Eileen and I watched the 1978 movie Capricorn One last night. I haven’t seen this movie in many, many years while Eileen had never seen it. I don’t even recall how we got on the topic of this movie many months ago but Eileen was intrigued with the plot, so we finally watched it.

It was pretty much the same as I recalled although I was probably more critical of the direction and writing this time around. Exactly as I remembered, the acting was pretty lame. And just like I recalled, there were really huge holes in the “science” of the script. Could you really believe NASA would use the old Apollo gear to land on Mars? That old lander would crumple like tin foil under the Martian gravity. Who could really believe astronauts would spend months at a time cramped up in that small Apollo capsule?

Its still a fantastic concept, well scripted, and everything else works well enough to pull off a decent movie. Eileen enjoyed it too, she pointed out how well scripted it was. The pace moved along at the right speed and there was nothing unnecessary to the plot line.

Eileen was the first to notice one of the actors was Sam Waterson, we know him better for his role in Law and Order and while he didn’t have a lot of screen time here he didn’t embarrass himself. Ditto for OJ Simpson, who would later go on to embarrass himself in other ways. Other actors we recognized by face, even if not by name, included Elliot Gould and James Brolin. Both gave excellent performances.

We were also reminded of similarites with many Hitchcock films. The most significant feature for me was how most violence was kept off-screen. People were killed, you knew they were killed yet it wasn’t necessary to show it. In fact the characters never really said that anyone was killed, you just knew it happened and the story moved along.

Many movies made today suffer the flaw of assuming audiences are stupid. Modern sound tracks are amplified to provide hammer-like cues telling us when to be sad, when to be scared, and when to be tense. Most of these movies are so full of special effects that you never really get to see really talented actors practicing their craft – if there are any really talented, rather than just popular, actors casted at all. Every detail of the storyline has to be played out as if it was being spoon-fed to an infant. It was refreshing to see one of these older movies that didn’t suffer these flaws at all.

We borrowed this film from our local library so it didn’t cost us anything but still gave us an evening of enjoyment. If you’ve never seen this movie then you should try to catch it someday.

Cassini continues to send back the most amazing pictures from the Saturn system. Every time I think I’ve seen the most stunning or most beautiful one, they post another one that grabs my attention. This picture shows Mimas (the small dark moon) moving in front of Dione with the rings shown below. You can just make out the curve of the rings at the far right end of the full image (click the image to follow its link to the full version).

The Cassini project also announced yesterday they have strong evidence showing large lakes of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan. I recall one of the more interesting challenges facing the designers of the Hyugens probe was the possbility of landing in a lake. So they made sure the probe could float if required. As it turned out floating wasn’t required, but its nice to think they didn’t waste their time or energy worrying about such a possiblity.

Google sometimes does the most surprising things. It (they? is Google a person, place or thing?) found this site and linked me to a page regarding my former employer Creo. I would have never discovered this except that someone else found it and followed the link, and I found the result in my access log. Weird.

Of course their page doesn’t actually detail the current state of Creo; it doesn’t really exist any longer, it was purchased by and subsumed into Kodak over a year ago. Maybe they don’t know everything but it must be close to everything.

I uploaded more pictures of my latest mini sumo robot project The Thin Man this morning. It’s coming along quite nicely. At this point there are two major milling operations still required: remove the material where the wheels will go, and remove the material from the bottom where the circuit board, sensors and batteries will go.

I had an interesting thought this morning while shaving: could spam be used as a communication method for a large, distributed secret organization?

There are two variants possible: hide your message inside plain text using typical cryptographic means or inside images using techniques such as stenography, or send your message as an encrypted blob of data that is otherwise unintelligible.

I received a curious message that got this thought process rolling. The SMTP mail header contains a bunch of HTML strings that got stuffed into Message-id lines. Normally I’d think this was just incompetent message formatting – spam generators often screw up like this. However the body text contains 17,776 characters like this:

WRzFXjk2HB+rXQtUYc0nZoVXaHhfB2HoehrfNI1Rp2qsQoLMcADJJrtLfaGbwtGuMH

This is a very curious message indeed. It originated from IP address 24.60.64.32 which is part of the Comcast network. The owner (I don’t know who it is specifically) is running a web server that claims to be Apache and serves up blank pages. There is no SSH server and no telnet server. The mail server claims to be a Microsoft server but I doubt it.

So continues my conspiracy thinking: its apparently easy enough to send spam; a seemingly endless stream of offers of Viagra and Rolex watches and such in my mailbox demonstrates that. Its even easier to receive spam; do you know anyone who doesn’t get it?

Let’s pretend you are a secret agent in the field, working under cover. I’m headquarters, wanting to relay important information to you. I create the secret message, embed it in an offer for a hot new stock pick, and send it off to millions of people. Only you would know how to decode the secret message, everyone else would simply delete it. Anyone observing the message traffic might not see a one-to-one communication method, they’d see a broadcast of junk to nobody in particular.

If you wanted to communicate covertly at a distance, wouldn’t this be a good way to do it? It’s sort of like hiding in plain sight.

More likely, its just spam. But maybe not. :^)