Posts tagged 'Weyland Corp'

Prometheus… 8/10

Posted by on June 5th 2012 in @ the movies
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A movie with brilliant effects but this great opportunity was spoiled by a less-than tense ending following after a plot that was a tad weak. Not as good as Alien or the much-better Aliens, probably on a par with 3 and much better than Resurrection. Mind you, of the five it's the only one not rated "18" so maybe we should have expected less anyway. The AvP stuff isn't canon so there's no comparison.

I should mention that the scenic shots of Skye and Iceland were excellent.

I'll not post any more so as to not let loose any spoilers, but I'd guess that most of the folk at the same screening as us left during the credits and so would have missed the easter-egg at the utmost end... the Weyland logo followed by the words "Building Better Worlds since 10.11.12"... I suppose I'll have to get sad and find out what that's all about, after I've sussed if the date format's UK or Yankee.

 

 

On the bright side, the trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey looked good.

Weyland-JPL… Building Better Wheels

Posted by on May 25th 2012 in Rambling on...
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There's an interesting/nerdy story about the design-evolution of the wheels on NASA's Curiosity Rover. The tale goes something like this...

An early suspension-test prototype rover was equipped with metal wheels which prominently featured "JPL" in raised letters which would imprint the company's initials onto the surface of Mars:

According to one of the scientists on the project, NASA was extremely upset by the "JPL" raised letters on the wheels, wanting them to read "NASA" instead. JPL assured NASA that this was merely a prototype and that the letters wouldn't appear on the final model.

Eventually the design was finalised and approved, and the wheels were made and fitted:

I'd imagine that the NASA folks would have felt that they'd won a little victory over JPL - all of the lettering on the wheels had been designed-out.

And I'd imagine that JPL's lot would have felt far more victorious because they'd got their initials in there anyway in the form of Morse Code which NASA, apparently, didn't notice:

🙂

Well, they launched Curiosity back in November 2011 and it's scheduled to land on Mars in August 2012 so there's no chance that they'll call it into the pits for a tyre-change. JPL will leave its mark on Mars despite NASA's objection. And those marks will be useful - the regular Morse patterns in the wheel-tracks will act as index marks, Curiosity's camera will count them to judge the distance travelled across the surface.

I reckon that's a cool story.

Of course you don't want to read too much into these things or you might start to believe that this pattern:

bears some similarity to this logo:

 Building Better Wheels Worlds

😉