Really liked that JimmyB. I too wish that our western society put the scientists and others who achieve outstanding feats on a pedestal rather than people who appear to be famous for being famous. Which is why I'm really proud that Tim Berners-Lee got that moment of recognition at the Opening Ceremony.

Anyhow, I'm pleased MSL landed successfully but I'm much more interested about what it's going to do over the next few years.

I finally saw this last night and loved it. Nowhere near as bad as some make it out to be, and far better than any Transformers movie.  Earlier, I made the comment that this couldn't be less coherent than Transformers 3 and I stand by that. This never descended into farce for long stretches as people tried really really hard to be funny. The action was also clean and determinable rather than comprising cartoonish furballs of movement.

This isn't the worst movie of the year. It's far less insulting and stupid, by a significant multitude, than Prometheus. There's even some genuinely good human character development in this, not Shakespeare, but then even Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare.

But then, I also enjoyed Battle LA (on much the same level, these are a perfect double bill).

I find it fascinating how acceptance of these movies seems to vary - Battleship isn't any less entertaining or more stupid than something like Independence Day of yesteryear or MI4: Ghost Protocol of this year. Decades from now, I'm sure people will be confused by the success of one over the other.

I concur.

Since manned spaceflight is a lot harder, rising to the challenges it sets and finding solutions arguably (or is that ideally?) leads to greater advances. It's also a lot more inspiring and exciting, meaning that it's more attractive to young scientists, engineers etc. to get into it.

You can only do so much with robots, and their limitations become more apparent the further away they are. So on Mars, where signals have about a 40-minute round trip, new instructions to the robot take up valuable time. Granted, you can just plan for longer missions but imagine a human just making that decision to go and pick up that specific rock right there spontaneously. The human, as trained geologist, can also recogise  which rocks are useful and more importantly be able to place them in their geological context. The best example is the moon Genesis Rock, would any robot have found that? Probably not.

When it started that was my feeling, all very Shire-like and transformation of Orthanc. There's even an uprooting of a large tree!

Truthfully, I was worried about The Hobbit being artificially split into 2 films, and now they're making it a trilogy. So, basically even more made up stuff and almost definitely more offball dwarf humour - things which I thought were among the weakess elements of LOTR. Dare I say this smells like hubris. I just reallly hope it doesn't backfire and we end up getting 3 films that are almost immediately fan edited by everyone and their tennis partner into one 3 hour epic.

The nature of film series is that they're going to be at best uneven, since different people are going to involved and/or the same people are going to run out of ideas/steam (or worst, misunderstand why the series was successful in the first place). The longest running series (in the west anyway) has got to be Bond, and they're all over the place with some fantastic ones and some which are pretty meh.

Well in all fairness, Curiosity was funded and completed years ago (started in 2004). NASA's rather limited in what projects they can start now. They've actually recently had to drop out of a joint Mars mission with Europe.

Orion is a capsule in the mold of Gemini, Apollo and Soyuz (and Dragon as well), billed as a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). It's what's left over from the Ares/Constellation program that Bush started and Obama axed (because billions had been spent and there wasn't any hardware to show for it, it was going nowhere fast).

It's now set to be launched by the Space Launch System (SLS) which is the new heavy lift rocket program which will apparently be the largest rocket ever built. It will use converted Ares designs (from Constellation) and modified SSMEs and SRBs from the shuttle launch system (so yeah, lots of recycling going on and yet it's still going to cost billions). It may or may not ever be realised since it's hampered by spiralling costs, politics and design flaws.

The problem is that purpose is often the best driver of design, and the Orion capsule and SLS currently has no clear destination - the Moon, Asteroids and Mars have all been talked about but each of these has very different needs (energy, consumables etc.). So the machines are being designed to cover a variety of purposes and destinations and will likely therefore fall short somewhere (because that's the nature of these kinds of machines). There's no "Moon in 10 years" direction in mind here either, with projections going into the 2030s in some cases. 2030s! Who are they trying to kid, no program can ever have that much support for so long in a political environment as poisonous as that of America.

The tragedy is that billions are going to get funneled into the SLS, limiting money for science missions, and like Constellation it'll be cancelled before the decade is out without any rockets actually being built. And Orion is going to go with it, since having a grounded spacecraft is pointless. And even if it's not, by the time a new rocket system is developed, Orion technology will likely be obsolete.

That Youtube distribution model is horrible, it might be ok if you are a video blog series (or Let's Play), but it handicaps creative works since you either have to chop up your narrative or you have to make truncated works suitable for the ADHD crowd. All for a pittance.

It's just not that profitable.