Grooves

Parallel grooves on Phobos.

Parallel grooves on Lutetia.

Parallel grooves on Vesta, in the July 9 picture I've linked before.

There are a lot of theories about these things and it seems to be a rapidly developing mystery. The research mentioned in the top link suggests that the grooves on Phobos are not related to the giant crater Stickney, but it's tempting to link them. They're not necessarily radial to Stickney.

But look closely at the new Vesta picture: the grooves appear to be mostly inside the giant southern-hemisphere crater (which is hard to identify as a crater in the photo), but they're running across it from side to side. Again, it's tempting to link them to the crater but it's hard to say what the relationship is. They probably wouldn't be chains of secondary impacts. Are they cracks in the underlying rock?

Vesta and Lutetia are the two largest asteroids imaged up close. So you might imagine that would be significant, but, then again, Phobos is a much smaller body.

Movie: Winnie the Pooh (2011)

The new Winnie the Pooh feature is utterly charming and very funny, almost surprisingly so. It's also very short, even with the unrelated short subject at the beginning; it was the first movie I've seen in years to leave me wanting more. Admittedly, that was probably a good decision given the probable age of the target audience. Jorie loved the movie but was ready to bolt when the closing credits rolled.

It's an adaptation of several additional chapters from Milne's Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, but the adaptation is as loose and rambling as those in the Sixties/Seventies Disney shorts (as it happens, Jorie and I recently read some of the source material), and Milne purists who hate those won't like this one any better. But it shows no sign of the manifold forms of damage Disney's done to the Pooh franchise in various media since then; the style is as close to the old shorts as they could get, including the metafictional "storybook" and narrator gags.

It's done mostly in hand-drawn traditional animation, or a digital approximation of same, with a few obviously CGI additions like the swarms of bees. One visual difference that took a little getting used to is that the old shorts were very much from the scratchy-line era of Disney animation (which I think was a response to the technical limitations of early xerography), and the new animation has a much cleaner line, more like what Disney was doing in the Forties and Fifties. Tigger's animation team seemed to be trying to scratch up the lines a little, but Pooh looks more cleanly geometric than he used to.

While the theater wasn't packed (Disney's marketing for this has been very low-key, downright subdued compared to Cars 2), the audience seemed to contain a surprising number of adults and older kids. I hope more people take their little kids to see this, because they'll like it and it's much less obnoxious than much of what's out there for them.