This is nice

The June 8 Venus transit, seen from the TRACE Sun-observing satellite.

Also, a couple of pictures of Phoebe, which looks somewhat the worse for wear.

Spirit is near the hills, and Opportunity is down inside Endurance Crater. As the landing sites pass into winter, months from now there won't be enough sunlight to operate, but the rovers have held up so well, the mission planners are now discussing the possibility of making them hibernate and starting them up again in the Martian spring.

The Editors speak

The Editors of The Poor Man have delved once again into movie criticism, and provide the following priceless comment about the Neil Simon movie Biloxi Blues:

There's a point - for me it's the scene where fresh-faced recruit Matthew Broderick blushingly loses his virginity to a hooker with a heart of gold, but your results may vary - when I realized that I might as well just go play My Little Ponys as watch this movie about military recruits in 1940's Mississippi. Could Matthew Broderick - already adorned that dewy whatsits granted to aspiring teen-age writers in movies - be any more blushingly innocent? Could the hooker's heart be made any more completely out of gold? I want to have this scene made into a hand-painted commemorative plate so I can put it in my grandmother's china cabinet, right between Liberace and Princess Di. I want the Franklin Mint to issue a set of ceramic figurines in honor of this scene so I can arrange them next to the unicorns in my glass menagerie. I'll stop now.

This is after I confessed that I had liked it when it came out. (Though, come to think of it, I remember almost nothing about it now except that Christopher Walken was pretty good in it. Actually, a lot of movies are like that.)

A question

Why do people read whole books that are nothing but tub-thumping for political opinions that they already have?

Or do people actually read these books, rather than just buying them as gifts, or in bulk quantities to inflate the sales numbers?

I read blogs that are like this way more than I ought to. Sometimes I do some tub-thumping on my own blog. But I get dissatisfied with them to the extent that they just preach to the choir instead of telling me something I don't know. And my reaction to the phrase "You must read this article" is almost always to run away.

Phoebe up close

Now that's a closeup. From a nondescript blur to this kind of view in a couple of days: expect much more of this in coming months. The topography reminds me a lot of other small worlds like Eros, and Phobos, really steep craters with giant boulders sitting on what look to us like impossible slopes. But Phoebe is larger than they are and is probably made of completely different stuff; it's an icy object, possibly imported from the Kuiper Belt.

This one shows a peculiar-looking crater that seems to have exposed some layers of bright- and dark-colored material just beneath the surface.

Mars Express

As long as I'm mentioning pretty solar system pictures, I ought to add that the ESA Mars Express orbiter has been sending back particularly lovely ones for a while now, with less fanfare than some other missions have gotten.