Random Developments

It has arrived.

Songs cost $1.69 each, Pixar videos go for $3.39. No Desperate Housewives or Lost, of course.

Not that I am a big music buyer, but it’s nice to know that I can, if I want to.

For those outside the country: Australia’s Brainiest Kid is a TV show that will allegedly choose the, well, you get it. I’m not sure if other countries have similar shows, but I guess it’s likely.

I watched most of the show this weekend and parts of it on the weekend before; they were two of the “preliminaries”, and only one kid from each goes to the final. There are seven preliminaries and one grand final, with nine children (11 or 12 years old) in each (the final two spots in the final are “wildcards”, apparently selected by the producers from among the kids who failed to qualify). The prize is a $20,000 trust to be released when the kid reaches 18 (plus a laptop for the winner of each preliminary).

I really like the idea of the show. Most of the kids are really smart (not just knowledgeable about some specific subject; they seem to be actually able to think, rather than just collect random facts) and likeable, although you also get one or two arrogant brats (and boy, do those look arrogant) in each lot (they didn’t win either of the shows I watched). And more than a few of them are really disappointed, or even surprised, when they don’t win; some are clearly holding back tears while Sandra Sully congratulates them on getting that far.

I’m guessing that many of those — not all of them — are somewhat geeky (or even nerdy) and don’t hang out with many similarly smart kids, so that show may be their first contact with children that are as smart as or smarter than themselves. And that can be a shock, especially for a 12-year-old, and especially if they find this out by failing at an intellectual challenge, possibly for the first time in their lives. Those are kids that breeze through school without really studying all that much; not being able to win can come as a surprise. I know this from my experience going into college: what do you mean, just going to lectures and browsing the textbook is not enough to get an A anymore? (well, at least not in some Math subjects) That was an awakening. And I was 18; at 12, it’s almost cruel (but, then again, maybe the sooner the better…).

That said, the producers need to work a little more on the questions. In the first round last Sunday, one of them asked who was the winner of this year’s Big Brother. Come on, I would give points to kids who didn’t know that! (they all did, alas) Big Brother, as Australia’s Brainiest Kid, is on Channel Ten.

One other question gave away one of the major plot points of the latest Harry Potter book (and all of the kids knew the answer to that as well); ok, it is a well-known book among kids by now, but I think it’s still a little too recent for them to give part of the ending away on national TV.

After the final round of the South American World Cup qualifiers, it’s defined: Australia will once more play Uruguay for a spot in the Cup finals. Uruguay beat the Socceroos in 2001 (Australia won 1-0 in Melbourne and lost the return match 3-0), and they are confident of repeating the result; Australia, after beating Jamaica 5-0 in a friendly match last week, is “cautiously confident” that it can do better this time.

The matches are set for 12 November in Montevideo and 16 November in Sydney’s Telstra Stadium; Football Federation Australia intends to arrive in Uruguay as late as possible for the first leg (and leave just as quickly) to try to avoid incidents like the ones that happened in 2001, when Uruguaian fans attacked the Australian players outside the stadium before the match.

This is the last time Australia will have to face a South American opponent to get to the World Cup finals: from next year, Australia will join the Asian football federation and will play the qualifiers for that region, competing for one of four spots (and with a chance of facing off a North American team for a fifth spot). While the Asian teams are certainly tougher opponents than most in the Oceania group, Australia probably has a better chance of scoring a spot in the finals through that route than by playing South American teams…

Launched on 12 August and scheduled to arrive to its destination on 10 March 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will bring something very important to Mars: high-bandwidth communications.

The MRO will spend its first six months in Mars slowly adjusting its orbital path, doing several aero-braking manoeuvres over more than 500 orbits until it settles on a path 300 km above the surface. From there, its high-resolution cameras will be able to photograph features that are less than one meter wide. And, when I say high resolution, I mean it: the main optical instrument, named HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), is actually a 20-inch telescope coupled to a 800-megapixel digital camera. As an example, the photo on the left is the Earth’s Moon seen by that camera from a distance of 10 million kilometres.

This will, of course, generate huge amounts of data to be sent to Earth. Due to the large distances involved and the difficulty of sending high-powered equipment to space, exploration vehicles have always returned data to Earth somewhat slowly. One of the more recent missions, Europe’s Mars Express (which is used to relay part of the data generated by the NASA surface rovers Spirit and Opportunity), sends data at no more than 200 kilobits per second (and as little as 30 kilobits per second, depending on conditions). The previous rover mission, Pathfinder, sent data at 1 to 2 kilobits per second, and the even older Voyagers managed up to 7.2 kilobits per second (as they didn’t have to land, they had larger antennas and heavier transmitters).

Clearly this would be less than appropriate for a spacecraft that can generate the equivalent of a 1,000 megapixel image every three seconds (and that is not counting the other instruments on board, plus occasional data relayed from the surface rovers — current and future). For this reason, MRO was fitted with a telecommunications system that includes a very large antenna (3 meters across), a fast computer and a high-powered (100 watt) transmitter which will allow it to send data at up to 6 megabits per second. Considering that this data will be sent over more than 100 million kilometres, that’s very impressive.

Together with this, the craft has also a second transmitter that will be used to test communications with Earth over a different range of frequencies (32 Ghz - Ka Band - instead of the usual 8 - X Band); if the test is successful, the new band can be used in future missions to increase even more the data rate of transmissions. The reason the higher frequencies aren’t used already is that transmissions in that range are more “fragile”, and are especially sensitive to moisture in Earth’s atmosphere (that is, if it rains, you’re out of luck). Better equipment and higher power may be enough to overcome these problems, and that’s what will be tested.

During its full mission (which lasts until 2010), MRO is expected to send 34 terabits of data to Earth; that is more than the amount of data returned by all previous JPL missions put together. It is expected to increase our knowledge of the red planet by orders of magnitude, and open the way to future scientific missions already being developed.

Last night I went to the theatre to watch Joss Whedon’s Serenity, the movie version of the TV series Firefly (very mild spoilers ahead). For those who don’t know it, it’s a little bit like Old West movies, but set 500 years in the future and with a touch of Japanese culture thrown in.

Having never watched the series, I have to say that the movie is pretty good. It’s fairly easy to draw parallels with Star Wars (the original trilogy): a renegade captain and his crew, with a somewhat old spaceship, suddendly take aboard two passengers that are more than they seem to be and find themselves as the target of the organisation that rules the known universe. Yes, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I like the type of humour displayed in the movie: somewhat sarcastic, almost self-derrogatory and still violently to the point. The acting seemed a little off in the first scenes, though, and some of the dialogue was, hmm, almost cheesy; I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to be like that, but it gets better as the movie progresses (or maybe I got used to it). Still, the characters are great, but they needed to better developed (perhaps the series does that). And have I mentioned the humour? It’s fantastic.

It’s refreshing to see a sci-fi movie set in a universe that follows most of our normal physical laws: ships actually have to go through re-entry procedures when landing in planets! They need heat shields! They have seat belts! That’s something you don’t usually see. Still, a few things were a little on the “plot device” category, but that was not really a problem.

All in all, it was lots of fun, and now I need to get my hands on the DVDs of the TV series.

Interesting developments in the outer solar system: it turns out that 2003 UB₃₁₃, the possible 10th planet (code-name “Xena”), has a moon. That body, which I discussed in a previous post, is larger than Pluto and orbits the Sun in such a way as to intersect Pluto’s orbit, which makes it the most similar body to other planets that was discovered so far.

The moon doesn’t have a name yet (it was discovered less than a month ago, on 10 September) and is officially known only as “S/2005 (2003 UB₃₁₃)”. The discoverers are calling it “Gabrielle”, though (understandably). Its discovery is very important because it will help astronomers to find out how massive “Xena” is by studying the way the moon orbits the main body.

Oddly enough, the discovery of a moon around it doesn’t mean that “Xena” has any more hope of being called a planet than it had before. Many other bodies in the solar system have moons around then, including several small asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.