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Usually spacecraft gallivanting around the solar system can't take pictures of the Earth after they've made their way to their destinations, because when you get far enough out our planet and the sun are often within the same frame. The extreme brightness of the sun is not friendly to the super-sensitive cameras that the satellites use.

But the other day, the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn happened to be in a place where the bulk of the ringed planet hid the bright sun and scientists directed it to take a picture of us.

I hope I didn't blink.

Check out the link to see the photo larger and a couple of others as well.

The key observation to make is that even from as relatively close in space as Saturn, we are one tiny dot. And between us and Saturn are only Mars, Jupiter, and an orbiting belt of rocks; we're practically cup-of-sugar-borrowing distance from each other in astronomical terms. From Cassini's point of view, 99.9999999+% of everything humanity has ever built takes up less than a pixel's width on its camera.

More perspective-thought producing.

Hallowed Halls

Writer Jill Harness assembled pictures of different libraries from around the world, some of which she has visited herself. She collected 62 of what she says are the most beautiful and showed them off here at Mental Floss.

I kind of have to agree with her that Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland, tops the list. I could walk in there and probably forget to check out a book as I just wandered around the place and took it in.

On the other hand, I'd have to quibble with the inclusion of the Grand People's Study House in North Korea. For one, it was built to honor a birthday of one of the modern world's most evil men, the late North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung. For another, although it has the capacity to house 30 million books, some tourists have estimated less than a few thousand are actually available. At first my suspicion was that the perennially starved North Korean populace ate them, but on the other hand, in a country where people were reportedly at risk of imprisonment for insufficient mourning when the last SOB dictator who ruled them died, an overdue or lost book fine might be quite dangerous to risk as well.

Dumb

-- Detroit is bankrupt, its emergency call answers measured in hours and two-thirds of its ambulances immobile. But it's going to spend almost a half-billion dollars on a new hockey rink for the Red Wings, so...Motor City is back, baby!

-- MSNBC contributor Touré -- who, it will be seen, uses one name because there is doubt he could spell two  -- said that George Zimmerman, accused of murder in the shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin but found not guilty by a jury, is not Hispanic as has been claimed. He is, in fact, a "Peruvian-American," presumably because his mother was born in Peru. Just what language does he think they speak in Peru? And by this logic, should we say that President Obama, whose father was born in Kenya though he himself was born in Hawaii, is not African-American but a Kenyan-American?

-- Intelligence (ahem) officials in Turkey detained a kestrel last week when it was found with a band around its leg that had the words "Tel Avivuna Israel." Villagers caught the bird and turned it over to the local governor, who sent it on to a university where it was X-rayed for microchips and spy devices. None being found -- the tag was apparently from an ornithology research project at Tel Aviv University -- the bird was released. But it was told to avoid suspicious avians.

-- San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who seems to have boundary issues that do not involve nearby suburbs, is being sued for sexual harassment. He has admitted poor treatment of people and is going to spend two weeks in an intense therapy environment to help him not do things like suggest female staffers come to work sans undergarments. And his lawyer has asked the San Diego City Council to make it so he does not have to pay to defend himself against the harassment suit by picking up his legal bills. I am no therapist, but I don't know how much good two solid weeks of being told, "You're in a hole. Put down the shovel!" will do.

From the Rental Vault: A Pair of G's

The Battle of Guadalcanal marked the end of Japanese expansion in World War II. Following their defeat there in February 1943, Imperial forces focused on holding territory and eventually, attempting to make Allied advances so costly their enemies would break off and settle peacefully. Had they held the island, the Pacific war might have followed a different course, but no one knows for sure. War correspondent Richard Tregaskis' memoir of his time with the campaign, Guadalcanal Diary, was actually published before the battle's end, in January 1943. Filming of a movie version of the book began in May 1943, and it was released in October.

Today, the movie Guadalcanal Diary probably stands out mostly for its faithfulness to some of the characterizations from the Tregaskis book and for being the film debut of 17-year-old Richard Jaeckel, who had a long career as a character actor. Time has made many of those characterizations stereotypes -- a grizzled noncom, a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn, a no-nonsense officer, a wise-cracking Brooklynite, and so on. It has some pretty good performances -- like the aforementioned proud son of Brooklyn, played by William Bendix and the surprisingly meaty role for Anthony Quinn as an Hispanic Marine treated no differently than his fellows. And given the restrictions of what you could show onscreen in 1943, it provides a pretty good picture of how war can terrify one minute and bore to tears the next.

But being made in the middle of the war, during a time when the outcome still wasn't certain and American men were dying at the hands of an enemy, Diary takes a dim and ultimately flat view of the Japanese soldiers the Marines were fighting (note the broad-shouldered shirtless Marine overhead-pressing an enemy soldier in the poster). It's understandable, but it pushes the movie uncomfortably close to propaganda. Even so, if the viewer recognizes that limitation as an unfortunate product of time and place and sets it aside as unrealistic -- after all, the movie fictionalizes the actual battle somewhat as well -- Guadalcanal Diary has a good, tense story to tell and more to show about war and its impact than you might originally guess.

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Pinewood Studios, home in the 1970s and 1980s to both Superman and James Bond, shot its first movies in 1935. It was closed down during World War II, except for production of wartime documentaries, and re-opened after the Allied victory in 1945. The first movie made at Pinewood after it re-opened was the 1946 murder mystery Green for Danger, based on a popular Christianna Brand detective novel of the same name.

A postman during World War II London is injured by a V-1 "buzz bomb" and taken to a rural English hospital. He dies on the operating table, and not long after, a nurse is murdered. Scotland Yard Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) is sent to investigate, and his peculiar and definitely abrupt manner stretch the tensions of the already-anxious staff to the breaking point. When a second murder is attempted, Cockrill closes in on his prey, but will he outwit the killer in time?

Green benefits from a tight, no-frills screenplay from director Sidney Guilliat and Claud Gurney. The former had written for Alfred Hitchcock, and the latter had a solid history directing London theater. It also boasts strong performances from Sim, Trevor Howard and Leo Genn as feuding doctors and Rosamund John, Sally Gray and Megs Lindley as nurses. It's an unaccountably forgotten top-rate mystery that gives us, in Sim's rumpled, absent-minded but brilliant detective, a sort of old English uncle of Peter Falk's rumpled, absent-minded but brilliant Lieutenant Columbo.

Brand wrote seven Inspector Cockrill mysteries in all, and Pinewood may have thought of making a series of them. But the movie struggled getting screened in its home country -- censors originally banned it entirely because they thought a hopsital-set murder might frighten soldiers returning home and keep them from seeking medical help. Of course, while the novel was set in a military hospital, the movie wasn't, so the ban was lifted. But all of the rigamarole may have soured Pinewood on the idea; the only other mystery adapted from Brand's books was a 1947 version of her debut, Death in High Heels. Another of her characters, Nurse Matilda from her children's series of the same name, became Nanny McPhee when adapted by Emma Thompson.

Sim, of course, went on to be renowned for his Christmas Eve haunting by three spirits in 1951's Scrooge, reprising the role in a 1971 animated feature of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. He continued to work in movies and on stage until his death in 1976 from lung cancer.

Light With an Expiration Date

You may remember from school that light is made up of what we call photons. Photons sometimes behave like waves and sometimes like particles, in a phenomenon called "complementarity." It means if your experiment is set up to see if photons act like waves, they will. But if it's set up to see if they act like particles, they will do that. Think of an annoying sibling who repeats everything you say -- that's kind of like how photons act.

For much of the time since their discovery in the 1920s, photons were thought to have no mass (If you want to ask how something that acts like a particle can have no mass, well, you will have to live in a universe that's not as weird as this one). But some physicists have begun speculating that photons do have mass, because they act like they do when they are at rest.

If they have mass, that means they will eventually decay into smaller particles -- either one of the kinds of neutrinos zipping around the universe or something that hasn't even been discovered yet. And if they decay into other particles, how long will it be before that happens?

German physicist Julian Heeck wondered about that and is using data from several new experiments to find out. Within its own frame of reference, a photon lives about three years, he calculates. He's not yet sure what it decays into; the data don't show that yet.

Now, that three years is from the photon's point of view (if photons have a point of view). When Albert Einstein started noodling around in physics and developing his theories of relativity, one of the ideas that developed from that was that the closer something approaches the speed of light, the more time slows down. Time moves slower for me when I am walking than when I am sitting down, although the difference is so tiny it makes no difference in my perceptions. Add up all the slowdown that motion has produced for me in my life and I may have lengthened it by something less than a second. But that second is only from my point of view. From the perspective of those who aren't me, my life is exactly as long as the calendars and clocks say it is. As for the perspective of those who listen to me preach, you'll have to ask them how long 20 minutes seems like.

A photon moves much faster than we do, so this time dilation effect is a lot larger. So how long do we see a photon living? According to Heeck's figuring, about a billion billion years. In numerals, this is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, and is also called a "quintillion." Since the best guesses for the age of the universe these days are in the 14 billion to 17 billion year range, it seems clear we are in little danger of running out of photons.

But I'm sure Al Gore will scold us about wasting them anyway.

Change of Scenery

Swedish photographer Gus Petro, after a trip to the U.S., got the idea of seeing what it would look like if Manhattan were transported to the Grand Canyon. Thanks to photo software, we can have one vision of it, anyway.

Petro matched up pictures with similar lighting angles and then used the computer to stitch them together in the proper scale. Which means that even the mightiest collection of tall buildings and towers in the country fits inside what is essentially a really deep riverbed, to spare.

A perspective-inducing thought worth thinking.

(H/T Yeahright)

It's All Connected

This guy figures all of the Pixar movies exist in the same universe.

He may convince you that they are, or he may convince you that he's spent too much time thinking avbout this. But if it's the latter, you'd better have made that decision before reading the whole thing.