I think Kate's right and I , chanelling for the man Battelle, was wrong. I guess the "heck, yeah" in the press release got to me -- and the idea that a gigabyte was something you give away free these days...
On the particles front, I wouldn't be so sure about Google mail: John Battelle knows a lot about this stuff, and the date too, so I tend to trust him...
(and he can put together a good joke himself, too)
Sorry, that should have been "I've blogged on that myself"; people pimping their musings ought to get the html tags right...
I'm afraid Graydon's not quite right on the redness. Though at times the Viking images were presented as being really red, when the final colour balancing was done (it took years to calibrate everything properly) they came out as being a "moderate yellowish brown" according to the arcane but internationally agreed conventions for reporting colour. Pathfinder found exactly the same thing, but was able to assign a separate colour to the rocks: "dark grayish yellowish brown".
That said, they're great pictures -- and the notion that the camera should provide pictures this good of the entire surface boggles my mind. The people at ESA are, as Chad suspects, spinning things a little, especially with the talk of a "eureka moment" and discovering water -- I've blogged on this disingenuousness myself. But they have a hell of a spacecraft there.
Coming in late on a few points
I think Tim Kyger92s largely right on the fact that it was only the second generation of spaceflight engineers who were drawn in by Heinlein (ie people reading Scribner92s juveniles in the 1950s and 1960s working on Voyager in the 1970s and 1980s). But he may go a little too far in downplaying sf's earlier influence. I92ve only really known one of the first generation pioneers, Mert Davies, a RAND veteran who worked on the first spy satellite cameras. He was at RAND because he heard they were interested in satellites in 1946 and, an sf fan and backyard astronomer since boyhood, he couldn92t think of anywhere else he would rather be.
Jonathan92s rhetorical similarities between V Bush and RAH seem to me more a case of common cause than evidence of a personal link. The quote about science, numbers and opinion, for example, echoes a long strand of thought perhaps best illustrated by the quotation from Lord Kelvin: "I often say that if you can measure that of which you can speak, you know something of your subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory". I believe this quotation is carved somewhere prominent in the economics school at the University of Chicago; it was also much loved of the 1930s Technocrats.
On the question of Heinlein thinking himself a failure and not being H G Wells, IIRC there92s a rather persuasive treatment of this by Alexei Panshin: "When the Quest Ended", NYRSF 38, October 1991, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 1.
If my roads have to roll, I want Jordin in charge.
And if Tolkien hadn't translated into Gregorian months I suspect even fewer of us would notice the meaning of the dates, as elucidated by Tom Shippey: that the fellowship leaves Rivendell on Christmas day and that Sauron falls on the 25th of March, traditionally the date of the crucifixion, the Fall and the annunciation (and also, accounting for a shift from Julian to Gregorian, the start of the UK tax year...)
On the linked subjects of who's the protagonist and the centrality of hobbits, in the documentary footage on FOTR I'm fairly sure that PJ says the editing for the theatrical release of that film was entirely dominated by the process of making and keeping Frodo central -- if it didn't move the Frodo story then out it went. The EE works better as a film, and as an adaptation, because it relaxes that constraint.
A problem with the centrality of hobbits became very clear in the theatrical TT, in that Merry and Pippin are pretty pointless in that part of the story. The screenwriters' response was to turn them into semi-trickster figures in order to get the Ents on side, which those of us who are moderately pro-Ent saw as a bit of a liberty, if not a shameful travesty.
The fact that... *very minor spoiler*
...ROTK apparently begins with a flashback to Smeagol's fall from grace suggests that small-people's-stories are very much on PJ's mind. Incidentally, it is very cool, I think, after 7 and a half hours of "previously", to begin the last film with a flashback to something not previously shown.
The Martian meteorite ALH 84001 had traces of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in it; not large traces, and not clearly of Martian origin -- but surely close enough to red-planet crude for this government's work.
Maybe they could trot out Tommy Gold, who claims that Mars is stuffed with Black Gold. Of course they'd have to shut him up before he went on to claim that the earth is, too, and that if we just wait around all the wells will replenish themselves...
On Andrew's question about non-physicist non-biologists, I'd offer Gene Shoemaker. Changed our view of earth by providing the definitive proof of large impactors and thus paved the way for the return of ctatstrophism to the earth sciences. Also later became involved in pioneering efforts to discover and track near earth asteroids and will thus, in time, be seen as someone who saved a lot of people (or who should have been taken more seriously). Provided the intellectual underpinning of planetary geology (and thus much of planetary science) with his photo-based geological mapping of the moon. Managed to get science taken seriously by the Apollo project. Enthused a generation of planetary scientists, and created one of the enduring institutions in which they work. Had his name on the century's greatest firework display. You could argue for Urey or Kuiper as "fathers of planetary science" but its hard not to end up favouring Gene.
Also Jim Lovelock -- the greatest living proof that chemists aren't boring. The insight that life and the planet on which it lives are components of something that must be seen as a system in its own right (Gaia), and that there must be all sorts of feedbacks involved in that system which we would be well advised to understand, has had a slow but persuasive influence on the earth sciences, less acknowledged than it should be if more acknowledged than it used to be. A great deal of what now goes under the heading "Earth System Sciences" is the result of the Gaia hypothesis. (Dept. of unsurprising coincidences; IIRC Lovelock first widely published outside the scientific literature in Co-evolution Quaterly, prop Stewart Brand.)
For the most part other scientists fall into the "if they hadn't done it someone else would have" problem inherent to their calling. (A friend of mine who is a scientist and a writer recently told me that he was considering putting his science -- very accomplished -- on a backburner as he grew older, because what he didn't do in that field would be done, whereas novels he didn't write would never be written.) Most of the players in the plate tectonic revolution seem to me to fall into the someone-else-would-have-done-it category. The scientists mentioned above avoid this by having done stuff that other people really might not have done.
Another scientist who might qualify sheerly for the importance of what he discovered, though, is Hubble. The universe is expanding -- it thus has a history and a beginning and maybe an end. That's a pretty big intrusion into our ways of thought.
On Gates, no contest that he doesn't make the 20c list. But if the Gates foundation achieves what it is being spectacularly well funded to attempt, he might make it on to the 21c one.
The thing that gets me about American political interviews is the incredible "always nice to have you on the show" "welcome back" stuff -- for a denizen of the British journalistic culture it verges on the surreal. That said, "hard hitting" British broadcast journalism of the "why is this bastard lying to me" variety is often counter productive -- John Humphreys on the Today programe is often unlistenably ineffective, and Jeremy Paxman's affectation of world weary disdain can grate. (Paxman does have flashes of brilliance, though, such as repeating the same question 13, or maybe 17, times when the answer was evasive. This seems no less impressive even though we now know it was done in part because the next item on teh programme was held up by a technical snafu, he had to fill and he didn't have anywhere else to go with his line of questioning.) I remember Paxman interviewing Jack Kemp some years ago, though and getting nowhere; after a minute or so, Kemp simply said something like "I don't understand -- is this an interview designed to get at my views or a debate about the issue". Wrong footed Paxman completely.
Incidentally, I have no brief for Tim Russert (though I have on occasion enjoyed his technique of providing old footage of his interviewee saying something that, in the context of their current position, they would rather the audience forgot) or GE, but does GE really count as "one of the world's leading DEFENSE CONTRACTORS." It is not a prime contractor on anything much -- it doesn't design or build military systems of any size; it has sold off quite a lot of defense businesses it used to own, IIRC. It does have a big business making jet engines, and a lot of them get sold to the military around teh world, making it the 16th biggest defense company in 2002 (on a five year average I think it runs in the 20s). But its military business is less that 2% of its total business. Lockheed, on the other hand, is 93% defense.
I love that Heinlein and Smith on a test drive story. I remember looking it up last year when reading George Dyson's "Project Orion", which begins "In 1957, tail fins, not seat belts, were standard equipment on American cars' -- a brilliant opening -- and goes on "Orion was a sibling of both Sputnik and teh Chevrolet Bel-Air." This seemed to me a great insight -- still does -- and I was a little disappointed that the book didn't quit carry it through. But its got lots of good stuff in it, regardless, -- and maybe bringing out the cars on the cusp ideas would have ended up looking heavy handed.
Isn't Usul the Fremen word for Al-Qa'ida?
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