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8 May 2005
The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn
On Thursday, Caltech Y invited a couple of us over to JPL to attend the Spring Friends of Caltech Y Dinner. The Y, as it is endearingly called, is a separate non-profit entity operating (nearly) independently of Caltech. It engages in a variety of student enrichment activities that are socially and environmentally oriented. The Y receives a good portion of its funding from alumni and many others living around the area and the dinners are an occasion to bring its patrons in contact with active student leaders. The most entertaining part of Thursday's dinner however was a lively lecture by Trina Ray on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn organised jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency. Ms Ray appeared to be an old hand at delivering these pop-sci lectures and was mentioned as a regular volunteer speaker for JPL but even though she must have said the same things about Cassini over and over again several times earlier, she never let her jadedness show as she guided her audience through the purports and fascinations of the Cassini mission's findings. What made the lecture even more remarkable was that it was delivered in the Von Karman Auditorium which contained a life-size model of Voyager 1 and a 1:2 scale model of Cassini.As Ms Ray spiritedly reeled off statistic after statistic about the Cassini mission, along with near-precise important dates in its history it was fairly evident that she showed great passion and zest for her work. As she herself put it best, being in a room full of scientists from different reaches of JPL who slaved for days on end to plan the mission and finally to see them "giddy as schoolchildren" every time the probe would report back with obscure numbers, hazy, kaleidoscopic images of the atmosphere on Saturn and its moons (principally Titan and Cassini's latest fascination, Enceladus) and fuzzy noise recorded from its passage through the rings of Saturn was a special thrill of sorts. She got most of us goosepimply as she put forth her questions on why there was so much methane on Titan, how the water-rocks were formed, how could wind systems on Saturn last for four days, how was it that the jagged edges on one of the moons were much older than the soft dents. Even for a skeptic like me who evinced scarce interest in solar system exploration hitherto, Ms Ray's talk was nothing short of exhilarating.
* * * * *
Two more days
In a brilliant parody of the V-Day, the College Republicans club at the Roger Williams College came up with the P-Day which was meant to be a celebration of the male reproductive organ. Unfortunately for them however, college authorities came down heavily on P-Day festivities putting one student on probation and confiscating the P-Day mascot, Testaclese which some argue was the intended effect claiming that the college administration played right into the hands of the club by demonstrating their two-sided policy stance on what they would allow in the name of free speech. Also, to add to the heady mix of days, weekends and months -- this particular weekend happens to be the Mother's Day weekend and the television was littered with ads for phone-order flower delivery services, greeting cards, cellphones, SUVs and Mother's Day weather forecasts -- May 6th was No Pants Day. While the progenitors of this momentous day disavow any intentional parody and just claim to be having some harmless fun, I find it hard to convince myself that the No Pants Day was not in response to Denim Day which was recently observed (for the record, on Denim Day I could hardly find a woman on campus who wore jeans).* * * * *
Professional Grade
A flurry of General Motors ads have begun to appear co-inciding with the NBA play-offs. All these ads end with a typical stone-cold voice signing off with the tagline "We are professional grade". In light of the recent downward revision of General Motors' corporate debt by Standard and Poor's to "junk grade", their ad-lib comes across as an excellent, albeit perhaps unintended, self-parody.* * * * *
Then and now
BBC has a great photo-retrospective on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of conclusion of military operations in the Second World War. The collage features photographs taken sixty years ago of war-ravaged monuments and cities posited alongside their present image along with short notes.* * * * *
