January 16, 2005

• Huh, I'm sort of glad I was at class during the landing show. It sounded very dissapointing. A shame, really, because so many people (myself included) were incredibly excited about this mission. At least some of the pictures are online now, and I can bypass that horrible picture box.
• This guy's just an old whiner.
• As for the ESA debacle, I agree with Bell. JPL didn't drop the ball on the Mars Rovers. Or Cassini going into orbit. They pushed pictures and info out as quickly as they got it. ESA (and more precisely the gang at U of A who refused to release the pictures quickly) really need to learn about the interest of the public, and how to maintain it. He also makes some good points about other projects (like JIMO, for instance) and their limitations. He does come off a bit like a crank in the Andy Rooney style, but there are some good points if you can get past the sourness.
• I've been skeptical of NASA ever since they faked the Earth-moon landing.
• What's disappointing is that the images all seem to be in black and white. Some yummy colors would help the PR a lot.
• It's not about PR...it's about science. the pictures aren't for you, they're for people who know how to interpret them.
• That's hilarious, scartol!
• >This is a classic example of a major cultural >difference between the USA and Europe that nobody >rarely talks about. Yeah, right. Just like we never heard before that chauvinistic drivel pitting the (mythical) classless, land-of-the-common-man America against that arrogant aristocratic Old Europe. >but specifies that the interviewees must answer >in their native languages! Anybody tuning in to >this part of the program by mistake would think >they were watching a comedy sketch. People speaking their own language! They must be speaking tongues! How dare they? There's one cultural difference he could have gotten right though, if he hadn't been so keen to bash those pesky euros. On my first trip to a US scientific conference, I was pleasantly suprised to discover that many american scientists really knew how to entertain their audience: they would make people laugh, tell personal stories etc. It was nothing like the matter-of-fact, neutral way of presenting papers that I had seen so far (and been taught) in Europe. The natural showmanship of those US scientists was quite obvious. I never knew how to explain that: the much longer and broader influence of commercial TV in the US, some specificities of the US children education (show-and-tell, Christmas pageants...), entertainment being a rather strong concept in the US (there's no word for it in Romance languages) etc. Even today, I have a hard time convincing my colleagues that making a scientific presentation a *** little bit *** entertaining isn't a pact with the devil...
• It's not about PR...it's about science. the pictures aren't for you, they're for people who know how to interpret them. If only that were true, rocket. These days, everything's about PR. You don't sell your stuff to the rubes that don't have a clue, you probably don't get funding. Sad? Yes. But that's the point human society has gotten to, market-driven life can suck sometimes.
• Agree the PR spin is important. PR is not science, but is how science happens these days.
• rocket88 is right, of course. The pictures come as they are for a reason. They will be spectrographed and analyzed with all sorts of crazy 22nd century technology to yeild every ounce of science. The colors will not look anything like what you would see, and every time you release an image those crazy square-earthers latches onto it as proof that there is no Neil Armstrong. That being said, at least here in the US, NASA has the right idea that perhaps showing a little eye candy to the people footing the $300 million bill is not a bad thing. Heck, with that kind of money you could field half the Red Sox, and the people love them cute unshaven Red Sox. Note to self: Write cranky letter to senator demanding a cut in funding to U of A astronomy department. Oh, and rocket88 too.
• Of course it's about science, but it is politicians who approve budgets for things like this. And it is the public who votes for those politicians. And each time the public gets excited by the scientists whooping it up, promoting a project, and then, for no apparent reason, make people wait needlessly for a payoff, imagine how, if even slightly, those people are less inclined to vote for someone who wants to budget for exciting scientific projects like this. If only NASA and the scientific community were better at PR. Perhaps the NASA annual budget might be larger than what is consumed by the Department of Defence in less than a week.
• You (and Jeffrey Bell) are actually upset that the raw pictures weren't released to the public immediately? You can't wait a few minutes, hours or even days without calling it a PR blunder? Can anyone here explain their immediate need to see pictures of rocks, other than idle curiosity?
• the presentation was horrible--and not because they didn't release the raw pictures immediately. transitions between feeds took up to 10 minutes to arrange, and there were long segments of watching ESA people clap at something just to the left of what was viewable. I had no problem with the various folks talking about their feelings in their native tongues--that actually added to the experience. The clips from various press conferences earlier in the day, where the editors felt the need to grab essentially the same sound byte from each press conference, was an exercise in the bizarre. The weird little CESA intro with quick cut video shots showing the complex and command center was cool in a retrofuturistic was, but they played it at least 5 times in an hour. rocket88, the problem with the delayed delivery is that there were press releases and broadcast schedules posted that promised the pictures immediately. I took those in good faith and recorded the broadcast, only to find that I'd seen more pictures on the web that day than during the official presentation. I wouldn't have bothered except that my "idle curiosity" had been piqued by the promise of "watching things as they happen."
• Patita hit it right on the head, there. The blunder wasn't in the delay, it was in the promise of a payoff met by delay. Had they announced "Landing early Friday morning on Titan, and photos released on Saturday!" people would've been excited on Saturday, rather than watching 6 hours of NASA TV with nothing to show for it but 2 images. And remember, rocket88, it takes no time for these images to be released, and requires no special security clearance or the like. It sounds like your argument is akin to asking why parents want printouts of ultrasounds before the baby is born. Low resolution, low fidelity, of real interest only to the doctor to check health... why not wait until the baby is born to see the final product? Because we're people, and we want to see new and exciting information, even if it isn't pretty, even if it isn't finished.
• Rocket88 wrote: "...it's about science. the pictures aren't for you, they're for people who know how to interpret them." The money from science ultimately comes from people who are passionate about it. The more folks that the ESA can get excited about their projects the better it is for them. We've been calling it PR. But really it's marketing and politics. You can't do big science without it. (By big science, i mean anything that needs a capital budget and the services of an auditor at the end of the year). This reminds me a bit of the Pioneer probes. Remember the metal plaques that they put on them, supposedly humankind's messages to the Universe? That was perfect marketing. Those plaques weren't meant for the aliens, they were meant for me.