Singin' in the Rain | WET WEATHER NO PROBLEM AT REUNION 2006

iN ITHACA, YOU NEVER KNOW ABOUT THE WEATHER. That seems to be especially true at Reunion, where one year it can be sweltering and the next rainy and blustery. The latter was true this year, but it didn't seem to bother many of the 4,000-plus alumni who returned to the Hill in early June. They just donned ponchos and kept going. It was an especially glorious weekend for the Class of '56, which saw nearly 20 percent of its members return to mark their fiftieth year since graduation--and present the University with a class gift of more than $17 million. In his final State of the University address, Interim President Hunter Rawlings announced another major donation: $10 million given by Bill Kay '51, for which a wing of one of the North Campus residences will be named in his honor. Rawlings praised the spirit of "the new Cornell," citing recent achievements in teaching and research and noting that the University is now being seen as "a pretty cool place" by many prospective students.

1. On Saturday morning, President Hunter Rawlings delivered his final State of the University address before a full house in Newman Arena.

2. In the front row for Rawlings's address were President Emeritus Frank Rhodes and his wife, Rosa (right), and President-Elect David Skorton and his wife, Robin Davisson (center).

3. The Olin Lecture was presented by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn '81, a business editor at the Times. (For more on the lecture, see page 4.)

4. The Johnson School celebrants included J. V. Dela Fuente, MBA '91, his wife, Michelle, and their kids, Maggie and Adam.

5. The Cornell Black Alumni Association (CBAA) celebrated its 30th anniversary at Reunion 2006. Alumnae enjoying lunch at Barton Hall included Wilma Ann Anderson '92 (left), Jessica Ingram Bellamy '92 (center), and Namelda Gerald Allen '76 (right).

6.Wow! A future scientist is amazed by one of the demonstrations presented by Philip Krasicky of the physics department in Rockefeller Hall's Schwartz Auditorium.

Hit Me | ASTEROID IMPACTS THREATEN THE PLANET. DON'T PANIC: ED LU '84 HAS A PLAN.

oN JULY 3, A HALF-MILE-WIDE asteroid named XP14 hurtled past the Earth at ten miles a second. It came as close as 268,873 miles--roughly the average distance to the Moon. A near miss, in astronomical terms, but not as close as the shave that an asteroid called Apophis is poised to deliver. In 2029, Apophis--named for an Egyptian god of destruction--will be visible to the naked eye as it makes a paint-scraping flyby, so close that the Earth's gravity will deflect its course and possibly put the 390-meter asteroid on target for a collision in 2036. It's an alarming prospect, made more so when one learns the official planetary defense plan.

"There isn't one," says NASA astronaut Ed Lu '84. "People assume that NASA is doing something about this, but it's not even in its charter."Until recently, Lu says, the U.S. space agency didn't officially field inquiries about hazardous asteroid impacts, and--despite the imaginative efforts of several recent Hollywood filmmakers-- there are no plans on the drawing board for deflecting or destroying a killer space rock.

This struck Lu, a veteran of two shuttle flights and one six-month tour of duty aboard the International Space Station, as more than a little short-sighted. The Earth has been bombarded with asteroids and comets for billions of years, and they strike with an infrequent but devastating regularity. Large ones of one kilometer and up hit every million years or so; smaller but still enormously destructive objects may arrive in one- to four-thousand-year increments. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid estimated to be twelve kilometers in diameter struck just off the Yucatan peninsula, triggering the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. More recent was the mysterious "Tunguska event" of 1908, now believed to have been caused by a fiftymeter asteroid that exploded in the skies over Siberia, flattening 800 square miles of remote forest with a force equivalent to a fifteen-megaton nuclear bomb.

The prospect of avoiding the next doomsday rock led Lu to help establish the B612 Foundation in 2002. The private nonprofit group--which takes its name from the asteroid home of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince--grew out of an informal 2001 meeting among two dozen scientists and astronauts at Johnson Space Center in Houston to discuss the threat of asteroid impact and mull options for possible deflection. The foundation's goal: change the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015. The B612 team wants to demonstrate the feasibility of moving a potential planet-killer out of the way by practicing on one of the hundreds of thousands of Near Earth Objects, or NEOs, that orbit within the inner solar system.

"The engineering challenges are really pretty moderate," says Lu, who has proposed a promising new technique, a "gravity tractor" that would use the gravitational attraction generated by a large unmanned spacecraft to "tow" an asteroid to a safer orbit. Lu published a paper on the idea, co-written with fellow astronaut Stanley Love, in Nature in November. "A lot of folks were surprised that gravity would have such a significant effect," he says. "But everyone who looked at the numbers said, ‘Wow, this will really work.' "He thinks a mission could be put together with "off-the-shelf equipment" and for a reasonable cost.

The key to the scheme is advance warning. According to Lu's calculations, deflecting a 200-meter asteroid heading for Earth would require a twenty-ton spacecraft to fly formation with the object for twenty years, a technological feat that would have to await a next-generation propulsion system. But in cases where the impact was preceded by an earlier nearmiss, as with Apophis in 2029, a much smaller craft with conventional chemical rocket engines could tweak the asteroid's orbit during the close approach just enough to steer it away from the "keyhole" in space--less than one kilometer across--that would put the object on a return impact trajectory for 2036. "It's like a bank shot in pool," Lu says. "Before a very close approach, the asteroid is extremely susceptible to small gravitational changes."

Why not just lob an atom bomb at an asteroid, like you see in the movies? For one thing, it violates an international treaty on weapons in space. For another, the effects of a nuclear blast are difficult to anticipate: a single asteroid that devastates a continent could turn into a lethal rain of asteroids that destroys civilization. "The cure might be worse than the disease," says Apollo 9 veteran Rusty Schweickart, chairman of B612's board of directors. Lu's idea has several advantages, among them predictability and relative simplicity. "It's a controlled deflection,which is important," Schweickart says. "Ed's done a lot of thinking on this, and I think the gravity tractor is going to be the preferred way of doing it."

Spacefarers past and present seem keenly aware of the fact that humanity lives in an interstellar shooting gallery. "We've been Near Earth Objects," Schweickart says. "There's a reality to all this for us." Micrometeoroid impacts often puncture holes in solar arrays on spacecraft, and NASA calculated a 20 percent likelihood that something will eventually breach the hull of the International Space Station. For the earthbound, however, the prospect of death-by-cosmic-debris can be a bit abstract, especially with a surfeit of manmade crises now clamoring for attention. Sounding the alarm for an event that might not happen for thousands of years has proven to be a challenge for the B612 members. "It's difficult for human beings to have any intuitive understanding of things that are extremely infrequent but extremely damaging," Schweickart says.

But public attitudes toward the threat of asteroid impact are changing, in part because of a growing understanding of how past collisions affected the planet's history. "It's respectable science now, but it was only since the mid-1980s that we had an understanding of how asteroid impacts shaped life on Earth." Additionally, the recent devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and a pair of South Asian tsunamis has vividly displayed the perils of poor contingency planning. "People are realizing that rare events of huge consequence are things that you really should prepare for," Lu says.

There's a deadline here as well. Congress recently tasked NASA with expanding the existing Spaceguard Survey program, which since 1998 has been finding and tracking NEOs of one kilometer and larger. NASA estimates that there may be 1,100 of these giants, perhaps 70 percent of which have been located. But now Spaceguard will inventory NEOs down to 140 meters, with the goal of finding at least 90 percent of all potentially destructive asteroids by 2020. Scientists don't know how many such objects exist--perhaps a million--but soon there will be many more that, like Apophis, will appear to be possible impactors. "The urgency is not, ‘We're about to get hit by an asteroid.'" Schweickart says. "The prime driver here is that we're going to be discovering NEOs at a rapidly increasing rate. In the process, we're going to find a number that will look like they're heading toward Earth. And when the public hears that, we need to be able to say, ‘Don't sweat it--we've demonstrated the capability to deflect one of these things.' "

In June, NASA hosted a Near Earth Object workshop in Vail, Colorado, that addressed impact mitigation--a first for the space agency, says Schweickart, and a critical milestone in confronting the issue that he believes is nothing less than humanity's ultimate test. "We're looking at this final exam and saying, ‘Are we dinosaurs or aren't we?' "

It is a test, Lu adds, that we should start studying for soon. "The amazing thing is that now we can actually do something about it," he says. "Eventually every civilization has to develop this technology or get wiped out.We're at that point now. It's an interesting phase."

-- David Dudley

The Final Cut | OSCAR-WINNING EDITOR SHAPES SCORSESE'S VISION

tHERE'S A CERTAIN LOOK TO A MARTIN Scorsese movie. From Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ to The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, the director's films share an edgy visual style and psychological tension cranked up by precise, rapid-fire editing. It's a result of Scorsese's vision--and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing.

Schoonmaker '61 has edited every major Scorsese film since Raging Bull in 1980.While her boss has never won an Oscar, her deft touch with his footage has earned her two, for Raging Bull and 2004's The Aviator. The documentary editing she did early in her career--on films such as Woodstock, for which she earned the first of five Academy Award nominations--honed her ability to shape raw footage. "One of the things you have to do," she says, "is create rhythm and pace and flow."

That was especially challenging on Scorsese's latest feature, The Departed, slated for release on October 6. Its thriller format initially seemed at odds with the director's trademark emphasis on character, and blending them required intercutting between scenes originally meant to stand alone. "The film," she says, "took on a style we didn't expect. It became a unique form."

A remake of the 2002 Hong Kong detective flick Infernal Affairs, The Departed is set in South Boston, where state police are cracking down on Irish- American organized crime. Leonardo DiCaprio plays an undercover cop who infiltrates the mob, while Matt Damon squares off as his mirror-image nemesis, a mob informant posing as a cop. Schoonmaker describes the movie as a tough post-9/11 film noir that pointedly avoids cliché. "Scorsese wanted to lay down the way that some real policemen talk and behave, a way that is often not politically correct," she says. "Films that get made these days don't seem to have enough guts. That's what we're trying to do.We'll see how it's received; we may be run out of town."

Like most artistic pursuits, film editing is hard to define and harder to do: pare down and rearrange hours of footage while staying true to the director's vision. Though Schoonmaker says she mostly brings objectivity and hard work to Scorsese's projects, film critic Kent Jones contends she offers much more. "She gets on his wavelength," says Jones, who co-wrote the commentary for Scorsese's documentary My Voyage to Italy, which Schoonmaker edited. "The decisions she makes about where to go with a given scene, when to cut on an action or reaction, the rhythm of the scenes in the whole movie--she's actually able to elucidate and to fulfill his vision. It's an enormous gift."

Schoonmaker watches "dailies," or raw footage, twice while shooting is in progress: first by herself, and again with Scorsese while taking voluminous notes. She then selects, for example, the three best performances of a line, and works from those selections when she edits. It's not just a matter of stitching scenes together, Jones says. "She's got one of the most sensitively tuned aesthetic intelligences of anybody I know," he says. "She feels the emotional difference that a millisecond of a shot can make."

Born in Algeria to American parents, Schoonmaker grew up in a lively international community on the island of Aruba, where her father worked for an oil company. When she was fifteen, her family moved to suburban New Jersey. "All anybody talked about was football and rockand- roll, about which I knew nothing," she says. "It was quite a shock for me, and I retreated and read books." She also found comfort in the classic films she watched on television after school.When she went to Cornell, she was "reborn." I was with a bunch of New York City girls on my corridor, thank God, and they were interested in so many things: literature, music, international affairs. All of a sudden my whole world opened up." After graduating with a government degree, she applied to the State Department to become a diplomat, but was rejected when examiners considered her criticism of apartheid undiplomatic.

Schoonmaker answered a New York Times want ad for an assistant in a "chop shop," where films by directors like Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard were cut to fit late-night television slots. "It was an absolute outrage, what my boss was doing, and I was horrified," she says. "I knew I wanted to know more about film--and that I wanted to get away from him." She enrolled in a summer film class at New York University, where Scorsese was getting a bachelor's degree. They met in 1963, when the negative of his short film What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? had been incorrectly cut. She was the only one in the class with experience in cutting film, and she volunteered to help him fix it. "We could tell Scorsese was the most gifted of anyone who was there," she recalls. "I wasn't as close with him as I am now. I was amazed by how driven he was to bust into Hollywood. He had so much to say."

It was Scorsese who introduced Schoonmaker to her future husband, the British film director Michael Powell. His work includes such classics as The Black Narcissus, Peeping Tom, and The Red Shoes, which Scorsese lists as one of his top five favorite films. Since Powell's death in 1990, Schoonmaker has appeared at several Powell retrospectives, including one at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005.

Those appearances, as well as a 2005 interview on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," have raised Schoonmaker's profile beyond film circles. She finds the measure of fame surprising--and sometimes a little alarming. "An editor's work is supposed to be invisible, most of the time," she says. "That's quite OK with me."

-- Susan Kelley

Doubting Thomas | MONTHS BEFORE RELEASE, NEW PYNCHON NOVEL IS ALREADY CONFUSING

when, in mid-July, an odd listing materialized on Amazon.com for the forthcoming book by Thomas Pynchon '59--his sixth novel and first since 1997's Mason & Dixon--fans of the camera-shy writer rejoiced. The blurb was bylined with Pynchon's name, and the brief description of the unnamed book, set for a December 5 release, appeared to be written in a plausibly Pynchonian style. ("The author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically.") Then the listing disappeared, leaving Pynchon aficionados to indulge in a rash of online speculation on the site's discussion board, and elsewhere. "Could this all be a hoax?" one fan asked. Another guessed that the vanished blurb was an example of either "viral-marketing or, more hopefully, a Swiftian selfparody and critique of Internet subcultures." An article in Slate wondered if this was all "a brilliant and deranged gag." After a few days, a more prosaic answer emerged: the book listing was genuine, but had been posted prematurely and was recalled at the request of the publisher, Penguin Press. A different version soon appeared, complete with the book's title (Against the Day) and a revised page count (a hefty 1,040 pages). A Penguin publicist confirmed to CNN that Pynchon himself penned the description, which closed with an apt warning: "Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."