Europa Report: Movie Review

I am always a fan of science fiction films and happy for any science fiction that comes my way. In this case Europa Report is a fairly independent movie that is being released online and On Demand before being shown in theaters. I recently watched this through my cable providers "Video On Demand" feature, where you can purchase a rental of this movie for $9.99 (ouch). There are both standard definition and high-definition versions available, but if you get one you don't get the other, so use with caution. I think releasing movies straight to the internet/on demand and skipping the theaters is a new strategy in the movie industry. Hear about that trend in this recent NPR: On Point broad cast: Is the U.S. Movie Industry Broken?

Europa Credit: NASA

Europa Report is about a fictional manned-mission to Jupiter with a landing on the icy moon Europa. One of the four large "Galilean moons" of Jupiter, it has an icy crust, and as we all know, likely to have a sub-surface ocean of liquid water. This near-future sci-fi to stick closely to known technologies and science, might be what one would call "hard sci-fi", more 2001 than Star Wars. But actual science is not usually box-office dynamite (or so studios believe), so as the crew of 6 astronauts approach Europa they fall into increasingly critical misfortunes that threaten their mission and their lives. The movie is foreshadowed by an "executive" talking to the camera, documentary style about the mission and you get the sense something went wrong. Most of the movie is then shown through lost-footage style clips showing bits and pieces of the long journey and the events on Europa. This seems to be a common trope now as it is similar in the style to Apollo 18. Not only is the footage spliced together out of order so you don't get a full understanding of the events until later, but they use a lot of creepy noise effects and interference at times to make it seem "spookier" I guess. I still think Moon did the best job in recent years, to tell a story in space without devolving into a sub-genre of typical horror films, and just having normal drama in a science fiction setting (yes the premise for Moon isn't that realistic). In any case, I don't think it is a huge spoiler, given the trailers for this movie, to tell that things don't ultimately end well for the entire crew.

Thera Macula (false color) on Europa. Credit: Paul Schenk/NASA

Other than the style, I found the characters and story were pretty good, the effects were pretty good overall and didn't seem like overuse of CGI and they did have some weightlessness scenes. The scenes in orbit around Jupiter and Europa were quite impressive, makes you wish we really were going there. There were no explosions in space, super AI, fusion reactors or any other really exaggerated technology. The ship had a rotating living section to simulate gravity which they spent most of their time in. Once they get to Europa they send a large section of the craft down as a lander which will then drill through the ice and hopefully reach the under-ice lake or ocean in order to search for life. That is the plan anyway.

Europa Report currently has a 69% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Overall I enjoyed the movie. It's probably worth a Netflix rental, rather than paying $9.99 for it.

spoiler alert!

 Stop reading if you don't want critical pieces of the movie spoiled for you.

While the Europa Report was pretty good, but the "science" part of the plot kept reminding me of List of things I did not care for in Prometheus. Basically it comes down to: "We are going to go halfway across the solar system, for the first time in humanity, but as soon as we get there we have no ability to actual get any scientific research done without being eaten by monsters". One the main claims to fame this movie has is the supposed realism and authenticity of the mission. I feel their hearts were in the right places, and it's basically a movie about every space geek's fantasy about what might be on Europa, but they fell into too convenient plot devices I found hard to swallow, despite enjoying the movie.

Among my issues with the plot:

• No redundancy of communications... what!? Isn't that the most important thing for a mission to another planet/moon? Not to mention they apparently did have a way to repair it, but chose not to until the very end. Oh and genius idea that the life-support subsystem can swap parts with the communication subsystem.
• No redundancy of their drilling probe? They lose one and all is lost. They can't improvise a camera on a pole and look under the ice?
• Apparently, there was no firm plan to have the crew explore the ice surface after landing, no radiation protection, no way to deal with hazards of walking on ice, no vehicles to use other than walking. Why send humans at all in that case?
• When they do send a scientist outside, they have no safety harnesses, they don't use a buddy system like mountain climbers (were the Apollo astronauts ever alone?). Let alone have any sort of a rescue plan i.e. a jet-pack or other person suited up ready to go out in an emergency. Maybe flotation devices might be useful on a planet with liquid water? For that matter, I wonder how buoyant a space suit is with low gravity, since I believe in those neutral buoyancy tanks on Earth they weigh down the suits with additional weight. She basically sinks like a stone in falling through the ice, they don't even bother to go after her, but it's implied she is eaten/killed by the monster. This is like horror movie 101 stuff, never go out alone, never walk towards the mysterious light.
  
• So they go all the way to land on Europa and they don't have a reliable way to go outside, so you would think the lander would have all sorts of robotic arms, scoops and other sensors to get as much science, like any other lander NASA has ever sent to another world, but other than the one drill probe, apparently not. Wouldn't a major effort be to take back "Europa-rocks" of ice samples or whatever they can find and bring back to Earth for research?
• You would think to support such a mission there would be a network of probes either in orbit around Europa or in the Jovian system which would be taking images of them and the landing site (maybe to see aerial view of the "lights" they are so desperate to see up close), able to relay communications, etc.. Like we have on Mars now with NASA's MRO
• 6 crew all the way to Europa and only 2 scientists doing anything while they are there.
• They didn't exactly explain how long they planned to live on Europa, similar to some missions to Mars, the return window is some length of time away, so they need to have some semi-permanent base to live and work out of for an extended stay. For Mars exploration there are ideas to send unmanned supply/cargo craft that would already be there on the moon for them to use to set up some sort of base. It didn't look like they had any plan like this, and it seemed like they had an all or nothing EVA to get scientific data before trying to come home? It wasn't clear if the rapid take off was due to the crew death's or because they weren't going to stay long anyway.

Maybe the idea (I doubt the writers even thought this far ahead) was that the mission was really just a "plant the flag" expedition to Europa, without much plan for hard science, but to promote the Europa Ventures company. Something like the quick and dirty ways they could get to Mars really fast without doing anything useful while there. But then again, they probably wouldn't need 6 crew for that. On the other hand, the one thing they did have redundancy for was the lives of the crew!

Some unresolved questions or plot points, and maybe I just missed them:

Why couldn't they leave theAndrei in the orbiter? Not that it mattered I guess, did they imply he had radiation poisoning or just that he was depressed?

 

Why did that male scientist die at the end, did he just fall because of an "ice quake" or did the monsters get him?

 

Hopefully the monsters' ecosystem isn't waiting for spacecraft to land, be attracted to their lights and fall through the ice so they can be eaten. They would get very hungry.

 

Wasn't the monster creature attracted to light almost directly taken from Arthur C. Clarke's "2061: Odyssey Three"?

 

It was implied that there was some connection between radioactivity interference and the monsters, could be interesting if there were alien life that could somehow use radiation in the environment directly as a food or heat source. But this was never really "answered" within the movie.

Windows Update Error code 80246007 on Windows 7

I have tried applying Windows Updates for .NET Framework security updates and was hitting failures on Windows 7 with error code 0x80246007. If I View the error details from Windows Update History I saw the following error codes:


For Windows update failure log (View Details):

Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 on XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2 for x64 (KB2804576)
Installation status: Failed
Error details: Code 80246007

...

Searching for this error on Microsoft Windows support site I only found the following KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958042/en-us
Unfortunately, the article does not apply to Windows 7 specifically. Searching for the error code and Windows 7 brought up no additional results. What to do?


Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Windows system administration, I make no claims to be able to solve your individual problem nor advise you to not follow normal support paths for your issue. If you use any of my suggestions you do so at your own risk.

Reading the knowledge base article, the cause is described as:

This problem may occur if the Windows Update database is corrupted.

Under resolution there are the same steps to resolve for Window Vista and  Windows Server 2008. Broadly speaking, these OSes are similar to Windows 7 in many respects. So I attempted to follow the steps, which involve writing a small batch script to stop the Windows Update service,  wuauserv rename the Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder and restart the Windows update and bits service.

I tried the instructions as described. Received access denied for every line of the batch script. I then tried running from a Command window I had 'Run as Administrator'.  I still got the access denied error on renaming the Download folder. So I just manually renamed via Windows Explorer, and reran the script.

 

The next time I ran Windows Update for the update which failed I then hit error 80070002 for one update.

This time Windows Help advised to delete data from Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore as well as \Download folder, and to just restart Windows Update service.

Read the full solution: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Windows-Update-error-80070002

This finally solved my issue. My guess is that these steps would apply to either 80070002 or 80246007 error codes on Windows 7.

I recommend if you hit this issue, to comment on the KB 958042 page above and let Microsoft know they need to update the KB for Windows 7.

New PC (again)

It's been a few years since I've gotten a new laptop. Realized it was about time as the screen on my old Toshiba began flickering white lines and generally acting up.

I got a new Sony Vaio S-series. This model is one of the few Windows 7 PCs that have a full HD resolution screen, 1920x1080. (I am envious of the MacBook Pro Retina displays). I looked at Windows 8 PCs as well, but couldn't stomach the "start" display, I wasn't interested in touch screen features.

Step 1: Transfer Files

I decided to try using Windows Easy Transfer, which advertises that it can transfer, "User Accounts, Documents, Music, Pictures...And More". My old laptop and the new laptop are both Windows 7 and come with Windows Easy Transfer pre-installed.

It's fairly straightforward, you start it on the source PC, and you get a pass key, start in on the new PC and you enter the pass key, once you do that you can choose what folders basically from the old computer you want to transfer. In my case I did a wireless connection. When you select a user account to migrate it pre-selects all their Documents, Pictures and Music libraries (under C:\users\.. ), for Shared files it selects Public libraries and also what appears to be any folder on C:\ that is not part of the default Windows install. This means a lot of garbage may be brought along from the old PC, it's not always clear on where programs store their files. Unselected the options for Program Data and Windows settings, I was unsure what files this would actually bring. In total I had 60+ GB of data to transfer.

After you select the folders and start the transfer the program on both PCs tells you not to use anything. I assume this is to prevent you from moving or changing files on either side during the move.

The transfer ran a full day before the new PC crashed giving me a helpful "Operating System Not Found" prompt. I had to restart that PC and there doesn't seem to be anyway to recover the state of the transfer. Worse, there isn't a report of the files moved, so I didn't really know what had completed. I could see most of the files on the new PC, and new it was almost done, so I didn't have to re-run the whole thing again. I just resumed from shared folders that I saw were missing.

One confusing thing was that it didn't actually transfer the Windows user accounts I had selected. It copied all the files from the old user accounts into my current user on the new PC (which happened to be a different user that I didn't want to keep). So you still have to manually set up any new users in the Control Panel.

Step 2: Install software
Basically I knew what I needed for my projects, Windows Easy Transfer also provided a report of all the software from the old PC that I didn't have. It's helpful as a reference.
 

Step 3: Fixes:
So far other than missing license keys and other things I had to dig through my email or memory to get back, one major issue was with Windows Live Photo Gallery. The the database that WLPG stores ratings and metadata (person, descriptive and geotags) for image formats that don't support it is not moved during the transfer.

Other people have had the same issue:
How to transfer image tags from Vista Photo Gallery to Windows 7 Live Photo Gallery

The ultimate answer involves some scary manipulation of the hard disk volume id, but ok:
Migrating Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery database
Some helpful details about where WLPG stores files and it's database.
http://johnfederico.net/2009/07/27/windows-live-photo-gallery/

As I mentioned in my own experience of upgrading to Windows 7, I also transferred the old Windows Vista desktop backgrounds and user icons.

Uninstalling Xubuntu from Ubuntu 12.04

I have been trying to learn to love Ubuntu 12.04 since my previous upgrade experience. It has been no easy task.

Among other things, my PC is not cutting edge, but even running Firefox was beginning to slow down to a crawl. I have not yet determined if this was due to some specific software or driver error, the Gnome 3/Unity interface, or other background tasks fault.

Getting desperate I have been looking around for lighter weight alternatives. I tried installing Xubuntu, which is supposed to be much more bare bones than the flashy Unity desktop.

I installed it
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

That was all fine and good. I restarted and went into the Xubuntu desktop. First of all, what I didn't realize, and my mistake for being ignorant, it kind of adds a lot of other software into your system, changes the boot screen, and generally is a bit more invasive that I liked. In the end, it was performing better, but due to some persistent graphics issues I have been having with Ubuntu I couldn't see the whole desktop after logging in. From what I could see of the desktop it looks a lot like the Linux experience I had in the mid-2000's on Red Hat or SuSE distros, pretty bare-bones, almost Windows 95-ish. Not saying it's awful, but I almost have to say I like Windows 7 more now. At least it was fast!

So, how to uninstall?

Well it's more difficult than it might seem. I have followed these excellently well-documented steps

Ubuntu 12.04 – How to Completely Uninstall/Remove a Package/Software/Program

The one comment I had, (which I could not post, apparently my email or website flags me as a spammer) is that GEdit 3 which come with Ubuntu 12.04 does not have the Regular Expression find and replace capabilities shown in those steps. You must additionally go and install a Gedit regex replace plugin to do so.

For now, I am using the Unity 2d interface. It looks almost the same for me, feels pretty quick. I'll stick with it. Not saying I would rule out a switch to Xubuntu or another desktop in the future if unity continues to be trouble.

Things you shouldn't do: or how I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04: Precise Pangolin

A Pangolin

So I just moved to a new house, and now that I actually have room for my stuff, I dusted off my old Ubuntu desktop for the fun of it and set it up on a desk in my new basement. It has been several months since I used it, so after booting I get prompted by Ubuntu's Update Manager program to install a million updates for things that I probably never used. Fine, maybe there are some security fixes or something. I click "Install Updates" and away, we go. Not too long later, I get some errors about the Bootloader being out of disk space. That sounds troubling. So I Googled for a while and found some advice about cleaning up old packages, and I did all that, removed a bunch of games and other programs I didn't need. That seemed to solve things. I ran update manager again, and finished the install. Everything seemed great.

There was just one more problem. Update Manager had a little tiny message above the normal dialog to select packages. It said something like "Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS". So my desktop was on 10.04. I had actually recently tried out the new version of Ubuntu on a VM using their prepackaged all-in-one Windows installer "Wubi". I didn't like it, and found the performance was horrible on my Windows 7 laptop. Opening a folder a document would take 30 seconds and literally lock me out of doing anything else. I wasn't crazy about the new "Unity" style OS face lift they now package. But regardless of that experience, I am now a well trained animal, and when my computer's operating system tells me I should upgrade, and they make it so easy to accept it, newer is always better, always more security issues resolved, defects fixed, I mean why wouldn't I want to upgrade? So I couldn't help myself after a couple of days I went back and started the upgrade process.

It ran all night long. Not necessarily because it took that long, but because every so often in the upgrade process it would sit waiting for a user prompt, usually for some third-party software license exception. Finally at the end of the process I had a new looking default desktop background, everything seemed great with the upgrade. It asked me to reboot and...

Approximation of the Ubuntu screen after upgrade

Then I couldn't log in anymore. Somehow they managed to make it so when I type my password for my normal super user account it just goes back to the same login screen. When I logged in as the guest user, it gave me a bunch of pop ups that I didn't have permission, but then loaded a totally blank screen with just the new Ubuntu background and my mouse cursor. I was trapped. "Linuuuuux!!" Since that point, I've been trying to recover this PC. I downloaded a new 12.04 Ubuntu Live CD to boot with. From that you get into the option to either Try Ubuntu out or Install Ubuntu. I wasn't prepared to reinstall and lose my data yet.

So first and foremost I was looking into similar related problems like screen resolutions not being detected. I found a few tips, for example editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and manually specify the Screen subsection with your resolution modes. However, of course, in the Try out Ubuntu from the Live CD none of your hard disks partitions are mounted. Even worse, in my case, I couldn't directly mount my partition containing my existing OS and data (/dev/sda5) was of type lvm2, which of course, the default Ubuntu doesn't have the packages for it. Somebody has gone through something similar and I was able to do those steps in the Live CD Ubuntu, the only difference is that I would mount the partitions as rw:

sudo mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/fcroot -o rw,user ...
So that was half the battle. But once I had done that, I tried the edit to xorg.conf. I saved the file and rebooted. Still got the same "Not optimum mode" message on my monitor. I tried a few settings, but no luck. I decided to try a more radical solution: A reinstall using thie Live CD without overwriting my existing partitions and data. Unfortunately. Due to having the "lvm2" partition that contained my logical volumes from my existing install the installer doesn't recognize these are a partition! So I had to go into the Try Ubuntu option first, and then follow all the steps described above to install lvm2 and activate my Logical Group in the lvm2 partition, then try the install.

I went through the entire install and ended up with a error that it was unable to install the Bootloader! Great! I went through an exercise to resize partitions thinking that might be the cause see:
lvm-resizing-guide ,linux-lvm-resizing-partitions (note Ubuntu 12.04 ships with GParted v0.11 which doesn't support the lvm2 file system format!, so in my Live CD OS I had to uninstall that and manually install the 0.14 version.). However after all that, I ended up using these steps to successfully manually install the Grub boot loader and use the Boot Repair program. After all this work I ended up with the same result as my upgrade, I was unable to see anything when I logged in as a guest (didn't recognize my actual admin user and password).

At this point after struggling with it for two days, I've decided to just do a reinstall. I don't know who or what installed the LVM partition, or where the boot loader should go. So I just went with a straight up new install of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop edition over my existing PC and I told it to reformat my HDD


After reinstalling clean. I had still got the Not Optimum Mode from my monitor during boot up. But from the login screen onwards everything looked ok. I did start getting new errors from Ubuntu telling me that jockey-gtk had crashed. Always helpfully I did a good search and located a few similar bug reports on the ubuntu forums. Seems to be an Nvidia driver issue. So I did an
apt-get update and
apt-get upgrade
to make sure I had all the latest packages. Then run sudo jockey-gtk, this prompts me to install Additional Drivers, I selected (version current)[Recommended], it installed the Nvidia driver, but didn't solve the problem in the boot screen and then I get a "The application Compiz has closed unexpectedly." error and a really messed up garbled background instead of the desktop, looking at the error details, it said that I had "obsolete packages" and that I should update "unity, libunity-core-5.05, unity-common and unity-services". So I rebooted this time into "Unity 2D" and did the update manager  which had a ton of updates (funny, why didn't apt-get upgrade install these before?)

Even after all this, I was still getting weird Not optimum messages on my monitor on shut downs and start ups. Seems that I was hitting some flavor of this problem. What worked for me. Use your own judgement was to first edit the /etc/default/grub config file

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash" (removed quiet).
Some answers for related questions tell you to set nomodeset. I tried this but had negative results...

Uncomment and change GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024
Default was something like 640x480, the 1280 resolution was the "optimum" resolution displayed by monitor in the error messages I was getting in start up.

Next update grub
sudo update-grub

I think followed steps in the above linked question's answer for the purple start up screen to force the graphics drivers to be loaded in start up by configuring
/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash.

Lastly, the other quirk which apparently is benign? Was that in the System Settings > Details it was reporting an "Unknown" graphics driver. This is apparently due to a missing library(?) mesa-utils that is needed for displaying the graphics driver information:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/151608/details-window-showing-unknown-driver-for-graphics
So following the steps:
sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

Solved that issue. A few reboots later and the splash screen came up and the login works fine on my brand new re-installed Ubuntu 12.04. Gotta love "Linux for Human Beings".

Edit: Courtesy of this Google+ post when #Linux briefly trended

Linux...

List of things I did not care for in Prometheus

spoiler alert!

I watched the movie Prometheus a few weekends ago, it was a decent sci-fi movie, in my opinion the more big sci-fi epics that are made, the better. Others have said similar things as I am about to. I recommend everyone read Bad Astronomy's review. In this post going to stick more to the bad science than the bad plot. Except for FTL travel, I don't care about that, I hate when people bring that up as a problem in movies, yes we know there is no currently known way to travel faster than light according to the General Theory of Relativity.


List of things I did not care for in Prometheus.

Sound in space. If there are no lasers or big explosions to make things exciting, you don't need sounds in space. You didn't need it in 2001: A Space Oddessy, so I don't know why every sci-fi movie since then feels the need to add sounds when there is an external shot of a space ship. Silence is unnatural and heightens the spookiness of space travel.

The spaceship Prometheus directly lands on the planet. Ok so they must have some super source of energy to fly FTL, but for some reason it bugs me they land their main ship directly on the planet surface. In Alien the Nostromo separated from the cargo portion of the ship, same thing in Aliens with the drop ship bringing the crew from the Sulaco which remained in orbit. Both of those movies are set at a later date, so it may be implying that these are one of the first expeditions to other star systems? Even so, it would seem technologically easier to construct an interstellar FTL ship without having to worry about landing it in on a planet with gravity and an atmosphere, let alone taking off again.

Another way you might expect them to economize their travel is by manufacturing things from the planet when they land, either fuel, or oxygen, water, etc.. all things you might not want to carry all that extra mass. I assume if you have some kind of infinite fusion drive energy source you might be able to get away with not bothering to do that, although unless they have super compression techniques, there didn't seem to be big storage tanks or anything on the Prometheus to hold the matter they would need for things like breathing and drinking. Another area where it would have been a nice thing to show them actually do for once in a sci-fi movie.

The purpose of the trip is supposed to be a scientific study but all the scientists immediately run out and dive into the first structure they see. There is no systematic mapping of the area, they landed near the first spot they came across. Even if they just land somewhere that seems interesting, if they had left the main ship in orbit or even just some remote satellites they could have begun mapping the entire world for any other interesting areas. That's not to mention that there are no efforts to survey the outside of the structure.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the scientists run around touching everything they see. The one thing they do which makes sense are sending those small robots to map out the interior, the one good idea they have seemingly. David has some ulterior motives in his programming, so I can give him a pass, although it seemed silly for the android to be the one to take the "touch first, ask questions later" approach to levels higher than the other scientists could possibly do. Overall everyone seemed pretty underwhelmed that they had in fact found an alien civilization at all! Even the remains of one would be a momentous archaeological find. It seemed like they were not interested in studying anything, and I guess it would be emotional but they seemed more greedy than amazed by anything they saw. If I remember the Alien series, there was no confirmed alien/xenomorph life on any planet ever surveyed, and since this was earlier than those movies, this would be the first proof of life outside of Earth, another amazing discovery by itself.

What was the one Engineer alien doing there asleep all this time? Did he come there after everyone else died and was trying to do something? Or did he go to sleep before all the others and didn't know that things went to shit for all the other Engineers? If so why wouldn't no one wake him? Or why would he be sleeping on a stationary ship in the first place while the others were there doing some work.

The first thing the Engineer does is start trying to kill everyone.  That was probably the low-point for me in the movie. So predictable and B-movie-ish. No dialog, no explanation, nothing profound from the mouth one of the creators of the human race, not even a thank you for waking him from his several thousand year hibernation or sleep. Maybe they are inherently violent, although the opening scene would seem to imply some sort of more thoughtful existence. It would have been better if he didn't physically try to hulk smash everyone but instead if his actions were more intelligently shown to trick or trap the humans, or even experiment on them. At that moment he would have no idea whether or not there were 100 armed soldiers just outside, what he did was careless and incomprehensible.

Plenty of unanswered plot points (I can't take full credit for these, thanks to my bro for expressing better than I can):
-- Why did the engineers, create humans billions of years ago, then come back to earth several times over our history to tell us about a military base they were building to eventually use to destroy us? Were those runes or cave paintings an invitation or warning?
-- So the engineers were planning on wiping out Earth with the goo, but something went wrong and they all died except for the one engineer who went to sleep before the others? Why are only the corpses of the engineers left but not the xenomorphs or whatever it was that killed them?
-- Did the rest of the engineers, the one not on the base just abandon the whole thing? The goo base and humans?
-- What happened to the two scientists who were trying to put the main woman [Shaw] under?
-- How does the main woman do this major surgery on herself, but no one seems to know, or notice, or react at all to it?
-- Why is no one particularly surprised that a stow-away, a man who had supposedly been dead for two years, turn up on the ship?
-- Where does EVERYBODY go? We see some people get off-ed but its a crew of 17. [>> So there were at least 3 in the bridge of the ship at the end. The Biologist, Geologist and Charlie killed by various alien things. Vickers met her end too. Thats seven. If David counts, 8, there were at least an orderly and two security guards with Weyland too, and presumably some of them were killed by the Engineer in the alien ship? I think you could count 3-4 more killed in the cargo hold by the zombie-Geologist, even if the number was only 3, then you're up 14. Two aforementioned scientists operating on Shaw, they vanished after being beat up. And Shaw herself being the 17th, not counting Weyland. ]



(Full disclosure, I wrote most of this the week after the movie came out when it seemed to matter more)

Redwood Road Trip

As readers of my blog may know, I am a fan of redwoods, specifically coastal redwoods. So this year when I planned my grand tour to the west coast to visit relatives in southern California, then head up to the Bay area, we of course took the opportunity to go up the coast to the Redwood National and State parks area, about 300+ miles north of San Francisco. This is a summary of my grand tour.

I started my road trip in San Diego, went from there to L.A. (Hollywood), took a detour inland to "Antelope Valley" region of California, let's just say somewhere between Sequoia National Forest and Death Valley, there were some interesting sights there too.

From there I mainly hit the coast on CA-1, the Pacific Highway from Cambria up to Monterrey, one of the more scenic roads I've ever driven. It was about a 9 hr drive all the way from where I started to San Jose. One cool stop was driving through Big Sur and seeing all the huge Redwoods on either side.

Long story short, after some time in the Bay area, we drove up 101 through Sonama / wine country and up the "Redwood Highway" past Humboldt Redwoods. Around that point, as you start to get close to Eureka, CA you begin to see stands of Coastal Redwoods along the highway, which lives up to it's name. The climate in general, visibly changes from the dry and gold colored hills you see from basically LA to Sonoma change to green conifer covered ridges, it was cool, even being July and mostly cloudy at least the first day we were up there.

It was a great few days in the parks with some amazing old growth trees you can read information on what hikes to take from some of these resources
http://www.redwoodhikes.com/RNP/RNP.html
http://www.turtlerocksinn.com/one-day-itinerary.html

Exploring the Redwood Parks - Day 1

We started our expedition from a B&B in Trinidad, CA, a great place, with an Ocean view overlooking some rocks where we could hear sea lions barking at night. Our first day itinerary was the following:

Redwood National Park:

Lady Bird Johnson Grove - First thing we did was stop at the National Park Kuchel visitor center. We got a map and directions from a helpful park ranger, we also found out that there was a ranger led walk through the LBJ Grove so we rushed off to make the start time. It was a cool and foggy day, perfect for seeing the redwoods. The park ranger was friendly and gave us a very informative tour where we would stop every few hundred feet to talk about some tree or plant species or the life cycle of redwood trees. It was my first time being around the really large Coastal Redwoods since I had been to Muir Woods 4-5 years ago. This was really impressive, and seeing the difference from the preserved old-growth grove and the second-growth areas that were 40-50 years old and much more like a forest you might see around New England. Interesting note. Most of Redwood National Park has been logged over already, this is what they say is a restoration park rather than a preservation park as every other National Park is. The hike was about 1 hour, including the tour, which ended about halfway around the 3/4 mi. loop and you just hiked your way back through more old-growth. One impressive thing is the fact that some of the Fir and Spruce trees look as large as some of the Redwoods, one difference is that the fir trees' trunks are covered in moss, lichen or ivies, the Redwood trunks are generally un-colonized due to their high acidity in the bark.



Trillium Falls Trail - A short 2.8 mi hike over some hilly terrain through some really beautiful forest. We parked at the Elk viewing area, and hiked to the trail head, the sign there is pretty misleading. According to the guides and trail description, you are supposed to head off from the dirt road to the right, getting to the falls pretty early in the hike then a loop around the forest. We missed the turn-off of course, which was a narrow foot path off of a dirt road angling away from the dirt road where the trail head is. So we ended up going through the hike "backwards" which actually was pretty nice, and seems better than the suggested in the guides. After walking along the dirt road for a bit you come to a trail heading off to the left marked "Trail" with no other information. We took a gamble and went down that path. It loops through these impressive old-growth Redwood groves. At this point the sun came out and lit up the forest as we hiked around, almost completely alone. After a while we figured out we went the wrong way as we never came across the falls after forty minutes (it also helped to realize that the traffic from the 101 was on our left which helped to give us a direction of where we were). But after just a little more hiking we met some other hikers coming from the other direction who were helpful enough to tell us that we were almost at the falls. The falls were nice, but nothing really impressive, a small mountain stream, felt like somewhere in the White Mountains of New Hampshire except for the enormous trunks of the Redwoods in every direction.

We had lunch in Orick, you take what you can get in that wilderness...

Final stop was on the way back to Trinidad, we went back to the Kuchel center and asked what kind of coastal hike we might try. We decided to go to the Patrick's Point State park which is not really a Redwood park, but it does have amazing overlooks over the Pacific from high up on rocks and cliffs. So we drove there, paid the $8.00 entrance fee (the National Park is free, California State Parks are $8.00 /per day, but if you pay once you can use the same pass at the other parks). Highlights were the Muscle Rocks, a hike down close to the "rocky" beach. The next thing was the Wedding Rock, a nice outcrop of rock a few hundred feet above the ocean with views up and down the coast. A truly beautiful place, and a nice walk back and forth from the parking lots in each case.

Video of Lady Bird Johnson grove hike

Exploring the Redwood Parks - Day 2

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

First stop on Day 2 was to the Fern Canyon hike in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. You need drive down a narrow dirt road over a ridge through the park to get down to the coast. It's a state park which costs $8 a day to enter per car. Past the ranger post the road continues along low elevation near the ocean to a parking lot. This is apparently the Gold Bluffs Beach area. The paring lot leads to a short path to the actual Fern Canyon, a small creek through a good size gorge or ravine where the walls are covered completely in a green carpet of ferns and other plants. No redwoods, but everyone keeps mentioning that they filmed Jurassic Park: The Lost World there. It is a pretty area, about a 30 minute hike, depending on how fast you go (or how far, there didn't seem to be a clear "end", you have to jump over the stream in a few places or bring shoes that can get a little wet.


Back in the parking lot, we walked across a marshy meadow to the dunes and the beach. On the way we saw herd of Roosevelt Elk feeding. We were separated from by a small waterway in the marsh. It turned out there was not path to the actual beach from this parking lot or so it seemed.


Video of the elk

After the detour we drove up the highway to the Klamath area to the "Trees of Mystery". The Trees of Mystery is a tourist trap with a giant Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox in front. There is a fee to take the hike which includes seeing a few remaining old-growth redwoods, some oddly shaped trees of different species and a sculpture park. The highlight is the SkyTrail a ski lift type gondola ride that takes you through the canopy of the forest up to a lookout platform at the top of the hill. What they don't tell you in the brochures is that the whole area was previously logged so it is all second growth up there. Some of the trees in their hike like the Brotherhood Tree are pretty impressive (a worker said they didn't log it since they knew it was rotted inside). The place is kind of a novelty. What is pretty interesting is at the back of their extensive redwood gift shop, is a Native American museum of different artifacts from all over the west.


Day 2 was actually the 4th of July. So that night we drove from our hotel up to Crescent City to enjoy the fireworks show. Its a nice little coastal town, very low-key, we had pretty descent sushi (probably the only sushi for 100 miles). The fireworks were basically people setting off their own rockets all over the beach and the Battery Point Lighthouse area, not exactly the Boston Pops, but we had a good time and left after it got dark (which was well after 9pm). Even though it was July in California, you needed a sweater at least to be out there.

Leaving the Redwood Parks - Day 3

On Day 3 we had a flight to catch...in San Francisco. About 320 miles away to the south. We had a good breakfast at the hotel first, one of the guests pointed out a bear on the opposite bank of the Klamath river, it walked around for a while, maybe looking for food in the sand? We then took our leave and started the journey back down to civilization, we were sad to go from that beautiful place. I kind of wish we had more time to explore some of the various other hikes, although I have a feeling from their descriptions it would have been similar to what we already saw on the first day.

It took us about 6 hours to get back to San Francisco. Along the way, I wasn't driving this time and got to see quite a bit more redwoods all along the aptly named "Redwood Highway", its quite a sight to see these huge trees right by the side of the highway. We took a tip from one of our B&B hosts "stay in the right lane through the Golden Gate tolls" this exits the 101 into what used to be the Presidio military base. They are now turning this area into a park and you can walk over the old concrete bunkers and coastal fortifications, I doubt you will see better views of the Golden Gate bridge or the mouth of the bay than from there. Very windy. Some scenic drives and delicious chinese food later, we made it to SFO for our red eye flight back to the east coast. It was quite an adventure for me, and overall a peaceful relaxing vacation.