Chasing the Ghost Particle

I wanted to like this one. Nils took the special iMAX camera to do filming at the pole, and we've got some fairly clear event animations that, with only a little explanation, show what's going on nicely. We've got some people who are used to explaining to non-technical audiences how things work and why. NASA has some great animations. Put them all together...

But some of the details ground my gears: the narrator talking about neutrino tracks, for example. And describing the really big kinds of explosions in space and saying that the really high energy neutrinos come from them (probably true, but we don't know that and we don't know how).

What really annoyed me was the Sesame-Street continuity. "Now let us go to the headquarters at Madison Wisconsin" jumps to a fast-motion street scene that has nothing to do with IceCube, and thirty seconds later it was back to pictures of big astronomical objects. True, there's not much exciting to look at at the headquarters: lots of people sitting around either doing analysis or in meetings, and a bunch of computers that do the heavy lifting. Still, if the scene is going to be boring, say so.

I saw it at the collaboration meeting "movie night." An iMAX's big screen would make the jazzy animations and continuity breaks dramatic, but even there a "general audience I" would leave not much wiser than I went in, though I might think I was.

Keith Reiminck's "No Horizon Anymore - A Year Long Journey at the Bottom of the World" (2008-2009 winter-overs) was better. Executive summary: 43 people living together in a frozen outpost through 6 months of night (plus a few more with some daylight) can get a little goofy, magnifying personality traits.

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Banff is in a beautiful spot. Some of the sidewalks and roads are a trifle slippery. I tried one of the nearby trails and got about 100 feet before I realized that it wasn't going to work. It took me about 6 or 7 minutes to come back down--carefully.