HMV’s future seen as handful of stores and website

LONDON (Reuters) – HMV, the 92-year-old British music retailer seeking protection from creditors, is unlikely to have much of a future beyond a rump of stores and the internet, if other recent retail failures are any guide.

After years of struggling as its core business of selling CDs and DVDs was hammered by competition from supermarkets like Tesco, online retailers like Amazon and download sites like Apple’s iTunes, HMV picked consultants Deloitte late on Monday to try to salvage some of its 239 British and Irish stores.

The decision, which puts 4,500 jobs at risk, is the latest blow to an industry which has seen a string of household names like Woolworths, MFI, JJB Sports and Comet fall by the wayside in a prolonged consumer downturn.

HMV, known for its Nipper the Dog trademark, will continue to trade while a purchaser is sought.

Chief Executive Trevor Moore, who only joined the firm in September, said on Tuesday he was confident it would emerge from the administration process in some form.

“We know that HMV is a well loved brand which has a high level of support amongst the public and we want to ensure that it remains on the high street,” he told reporters.

He had “a plan in mind” that would see the firm surviving with a stores presence along with a new digital and online offer, though he would not elaborate or say what the optimum size of the store estate should be.

SHAME

“It’s a shame, it’s been around so long. It’s like a bookstore – it’s nice to go and browse and feel them (CDs and DVDs), I’d miss it,” said Paul Wood, shopping at an HMV store in Canary Wharf, London.

However other shoppers, typifying HMV’s problems, said they were just looking before buying from cheaper outlets online.

Neil Saunders, managing director at retail consultancy Conlumino, said potential buyers could be interested in running the brand online or through some of its larger stores.

“I think it’s a good brand with a good emotional connection and I think someone will want it. And someone will be interested in acquiring a rump of stores because there are some that trade profitably within the group,” he told Reuters.

“A lot of the grocers have their own download services or mail order services so there could be interest from an existing player who just wants to use that name. Private equity may also see it as an opportunity.”

One that will not is U.S. private equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC. It holds some of HMV’s debt but ruled itself out of a takeover move on Monday.

The backing of suppliers – like music labels which look to HMV as one of the last major outposts for sales on shopping streets – has been crucial to the firm, and support remains.

“We are very supportive of them because they have been great trading partners,” said Universal Music, the world’s biggest music company.

But lenders and stakeholders were not prepared to strike another refinancing deal with HMV – whose 176 million pounds of debt as of October 27 dwarfs its market value of about 5 million.

“SEVERELY REDUCED”

“I think there is probably still some traction in having a presence on the high street but it would have to be severely reduced to be much more cost effective,” said Maureen Hilton at retail researchers Verdict. “There might be some attraction from investors if they can just pick which stores they have. Otherwise I think it will just become an online offer.”

Any residual presence online would see HMV following variety stores group Woolworths and rival entertainment group Zavvi.

Other collapsed retailers have managed to sell some stores, particularly to supermarket groups growing their convenience shopping businesses, though few have survived to trade under their own brands beyond a handful of outlets.

HMV, whose first store on London’s Oxford Street was opened by English composer Edward Elgar in 1921, grew to become a musical powerhouse, selling vinyl records, tapes and CDs to generations and had a hand in the Beatles’ big break, recommending the group’s demo record to publishers.

But it struggled to reinvent itself when its core markets went into decline, with expansion into live entertainment and books failing to change its fortunes and a recent push towards tablets and headphones coming too late.

In 2006 HMV’s board rejected an 842 million pounds bid from private equity firm Permira, saying it undervalued the group.

(Additional reporting by Kate Holton and Jonathan Cable; Editing by Mark Potter)

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Personal Best: Training Insights From Star Athletes

Of course elite athletes are naturally gifted. And of course they train hard and may have a phalanx of support staff — coaches, nutritionists, psychologists.

But they often have something else that gives them an edge: an insight, or even an epiphany, that vaults them from the middle of the pack to the podium.

I asked several star athletes about the single realization that made the difference for them. While every athlete’s tale is intensely personal, it turns out there are some common themes.

Stay Focused

Like many distance swimmers who spend endless hours in the pool, Natalie Coughlin, 30, used to daydream as she swam laps. She’d been a competitive swimmer for almost her entire life, and this was the way she — and many others — managed the boredom of practice.

But when she was in college, she realized that daydreaming was only a way to get in the miles; it was not allowing her to reach her potential. So she started to concentrate every moment of practice on what she was doing, staying focused and thinking about her technique.

“That’s when I really started improving,” she said. “The more I did it, the more success I had.”

In addition to her many victories, Ms. Coughlin won five medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, including a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke.

Manage Your ‘Energy Pie’

In 1988, Steve Spence, then a 25-year-old self-coached distance runner, was admitted into the United States Long Distance Runner Olympic Development Program. It meant visiting David Martin, a physiologist at Georgia State University, several times a year for a battery of tests to measure Mr. Spence’s progress and to assess his diet.

During dinner at Dr. Martin’s favorite Chinese restaurant, he gave Mr. Spence some advice.

“There are always going to be runners who are faster than you,” he said. “There will always be runners more talented than you and runners who seem to be training harder than you. The key to beating them is to train harder and to learn how to most efficiently manage your energy pie.”

Energy pie? All the things that take time and energy — a job, hobbies, family, friends, and of course athletic training. “There is only so much room in the pie,” said Mr. Spence.

Dr. Martin’s advice was “a lecture on limiting distractions,” he added. “If I wanted to get to the next level, to be competitive on the world scene, I had to make running a priority.” So he quit graduate school and made running his profession. “I realized this is what I am doing for my job.”

It paid off. He came in third in the 1991 marathon world championships in Tokyo. He made the 1992 Olympic marathon team, coming in 12th in the race. Now he is head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. And he tells his teams to manage their energy pies.

Structure Your Training

Meredith Kessler was a natural athlete. In high school, she played field hockey and lacrosse. She was on the track team and the swimming team. She went to Syracuse University on a field hockey scholarship.

Then she began racing in Ironman triathlons, which require athletes to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and then run a marathon (26.2 miles). Ms. Kessler loved it, but she was not winning any races. The former sports star was now in the middle of the pack.

But she also was working 60 hours a week at a San Francisco investment bank and trying to spend time with her husband and friends. Finally, six years ago, she asked Matt Dixon, a coach, if he could make her a better triathlete.

One thing that turned out to be crucial was to understand the principles of training. When she was coaching herself, Ms. Kessler did whatever she felt like, with no particular plan in mind. Mr. Dixon taught her that every workout has a purpose. One might focus on endurance, another on speed. And others, just as important, are for recovery.

“I had not won an Ironman until he put me on that structure,” said Ms. Kessler, 34. “That’s when I started winning.”

Another crucial change was to quit her job so she could devote herself to training. It took several years — she left banking only in April 2011 — but it made a huge difference. Now a professional athlete, with sponsors, she has won four Ironman championships and three 70.3 kilometer championships.

Ms. Kessler’s parents were mystified when she quit her job. She reminded them that they had always told her that it did not matter if she won. What mattered was that she did her best. She left the bank, she said, “to do my best.”

Take Risks

Helen Goodroad began competing as a figure skater when she was in fourth grade. Her dream was to be in the Olympics. She was athletic and graceful, but she did not really look like a figure skater. Ms. Goodroad grew to be 5 feet 11 inches.

“I was probably twice the size of any competitor,” she said. “I had to have custom-made skates starting when I was 10 years old.”

One day, when Helen was 17, a coach asked her to try a workout on an ergometer, a rowing machine. She was a natural — her power was phenomenal.

“He told me, ‘You could get a rowing scholarship to any school. You could go to the Olympics,’ ” said Ms. Goodroad. But that would mean giving up her dream, abandoning the sport she had devoted her life to and plunging into the unknown.

She decided to take the chance.

It was hard and she was terrified, but she got a rowing scholarship to Brown. In 1993, Ms. Goodroad was invited to train with the junior national team. Three years later, she made the under-23 national team, which won a world championship. (She rowed under her maiden name, Betancourt.)

It is so easy to stay in your comfort zone, Ms. Goodroad said. “But then you can get stale. You don’t go anywhere.” Leaving skating, leaving what she knew and loved, “helped me see that, ‘Wow, I could do a whole lot more than I ever thought I could.’ ”

Until this academic year, when she had a baby, Ms. Goodroad, who is 37, was a rowing coach at Princeton. She still runs to stay fit and plans to return to coaching.

The Other Guy Is Hurting Too

In 2006, when Brian Sell was racing in the United States Half Marathon Championships in Houston, he had a realization.

“I was neck-and-neck with two or three other guys with two miles to go,” he said. He started to doubt himself. What was he doing, struggling to keep up with men whose race times were better than his?

Suddenly, it came to him: Those other guys must be hurting as much as he was, or else they would not be staying with him — they would be pulling away.

“I made up my mind then to hang on, no matter what happened or how I was feeling,” said Mr. Sell. “Sure enough, in about half a mile, one guy dropped out and then another. I went on to win by 15 seconds or so, and every race since then, if a withering surge was thrown in, I made every effort to hang on to the guy surging.”

Mr. Sell made the 2008 Olympic marathon team and competed in the Beijing Olympics, where he came in 22nd. Now 33 years old, he is working as a scientist at Lancaster Laboratories in Pennsylvania.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 15, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the year in which Steve Spence competed in the Olympic marathon, finishing 12th. It was 1992, not 2004. It also misidentified the institution at which he is a coach. It is Shippensburg University, not Shippensburg College.

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DealBook: Alibaba's Founder to Give Up C.E.O. Title, but Will Remain Chairman

After 14 years of building up the Alibaba Group into one of the biggest Internet companies in the world, Jack Ma is taking a step back from the chief executive role of the Chinese e-commerce giant.

But Mr. Ma isn’t leaving entirely; he will hold on to the role of executive chairman, he told DealBook in an interview on Monday. He plans to name his successor when his title change becomes effective on May 10.

He won’t be the only one to hand over some of the company’s reins. Mr. Ma said that most of Alibaba’s leaders “born in the 1960s” will pass their leadership responsibilities to younger colleagues, born in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We believe that they understand the future better than us, and then have a better chance of seizing the future,” he wrote in an e-mail to employees explaining his change in duties.

The shift is the biggest change yet at Alibaba in some time, as it continues to ready itself for the next chapter of its existence. Last week, the company said that it was cleaving itself into 25 smaller divisions — to give managers more flexibility.

And it follows the transformative deal that Alibaba struck with Yahoo last year, in which the Chinese company agreed to buy back about half of the stake in itself held by Yahoo, its American partner. Alibaba had long sought to repurchase the shares to help regain control over its corporate destiny.

For Mr. Ma, the decision to step back from day-to-day management was borne of several reasons. One of them was personal: the job is increasingly tiring.

“I’m 48. I’m no longer young enough to run such a fast-growing business,” Mr. Ma said in the interview. “When I was 35, I was so energetic and fresh-thinking. I had nothing to worry about.”

Come May, Mr. Ma will slide into the role of executive chairman, which he said would let him focus on broad strategic issues, as well as corporate development and social responsibility.

It is a move that the entrepreneur said had been in the works for some time. He has been training “a few candidates” among the younger generation for the chief executive position.

Speculation about who will take over is likely to focus on the heads of Alibaba’s biggest businesses, including Alibaba.com, an online market for small businesses; Taobao, an enormous consumer shopping site; and Alipay, an online payment platform.

Mr. Ma’s early departure will give his replacement time to grow into the role, Mr. Ma said. That could be important when Alibaba finally goes public, sometime down the road. Mr. Ma added that the exact timing or other details of an initial offering haven’t been determined.

Until then, Mr. Ma will remain a powerful figure within the company he founded.

“I will still be very active,” he said. “It is impossible for me to retire.”

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An Anaheim woman demands respect for her neighborhood

Yesenia Rojas, vibrant in her purple shawl, sang with a voice so powerful it rose above the rest of the procession as they shuffled down the damp Anaheim sidewalk.

"Era mexicana. Era mexicana," they sang with a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe hoisted high, candlelight and street lamps illuminating their way. "Madrecita de los mexicanos."

The singsong serenade lauds the patroness, the mother of all Mexicans.

On this drizzly evening, Rojas led the group down Anna Drive, where she and her family have made their home.

In a city often defined by Disneyland and elegant sports venues, this street of working-class Latino immigrants has become an avatar of a lesser-known, voiceless Anaheim, one riddled with poverty and gangs.

When police shot and killed a 25-year-old alleged gang member who lived on Anna Drive, it stoked what had been a growing fire in the city. It was the latest in a spate of police shootings last year, which inflamed anger with law enforcement into a larger sense of resentment over ethnic and class fissures that divide Orange County's largest city.

Unrest — amplified by Occupy-connected protesters from outside the city — gripped Anaheim for days after the July shooting, followed by weeks of heated City Council meetings.

The wave of protesters demanding change has washed away, but Rojas has emerged in its wake. The 35-year-old mother of six, with short, wavy dark hair and a small frame that belies her force of will, has taken it upon herself to become the voice of Anna Drive.

Her family lives in a one-bedroom apartment just yards from where Manuel Diaz was shot that summer day. Rojas' 14-year-old daughter saw Diaz's body and has been traumatized since. Her mother can't let that go.

"I thought about leaving, and so did my husband, because of the children," she said. "But I said no. Because, first of all, we don't need to fear anyone, not even the police. The biggest thing right now is to stay on our feet and make things happen as a community. If we all leave, things won't change. They'll keep trampling us and humiliating us."

Rojas has a vision for her community that would seem bold if her wishes weren't so simple: She imagines playgrounds and community centers and political representation. But most of all, she sees respect for Anna Drive.

She balances two jobs, but she makes time for her community. She bends the ears of politicians. She organizes rallies encouraging her neighbors to register to vote and head to the polls. She plans events that she hopes will draw together a community that has grown accustomed to seeing itself as the backdrop of news cameras trying to highlight the city's ills.

And on this night, dozens gathered to pray a rosario in the tight courtyard outside her apartment, where the statue of the Virgin rested on an altar of roses and carnations.

As sirens echoed in the distance, the crowd stayed late into the night. They sang, they danced, they sipped cinnamon-spiced coffee.

And they prayed, petitioning the Virgin Mother for peace and for guidance.

"This is the community," Rojas said. "These are the people of Anna Drive."

::

Anna Drive, a collection of squat, modest apartment buildings, horseshoes off of a busy thoroughfare. On any given day, it pulses with life: children whipping down the sidewalk on scooters and skateboards, older boys tussling with one another and nanas and tatas watching it all unfold from chairs in their frontyards.

The street is clogged with cars and the vending truck that always seems to be parked along the same slice of curb, hawking snacks, produce and spices to the families who live on this stretch of tidy apartments and small, fenced-in lawns.

Rojas came to Anna Drive about a year ago, moving her family into the tight but comfortable apartment, its walls lined with family photographs. She was born in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, but she has lived much of her life in the flatlands of Anaheim. Her mother has lived in the same apartment, just a few blocks away, for decades.

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Live at Detroit Auto Show — Day 1

7:44 AM PST

Five new E-classes. E coupe. E convertible. E sedan. E wagon. And most importantly, 560-hp E63 AMG.

In years past, Chrysler would kick off the Detroit show with some utterly outrageous spectacle.

To introduce the new Ram, they corralled a few hundred head of cattle, marching them down Washington Blvd. in front of Cobo Hall, complete with cowboys leading the heard. The previous year, the head of Jeep drove a Wrangler through one of the hall’s windows to introduce the latest version of their rough-and-tumble off-roader.

How times have changed.

At today’s opening press conference, Jeep showed off a mildly refreshed Grand Cherokee (now with diesel power) and a few rehashed crossovers with new grilles and trim. No pyrotechnics. No laser-projected waterfall. Just a bit of awkward pomp and circumstance, which speaks volumes about where Detroit’s been and where it is today.

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Famed Hollywood movie house renamed TCL Chinese Theatre

(Reuters) – Hollywood’s landmark Grauman’s Chinese Theatre has a new name after a Chinese company purchased naming rights to the famous movie house and tourist destination.

The one-time site of the Academy awards will now be called the TCL Chinese Theatre following a 10-year deal with Chinese TV maker TCL Corp, its owners said on Friday.

Opened in 1927, the building had been named for Sid Grauman, a Hollywood showman who helped finance the theater’s construction. The theater hosted red-carpet premieres for “The Wizard of Oz” and other classic films and now is the site of about 40 movie premieres annually.

The landmark draws about 4 million viewers each year. It is fronted by an ornate Chinese pagoda and the hand and footprints of famous film stars captured in cement.

The deal with TCL will fund upgrades and preservation of the historic site, theater owners Elie Samaha and Donald Kushner said in a statement.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Calling All Cauliflower

At my house we eat cauliflower like popcorn. Using a simple recipe from Alice Waters, we slice it thin, toss in olive oil and salt, and roast. One head of cauliflower is never enough.

This week in Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman takes us on a trip to Sicily, where cauliflower is a favorite food. She writes:

Every once in a while I revisit the cuisine of a particular part of the world (usually it is located somewhere in the Mediterranean). This week I landed in Sicily. I was nosing around my cookbooks for some cauliflower recipes and opened my friend and colleague Clifford A. Wright’s very first cookbook, “Cucina Paradiso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily.” The cuisine of this island is unique, with many Arab influences – lots of sweet spices, sweet and savory combinations, saffron, almonds and other nuts. Sicilians even have a signature couscous dish, a fish couscous they call Cuscusù.

Cauliflower is a favorite vegetable there, though the variety used most often is the light green cauliflower that we can find in some farmers’ markets in the United States. I adapted a couple of Mr. Wright’s pasta recipes, changing them mainly by reducing the amount of olive oil and anchovies enough to reduce the sodium and caloric values significantly without sacrificing the flavor and character of the dishes.

I didn’t just look to Sicily for recipes for this nutrient-rich cruciferous vegetable, but I didn’t stray very far. One recipe comes from Italy’s mainland, and another, a baked cauliflower frittata, is from its close neighbor Tunisia, fewer than 100 miles away across the Strait of Sicily.

Here are five new ways to cook with cauliflower.

Sicilian Pasta With Cauliflower: Raisins or currants and saffron introduce a sweet element into the savory and salty mix.

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Baked Ziti With Cauliflower: A delicious baked macaroni dish that has a lot more going for it nutritionally than mac and cheese.

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Cauliflower and Tuna Salad: Tuna adds a new element to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil.

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Tunisian Style Baked Cauliflower Frittata: A lighter and simpler version of an authentic Tunisian frittata.

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Sicilian Cauliflower and Black Olive Gratin: A simple gratin that is traditionally made with green cauliflower, but is equally delicious with the easier-to-obtain white variety.

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Aaron Swartz, a Data Crusader and Now, a Cause

Michael Francis McElroy/The New York Times

Aaron Swartz in 2009. One person remembered him as a “a complicated prodigy.”

At an afternoon vigil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Sunday, Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old technology wunderkind who killed himself on Friday, was remembered as a great programmer and a provocative thinker by a handful of students who attended.

And he was recalled as something else, a hero of the free culture movement — a coalition as varied as Wikipedia contributors, Flickr photographers and online educators, and prominent figures like Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and online vigilantes like Anonymous. They share a belief in using the Internet to provide easy, open access to the world’s knowledge.

“He’s something to aspire toward,” said Benjamin Hitov, a 23-year-old Web programmer from Cambridge, Mass., who said he had cried when he learned the news about Mr. Swartz. “I think all of us would like to be a bit more like him. Most of us aren’t quite as idealistic as he was. But we still definitely respect that.”

The United States government has a very different view of Mr. Swartz. In 2011, he was arrested and accused of using M.I.T.’s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals.

At his trial, which was to begin in April, he faced the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison, punishments that friends and family say haunted him for two years and led to his suicide.

Mr. Swartz was a flash point in the debate over whether information should be made widely available. On one side were activists like Mr. Swartz and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Students for Free Culture. On the other were governments and corporations that argued that some information must be kept private for security or commercial reasons.

After his death, Mr. Swartz has come to symbolize a different debate over how aggressively governments should pursue criminal cases against people like Mr. Swartz who believe in “freeing” information.

In a statement, his family said in part: “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office and at M.I.T. contributed to his death.”

On Sunday evening, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, said he had appointed a prominent professor, Hal Abelson, to “lead a thorough analysis of M.I.T.’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present.” He promised to disclose the report, adding, “It pains me to think that M.I.T. played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”

M.I.T.’s Web site was inaccessible at times on Sunday. Officials there did not provide a cause, but hackers claimed responsibility.

While Mr. Swartz viewed his making copies of academic papers as an unadulterated good, spreading knowledge, the prosecutor compared Mr. Swartz’s actions to using a crowbar to break in and steal someone’s money under the mattress. On Sunday, she declined to comment on Mr. Swartz’s death out of respect for his family’s privacy.

The question of how to treat online crimes is still a vexing one, many years into the existence of the Internet.

Prosecutors have great discretion on what to charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law cited in Mr. Swartz’s case, and how to value the loss. “The question in any given case is whether the prosecutor asked for too much, and properly balanced the harm caused in a particular case with the defendant’s true culpability,” said Marc Zwillinger, a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor.

The belief that information is power and should be shared freely — which Mr. Swartz described in a treatise in 2008 — is under considerable legal assault. The immediate reaction among those sympathetic to Mr. Swartz has been anger and a vow to soldier on. Young people interviewed on Sunday spoke of the government’s power to intimidate.

Jess Bidgood and Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 14, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated Aaron Swartz’s academic role at the time of the events at M.I.T. that led to his indictment. He was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard; he was not a Harvard student.

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Egyptian court orders new trial for Mubarak

CAIRO—

An Egyptian court granted an appeal by former President Hosni Mubarak and ordered a new trial into the killings of hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising, a move certain to inflame the political unrest that has upset the country’s democratic transition.

The ruling was a victory for the ailing Mubarak and his Interior minister, Habib Adli, who also won his appeal. Both men, who had been sentenced to life in prison, face other criminal charges and are likely to remain in detention until a new trial in the deaths by security forces of more than 800 protesters.

“The previous ruling was unfair and illegal,” said Yousry Abdelrazeg, one of Mubarak’s lawyers, who accused the judge in the first trial of political bias. “The case was just a mess and there was no evidence against Mubarak.”

No date has been set for the new trial.

The court’s decision comes amid turmoil over an Islamist-backed constitution and outrage over the expanded powers of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. It means a bloody chapter in Egypt’s 2011 revolt will be revisited with the prospect that Mubarak, whose police state ruled for 30 years, may be absolved in a case that deepened the nation’s political differences and impassioned the Arab world.

Mubarak was convicted in June of not preventing the deaths of hundreds of protesters attacked by police and snipers during the uprising, which began on Jan. 25, 2011, and ended 18 days later when he stepped aside and the military seized power.

Mubarak argued that he had not ordered the crackdown and was unaware of the extent of the violence. A recently completed government-ordered investigation into the killings, however, reportedly found that Mubarak had monitored the deadly response by security forces in Tahrir Square via a live television feed.

The appeals court ruling came a day after prosecutors announced an investigation into allegations that Mubarak, 84, received about $1 million in illicit gifts from Al Ahram, the country’s leading state-owned newspaper. The former president has reportedly been in a military hospital since December after he fell in a prison bathroom and injured himself.

Last year’s trial riveted the nation with images of the aging Mubarak wheeled into the defendant’s cage on a stretcher, his arms crossed and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com  

(Special correspondent Reem Abdellatif contributed to this report)

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<em>Firefly</em> Fan Tries to Retroactively Save Dead Character With NASA Data

Spoiler warning: Firefly ended over 10 years ago and it’s been 7 years since its subsequent film, Serenity, came out, so the spoiler statute of limitations is officially up. Proceed at your own risk.

Like many fans of the Joss Whedon space western Firefly, Kyle Hill was shocked by the end of the Serenity movie, when fan-favorite character Wash (Alan Tudyk) was unceremoniously impaled by a Reaver harpoon. Unlike most fans, Hill — a research assistant with a degree in Environmental Engineering and a contributor at Scientific American — decided to try and rewrite (fictional) history by proving that Wash’s death was scientifically impossible, using the power of math, physics and fandom. His article originally appeared online at Scientific American, and Wired publishes this updated version with permission.

I was late to Firefly. Nearly 10 years after the show first aired and then was subsequently cancelled, I holed up in my room, coffee and external hard drive in hand, aiming to blaze through one of the most beloved sci-fi series.

A mix of science fiction and “spaghetti-western” genres, Firefly was wonderful. It certainly awakened the fanboy in me, and I quickly understood why my girlfriend envied me for being able to watch the series for the first time.

It all ended abruptly, due to early cancellation, with the last episodes of Firefly barely answering any central questions or exploring the rich universe that had been so lovingly crafted by creator Joss Whedon. It was to my delight to learn that in 2005 there was a full-length movie in response to public (and private) outcries for more of Serenity and her crew.

Watching Serenity let me spend a bit more time in the ‘verse, and the film thankfully resolved a number of outstanding loops justwaiting to be closed. But the forced end of Firefly also forced Joss Whedon’s hand. He put in scenes that would only have appeared in a last hurrah like Serenity. One scene in particular shook me, like the unexpected sight of a Reaver ship. It’s a scene that drove me to NASA forums and technical reports, glass manufacturers, my calculator, and eventually to this post.

Late in Serenity, after crash-landing at the mysterious base of “Mr. Universe,” pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne meets his end at the tip of a Reaver spear. The immediacy of the violence, and his wife Zoe’s touching reaction, kept my mouth agape well into the next few minutes of the film. One of my favorite characters just died, as Firefly died. I couldn’t stand it. I had to be sure.

What if the Reaver spear couldn’t plausibly make it through the forward windows of Serenity? The movie may have been set in the future, but we too have built spacecraft with windows, and they are made to withstand impacts. If I could prove that a modern shuttle window (assuming that a future window would be even better) could withstand the impact that killed Wash, I could have the ultimate in fanboy closure: the movie is “wrong,” and my version of the story lives on.

Objects in Space

In terrestrial situations, a speck of paint is less than harmless. In space, it’s deadly. Travelling at a blistering 10,000 meters per second in orbit, the equations deem it lethal. It becomes a “hypervelocity” bullet.

Our spacecraft obviously must account for this deadly debris. Tens of thousands of pieces of extraterrestrial trash litter the orbit of Earth [PDF], meaning that a shuttle’s final impact could come from an errant hex nut. Shuttles today are outfitted with shielding to prevent such disasters, and feature two-and-a-half inch thick windows—the thickest pieces of glass ever produced in the optical quality for see-through viewing.

The largest impact to a shuttle window occurred when a fleck of paint struck STS-92—a flight to the International Space Station. A shuttle window has never been penetrated by a hypervelocity impact, but it doesn’t have to be. A deformation large enough could eventually cause window failure upon repeated take-offs and re-entries.

After engineers examined the crater in the window of STS-92, the shape that best explained the damage was a sort of miniaturized plate. But to begin making comparisons, I’ll consider the fleck of paint to be a similarly sized metal sphere. This will bring the numbers in line with the hypervelocity testing that NASA has already conductBased on the size and the speed of the fleck that hit STS-92, I calculated that the window weathered an impact with around 20 Joules of kinetic energy—equivalent to four milligrams of TNT or a decently thrown baseball. It created more than enough damage to warrant a window replacement. And such replacements from serious impacts are commonplace. Robert Lee Hotz notes in the Wall Street Journalthat “NASA shuttle engineers have replaced the spacecraft’s debris-pitted windows after almost every flight since since 1981, at a cost of about $40,000 per window.”

 

Such little flecks can be catastrophes. An orbiter unlucky enough to be hit by anything much larger than the paint chip that hit STS-92 is in for some trouble. Debris measuring five centimeters in diameter packs the punch of a bus collision. Any larger than that and we begin making comparisons to sticks of dynamite.

The shuttle windows are tough, to be sure, surviving nearly 1,400 impacts intact over 43 sampled missions, but are they strong enough to save Wash? Tiny particles are elevated to terrifying status because of their ridiculous speeds, not their mass. Conversely, the Reaver spear that killed Wash was larger, but moving much more slowly. A few assumptions and some physics equations would determine if I could save him.

I Am A Leaf on the Wind…

To get the general dimensions of the spear that killed Wash, I had to (unfortunately) go back to the scene in question, excruciatingly slowing down an emotional moment to be replayed over and over.

Diving back into Serenity, I used an earlier Reaver chase scene to guesstimate the spear size and speed. If Reavers shoot spears slow enough to be dodged (which they do), the spear that kills Wash can’t be moving much faster than a Major League fast-ball, putting the upper limit on speed around 100 miles per hour (45 m/s). This is orders of magnitude slower than the hypervelocity impacts that a shuttle deals with, but the spear is thousands of times more massive than a fleck of paint. Assuming it’s fashioned out of an “average” metal, and given its size, I’d guess it’s around 100-200 pounds (45-90 kg).

Kinetic energy is easy enough to calculate. The kinetic energy of a moving object is one-half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity.

This equation gives the Reaver spear a frightening 45,500 Joules at the low end. This is over 3,700 times the energy of the largest recorded impact to a space shuttle window — equivalent to a detonation of a pencil made of TNT or a medium sized anvil dropped on it.

What are the risks? via Aerospace.org

Based on hypervelocity testing undertaken by NASA, the Reaver spear would be like an aluminum sphere with a one-centimeter diameter hitting the window at 10 kilometers per second (assuming that the tip of the spear is comparable to a 1cm diameter point). Seeing that the damage threshold for a shuttle window based on this testing is 0.004 centimeters, my hopes quickly vanished. With this kind of energy, the Reaver spear could pierce a shuttle’s wing, its thermal protection tiles, or even its crew cabin.

The math doesn’t lie—Wash didn’t stand a chance.

Watch How I Soar…

I thought I had found the perfect fanboy out. The windows in Serenity looked flimsy and thin, surely not something a space-faring craft would be outfitted with. If the windows were anything like what we use to traverse the ‘verse today, perhaps all that would have happened is a jolt of fright from a deflected Reaver spear, or so I hoped.

But even delving through a hundred page NASA technical report [PDF] on impact shielding couldn’t ease my psyche.

Now, this is at its core a fanboy rant. No matter what I found, Wash dies in the movie. It’s part of the larger story and serves as a plot point, not a meaningless killing-off. But I selfishly wanted closure; I needed to resolve the dissonance between a character’s death and the fact that we know he wouldn’t have died if the networks saw better numbers from Firefly.

Maybe this is a testament to the enduring qualities of the show. To create characters important enough, and in only fifteen short stories, to warrant hours of research and calculation that ultimately proves useless in the larger story is an outcome of a great narrative. It’s typical of a fan base that will still pack a Comic-Con panel ten years after the airing of the show.

In the end, I like the story better this way. It takes a great narrative to make someone care so much about a character that he takes real world steps to resolve his own dissonance. If I could have ‘proved’ that Wash wouldn’t have been killed, a whole can of worms would open. What about the fact that Serenity was an old ship with sub-optimal gear? What about space-age technologies like super-strong window polymers? The scene obviously resonated with people (especially me), and the fact that I failed is a better story than a discussion of faulty film physics.

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