As it happens, I’m in the midst of preparation for another trip, this one pretty literally the most important one of my lifetime thus far. Since I try to keep my religion and politics off this blog, I don’t have too much more to say about that, or about the whole WisCon fracas (aside from saying that as far as pure science fiction writing ability goes, replacing Elizabeth Moon with Nisi Shawl is a laudable coup indeed).

With deference to Mrs Moon, I ask for a little more forebearance from my readers!

Related, I do not endorse it, but do guiltily admit to finding this hysterical (via Brickmuppet).

UPDATE (unrelated): this is why you should always try to engage another blogger with a post link rather than an email. We are bloggers. We shouldn’t ever have any reason to email each other.

---

This post: "excuses, excuses" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I’m going on a trip to Stockholm tomorrow, for my annual conference. Will try to post photos etc. In the meantime, any suggestions on essential things to do there would be welcome… probably won’t have any time to do anything extra-curricular, but who knows.

Also, I also always drink ginger ale on planes. Funny, that – I thought it was just me.

---

This post: "Headed to Stockholm tomorrow" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Amazing video of European air travel starting up again after the volcano:

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

I found this via Mark Ashley‘s indispensable air-traveller blog. Mark notes,

You’ll notice some gaps, especially over France. That doesn’t mean that there’s no radar over French airspace. Rather, the website’s data are gathered by individual aviation enthusiasts who hook receivers up to their computers, to capture and track planes with ADS-B transponders. It’s an enthusiast community, sorta like HAM radio operators. (I’ll defer to the site’s “About” link for an explanation, since I claim no expertise in transponders.)

But regardless of the technology driving the site, it’s a neat video. You’ll notice a few test flights, some flying a loop. Then a few more. And then, the deluge.

In particular, note the impact when London Heathrow comes online. A behemoth.

All this is particularly reassuring to me personally as I have a little trip to Europe myself coming up.

---

This post: "video: rebooting air travel in Europe" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Steven is a bit harsh on Brickmuppet, who was complaining that we haven’t escaped low-earth orbit in four decades, and how that represented a betrayal of our generation’s birthright. Steven argues that the past 40 years, dominated by unequivocally successful space probes throughout the solar system and (in the case of Voyager) beyond, have been anything but a betrayal, but I think Steven misses the point.

Steven is right, that the best way to do science is via unmanned probes. You can pack more sensors and bring back more data without the need to keep a human being alive – this is just the simple reality of biology, information theory, and physics. But the space program was only partly about science, it was also about something more primal, about something that is unique to the human animal, the need to explore and understand. That indefinable wanderlust has been the subject of artistic exploration as well as physical – I think it’s best captured by Romanticist art, in particular the famous painting The Wanderer (1818) by German artist Caspar David Friedrich:

I’ll leave the meta-analysis to Wikipedia but I think anyone will recognize a familiar emotion in this work – the same emotion that makes us receptive to 2001: a Space Odyssey, or Star Trek, or even Lord of the Rings. The space program was the ultimate expression of this wanderlust because it was real – the possibility existed that we might actually follow where our imaginations have lead. All of us wanted to be an astronaut, and most of us still do. Maybe our children will yet be, one day.

---

This post: "the Romanticist astronaut" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I’m in Honolulu this week attending the ISMRM conference. Neither paradise nor intense technical sessions are conducive to blogging, but I have been getting some great photos of late. Here’s a slideshow of my photos thus far…

---

This post: "The colors of Oahu" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I intended to mention that I was going on a trip to Mombasa, Kenya but seem to have neglected to do so here (though I did mention it here). At any rate, I am back. Whether this translates into more blogging or not is an orthogonal question

I will say though that this was my first visit to Africa (aside from a childhood visit to Egypt), and certainly my first visit to the Other Hemisphere. The toilets flushed the same direction, as far as I could tell.

---

This post: "back from Mombasa" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I took this video in Tokyo while waiting for my train to Kyoto back in 2003, when I had gone to Japan to attend the ISMRM conference:

---

This post: "Ambitious Japan" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Two cute kids I met in Colombo, named Husain and Alefiyah:

Their hometown in India, Pune, is my father’s hometown and the origin of my family name.

---

This post: "kids" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I’m planning a trip to San Antonio next week, as my wife has a conference in town. I usually assemble all our various flight, hotel, car rental reservation info myself and manually create a travel summary, pulling in maps from google and whatnot. However, for this trip I am trying something new, a service called TripIt, and I am duly impressed. All you do is forward your email confirmations for your flight, hotel etc to their email address and it scrapes the data for you and assembled your itinerary, along with relevant info like weather and maps, automatically. There was some duplication but it was easy to delete the redundant items. Highly recommended if you’ve got a trip planned in the near future.

---

This post: "TripIt" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

By my best estimate, I spent about 17 hours outbound and 20 hours inbound in the air to get to and from Colombo. I can’t estimate how much of that time I was sleeping, but I did get to see a lot of movies (as well as do a lot of writing, taking photos out the window, and reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the inflight magazines). Here are the movies I saw in flight and some brief comments on them, a multi-mini-review of sorts.

3:10 to Yuma: Christian Bale is a god. The movie would have been pretty dull without him, even though Russell Crowe did a reasonable job (though he just doesn’t have the same badass vibe anymore). With Bale, though, I think this movie qualifies to complete the Trilogy of best neo-Westerns ever made, alongside Unforgiven and Serenity (yes, I know what you’re thinking, and I stand by the assertion. Pfft). One of the intriguing things about the movie is the way that simple answers to simple questions about Bale’s character, Evans, are used to really move the plot, such as what he was doing before he was a hardscrabble Arizona rancher, why he became a rancher, and most critically, the circumstances behind his amputated foot. The father-son relationship also worked well as a plot element because it wasn’t overplayed, it just remained matter of fact. Highly recommendedas a rental, maybe even purchase outright.

Rush Hour 3: Apart from the scene in the dojo, where the dynamic duo take on Yao Ming’s kung-fu clone, this movie was actually equally enjoyable with the sound off. That is to say, not all that much. The mystery villain’s identity was intriguing but the final scene seemed very Backdraft-ish to me. Not really recommended as worth the time.

Bourne Ultimatum: I came into this one without having seen the prior installments, and had no problem following the plot whatsoever. I loved how linear the plot was, and how modest the technobabble was, as well as how the trail of clues led Bourne and the CIA to the same conclusions despite their two very different set of resources. My only complaint was that the field agent who helped Bourne seemed rather token to me, in that she was just a plot device for the Morrocan segment and could easily have been written out of the movie without any real impact. The idea of a spy movie where the spy questions his very purpose is not new but also never been done with this level of sophistication before (though there are some hints of this in the new Bond franchise relaunch with Daniel Craig). What struck me the most was the centrality of the idea that we as a nation stand for something more, the ideal of American exceptionalism of character and values, and the simple and effective repudiation of the idea that we as a nation should ever betray ourselves by allowing ends to justify means. Spy movies don’t often have much of a comment on patriotic ideology. The only purpose of a nation in the Bond films is as a sugar-daddy. In fact the contrast with Bond is very instructive; I’d rather have men like Bourne represent our nation than men like Bond, and the entire movie functions as a powerful moral critique of James Bond. I’ve no clue if the previous installments of the trilogy were this surprisingly thoughtful and introspective behind the mayhem, but I intend to find out. Of course, the ending left the door wide open for sequels, though (mild spoiler) one assumes that they won’t be using the word “Bourne” in the title, unless it’s “Bourne Again”. This is a must-rent for any fan of the action-spy genre.

The Darjeeling Limited: I’d seen reviews of this movie, trailers, and plot summaries, but not a single one of these came even close to describing it accurately. This is more than a movie about brotherhood, it’s one about growth and letting go of the past. It’s ironic that the biggest life lesson that the three brothers learned was from their reclusive mother, who advised them to let go of the past, but herself chooses to run from it instead. This is one of those movies where you get so caught up in the characters you almost don’t realize there is a message hidden below their antics. This is one worth owning as the rewatch potential (especially with family) is very high.

The Heartbreak Kid: A fun Ben Stiller rom-com with a twist in that it defies the usual convention of movies about marriage by (spoiler) allowing the main character to really and truly screw up everything. This one would make a good movie night rental pairing with The Breakup (Vince Vaughn), especially for someone who verges on cynicism about love but needs/wants to be reminded of why it’s worth pursuing.

Stardust: What a pleasant surprise! Claire Danes literally shines. I mean, literally – she’s a fallen star. I mean star in the literal (but fantastic fictional) sense – knocked from the sky down to earth by a magic amulet. This movie evoked The Princess Bride in a lot of ways, and would make a great movie night pairing. Bonus casting of Michelle Pfeiffer as the chief villain, Robert Deniro as the Dread Pirate Roberts, er I mean, Captain Shakespeare, and Peter O’Toole as the worst king ever (for all of 5 minutes of screen time) was just icing on the cake. A great family film and highly recommended.

I think that covers it, six movies total accounting for about 12 hours of screen time, meaning I whiled away about 1/3rd of my time in flight. Don’t ask about the remaining 2/3rds. I am glad to be home, indeed.

---

This post: "movies on a plane" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

---

Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.