Uhhhh...

Mary Kay Kare has links to get-out-the-vote/election-activism efforts, with this mention that gives me pause:

[...]ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) plans to contact each of its newly registered voters SIX TIMES before November 2.

Is this really a good idea?

Aaaand the horse race.

Here's electoral-vote.com's trend chart, and spacerad.com's.

Obviously, nobody can say who is really ahead right now. The trend beneath the noise looks to be toward Kerry (that Bushward blip around Oct. 21 in the otherwise smoother spacerad.com aggregation was because of a methodological change). ...But that may not matter, because it looks to be so close that statistical fluctuations, systematic error and dirty tricks could easily trump the effect of any trend over the next week.

I gather, mostly from secondhand sources, that there is a theme in the mainstream media to the effect that Bush is ahead and expected to win. I certainly see some of that in the increasingly Republican-leaning Washington Post, which is the main source of mainstream media that I actually read. I hope nobody is calling this a landslide in the making.

Titan flyby

If all has gone well, Cassini is still examining Titan with radar, and will start playing back its collected data to Earth around 9:40 PM eastern.

Notice this part:

12:32 p.m.........................Turn INMS/HGA to Titan ram direction
12:38 p.m.........................Begin INMS atmospheric collection
12:44 p.m.........................Titan closest approach

At closest approach, the spacecraft was passing through the tenuous outermost reaches of Titan's thick atmosphere, with the big antenna dish facing forward to provide some degree of protection. While doing so, it was directly sampling atoms and running them through an onboard mass spectrometer. Future flybys may be even closer, and besides doing pure science about the Titanian atmosphere, one purpose of this is to figure out how close Cassini can get safely.

The Huygens probe doesn't get released on this Titan pass; I think it goes on the next one around.

were you surprised?

Oh yes, they're trying it in Florida too.

Titan

Well, if World's apparently eternal outage made you miss my enhancement efforts on that big Cassini Titan picture, take heart: the people at JPL did exactly the same thing I did. And then they unsharp-masked the hell out of it.

(When samantha2074 saw my version, the first thing she said was "Which part is the fetus?")

I haven't been watching NASA's webcast because of my reluctance to pollute my system with RealPlayer. Instead I've been trying to get to the raw-image page, but the server is so hammered that I haven't seen anything. The real goodies are tomorrow morning anyway.