Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

So this afternoon, the significant other and I decided we needed to see a movie. I voted Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was told this is not actually out in theaters yet (I don't really follow these things, but I finally saw a trailer for it for the first time last night, which made me want to go see it immediately). So we settled on a 1:50pm showing of Prince Caspian. We get to the theater and pay for our tickets, but my credit card got double charged. So I had to wait at the little desk for a bit to get my card reimbursed. As this is happening, a group of people (carrying legal pads!) comes in, looking mildly confused, and the lady helping me asks, "Indiana Jones?" My head does several 180s; she explains it's a press showing. "I have a blog! I can write a movie review!!" I go join the SO, who is standing in line to buy some popcorn. I do a recap, and a man in the next line over explains to us that it's in Theatre 15, and they aren't asking for credentials, only a name and affiliation. We decide we're too nervous (and maybe too moral) to try for it, and it's about five minutes before Prince Caspian is supposed to start, so no go. Well, actually, Prince Capsian wasn't finished yet, so we went and sat on a bench for a while, whereupon we realized that if we didn't try to see Indiana Jones—it's Indiana Jones !!!—then we would regret it. So we walked over to Theatre 15 with our popcorn and I told them we were from an Ohio State newspaper, and we walked right in.

Now, I promised a review, but, first, there's a slight problem, a dilemma if you will. See, I hate spoilers. I abhor them. I think people who spoil movies or TV shows without fair and ample warning should be drawn and quartered, or at least stripped of their right to enjoy any entertainment ever again. I don't read movie reviews because, if I know I want to see a movie ahead of time, why would I want to know what someone else has to say about it before I go see it?? I'll make up my own mind. And if I don't want to go see a movie, then why the hell would I be caring enough about it to read reviews?? It's just not logical. (And, no, I don't think that the first new Indiana Jones movie in 19 years will qualify for many under the third case of "and if I haven't heard about a film...")

As it happens, however, I happen to be dating someone who, while also having a strong aversion to spoilers, does not hold the same reservations towards movie reviews as I do. So the SO will be doing the actual review:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first Indiana Jones movie to exist in the history created by the earlier films. I mean, did Indy ever talk about the stuff he'd already done before? The movies are pretty stand alone, right? There is, I believe, one little blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Raiders in Last Crusade, but that's it. The Indy we meet here, however, has done everything. He found the Ark of the Covenant. He found the whatever-they're-called stones. He found the Holy Grail. And he's done 20 more years worth of stuff that we didn't get to see. He fought in World War II, one way or another. He's done all this, and he's no longer afraid to talk about it. He's a guy starting to see the end of the tunnel and has learned that he likes telling his lifetime's worth of stories. This is not the Indiana Jones we met before, nor should it be. He's lived 20 more years, grown, maybe even learned a little bit since we saw him last.

This means, of course, that the movie takes place in the 50s, and if you manage to forget this fact, you'll be reminded as the film traverses every archetype (or should I say stereotype?) of the nostalgia decade before the end of the first reel. Shia LaBeouf does a reasonably good job of inhabiting one of those ----types. But not as good as Cate Blanchett, who, in her unending streak of impressing me more than I expect her to, may very well have crafted the best Indiana Jones villain ever from what is really an underwritten role. She's a wonder to behold, and she and her minions never quite manage to fall into the incompetent villain class, despite being constantly outsmarted by the heroes.

Now, I have to say something about the title. When I first heard it, my response was something like "'Crystal skull'? Really? I mean, seriously?" It really didn't seem like a sufficiently substantial object, particularly compared to the Ark or the Grail. But the movie sold me. It totally sold me. I don't want to say how exactly it does this for fear of spoilers, but it does.

My biggest complaint is that the movie sometimes seemed too eager to underdevelop a character or a dramatic situation in order to get back to another in a very long line of witty action sequences. I think that if you go in expecting the Second Coming of Spielberg, you'll be disappointed. This is not really an important film. It won't change the face of cinema as we know it like Raiders did, and it won't take Indiana Jones to a place he's never been before or will again like the Last Crusade did. All it will do is give us a few more events in the unusual life of Henry Jones, Jr. I suspect that nothing that occurs in Indy 4 is really so spectacular for him, which makes this new (older) Indy different, but it is fun to spend a few days walking around underneath his hat again.

An Engineer's Guide to Kitties

To ensure it doesn't get too serious around here, here's some Friday afternoon fun:

Personally, I prefer the phrase "snuggle attack" to "corporal cuddling," though the alliteration in the latter is appealing. And, for the record, δ Carina is about 18 inches by at most 5 inches, for an aspect ratio of about 3.6; this is why she has graduated from "furball" to "furslinky."

Paper Summary: Metal-Rich Dwarf Galaxies

Towards the last week of January, when I was hugely absorbed in trying to figure out a thesis proposal thing, a professor came into my office and started talking about the mass–metallicity relation. I knew about it, of course, but here was a new, simple idea: are the extreme outliers from this locus of galaxies real? In the spirit of a short "one month" project, it's now about three months later, and we've "finally" got a paper on said outliers on astro-ph. (I think this is a great example of: if anyone ever offers you a great idea, take it and run with it.)

So to back up a bit. What's this "mass–metallicity relation"? The short version is that a correlation exists between galaxy mass and metallicity such that the more massive a galaxy is, the more likely it is to be "metal rich." Originally this was the luminosity–metallicity relation, since how bright a galaxy is is much easier to measure than how massive it is, so on the right here I've plotted metallicity versus "absolute magnitude" in small grey points for a large sample of star-forming galaxies (remember: magnitudes are silly, so the right-hand side is brighter than the left-hand side, even though the numbers don't increase in that direction). Our outliers are, well, the larger red and green outliers from this relation; the different colors simply denote slightly different ways of selecting different subsamples. Astronomers being astronomers and not material scientists, when we say "metals" what we really mean is "any element which could not have been made in the Big Bang, i.e., basically anything not Hydrogen or Helium (or maybe Lithium but there's so little of that we'll completely ignore it)." There is of course a nice slew of caveats. The first is that the easiest way to measure the metallicity of galaxies is to limit ourselves to star-forming galaxies; all of those nice new young stars heat up the gas around them, and then as this gas cools it gives off emission lines. We can then look at the spectra of these galaxies and by measuring the how how strong various lines are relative to one another and combining it with some black magic (a.k.a. "spectral synthesis codes") we can measure the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in a star-forming galaxy's gas. So I (and others!) basically use "metallicity" and "oxygen abundance" interchangeably, and, more precisely, I basically always mean "gas phase" abundance.

One of the interesting interchanges between theory and observation is that sometimes there will be some interesting observation (such as the obervation that galaxy mass and metallicity are correlated). So theorists will come up with a bunch of reasons why this is the case, and a few will even attempt to give explanations fo the scatter about the observed relation. A robust theory will also be able to explain seemingly strange galaxies: if a theory is able to explain why low mass galaxies have such low metallicities, then it should also be able to predict in what ways a low mass galaxy with high metallicity is different from its more mundane cousins. I spend a lot of the paper exploring various explanations (and then eliminating them) for why these galaxies could be so "weird," but I eventually hit upon one explanation which, in retrospect, is blindingly obvious.

The idea is that low mass galaxies have low metal abundances because they have low star formation rates and relatively high gas fractions (i.e., the fraction of their mass that is in gas rather than stars is large). An easy way to think of this is like so: stars turn hydrogen and helium into more massive elements (metals). As stars are formed, they the most massive ones die quickly, throwing their metal-rich selves back into the surrounding gas, thereby raising the metallicity of that gas. But a low star formation rate in a high gas fraction environment will not be making enough metals in order to fully pollute the gas around it, and so the fraction of metals in the gas will be relatively low. (This argument only really works for low-mass galaxies, but since those are the ones we're interested in, I'll ignore that subtlety for now.)

So how do you get high-metallicity low-mass galaxies? Well, presumably the galaxy would need either a very high star formation rate (so the massive stars can actually pollute the gas) or a very low gas fraction (so each supernova has a higher impact on the gas). We find that these outliers don't have unusually high star formation rates, so we conclude that they must have rather low gas fractions. But this is the same gas the stars are forming out of! So the star formation must not have very long left to go. A nice bit of supporting evidence for this scenario is the occasional mention in the literature that so-called "transition" dwarf galaxies tend to have low gas masses and higher-than-expected gas-phase metallicities; these galaxies are known as "transition" objects because they are between regular star-forming dwarfs and quiescent non-starforming dwarf galaxies. The especially neat part is that several of these galaxies have the star formation limited to their centers (like this galaxy to the left: blue in a galaxy is a sign of lots of young, recently formed stars). One way to interpret this is that star formation used to occur on all scales in this galaxy, but the gas has since been extinguished (or blown out of the galaxy) at the larger scales.

Passover

I'm in San Francisco this weekend for my first celebration of Passover. As I've never observed a religious holiday in a purely secular setting (and, no, Christmas doesn't count), this should be fairly fun and educational. Growing up, I always thought Easter and Passover occured around roughly the same time of year, but of course this isn't strictly the case. This year Easter was really early: it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of Spring, which this year all happened to make Easter three days after the Vernal Equinox. And, of course, leave it to an astronomer to explain all of the intricate calendar calculations and relations between Easter, Orthodox Easter, Passover, and Rosh Hoshanah. Basically, the confusing arises when the Vernal Equinox is approximated to be (as opposed to basing these holidays on when the Vernal Equinox actually is).

2nd Blogiversary

Today is apparently this blog's 2nd birthday. I'm too out of it right now to do anything special, mostly because I finally submitted the paper I've been working on for the last few months to ApJ (i.e., a journal) and the arXiv (it'll be up Thursday night and I'll probably write something real about it this weekend), and I've still go this "thesis proposal" thing to prepare for Friday. So, in the meantime, here is a word count breakdown of the paper. Your job is to guess the subject matter.

Word	Count
the	417
galaxy, galaxies	164
mass, masses, massive	105
metal, metallicity, metallicities	98
sample	78
we	76
star, star-forming, stellar	75
low	59
gas	41
correlation, relation	39
abundance, abundances	37
dwarf	30
relative, relatively	27
outlier	26
oxygen	22
less, more	22
e.g., i.e., vs.	20
seventeen, 17	18
therefore, thus, hence	17
effective, effectively	10
spurious, spuriously	6
pathological	2

Definitely a Link Dump

I'm tired, and therefore you're not going to get a real blog post out of me. So here are some interesting and/or funny things I've seen on the internet lately.

• Class and National Service as well as Social Class and Educational Access tackled at Uncertain Principles


• And then there's Sean at Cosmic Variance discussing even more evidence for why funding and curriculum standards for public schools should be nationalized.
  


• From Freshome we have a house that looks like a toilet and a sideboard with a glowy full moon


• Are Homophobes Aroused by Homoeroticism? from Dispatches from the Culture Wars


• a funny kitty:
  


• A delightful discussion of typography and political campaigns, via Deadly Mantis
  


• Hat tip to Blake for pointing me to the Relativity Song from everyone's favorite Max Tegmark and 8.033:
  
  


• And finally, via the Friendly Atheist, a nice explanation of how Jesus and Tetris are really the same thing.

Brunch Review: Spagio's in Columbus, OH

My brother was in town last weekend, and being inspired by my previous two brunch reviews, decided that some "Is it breakfast, or is it lunch?"-y goodness was in order. So last Sunday morning we went over to Spagio's in Grandview, the closest thing I have to a "default" brunch place in Columbus, and this Sunday morning (after visiting for a second weekend in a row!) he has reminded me that I never got around to writing up what I think of brunch at Spagio's.

First off, Spagio's is one of my favorite restaurants in Columbus. It is one of the default places several people in the astronomy department take visitors (colloquium speakers, prospective graduate students, and the like); I unequivocally recommend it for dinner. The restaurant is attached to a decent wine store, so the wine selection is understandably good (and unlike many restaurants, they have a decent list of wines they serve by the glass). The decor is kind of random: there are hammocks hanging from the ceiling (which certainly hundreds of people who have dined there never noticed), random art hanging on the walls (including a weird wooden sculpture of a pig's head and a napkin one of the restaurant's owner's [or the chef's?] friends spilled some wine on and then went to town on turning into Art), and generally just an eclectic collection of decorations which somehow jive together into a neat atmosphere. Pretty much everything I've tried there for dinner I've enjoyed, so it was a natural choice for a first attempt at brunch in Columbus.

So, brunch. Spagio's is a few doors down from Columbus's Stauf's Coffee, and so that is what they serve. Delicious. Unfortunately, this is Ohio, and so no alcohol can be served before 1pm. So much for a bloody Mary for my brother. My normal fare is the croissant French toast with maple cream cheese; oh gods it's so good. Last week I decided to try to jump out of my comfort zone, and I tried the steak and eggs. The steak was fine, but the eggs were kind of flaky and weird and I didn't end up eating them. My brother at least enjoyed his eggs a la maison ("it was food"), but generally I was unimpressed last week. But hey, if someone else is willing to pay for it, I wouldn't turn it down. Just stick to the French toast.