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This month, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is going to have its 2009 general assembly. One topic that may come up for discussion is Pluto's right to be called a planet. Which is really the topic of how to define a planet. And as we shall see below, although Pluto has been the driver for this redefinition, no matter which way it goes this year, if it is discussed at all, Pluto will never again have the same reverence it once had.

In 2006, the IAU defined a planet to be a celestial body that is:

1. In orbit around the Sun.
2. Has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape.
3. Has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

All three of these rules are contentious to some degree or other. Not the least of which Rule Number 1 implies that this definition only applies to our Solar System. Are the increasing number of exosolar "planets" being found not really planets after all?

Rule Number 3, however, has drawn the most ire, as it is that rule which has seen Pluto demoted from planet status to the newly defined (in 2006) dwarf planet status. In fact, it has been asserted that Rule Number 3 was brought in to do exactly that: dump Pluto. Some people weren't happy about it, but then some people don't like change. But then again, there would still have had to be change were Pluto kept as a planet.

If Rule Number 3 was to be retracted, and Pluto was to be re-reclassified in the big league, then there are at least another four bodies in the same boat. Taking the planetary total up to 13 (and requiring another reprint of astronomy books). The planets would then be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. Ceres? Haumea? Makemake? Eris? Who? What? Where? When?

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For your viewing pleasure, here is "Blink of the Mind":

I am officially over the 48Hours film competition. Yeah, I know, I say that every year. But this year something has changed. I can feel it.

To get you up on the play, we — we being myself, Darryl, Jed, Hadyn, Amy, Dom and Frank — did 48Hours again this year. And for the third time in six years I got the Educational film genre. Damn, I was disappointed. Actually, we all were disappointed. After last year's success, helped immeasurably by finally getting to do a film in a genre that was interesting and amenable to a proper narrative story, we were looking forward to building on that and applying the lessons learnt to this year's effort. And then we get Educational.

OK, maybe we're not creative enough, but, I mean, doesn't Educational just scream "man-in-a-lab-coat-explaining-chemistry-with-a-bunsen-burner-BORING!" into your skull? And if it's not to be boring then to me it's the other end of the spectrum: slapstick, over-the-top, often fart-joke, funny. That has its place — flatulence is funny after all — but we didn't want to make one of those. We wanted to be serious and practice some film-making theory. And not be boring. OK, maybe the 48Hour film competition isn't really the forum to be practicing serious film-making. But because we all love film, and getting everybody organised at other times is like herding cats, 48Hours is really a fantastic opportunity to do that: it's short (48 hours, duh), there are ready-made constraints (the genre, the random elements) and it has…uh…the vibe.

So, we got landed with a genre that was not story-friendly. And to prove that point, we spent until 3am on the Saturday struggling to come up with ideas, and when we did come up with one, we all kind of went "Nnnnhhh". Come 3am, we had landed on the tiniest germ of an idea (let's pretend to be the devil and do something mean to the audience, like pretend to hypnotise them — well, why not?), but we had no script. One thing we did know was that we wanted something that could be delivered to camera virtually as a monologue. It meant our poor actor, Frank Edwards, star of last year's Re:Generation, would have to learn about 3 minutes worth of dialogue, but it also meant vastly reduced shooting and editing times. So, to bed feeling a little deflated that we couldn't nail a script, but feeling that we'd be OK once we did.

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In addition to all of the links I put in my last post, here are two more:

We Choose the Moon is the complete realtime 40th anniversary experience. It's a Flash crap-fest unfortunately, and you have to sit through an introduction that shows you what's what (and I can't find any way to skip it), but it's the best one-stop-shop I've found: it gives the realtime radio, the Twitter updates and a diagram showing where in the mission the spacecraft is. If only they'd done it in HTML and used Flash only for their occasional animations.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the original Apollo landing sites! You can even see the tracks the astronauts made when moving between their lander and the scientific instruments they had set up (in the Apollo 14 shot to the left there).

40 years ago this day^[1], arguably the greatest achievement in human history lifted off from Pad LC 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre, Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Certainly there have been giant steps in all sorts of fields of human endeavour throughout history, but my feeling is that at the pinnacle is this: Apollo 11. Everything else was just a prelude. Fire and chemistry to fuel the boosters; the written word, and ultimately the printing press, to enable people to communicate more readily and disseminate knowledge with previously unimageinable ease; the thinking machinations of computers and the genius of Newton to enable calculation of orbits and entry angles at the speed of electrons; the accumulated astronomical observations and navigational techniques of eons past that made possible the safe journeys of the astronauts to the Moon and back; the medical knowledge of the centuries of scientific reason that allowed doctors on Earth to make sure the astronauts were healthy and able to do their jobs (even if it meant sometimes the medicine got in the way of some astronaut's dreams); James Clerk Maxwell and the miracles of electro-magnetism; Einstein for, well, being Albert Einstein, not just his immense contributions that reverberate through most modern technology, but the power his name gave to science; the Wright brothers for getting powered flight off the ground in the first place; Robert H Goddard (to whom the New York Times published an apology when Apollo 11 landed!), Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and Hermann Oberth, the three fathers of rocketry; and last, but nowhere near least, the imagination and flights of fancy, the arts, of people, without which would we ever have stared up at the Moon and wondered whether it was cheese.

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You may, or may not, have noticed that I have changed this website quite a bit. Included in that change is a new section called "Flickr Stories". You can see a link to it on my front page, although you may have to scroll down a little bit. Flickr Stories is an idea I had with Hadyn, Jed and Darryl to take, at reasonably regular intervals, a photo off the "Explore interesting photos from the last 7 days in FlickrLand…" page on flickr.com and then write a short story about it. Since we began we have added Marcus.

We're currently up to our sixth photo. I've set up an RSS feed for my Flickr Stories that you can subscribe to. There are RSS feeds for Hadyn, Jed and Marcus. Darryl's stories are not for public consumption at this point in time. Maybe one day, when human civilisation grows up, they will be.

In case you haven't noticed, there are now RSS feeds available for this site. There are currently four feeds available:

• One for this blog: Selected Narrative (RSS Feed).
• One for my photos: Selected Photos (RSS Feed).
• One for my travels (which is unlikely to be updated unless I actually travel!): Selected Travels (RSS Feed).
• And one for my Flickr Stories: Flickr Stories (RSS Feed).

By putting one or more of those URLs into a feed reader you will be informed whenever I make any updates. (Of course, don't get too optimistic; the rate of updates around here has historically been pretty poor!)

A feed reader can be referred to as a number of things, including "news reader", or "aggregator" (with either "feed" or "news", or neither, appended to the front, and possibly with "RSS" thrown in for good measure). Personally I use NewsGator's free NetNewsWire on my Mac (see NewsGator's suite of news readers for other operating systems). NewsGator also operate a web-based feed reader that can sync with your computer-based feed reader, which is handy for getting your feeds when you're on a computer that's not your own.

Unfortunately, of course, this means signing up for a webservice, which means at the very least giving someone else your email address, a username and a password. For some this is an issue in this day and age of privacy concerns. Because you are going through NewsGator to get your news feeds, NewsGator can obviously track what feeds you have and what your viewing habits are, so if privacy is a concern, it's probably not for you. The popular Google Reader is probably in the same boat. What Google doesn't know about you isn't worth knowing. I don't know the field in terms of computer-based feed readers, but a quick perusal of Wikipedia's list of feed readers reveals a number of candidates across the various main operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS X). Note that at least the Firefox and Safari browsers include built-in news readers, as does MacOS X Mail, so you may not even need a separate program; just clicking on the RSS Feed links above should be enough to get them going if you already have a default new reader that you don't know about.

As I've noted already, this year's Wellington Regional Final of the 48Hours Film Competition proved to be the pinnacle of my stunted filmmaking career to date. (The non-48Hours "Night of the Hell Hamsters" would be up there.) But what about the rest of the films that were shown that night? Were they up to the standard of previous years'? What were the hidden gems? Or the all-too-obvious clunkers? Here, then, is my annual review of the Wellington 48Hours final.

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There is a saying, of which you're all no doubt familiar, that goes along the lines of: "third time lucky". Well, when it comes to the 48Hour film competition that phrase well and truly did not apply to me. As you can discern for yourself by reading up about the outcome of my third attempt at making a film within two days. However, I am now officially coining the phrase "fifth time lucky". (Note that your mileage may vary when using the phrase, as it may only apply to the combination of me and 48Hour film competition entries.)

I am coining it because in my fifth year of competing, the film I was involved with—"Re:Generation" — did rather well. I knew we'd made a tight little film. With a simple little story it flowed nicely (we thought), and clocked in at a shade over four minutes long. Which made it on the short side; a good thing. Many, if not most, 48Hours films bloat out to the maximum allowable seven minutes. And surprisingly that often makes for a interminable watch. (Not all seven minute films suffer from this, of course!) If people were to get bored watching our film, at least they wouldn't be bored for long. But its success violently exceeded my expectations. I guess my expectations weren't that high to start with; having minimal ones was in keeping with our theme this year: team name (Minimal Dramas), team numbers (minimal), locations used (minimal), dialogue used (only the required line, so minimal), etc, etc. So, while only exceeding expectations wouldn't have been that much of a stretch, violently exceeding them was. To violently exceed expectations, a number of things had to happen.

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As promised in my last blog entry, here is our 2008 48Hours short film "Re:Generation".

And here, as hasn't been promised anywhere at all, is our re-edited version of the film "Re:Generation Re:Dux", now with extra desaturation, visual effects and sound.

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