Pandora

The best view ever of Pandora, an inner moon of Saturn orbiting just outside the F ring, taken on Monday. Pandora looks a lot like the nearby moon Prometheus, which orbits just inside the F ring; it's elongated with its long axis pointing toward Saturn. To my eyes the surface features on Pandora look smoothed out, as if they're buried in loose dust; you see that on a lot of small bodies, such as Comet Tempel 1.

To taste the secret sauce of life

This one goes out to The Editors of The Poor Man: Jon Pertwee's groovy single "I Am The Doctor" (via londonkds).

Hurricane Pam

Fascinating: Greg Peters talks about what went on at the 2004 "Hurricane Pam" exercise.

The scenario was somewhat different from what happened; it was the "storm surge overruns intact levees" scenario that people were talking about just before landfall, in some ways worse than Katrina. Regardless, FEMA made extravagant promises about their ability to deliver rapid aid, out of all proportion to what they actually managed to do; afterward, the comprehensive vertically integrated hurricane-response plan that was supposed to come out of the exercise never materialized because the follow-up conference was cancelled, apparently because the federal money for it wasn't there.