Planet X" now seems quaint (although again, I'm still hoping). With new planets being constantly discovered both inside and outside the solar system, it's an exciting time in the field of astronomy!

Games4Learning: The Immersive Power of Creative Worlds

~I attended a lecture & discussion today titled, "The Immersive Power of Creative Worlds" by Dr. Brian Sturm, a professor in my school at UNC. It was part of the "Games4Learning" initiative, which is the same program that ran the "Exploring Haptic Devices" event that I went to last semester.

During today's lecture, Dr. Sturm spoke about his own research into immersion, what can enhance it (by pulling a person into a story), and what can break it (by jarring them out). At some point, we've all been pulled into a good story, be it a book, film, game, or a story someone tells us. The focus of this lecture/discussion was how games can be used for learning, so we discussed whether or not immersion is desirable in eductation, how it can increase or decrease recall of information, and so forth.

I said quite a bit during the discussion, as I am a gamer (albeit not as much as I used to be thanks to constraints on my time). For example, one of the issues we discussed was whether the presence of other people in a game (i.e. a multiplayer game) increases or decreases immersion. I think that this depends on the game; certain games are built for multiplayer, and are more fun that way. However, I felt that other people in computer role-playing games greatly detract from immersion.

That's why, for example, I can't stand (and don't play) online Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft. Having some clueless new player with an absurd character name speaking in abbreviations about unrelated things does not immerse me into the story. Discussions of optimizing one's character to increase their effectiveness is boring. Worst of all, I don't want to spend time completing a major section of the game, only to have other players tell me about how they already completed it. In an MMORPG, you're never the hero; you're one among thousands (or millions, in World of Warcraft). You can't save the world; you can't even change anything. What's the point of playing? I guess people play it as a form of social interaction, but I prefer to see real, live people.

I did disagree with a couple of points that Dr. Sturm brought up. He mentioned several qualities of a game that increase immersion; most of them made sense, but I took exception to the idea that if you fail in a game (or get killed, or whatever), it's essential to be able to quickly reload and not be too far behind. Compare this with the genre of games called roguelikes, adventure games with very simple graphics (often only ASCII text) in which you can save your game, but if you die, the save file is deleted! In these games, unlike most RPGs, decisions have real consequences. When your character in Rogue walks into a room and sees a capital J (for Jabberwock, one of the most dangerous opponents), your pulse rises and you get scared...because if you don't deal with it properly, it's over, and back to the beginning.

I also brought up the case of "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem", a brilliant horror survival game for the Nintendo Gamecube, which includes a special "sanity meter". As your character faces horrors, the sanity meter decreases, which results in on-screen vertigo: the screen blurs, hallucinatory sounds play, the size of objects become distorted, and so forth (a similar sanity mechanism is used in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth). These kind of effects, as Dr. Sturm agreed, increase immersion by having you experience what the in-game character is experiencing.

Where Sanity's Requiem really shines, however, is that when the sanity meter gets low enough, the game starts to mess with not only the character, but with the person playing the game. Examples of this include the word "VIDEO" appearing in the screen as it blanks out, as if you had accidentally hit the wrong button on the remote; or a (fake) error message saying that the controller has been detached; or a (fake) volume bar that appears and goes up and down, along with the sound in the game; or when attempting to save, the game refuses to acknowledge and says that you have chosen not to save. Normally, these kind of jarring effects would, according to Dr. Sturm, decrease immersion, but I think that the opposite is true. Instead, they add to the confusion and horror of the game and pull you even more deeply into it.

Obviously, I enjoyed the discussion. I've registered for the next Games4Learning event on "Alternate Reality Games", and I might even take one of Dr. Sturm's classes next semester.

Movie Review: "THE ILLUSIONIST"

THE ILLUSIONIST (official site) is a 2006 period drama starring Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, and Paul Giametti. Norton leads as legendary stage magician "Eisenheim the Illusionist", whose arrival in turn-of-the-century Vienna attracts the attention of both the ambitious Crown Prince Leopold and Leopold's fiancee, the Duchess Sofie von Teschen. Why has Eisenheim, long absent from Vienna, suddenly returned? How does he accomplish his seemingly supernatural illusions? What's his relationship with Sofie, and what is he really after? Watch this trailer for a preview:



Although it takes place in Vienna, much of the movie was actually filmed in the Czech Republic. I didn't realize this at first, but a flashback of Eisenheim's childhood early in the film seemed familiar to me:












The flashback scene on the left was filmed in Krumlov, one of the towns I visited while in the Czech Republic (the photo on the right is one of mine). I went to the top of the tower that Eisenheim is looking at! Here's another example from the movie:












In the film, the image on the left is Prince Leopold's palace in Vienna. However, if you've been to Prague (or have been following my blog), you may recognize it as the main gate to Prague Castle, adjacent to Castle Square. While watching the movie, I knew I'd seen those Fighting Greek Titans somewhere before...

Overall, I enjoyed "The Illusionist" very much. It's a movie that caused me to think, mostly along the lines of "How the heck did Eisenheim do that?", and "What's he up to now?". While it is not a comedy, there are many humorous moments, chiefly from the interaction between Eisenheim and the Chief Inspector (played by Giametti) assigned to investigate him. While somewhat predictable, the superb acting, witty dialogue, and enjoyable plot combine to create a fun and memorable movie experience.