Hacker Cinema
Apollo 13
1995 · Film · 140 min
Directed by Ron Howard
The true story of technical troubles that scuttle the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, risking the lives of astronaut Jim Lovell and his crew, with the failed journey turning into a thrilling saga of heroism. Drifting more than 200,000 miles from Earth, the astronauts work furiously with the ground crew to avert tragedy.
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140 comments on Hacker News
That was a great article.
Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.
(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
I always think of Apollo 13 (the movie): oh look, constellation u-rine
Jellyfin's a media server first and foremost.
Out of the box, what you get is a server with (Optionally! But included by default in e.g. the Docker image, I think) an official web UI.
It's multi-user, has decent parental controls, automatic metadata fetching from a bunch of sources, can live-transcode when a client needs it (I have that disabled because my server is too weak, LOL), lots of good stuff.
You'll manage it through the Web UI, mostly. Set-top platform clients tend not to include much in the way of management features. (which is fine, it's way more pleasant to do that through a browser)
The web UI is also a Netflix-alike interface. Watch straight from the browser, if you like.
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The one major concession that puts some people off it is that it works butter smooth if your file naming conventions match what it expects, but it gets a lot less-pleasant if they don't. There are some minor variations allowed but mine's basically like:
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).mp4 /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).en.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).fr.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.mp4 /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.en.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Final Cut.mkv /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/The Making of Apocalypse Now.mkv /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/Trailer.mkv For movies. This demonstrates naming for the movies themselves (in this case, three different cuts of the same movie), extra features (you can change the extra features folder name if you like; it may default to "featurettes" and I may have changed mine, can't recall for sure) and external subtitles. I think you can handle external audio files similarly, if you have any of that going on. There are also ways to categorize special features into like trailers or whatever, with directories, but I haven't bothered with that.
I think there is a way to put your subtitles in a "subs" directory or something like that, but I don't do it. Then again I rarely keep more than two sub languages, maybe three or four total files if there are separate SDH options, for a given video. Usually just English and if it's a foreign film maybe the original language's subtitles (the French file for Apocalypse Now above is just an example, I didn't look at a real directory to write it)
For TV:
/tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 0/s00e08 - Reunion.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 0/s00e10 - Season 1 gag reel.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 1/s01e01.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 1/s01e02 - The Detail.mkv The naming on these is pretty flexible. Basically as long as it can find the series (the year helps a lot) and everything's got `sXXeXX` somewhere in it, it'll be fine. Spaces, dots, dashes, doesn't affect much. "asdf.s03e05 - Some Name (stuff in parens).mkv" will find TheTVDB's entry for season 3, episode 5 (even if the name and all that in the file name are wrong, doesn't matter, it ignores that). External subtitles work like for movies (just stick them alongside the video files)
One pitfall: every now and then you find a case where DVD/BluRay and aired orders differ. TheTVDB usually records multiple orders in these cases. I dunno how to force Jellyfin to prefer one or the other, I just figure out which it's preferring (usually the one TheTVDB shows you on the Web by default, I think?) and adjust to that.
Also note that rarely (but sometimes for important cases, like e.g. Looney Tunes) TheTVDB uses years for the seasons. So you'll want "Season 1965" and such for those. No big deal, just a weird quirk of certain shows' metadata. Not that common.
I think you can name the "specials" directory to... specials, and maybe even give it an arbitrary name in the Jellyfin settings, but I like "Season 0" or "Season 00" (either works, prepended zeros are ignored, I have both hanging around) because it matches the special episode naming in TheTVDB (like "s00eXX").
In a pinch, you can override which IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB, et c. ID that Jellyfin decided belonged to the movie or TV show, using the web UI, and make it re-scrape the metadata. Usually it's better to figure out why it got it wrong and fix that instead—that way you don't even have to care about Jellyfin's database of scanned metadata, you can always just have it re-create it from scratch with little or no fuss. (and you can also set it to write the metadata alongside your shows and movies in files, like Kodi can)
I think there might be a way to put things like IMDB IDs directly in file names to make it even more clear what you mean, but "name (year)" has been so reliable for me I've never bothered to look into it.
I base my naming and years on what I find in the metadata sources themselves, usually IMDB and TheTVDB for me. Surprisingly often, Wikipedia disagrees with these, and sometimes [ahem] acquired files also have file names recording years that disagree with those sources. Usually it seems to be a festival-circuit vs. wide-release thing, as those often fall in different years. The metadata source should win, since otherwise it'll make auto-scanning worse.
Some people are really set on things like having their movies categorized in folders by director or whatever, and that doesn't work too well with Jellyfin.
(I know that file naming explanation is a lot, but it's really not that complicated in practice, and there are docs but I found there were some "but can I..." or "is it necessary to..." gaps in it for me that I've tried to fill in above)
DESPITE the impression probably given by all that text, I've found this one of the greatest parts of Jellyfin. Delete a file? After a couple minutes, it's gone from the UI. Add some files? In a couple minutes, they show up. (and you can force re-scans to speed it up). Slightly rename a file? But Jellyfin still reads it as the same movie from its metadata source? Your watch history survives. Hell I think you can even delete a movie, then add it again later, and your watch history survives (as long as Jellyfin decides it's the same movie by ID). There's no cruft that hangs around to deal with. It's very low-stress. Like 99% of my "management" of Jellyfin is just rsycing files, LOL.
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As for non-Web clients:
- There's an official Roku client, but... most Roku devices have pretty limited codec support. The client works great though. If your server can transcode, this may be a totally fine choice. It's what I used for quite a while until enough of my files were in formats newer than h.264 that it was no longer viable.
- AppleTV has an official client. It's pretty good, but... if you can't transcode, there's one somewhat-common Dolby audio format (I forget which exactly) that AppleTV doesn't have a license to, so it causes problems. However, for that problem there's:
- Infuse (also AppleTV). It's amazing. The recent release supports multiple user accounts with different server access settings (not only can they log into Jellyfin with different credentials, they could conceivably use totally different servers), which is brilliant if you want parental controls or just to have different "watched" lists. It's free but there's a paid version with a few extra features that includes a license to that tricky audio format. I've been using this for years, at this point, and aside from wishing it supported multiple accounts (and it does now, as of very recently!) I've had no trouble with it at all. Also, Infuse supports other media servers as backends.
There are clients for tons of other platforms, too. And you can always Airplay or whatever from (say) a laptop.
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For going on the road (and short of taking your server with you) I have used two options:
- You can just use it directly over a VPN to your house, like Tailscale, if the client end's connection is solid (and your home connection is good, for that matter). I've streamed mid-quality 4K over such an arrangement, halfway across the US. You can even connect an AppleTV to Tailscale and take the AppleTV with you (it's much smaller than most servers, lol) for the full at-home experience while traveling (Christmas movie marathon at the in-laws' house this holiday season?)
- Long road trip with the kids and want them to watch Apollo 13 (and perhaps a couple Disney movies) while you drive to Cape Canaveral? Browse your Jellyfin web UI on the tablet they'll use, and download the file(s) you want straight from there. Play files in VLC. Done, no internet connection required. Being able to use the web UI is nice because you can browse categories and such, it's actually a fair bit better than something like using an SFTP client.
I think you mean Apollo 11, Apollo 13 was the dramatization with Tom Hanks. Both excellent movies in their own ways.
The Todd Miller Apollo 13 documentary (which is phenomenal, it's entirely file footage but assembled better than most blockbusters) has these bits during launch/landing where they overlay the three astronaut's heart rates with the footage. My big takeaway from that was that they were incredibly unflappable, almost to an absurd degree.
> I became the math consultant for A Beautiful Mind in part because I was such an Apollo 13 buff.
Cool, awesome job, as far as i can tell as a fan of the movie!
So you did what was best for yourself... and the group.
And David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, was the technical consultant. As Ron Howard explained this to me, he sees reality as more interesting and detailed than any fiction. No one would grasp the details were correct, but he felt they would contribute an irreplaceable texture to the film.
I became the math consultant for A Beautiful Mind in part because I was such an Apollo 13 buff. In my first call with Todd Hallowell, the executive producer, we spent an hour's aside discussing Apollo 13. This actually was part of the interview: Making a movie is intensely boring unless you're really engaged, and I demonstrated the required interest in detail.
That, plus the way the scene is set, you cut to the family not knowing if the astronauts survived. And then the movie cuts out about 4 minutes of waiting between when Apollo 13 regains contact, and when the main chutes are deployed and unreefed - when things seem 100% safe, and everyone starts cheering.
It's a really good decision in a movie that made a lot of them, as it made the relief hit all at once.
And then you see Jim Lovell's cameo as the captain of the Iwo Jima, just to cap the movie off.
In the movie "Apollo 13", when the astronauts board the Navy ship after being recovered at sea, Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, is greeted by and shakes the hand of the captain of the ship. The captain was played by Jim Lovell.
Only to have the Apollo 13 movie unnecessarily invent a fake argument in which Haise accuses Swigert of screwing up the oxygen tank stir
Decent movie, but that scene ruins it
> cool manner in which Jim and everyone else conducted themselves
I find it interesting that the argument briefly depicted in the 1995 film was added for dramatic effect. The real crew didn't even raise their voices!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film)#Technical_and_historical_accuracy
I don't get that emotional when watching movies. I cried a little when the parachutes opened in Apollo 13.
As a kid I had a book detailing hundreds of space missions—mostly probes, obviously—but my favorite mission to read about was Apollo 13. Just incredible.
Maybe when Jim got to heaven, the first place the angels took him to was where he would have landed on the moon.
Probably one of the more famous astronauts in pop culture given the movie Apollo 13. As someone who grew up near NASA that is one of my favorite films.
I recommend "A Man on the Moon" for anyone interested in that era.
Rest in Peace! Time to read up on him again.
Yes, in the movie, Lovell says "What's the frappin' attitude?" as the 8-ball rolls out of control. The actual Apollo 13 transcript has nothing like that, interestingly enough.
Links: https://archive.org/details/apollo1319959231994/page/n92/mode/1up?q=frappin https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/a13/AS13_TEC.PDF
I mainly remember this because he refers to it as the 'frappin 8 ball' in the Apollo 13 movie, if my memory serves.
Many of us knew the story from books, or even the Tom Hanks Apollo 13 film, but the detail here is fascinating.
It’s a reality of cinema that when they do a biopic or a film about a real event, they often have to make changes that enhance the drama. Some of these are reasonable, some not so. In Apollo 13, they upped the drama by significantly shortening the time required to get the LEM up and running as a lifeboat. I’m okay with that. Inserting drama where there was none is less justifiable, as it speaks to the character of the persons involved.
That said, as a retired NASA contractor, I can say that Apollo 13 is highly respected at NASA. Hidden Figures has a lot of fans there, too. In spite of the horrible physics, Gravity also has its fans - some astronauts said it really captured the feeling of being in space.
Right. The thing that bugs me about Apollo 13 is that they played up the drama unnecessarily, because the ground crew was so large, well-trained, and in sync. Like the scene where they dump a box of stuff and say "You have to make this go into here using just this?"- the actual story is that one of the engineers on the ground realized basically as soon as he heard about the accident (and the LM lifeboat) that they would need to use the CM scrubbers, and within five minutes of talking to another engineer they had figured it out in principle. The delay was that they wanted to walk through all the steps to make sure their documentation was correct, and the only CM scrubber available was at Kennedy, so they had to wait while it was put on a plane and flown to Houston to mate with the rest of the practice equipment.
Similarly, the "oh we forgot the moon rocks!" bit was actually the engineers realizing it ahead of time and changing the prep checklist to account for it, rather than a last second dash. This was only because there were so many engineers, and they had made themselves so immersed in the task, and they had such good lines of communication that someone identified the problem and was able to escalate the fix to the correct levels at the appropriate time. This didn't happen by accident, but was the result of years of working together, both training and the experience of actual flights that made these teams so good.
Separately, there were a few things the movie got wrong just as one-off moments. At launch the arms retracted simultaneously, rather than sequentially as shown in the movie (not quite as cool looking) and if you listen to the bit where Lovell says "Houston, check my math here" he is doing addition, which can't be done on a slide rule.
One of the interesting things about the movie was how well they conveyed the mood and atmosphere on subs.
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.
Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.
Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.
I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.
> regime that controlled NASA
As far as I know the political regime of the USA was a democratic one last year.
The PR victory of a returning two astronauts (one of which called space her "happy place"[1]) who didn't take the ride home on a leaky capsule is rather minute and not worth a movie like the Apollo 13 mission. When them staying up longer NASA actually might have gotten more stuff done than if they didn't, even with Crew 10 starting with two empty seats in September.
The whole thing isn't as bad as Trump ordering the release of water in Northern California, but once more it shows that he wants to things purely for show with no regards to the consequences.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/ced019gne3no
This is such a weird article. It reads like a 3000 word lament for the death of video stores, down to a coda about how Reed Hastings fabricated the story about the Apollo 13 late fee that triggered him to start Netflix in the first place. Why would I care if that story was false? Video stores were bad. Multi-month theatrical release windows are bad. The studio system was bad. Things are better now.
In all these kinds of stories that revolve around how much crap there is on Netflix, there are two things you have to keep in mind:
* Netflix didn't invent shlock and probably didn't even accelerate it; if anything, Netflix probably reversed the trend away from scripted and towards "reality".
* What distinguishes Netflix more than anything else is its efficiency getting content to viewers, which means that there's more of everything on Netflix, and in its catalog of originals. There's more schlock, which is very noticeable, and, compared to pre-Netflix-streaming outputs of places like HBO, also more solid original films. But 99% of everything is crap, so if the only way you have to engage with the Netflix catalog is browsing their interface, that's most of what you're going to see.
This is just some guy's top 50 favorite movies. And if you'd gone just one year further, to 1995, you'd have gotten Heat, Braveheart, Casino, 12 Monkeys, The Usual Suspects, and Toy Story. The Basketball Diaries doesn't hold up, at all, but Apollo 13 was great.
(I will stick up for Heat, but my god, the shoulder pads).
Here's what I term my "flypaper" movies. If I happen to glance at the satellite TV guide and notice one of these coming up, there's a good change I'll be watching it.
Lawrence of Arabia The Maltese Falcon Most Hitchcock films Blade Runner The Man From Snowy River The Martian Monty Python & the Holy Grail The Princess Bride Serenity The Thin Man series The Thing Tombstone Young Frankenstein Monty Python and the Holy Grail Clerks and most Kevin Smith movies Baby Drive and most Edgar Wright movies Fanboys Spinal Tap Kung Fu Hustle Apollo 13
> It wasn't a documentary.
I guess by that standard HBO's Chernobyl (which condensed an entire group of scientist into a single character) or Apollo 13 were "far from the truth" as well because they definitely weren't documentaries.
> So yes, it was far from the truth.
Kind of weird stance to take since nobody knows what the real story is at this point.
Found it cool that this has the real sound of the master alarm in it; the movie version from Apollo 13 was dramatised.
Yeah, the risk appetite was much higher. Those are good reminders on Apollo 1/6/8, but the problems didn't stop there. The first 5 landing missions all had huge problems that nearly killed everyone, too. Only the last 2 landings were sort of OK.
Apollo 1: burned all astronauts alive
...
Apollo 10: POGO oscillations on launch (Saturn V still trying to tear itself apart), LEM tumbling
Apollo 11: Computer kept crashing all the way down to the moon (it controlled the engines)
Apollo 12: Brownout in the command module during launch, "Set SCE to Aux"
Apollo 13: Oxygen tank fire. So rough they made a movie.
Apollo 14: Shorted abort button almost killed everyone
Apollo 15: Parachute failure
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We have no shortage of people who would be willing to put their life on the line, but we do have a shortage of the political urgency/unity to tolerate actual problems. Just look at people dig into Elon Musk every time he explodes a prototype with his own money and nobody on board, and realize that accelerating a human program creates 10x the political sniping opportunity.
> It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present.
In hindsight, it seems like the middle of the 20th century was right in the middle of an "S-curve" for societal change and technology advancement. Anyone who grew up in the 2nd half of the century thought it was completely normal. But now that we're somewhat removed from that era, it's more like completely bizarre to consider how much things changed in how little time.
The 90s when Apollo 13 came out were an interesting time in their own right because that's right around when the societal change started slowing down. Anyone who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s in particular probably doesn't even think of the 90s as being particularly "old". A lot of the same fashions and music styles that we have today had already emerged, at least in primitive forms. Cell phones and computers and the Internet were becoming mainstream. In a lot of ways, the late 90s and early 00s seem more familiar and similar to today than they do to the 1960s.
It's weird to imagine a world where major life-altering advancements aren't happening every decade (no, AI is not one of them, at least not yet). That's been the norm for over a century now, but it's come to some kind of an end. We are entering new cultural territory.
I remember when NASA Rd 1 in Clear Lake for renamed "John Glenn Parkway" for a few months due to his flight on the shuttle back in the day.
The space program is just one of those amazing moments in US history to read about. A Man on the Moon was a good book for it, and there are some others in the top tier.
It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. These guys were top notch.
> Apollo missions used two launches of the Saturn V - one for the crew capsule and one for the lunar lander,
What? Have you watched any Apollo mission media ever?
Watch Apollo 13 the movie at least and get the most basics of facts straight.
> Apollo missions used two launches of the Saturn V - one for the crew capsule and one for the lunar lander, which rendezvoused in orbit.
That was a concept called "Earth Orbit Rendezvous" which was discarded early on during the Apollo program in favor of "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous" where the Command and Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM) was launched on a single Saturn V. You can see this in the movie Apollo 13.
My cousin worked on the Apollo 13 movie in the prop department. All that extra hardware made his life much easier. He said they didn’t really track what happened to non-flown equipment. A couple things from the Smithsonian had guards.
To be fair, his involvement didn't end with "not going to the Moon"; he was instrumental in saving the lives of three other people who didn't go to the moon, and arguably therein saving a generation of science and cosmology from being lumped in with recklessness and death.
The cold start procedure is probably in the top 100 most notable on-the-fly hacks in human history (though my understanding is that it was actually _less_ challenging in real life than is depicted in the film, once the test pilots got together and compared notes).
The headline is unfair, I agree. But his contribution to the Apollo 13 mission was significant.
If I'm assuming good faith, I'd say that Mattingly is, as the lede notes, best known amongst the populace for being scrubbed from 13. If you weren't alive to witness 13 or 16, the movie is probably where most people get all their Ken Mattingly information. This does him a disservice but is probably what people will know him best for.
Truth be told, I think most people won't know the name or even Apollo 16, but will know Apollo 13.
"Apollo 16 astronaut..."
Who?
"Astronaut scrubbed from Apollo 13..."
Oh yeah! I know that guy, I remember him from the movie.
If you haven't seen the film Apollo 13, do it. It's one of my favorites. Ken Mattingly is played by Gary Sinise, great performance.
This is one of the many things Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film depicted correctly, as opposed to how the tones were simulated on quite a few other TV shows and films about that era of space flight. For example, some of the more egregious depictions had the tones coming from astronaut transmissions, not the ground transmissions. Knowing this would have been a simple matter of research, but a lot of folks apparently didn’t do it.
If you haven't already, I would highly recommend watching 'Apollo 13'[1]. On a technical basis it is really accurate to the real-life events. The astronauts having to shut down the lunar lander's (LEM) heating system comes into the story about half way through. It's one of my all-time favourite films!
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112384/
The way I like to think about this is Rick Altman's Sementic/Syntactic approach to genre. (a short summary here: https://introfilmgenres.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/the-semanticsyntactic-approach-and-genre-development/ ) Basically there are stock elements like space, lasers, aliens, etc. and there are thematic elements like themes of futurism, exploration, paradoxes, what is live? (these are just the ones I came up with off the top of my head) and just because a work has one of these doesn't make it part of that genre. Apollo 13 is set (largely) in space but I don't think people would call it science fiction. Star Wars is set in space but I have seen it argued thematically it is a western.
(I think in the book Film/Genre Altman added a third category but I don't remember it and thought the book was pretty confusing compared to the initial article he wrote.)
It is well-known, especially after the film came out, that NASA engineers and staff were consciously tempting fate when they scheduled the Apollo 13 launch for 13 minutes after the hour. Of course, up until that point in history, it was customary to omit the 13th floor in buildings and to omit the 1300 block in city street planning, among other things. So it was a rather "progressive" move for NASA to even suggest that they not skip directly from Apollo 12 to Apollo 14.
I do not rightly recall, but I believe that the film portrayed other ways they poked fun at superstition in a really callous and cavalier manner. So is it any surprise that they were rewarded with a disastrous and life-threatening mission? Hmm.
If you are even tangentially interested in the Apollo program, or by extension Apollo 13, I can strongly recommend the book "Apollo 13", formerly sold as "Lost Moon", by Jim Lovell and Jeff Kluger.
The book briefly outlines Lovells early life and career as a test pilot up to the Gemini and Apollo programs, and the Apollo 8 mission before spending the bulk of the book recounting Apollo 13.
Even on the earlier missions and programs, the book is full of interesting tidbits, anecdotes and explanations. Particularly with Apollo 13 it is IMO quite gripping to read about the myriad of issues that came up and how they were discussed and dissected on the ground to systematically come up with a viable solution.
From the movie adaptation, I guess one of the more commonly know issues was the LiOH CO2 scrubber, where the CSM canisters didn't fit into the LEM. While apparently a lot less dramatic in real life, there were tons of other issues that the movie glossed over, from accidentally loosing navigation data while moving over from one computer to the other, the two course correction burns that were needed, exploding lead-acid batteries on the LEM, etc...
Anyway, as I said before, it's IMO a good read and I can strongly recommend the book.
> As long as it doesn't know what it doesn't know, I'm inclined to think of it as a super-advanced Markov chain.
... that's basically what it is.
But that means that if you give it a context which looks like a part of the internet where people say "I don't know" when they don't know something, it will say "I don't know" in those situations (specifically the situations where people in the training set do not know things, not the situations where it does not know things). Sometimes this is close enough to what you want. Here's an example:
> Who did Tom Hanks play in the 1995 film "Apollo 13"? If you are unsure, say "I don't know".
> > Tom Hanks played the role of Jim Lovell in the 1995 film "Apollo 13".
> What year was the film "Ice Cold in Alex" released? If you are unsure, say "I don't know".
> > The film "Ice Cold in Alex" was released in 1958.
> Did Gilbert Harding play any roles in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex"? If you are unsure, say "I don't know".
> > I don't know.
> Did Sylvia Syms play any roles in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex"? If you are unsure, say "I don't know".
> > Yes, Sylvia Syms played a role in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex".
> What role did Sylvia Syms play in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex"? If you are unsure, say "I don't know".
> > Sylvia Syms played the role of "Nurse" in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex".
> What was the name of the nurse that Sylvia Syms played in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex"? If you are unsure, say "I don't know".
> > I don't know the specific name of the nurse that Sylvia Syms played in the 1958 film "Ice Cold in Alex".
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
Not fiction, but based on true events.
Netflix series - Billion Dollar Code. The Google Earth court case fought by the a couple of German hackers https://www.netflix.com/in/title/81074012
AMC TV series - Halt and Catch Fire. Follows some players in the 80s technological revolution that lead to information society. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/
Apollo 13. When Apollo 13 sustains hazardous damage mid-orbit, NASA works to devise a plan to lead the spacecraft back to Earth and spare the lives of the astronauts on board. https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-13-Tom-Hanks/dp/B001JI5DRC
I didn't say anything about a historical movie. Sure if a historical documentary is more your thing, perhaps wait for it on the History or Discovery channel. But I'm thinking more like an Indiana Jones/Pearl Harbor/Apollo 13 style movie.
Real Genius (1985) is a pretty good one. Apollo 13 has some hardware hack stuff. Wargames (1983) a little bit. Hackers (1995) did a good job of capturing what it felt like online during the tail end of the HPA BBS thing. Halt and Catch Fire is a good TV show. Others have mentioned Silicon Valley, Office Space and Mr Robot. The best related thing I’ve seen lately is Apple TV’s Mythic Quest, lolling right now thinking about it. Watch all of these.
I really enjoy James Horner's soundtrack for "Apollo 13". I think this is partially because I got an edition that includes actual audio from the movie itself as part of the soundtrack, which helps to place the music in the context of the movie scene.
So, during the Saturn V lift-off, I get to hear the dramatic music, the dialogue from Mission Control and astronauts, and the roar of the rocket itself.
I still get goosebumps every time I play that piece of music on the soundtrack.
I distinctly remember feeling like 1995 was absolutely amazing year for cinema.
Toy story, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Usual Suspects, Heat, Casino, Seven, Clueless, 12 Monkeys, Babe, Get Shorty, Leaving Las Vegas, etc.
A great time to be going to the Cinema.
I'm a logical person. Thought myself well-grounded, agnostic after leaving Mormonism...etc... then last year I went down a rabbit hole on some Mandela effects, esp. ones that flip/flop.
Short of it is - the Movie Apollo 13...
I remembered it has "Houston we have a problem!" with frantic Tom Hanks. I was reading how it's the most misquoted movie line, and is actually "Houston we've had", and that a lot of people have seen this flip back and forth between the two states.
Well, I double checked on youtube and sure enough... Houston We've HAD a problem was the correct/current iteration. Tom Hanks was also a bit more 'cool' like I'd imagine the real astronauts were...
My wife watched it with me and can verify.
Fast forward just 3 days. I'm reading a list of Mandela Effects still intrigued by things like the Cornucopia in Fruit of the Loom never existing...
On this list: Apollo 13 Movie, previous: Houston We've Had a problem, current: Houston we HAVE a problem.
Well, I immediately thought it was a typo. Till I opened youtube. It's now a more frantic Tom Hanks + Houston we HAVE a problem and different camera angles, etc.
Oddly, just about all the links out there claiming it's the most 'misquoted movieline' are still there on many different sites from Buzzfeed to Ebaumsworld. Yet, that ONLY works if the ACTUAL line is Houston We've Had a Problem, because as you can probably attest -- in all of pop culture when that line is uttered it is almost 100% "Houston We have a Problem".
In fact when I first saw the We've Had version, I chalked it up to bad memory because ...well it's just such an ubiquitous line and is used everywhere, in countless movies/tv-shows etc...
My wife can attest - she witnessed the flip too.
For like 3 months after that, I kinda went down some weird rabbit holes trying to find some control of the 'matrix' or simulation...before coming back down to earth. It rocked my world view.
Personally, I think we're either a simulation or that the entire universe is conscious and what we think we're experiencing is a dream of sorts or something, the only way I'd buy multiverse is maybe if the multiverse is reaching some sort of entropy so worlds are 'popping' like bubbles and colliding so that people from different timelines end up together and dispute reality.
If it's a simulation though, I was thinking this same thought that - everything we perceive or believe is a result of consensus, but I don't even think it's total human consensus -as much as it is potential network consensus... if 51% of the people you're likely to connect/network with online or off believe that it's Houston We've Had a Problem, that's what you'll see... say there's a deadly pandemic and people are dropping like flies, maybe those networks change faster... and thus things flip flop back and forth more...
The biggest Mandela Effects seem to be related to popular content, so it's usually things where there easily has the majority of people who at least have a memory of something one way or another. For instance there's lots of biblical MEs like there used to be a scripture about the lion laying down w/ the lamb, but it never happened. There's also many spots in the bible where it feels like the word 'things' should be 'possessions' and 'alien' should be 'stranger'... and I don't even believe in the bible, some would say it's 'Satan', but what's he have against Apollo 13 or the Fruit of the Loom Cornucopia? or "Objects in Mirror MAY Appear closer than they appear" (may be is actually 'Can').
I think it could also be related to quantum physics double eraser / delayed choice experiments, but I'm not convinced that quantum physics doesn't actually lead us to discovering we're simulations. To be honest there's some trippy concepts/theories and actual experiments in that area.
I'm agnostic, but I used to be mormon. Recently, I've been noticing more and more mandela effects... Some big ones affect the bible, many 'believers' think it's some satanic nefariousness, I've seen as many non-biblical mandela effects to think it's just randomness, or concensus algorithms (51% of people remember x, so x exists in reality the alternate is erased).
Some examples:
Isaiah 11:6:
Remembered: The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the bear shall eat grass like the ox, nd the child shall play on the hole of the asp, and nothign shall hurt nor destroy in all My Holy Mountain!
Current:The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
Interestingly many biblical scholars, pastors, etc claim to remember the 1st one as well. I also could've swore the word Demon was in the KjV at least a number of times (currently 0), and if you look in a KJV search engine for "alien" or "stuff" you'll get some very funky modern-era sounding translations that ... where it should definitely be probably: strangers or possessions...
examples:
Also regard not your stuff; for the good of all the land of Egypt is yours.
Whereas thou hast searched all my stuff, what hast thou found of all thy household stuff? set it here before my brethren and thy brethren, that they may judge betwixt us both.
There's like 20 results for "stuff" and only 16 for "possessions".
Aliens: Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
Another fun one that apparently seems to allow for homosexuality which most religionists claim the bible is against says:
Luke 17:34/35 - I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
The context could be seen/understood as they're taken because they're lgbqt, but the next line says 1/2 men will be taken from the field as they labor...instead it sounds to me that the bible as it sits is fine w/ LGBQT lifestyles.
.....
So my belief I guess is we're in a simulation, and the bible being one of the most read and quoted books with so many different translations makes it so easily fucked w/ as far as if everything is some blockchain-like concensus algorithm when it comes to mandela effects.
I'll also die on the hill that the apollo 13 movie w/ Tom hanks has flipped back and forth I've seen both versions where there's hyper Tom Hanks screaming HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM! and a Non-chalent, calmer Tom Hanks saying... Uh, Houston - we've had a problem. (We vs We've -- plus a different 'tone').
I stupidly “rented” a copy of Apollo 13 for $3.99 and being a long movie fell asleep halfway through. I came back to watch it a few days later and found the rental had “expired” in 2-3 days and was required to pay again to continue watching.
Sometimes I think these people live in an alternate universe. last time I did that.
I'm an exmormon (thanks to the CES Letter and A letter to my Wife)...
This led me to become agnostic mostly, Still have some hope for life after death of some sorts, but without deity as a requirement... i.e. our energy source lives on...
However in April last year, I witnessed a Mandela Effect w/ my wife, I was reading about the movie Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and how he said in the movie: "Houston we've had a problem". I was literally reading about a "flip-flop"... where to the person writing the thread on reddit it flipped back and forth from "we have" to "we've had" like twice for them...the current state from the thread being: "we've had"...
Now I hadn't seen the movie in over a decade, but I remembered "we have", but I thought that could easily just be because it's a pretty popular saying in pop-culture.
Anyhow this was a Friday night, and we watched it on youtube. Sure enough Tom Hanks says... "Uh, Houston we've had a problem".
Fast forward, I'm reading a list of common mandela effects in the format: Current => Previous, and it says Houston We Have a Problem => Previously: Houston we've had a problem.
My first thought: Well, that's obviously a typo,but just to be sure I go check.
The scene is completely changed. In fact the entire cadence is changed. It's now "Houston we have a problem" but also Tom Hanks is a lot more "frantic" and intense, when he was a little more laid back in the other version.
It's kinda funny there's a Buzzfeed article on the top mis-quoted movie lines. Apollo 13 is first. <https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/20-famous-movie-lines-that-you-have-been-saying-wrong>
> Misquote: “Houston, we have a problem”
> Actual movie quote: "... Ah, Houston, we've had a problem.”
If you look at the subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/retconned - this is probably the most common "flip flop"...
It's the fact that I honestly believe reality "changed" that I have to agree with you on simulation theory being a possibility that or many worlds...and somehow we're traveling through them, or maybe we do when we die and I died of sleep apnea or something...
Simulation to me seems most likely though, as it would explain the double slit quantum eraser experiment pretty handily. It could be then that reality's "truths" or "facts" then become some sort of consensus mechanism where if 51% of people remember "Houston we've had a problem" it changes back to that...
Like you I also thought maybe I could interact w/ the "matrix" and tried researching occult, magick, etc... and really never figured much out in that regards.. though /r/castaneda was probably the most interesting rabbit hole I found... darkroom gazing was very interesting indeed and trippy.
I was a bit manic/hyperfocused on this for like 3 months ...almost in a bad way. When you doubt reality it's easy - esp. if depressed to think about if reality is fake then quitting reality doesn't even matter.
For my own sanity, I gave up on the endeavor of finding out what's going on and how to control it, but go back to just appreciating the beauty of what we do see, and admire the complexities - though I do still read any threads I can find on new discoveries in consciousness-related neuroscience, quantum mechanics, etc...
Spent a month going down rabbit holes like this. I'm a very logical 42 year old, but I saw what I'd call a "glitch in the matrix" really it was just a common mandela effect but the kicker was it flipped.
Scenario:
Read on reddit about the flip flop. Check current status.
Movie Apollo 13: Calm and collected Tom Hanks says: uh Houston we've had a problem.
My childhood memory of this is more Frantic Tom Hanks: "Houston we have a problem".
I discussed this w/ my wife, and she watched it as well. She remembered the same as me.
Two days later, I'm reading a list of mandela effects one of which said: Apollo 13 Movie: Previous: Houston we've had a problem, current: Houston we have a problem.
I do a double take, and think that's a typo. Off to youtube to verify. It's now Houston we have a problem.
I wake my wife up at 6am to ask her what it said the other day and she tells me: Houston we've had a problem.
this disrupted my entire view of reality as at least somewhat 'solid/stable'. Led me down lots of research into quantum mechanics, physics, etc... as well as topics on what consciousness even is, or the possibility of living in a simulation.
I'm thinking simulation makes the most sense, and that reality is some sort of consensus mechanism like blockchain. What the majority 'remembers' becomes reality for all... though, it seems when polled a majority of people remember Fruit of the Loom having a cornucopia, and other than a trademark file from 1974, there was never any cornucopia associated w/ the company....
Tandem aside, that made me try /r/castaneda (dark room gazing), meditation, mindfulness, neville goddard/law of attraction, reality shifting, tulpamancy, etc.. just to see if I could maybe find a 'chink' in the armor of reality. Only thing I found was obsessing over that was ruining my life, and mental abilities except for the meditation practices, but I think the acts that supposedly bring on those scenarios (lucid dreaming/meditation) instead brought me to a realization I don't need those things to find happiness - except meditation maybe I still do that from time to time, and binaural sleep music occasionally for a deeper sleep.
I found the oddest stuff with /r/castaneda doing darkroom gazing where you spend 4 hours every night in pitch blackness, and try to see energy and eventually you do. Though I saw a huge spider while practicing this crawl up my leg and dissipate and I quickly stopped. I was awake, and it wasn't dark but it was after a week of practicing.
I think there's still stuff to find out, and I'd like to still pick around the edges of reality, but I don't want to be homeless either, and we still need to and deserve to have happiness here, and to do that we must be present.
Donald Hoffman who's done a number of talks/interviews on his theories and proofs that we are living in a simulation basically says that those who 'win' at life are those who don't 'know' we're in a simulation or speculate, something to do w/ evolution. Makes sense that you'd be happiest in a fake world if you didn't know it was fake, once you figure that out, how can you just go back to life as normal, or want to? Since, I have to live here, and have kids and a family I figure it's best to just keep trying to 'win' than focus too much on odd side effects of reality.
Interested in Mandela Effects or reality changing? I'd suggest /r/retconned for some interesting takes. There's a weird venn diagram of people who believe in ME's that includes religionists and less-theistic more-scientific people there's very weird fringe theories based on the bible, and then a bunch of people discussing quantum eraser experiments and how to run experiments to track changes to reality over time, some results that use md5 hashes on images that represent the change have actually seems somewhat interesting.
tldr: I know what I saw, and my wife saw it too, and it drove me mad, but I came back from madness to realize we can't just dissociate from reality even if reality is not 'true', because it's the only thing we have in life, and it's still a miracle even if it's fake.
> Alternatively, we had a near-miss: given there was a solar maximum around 1972
I think that by the time they actually built flyable hardware for that mission, they'd learn to properly shield the crew. They could at least hide behind the propellant tanks.
Except that the 3rd stage would be empty by then :-(
BTW, it'd be a cool movie, even if a bit Apollo 13-like.
> Alas, the Shuttle turned out to be a white elephant with a couple of lethal design flaws
Indeed. The Shuttle shouldn't even called "reusable", but merely "fixable" or "rebuildable", if you got lucky.
In any case, I'd have loved more Skylab workshop launches and the AAP permanent lunar presence. The modules were huge compared to ISS ones. It was a tragic loss to have Skylab fall to Earth because they didn't have the money to build something to boost it up a little.
Apollo 13 (1995) - there are various scenes showing the engineers working through various technical problems (much like gravity and the martian)
Antitrust (2001) - The technical portion is goofy, but discusses the open source software movement, VCs, working for a major tech company (an evil bill gates character played by tim robbins)
Sneakers (1992) - Personally, one of my favorite movies of all-time. Code breaking, old school hacking (think wargames). I think the best description i've heard of it is an 1970s caper movie. You will never see a better cast in a movie. Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Dan Ackroyd, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell all play major roles
Mythic Quest (2020) - Apple tv show about creating video games and running a tech company
I don't agree. If you starve yourself very fast, the body starts to shut down, and of course your passive burnrate decreases significantly. It is like keeping only the most critical systems powered when you lose your main power generator. (See Apollo 13 movie for visual representation).
Still, this happens when you starve. If you do it gradually, the body adjusts. The main thing is to keep in mind that person can survive just fine on 1700 kcals, and that you are not dying when hungry, it's only a discomfort.
This seems disingenuous at best. Even on the very first day that Google launched if you typed those things into it, you would get 'the most relevant responses' which is all that these are, a search engine providing the most relevant response to your query. At some point the tool and its underlying algorithms have to operate on a good faith assumption which this twitter person was clearly not operating on.
There may have been some tomfoolery going on with that twitter guy as well and/or in the intervening time Google has improved the algorithms to handle people trying to get silly results. This is what I got trying to repeat his first query:
What year did Tom Hanks land on the moon
1995 William Broyles Jr. Apollo 13 is a 1995 American space docudrama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise.
For his second query, it makes perfect sense to me why google returned what it did (still returning the answer he got, but notice he conventently cutoff the paragraph of text that includes the saturn 5 rocket and the statue of liberty, possibly the only document on the web to have both in the same sentence, explaining why you got that return.
which rocket launched the statue of liberty into the ocean? The Saturn V rocket The Saturn V rocket was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a 36-story-tall building, and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed 2.8 million kilograms (6.2 million pounds), the weight of about 400 elephants.Feb 21, 2018 Apollo 13 (film) - Wikipedia
Ahh, yes; I've seen the series multiple times - agreed that it's great, especially for those who enjoyed Apollo 13. I wasn't sure if there was a different Apollo-14 movie OP/Trothamel was referring to...
I think what you're really saying is you'd watch the movie version of this.
And considering there are no life or death stakes, it still wouldn't be as exciting as Apollo 13.
pushes up glasses I would watch the heck out of a Twitch stream of their debugging/brainstorming sessions. I always loved the movie Apollo 13, especially the technical troubleshooting parts.
> You read about how Apollo 13 the movie with Tom Hanks has a calm Tom Hanks saying: "Houston, We've Had a Problem",
That's what was said in the actual Apollo 13 mission, which might be the source of confusion. Surely "multiple realities" is a bit more far fetched than "sometimes people are wrong in similar ways"?
I'm not a quantum mechanic expert or scientist. I have become a believer in multiple realities through personal experience.
(Edit: I'm not usually conspiracy theorist, I don't believe in god/religion, I believe in science, global warming, wearing masks, etc...but sometimes your eyes see things you can't unsee).
You read about how Apollo 13 the movie with Tom Hanks has a calm Tom Hanks saying: "Houston, We've Had a Problem", then you read a list of Mandela Effects a few days later and it says that the actual lines are "Houston, we HAVE a problem", you verify with your wife who watched the clip all 10 times last week, and you watch it with her another 10 times just to make sure, you have her pinch you...
Lo and behold, reality has changed. No idea how, others agree with you, but that's irrelevant since you don't need to believe them or not because you now how personal proof, which most people will say is not proof it's just "Mis-remembering" but have you ever watched something with full awareness and intention with another person to see what the actual "fact" is at the time?
Did you forget the outcome 3 days later? Most people would say empatically no, they did not. So if 3 days later you have not forgotten the fact, but the fact has changed via sources online that are trusted (often the same sources), is it not suggestive that something has changed? Or that perhaps reality is really some-part subjective?
Is it hard to consider that reality could be partially dependent on those in the reality? what if reality is consensus based?
If 10 people have a fact and 6 people believe chartreuse is maroon, and 4 people believe chartreuse is green, then it's really green. In fact I'd say a lot of facts in life are based on consensus. Colors are labels, and if the majority think blue is green and green is blue, then seems like people will be calling green blue and vice versa.
That's more though about a group-think decision on what something means. When a literal historical fact or video changes almost before your very eyes, it's very hard to dispute...
Probably from the film Apollo 13, which depicts (likely wise) hesitance to fire the SPS due to suspected damage and instead firing midcourse correction burns with the LEM descent stage while attached to the CSM. By contrast, during the otherwise normal Apollo 11, SPS was responsible for returning Collins and the CSM to Earth (TEI) whether he retrieved Armstrong and Aldrin or not. The latter case was a rehearsed abort and the stakes were known, but the maneuver was otherwise the same as a normal TEI (excluding LEM jettison, obviously). Nixon’s backup speech illustrates this, as it eulogizes those two alone; Collins would have most likely returned on his own in that horrible circumstance barring a further failure of some kind.
One year ago I'd have agreed.
Today? I'd be running around like an excited child, given half a chance. Probably hugging people I know are comfortable with it. I recognized I really do like that energy, and I only live once.
Not saying people who prefer a more restrained celebration are not valid in their preference! Everyone is a little different, and that is a good thing. At my workplace we like to have multiple ways to celebrate a milestone, because it's important that everyone can participate if they want. For example, we might have a team lunch/party (pre covid) for folks who like that, but also, say, personalized notes sent out, or office posters made of the achievement with participants' signatures on it (optional), and companywide announcements (again, representation optional).
For the record the only movie that routinely tears me up is Apollo 13. Specifically, when they land, and the people in Mission Control are shown. Some of those people have a lifelong bond because of that event, I'm sure. That's important to me.
Hmm. In the Apollo 13 movie, high CO2 levels triggered a panic/anxiety attack in one of the astronauts. (Which may not have happened, or not as severely, in reality – but that’s adifferent issue. For one, astronauts are trained not to panic.) A quick google seems to confirm this. As for breathing in a paper bag, I believe that is one common way to deal with hyperventilation, which may also induce anxiety and thus lead to more of the same.
Whoa, 10 yo and interested in exoplanets! Great boy and good job for supporting him.
I watched with my children (the youngest one must have been around the age of yours) the movie Apollo 13 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film)). I fast forwarded the first 1/3rd of the movie (the introduction and romantic part that was really boring IMHO) and started when the preparation actually started.
They loved it, and I loved it too - mostly for the extraordinary capacities of these people to calculate/engineer such solutions on the fly in 1970. This is the second time I was watching it and was biting my nails up to the elbow again :)
He could be interested, especially if you pause from time to time to explain what is going on.
I know pretty much everyone else who has worked as a math consultant on a Hollywood movie. I worked more hours than everyone else combined. Fine with me, you couldn't tear me away.
Ron Howard hired Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott to consult on Apollo 13. He finds reality more interesting than anyone's imagination, he wanted to get textures right, verisimilitude. I was hired at first with a short list of specific goals, such as the problem Nash writes on his calculus blackboard. I know too many mathematicians who claim to have solved the Good Will Hunting blackboard while it was onscreen; we wanted everything we did to survive "freeze framing the DVD".
A film is like joining the circus. Once you're in, you can be asked to do anything if there's a way you can help.
After watching art make 200 panels digit by digit for the Pentagon scence, supposed to be random enough to pass as encryption, I wrote a C program overnight to generate similar panels with a simple settings file they could play with. My childhood anti-drug literature included photographs of spider webs under various influences; the storyboard artists used this to draw the "Mad Shack" scenes, as seen in the film. For the writer Akiva Goldsman, I'd make strange phone calls for example to the CIA to discuss terminology.
I was a go-between to strong go players for the game sequences. I proposed a go consultant but they said I'd do. After one rehearsal where no one could act and position stones at once, Ron Howard said to just act, we'll fix it in second unit. We break for lunch, I pronounce "This is why we don't have a go consultant. A go consultant would commit ritual suicide right now." Russell Crowe responds they'll put my phone number in the credits. Then everyone in the room recites verbatim their most scathing reviews ever, to enormous peels of laughter.
Day to day, the props department always wanted more scribbled paper, or a blackboard needed scrawling. The actors were entitled to ask me anything before scenes; I'd often be around hours for a one minute conversation. There's a Time magazine cover with Nash as one of four faces. Held in an actor's hand one can barely make out the backgrounds on Blu Ray, but Russell Crowe wouldn't pose for that still photograph till he'd found me to confirm that the blackboard was my writing.
Facing a writer's strike, and with second unit costing a fraction of first unit, there were body doubles whenever Russell Crowe's face didn't show. I wrote all the math, so I was his hand double for everything. He got the idea of making his fingers longer with acrylic nails, so I had acrylic nails for six months. I loathed them but it certainly established my loyalty. Try having your friends in a bar tell strangers about this; I'd admit I was a Barbra Streisand impersonator and that they'd believe.
I had my nails done at the same shop in New Jersey that Edie Falco used on The Sopranos. The woman who'd promised to do the work was on a cruise in the Caribbean, so she phoned in. She asked me if I was doing anything else for the film besides being a hand double. I said I was also Russell's love double (a story he later enjoyed):
"Will you be needing an extension for that too?"
Bing search answers the same questions. (Copied the first line of first result with text.) I think Bing's winning the reality contest.
>>what year did tom hanks land on the moon
>I n the movie Apollo 13 (1995), Tom Hanks (and some others) was wearing the Omega Speedmaster.
>>what rocket launched the statue of liberty into the ocean
> Once fully assembled, NASA said the SLS rocket will stand taller than the Statue of Liberty
>>which apollo 13 astronaut exploded
>Two days into the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded.
>>when did canada become part of the united states
>America invades Canada, 1775. The invitation was officially made on March 1, 1781,
>>when did the simpsons first learn to control fire
>It's a not-so-merry Christmas for the Simpsons. Mr. Burns plans to cut Christmas bonuses,
> Apollo 13 - I think few films come close to capturing how ingenious some people can be
I agree, I also like The Martian and The Shawshank Redemption, which both have similar premise of human ingenuity solving difficult problems.
Going through the list, I noticed a lot of films from the Criterion Collection. For people that love film, I think it's a great subscription. $9.99 per month (US; I signed up before the release, so it might've gone up since then) for a host of film and commentary – probably some of the best ever made. At this point, besides Apple Music, it's the only subscription I've kept (unless you count Amazon Prime Video included in Amazon Prime).
Films that had a great impact on me, however:
1. Lord of the Rings – Lord of the Rings is, to me, the epitome of the epic. It is grand, sweeping, and larger than life. I inevitably compare all movies to the trilogy.
2. Hamilton - Its made me think a lot about ambition and legacy and, to a lesser extent, representation and sanitization of those that came before us.
3. Apollo 13 - I think few films come close to capturing how ingenious some people can be – as well as how many people it takes to get us off the world and back to it safely.
>Dating apps have the same problem to some extent I guess.
No. I think Kent Beck tweeted something along those lines, that the mere fact one was still using the app meant the app failed to do the "job to be done" and my reply was that the tweet assumed that search would stop once a match was found, when clearly it wasn't necessarily the case. Many users do concurrent processing of matches, with some being better than others as their processing algorithm is more efficient, and they can handle more IO and compute workloads. Some do round-robin. Though others pin one thread for processing matches sequentially.
I think this is different. This is similar to hospitals optimizing for patients not coming back after coming in (mitigation), and systems being improved to prevent "failure demand".
What you can draw inspiration from is "remote patient monitoring". I think you have to find differences in behavior from metrics and dimensions. There's that scene from the "Apollo 13" movie where the characters rip off vitals monitoring electrodes and the ground person freaks out looking at the telemetry data thinking they had lost the crew.
I also think the hypothesis that the goal is "churn" is to be revisited. Can we view your device as something that accompanies someone suffering from depression until they recover, and then preventing them from relapse and regression. Your device helps get better, and it is a spectrum, not a binary "depressed"/"not depressed". Similar to physical fitness, you don't stop once you're there, because there is dynamic. So your product adapts and can provide value throughout the journey, as opposed to punctual.
It's not a wedding planner one needs punctually, it's more like a buddy who will be there at the wedding, during the divorce, after a hangover, at the gym, and much more. Support.
So, what are the behaviors exhibited by people who are depressed, by people who are recovering, by people who're giving up (maybe throwing the device). Can you detect those?
You may have started in a niche thing with depression, but could eventually later expand to wellness.
Apollo 13 was a much better movie to point to with regards to STEM types saving the day, despite the artistic license it takes.
At the same time, it also means collectively we don't know what we're doing to get where we're going and are just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks.
It also made me think of the Apollo 13 movie.
The engineering/process people got the thing into space, the adaptable/dynamic solve it with 'gaffer-tape and whatever is laying around' people got the thing home.
We still need both approaches for different reasons.
“Personal survivor bias“ accidentally chooses a side for you.
Experience eventually makes one realise there aren't diametrically opposing sides, just different capabilities needed in different circumstances.
I remember watching the Apollo 13 movie for the first time in 1995 and thinking at the time how modern they were in those far off days of 1970. Now the same length of time has passed since 1995 (in the blink of an eye) and it still hasn't dated. The internet is huge but it feels like the only thing we've done since 1970.
I just finished reading "Apollo" and have so much respect for NASA of that time. It's a case study of what an Engineering project can do with a military size budget. Apollo 13 never comes home without the constant red team smoke testing of every last operational detail and how they managed problem solving for a real time crisis is a lesson for anyone who ever had to fix anything.
Quick plug also for Gene Kranz's memoir at the center of Mission Control (Failure is Not an Option)
And the BBC is running a podcast series on this. It's 6 Episodes and the last one drops on the 13th (50 years from the O2 tank blowout).
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/282086.Apollo
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141499.Failure_is_Not_an_Option
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads
The story of Apollo 13 never gets old for me. I enjoyed Lovell's book, Lost Moon [1] (and despite its occasional dramatic liberty/deviation, I rate the film Apollo 13 highly), and I can't resist plugging again on HN the Apollo in Real Time site [2], which features Apollo missions 11, 13 and 17. I keep returning to 13.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Moon
[2] https://apolloinrealtime.org/
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/m.html
How about the world of radio waves? Type in 198, AM. There's a good documentary of Apollo 13 on the Beeb currently, 7:43 PM PT, 0243 UTC :-)
Not the OP, but I'm guessing that Syzygies is Professor David Allen Bayer. [0][1]
>Bayer was a mathematics consultant for the film A Beautiful Mind, the biopic of John Nash,
"Syzygies" appears to be a reference to a construct in abstract algebra. [2][3]
Dave Bayer is referenced on the version of the Wikipedia page Erdős–Bacon number dated 03:25, 9 February 2013. [4]
>For a time, the person with the lowest known Erdős–Bacon number was Dave Bayer, mathematical consultant to A Beautiful Mind who was on screen in a minor role in the movie. Rance Howard was also in A Beautiful Mind and in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon to give Bayer a Bacon number of 2. Bayer wrote a paper with Persi Diaconis, who has an Erdős number of 1 due to a jointly authored 1977 Stanford University technical report, later published in a 2004 compilation. As such, Bayer's Erdős–Bacon number is 4. ...
But there is a tsunami of deletions [5] by Wikipedia User:Cresix [6] on that day, and the text above plus a table that references Dave Bayer is gone.
[0] https://simonsingh.net/media/articles/maths-and-science/erdos-bacon-numbers/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Bayer
[2] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/papers/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_syzygy_theorem
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number&oldid=537328352
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number&offset=20130209091114&action=history
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cresix
Nice.
For some strange reasons it immediately reminded me of the scene in Apollo 13:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112384/quotes/qt0476826
This is true, in the movie Apollo 13 it's portrayed as part of the plot that TV stations don't want to do a live broadcast of the mission. This is based on historical fact. Even Mission Control told them to cut it short because there was a Baseball game on. The broad public was only interested once something went wrong.
I sure hope your office isn't all on one circuit!
This conversation reminds me of the movie Apollo 13: "You can't run a vacuum cleaner on 12 amps, John!"
It's a classic piece written by a Vietnam War veteran: Why Men Love War (1984) By William Broyles, Jr. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/
Boyles is a screenwriter who was involved in writing in the movies like Apollo 13, Cast Away, Jarhead, and Saving Private Ryan.
Most of the film people have seen from Apollo 11 is the rocket itself (and most of the most famous Saturn V footage isn't even Apollo 11) and the lunar landing. I'd bet a significant number of people don't even know who Michael Collins is.
Most of the film people have seen from Apollo 13 is a movie where Gene's got a bunch of snappy quotes and has a starring role in the middle of the action in mission control.
I suppose it's an example of how much failures are far more visible than successes :) Going to the moon was "routine" by the time 13 launched because as far as the public could tell, it was all going smoothly. Seemed easy. A solved problem. That's even a theme in the Apollo 13 movie!
In 1995 when Apollo 13 the movie came out, it felt like a very long time after the actual events. The same length of time again has almost elapsed but 1995 seems not that long ago.
In 1995 I thought the real Gene Krantz, an old man so I'm amazed by how well he looks today.
Hmm, I've read A Man on the Moon and Failure is not an Option and I don't recall any inaccuracies in the Apollo 13 movie. According to the wikipedia there were a few but it mostly seems like simplifications, not embellishments:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film)#Technical_and_historical_accuracy
So, as the article says, the majority of the facts about the story are true, and the things that make it memorable -- the 'embellishments' -- have dubious sources and rely on eyewitness accounts only. Pretty much like most other stories like this (Check out the inaccuracies in the Apollo 13 movie, for example).
How exactly does that debunk the entire thing?
Apollo 13 (the movie) had plenty of careful checklist readbacks and minimal explosions or shaky cameras. Most scifi is more like Michael Bay in space. See Gravity for a more egregious example of a movie that tries to play itself off as "hard scifi" but ends up just being an over the top action movie.
> "A properly trained pilot should be able to solve an MCAS anomaly or any uncommanded flight-control input through procedures that are taught to all 737 pilots"
It blows my mind that anyone still talks like this.
My first job was writing (non-life-critical) scientific software for detail-obsessed university researchers working in a lab with notebooks and procedures. If "just solve it with training" could work for anyone in the world, it would have been these people. Yet it was immediately and abundantly clear that designing usability into the system would have far more impact on their success rate at any task than documentation or training or even the reliability of the software itself.
The movie "Apollo 13" showed astronauts working in a simulator, and engineers giving them faulty sensor inputs to try to trick them. They had to train to be able to identify this possibility, and react correctly to it. This isn't the sort of thing you can figure out on the fly (so to speak). If the solution to flying an aircraft with a faulty MCAS sensor was "the pilot should have read it in a book last month", it's no wonder they were in trouble.
The software industry does make some programs with random inputs and hidden internal state, and require users to figure out what's going on and solve it anyway. We call them "games". Perhaps the defining characteristic of a game is that, even if you've read the manual, you won't succeed on the first try.
> "But, he said, if he were designing the system from scratch, he would emphasize the training while also building the plane with three sensors."
Is even three enough? From an earlier version of the "2001" Wikipedia page [1]:
> "In the story HAL features a design with triple redundancy, so that if one of the three modules fails the other two can outvote it. However, there is a [[theorem]] in [[computer science]] that proves that for such [[distributed systems]] a vote-based [[sanity check]] only works if ''less than'' one third of the modules fail. Thus the failure of a single one of HAL's redundant modules would be sufficient to compromise the system, as apparently happened in the movie."
I don't know what theorem this is referring to. Help?
See also: Segal's Law.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)&diff=537589&oldid=530391
What I recommend is having a DVD, Blu-Ray, and Netflix streaming of a movie with good sound and a lot of dynamic range that you can A-B-C with. Apollo 13 is a reasonable example and fairly cheap. :)
It's super obvious side by side, at least on my setup. Streaming is more-or-less DVD quality at best in my experience.
This was a nice read.
I really enjoyed the 1995 movie about the Apollo 13 mission. It struck me that it provides a mental model for critical internet infrastructure or for relating to an online audience that you want to share anything important with.
They couldn't give the astronauts anything physical. They could only transmit information.
Yet, they did research on how to address some of the problems, wrote instructions and relayed them. This was crucial to their survival.
If you do anything of any importance online and need a little inspiration, I highly recommend watching the movie with that mental framework in mind. Ever since I watched it, I tend to gravitate towards to articles on the mission that show up here because it was a huge mental paradigm shift for me, for lack of a better term.
Some of us can spot it. In the Apollo 13 movie, I could tell the real dialog (recorded in history) from the fake dialog.
The big failure was right after the explosion. There was a desire to show the level of stress at that time, so the script writers had the astronauts be antagonistic toward each other and generally unproductive. As I watched that, I instantly saw a bunch of wimpy unstable Hollywood types instead of carefully screened professional test pilots.
The intro dialog was also really forced, and the historical dialog contradicted the direction that rockets were fired when returning.
This has turned into a discussion about First Man rather than the article, so I may as well contribute:
I think Damien Chazelle intended to frame the movie as a war movie, even toeing towards a parallel between the Apollo missions and the Vietnam War. The idea that we actively gambled with these men's lives, somehow collectively desensitized ourselves to human loss, that we are all boys pretending to have protocol- obvious parallels to war, in that a bureaucratic borg overlooks human lives in a competition the borg itself created.
But the thing is- its pretty hard to not lean into the inherent heroism of landing on the moon, especially since the studio clearly gave Chazelle a blank check to recreate the moon landing as immaculately as possible.
So its a little hard to parse the final message. The movie is the inverse of Apollo 13, pessimistic where 13 is optimistic, even though First Man is about the successful one. To some extent, Mission Control are the villains in this movie.
It isn't not going be a loved movie, like his last two (Whiplash and La La Land.) The characters are constantly aware of their mortal peril, which in turn makes them coarse and hard to like. But its such an interesting take on the Moon missions.
Author namechecks Thirteen Days, the harrowing account of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a world on the brink of annihilation. There is also a terrific movie adaptation. In it, Secdef McNamara talks about how the positioning of submarines and aircraft carriers about the open seas is actually a coded language. And by making moves and counter-moves, what the US and USSR are actually doing is communicating intent.
Another classic is Ron Howard's Apollo 13. One of the few movies that depict the engineers as heroes. An inspiring watch for the whole team. And Damien Chazelle's upcoming Neil Armstrong biopic might make for a similar outing.
Crisis management, perhaps more so than innate technological superiority, can yield distinct competitive advantage. And this is where actually learning from precisely the type of case study found in the YC network makes sense. Knowing that you can stay calm, slow time, take deep breaths, and react rationally because others have dealt with far more on their plate than you ever will.
I'll share an anecdote. A small independent media outlet once got wind of a redesign I was working on and reported the story. The client was incensed as they were planning a full marketing rollout and had "lost the narrative". We were still months from launch. But rather than get into a blame game and lose more time. I suggested a soft, beta launch with media blitz immediately. After a week of jamming to polish our working prototypes for general availability, we were public facing, with laudatory feedback and the client appearing on CNBC ;)
Weeks later, as it turns out, it was revealed I was in fact the source of the leak. An unscrupulous reporter had called my office posing as a contract employee of the client and asked about a meeting time and place. In replying that it would be at my office that afternoon, they had confirmation that in fact the redesign was in progress!
That is an engineering mindset. I was confused when I first read a review of the "Apollo 13" movie that said engineers think the real heroes of the crises were the engineers on the ground - who else would someone think was a hero? Oh yeah, the astronauts who were risking their lives.
I saw the video animation of the Tesla separating from the second stage. At that point, the car no longer has thrust, so I'm assuming they've calculated the thrust to be just enough to reach Mars and to be able to fall into orbit. To quote the movie Apollo 13, "we've just put Isaac Newton in the driver's seat". I dearly hope that Musk and team have been referring to the "dummy" in the driver's seat of the Tesla as Isaac.
12 Monkeys - Travelling back in time to try and track the outbreak of a virus that wipes out most of humanity.
The Abyss - Survival and discovery on a deep water mining platform.
Apollo 13 - Look at the rescue efforts of this historical NASA moon mission. (Does it count as sci-fi?)
The Dish - Also not quite sci-fi, but a comedy about Australia's involvement in the first moon landing.
Battle for Terra - Surprisingly good animated movie about invading aliens.
District 9 - Alien refugee camp in Johannesburg.
Gravity - Astronaut stranded in orbit, trying to get back to Earth.
The Martian - Survival and rescue of a lone astronaut stranded on Mars.
Moon - After a serious accident, a solitary worker on the Moon discovers a conspiracy.
Oblivion - A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.
Predator - The classic that launched the franchise.
Predestination - Faithful adaptation of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies."
The Prestige - Some minor sci-fi elements. At the end of the Nineteenth Century in London, two stage magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion whilst sacrificing everything they have to outwit the other.
Source Code - Using limited time-travel to try and get information to stop a second, larger terrorist attack.
WALL E - In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
I think Apollo 13 did a lot to show what talented engineering teams can do. They also didn't shy away from real terminology and rarely stopped to explain it. No other movie has done that in my experience.
Remarkable. I'm vividly reminded of that scene in the movie, Apollo 13, where this is said: [Gene Kranz:] I want you guys to find every engineer who designed every switch, every circuit, every transistor and every light bulb that's up there. Then I want you to talk to the guy in the assembly line who actually built the thing. Find out how to squeeze every amp out of both of these goddamn machines.
NASA has a remarkble group of engineers who know how to get every last erg of energy out of that machine.
I haven't heard anything since the announcement. IMDB's last update was in January. It's not just Ron Howard though--it's also a bunch of the people who worked on the Apollo 13 film, which seems like a very good fit.
Unlike a lot of folks, I liked the second part of Seveneves, but I won't miss it if they cut it from the film. I don't even know how they'll fit the whole first part in without a 3.5 hour running time.
WRT short sleeved shirts: The Apollo-era NASA engineers pretty much all wore short-sleeved white shirts, black slacks, and a black tie. The image has stuck in many people's heads as what a professional engineer should look like, even younger people who've seen movies about the era like Apollo 13. It's also still a popular style at NASA for looking professional (photo ops and such).
Of course the reasoning for short sleeves is that graphite dust would stain long sleeves. Likewise for a black tie. Since drafting using pencils is pretty much nonexistent these days the need for the style is gone. Now it's just used to project an image of competent professional engineering.
It's also much more common among engineers in disciplines where they could get a PE than among programmers. Code monkeys don't match, sparkies and gearheads do.
Well said. I would also add: why did this bathroom thing even need to be pointed out?
Is it not obvious that it and other moments in this movie were hollywood slices of a horrific, decades-long, deliberate campaign of dehumanization and oppression?
Was the point that because the bathroom scenes as depicted were not 100% historically accurate that the oppression of African Americans was somehow misrepresented or exaggerated?
Maybe the commenter is aware that all of the memorable vignettes in Apollo 13 did not occur exactly as presented there because they were exciting distillations of what actually happened. Do they normally call those out when talking about the meaningfulness of the movie Apollo 13? I doubt it.
As Kranz lays out in the book (and as indicated in the wiki) "Failure is not an option" was written by the Apollo 13 screenwriters. The original quote was by the FIDO at the time which was adapted for the movie. Kranz has since started using it as it summarizes the idea more succinctly.
You are not off base. The first Russian cosmonaut in space died on reentry. Apollo one burnt on the pad. Apollo 13, well, it got a movie.
And that's just of the top of my head, sitting in traffic.
I just finished watching it, and now HN tells me Nasa has an announcement? Fun coincidence.
I really enjoyed the movie. Mood wise it's somewhere between Apollo 13 and Contact.
This brings to mind a moment in the movie Apollo 13, where one of the supporting characters says something to the effect of: "Leave it to NASA to make a moon landing boring".
I think it says a lot of great things about NASA that people consider putting a satellite in orbit around Jupiter to be routine. Further great things from the fact that they really want NASA to stop being "boring" and invent some crazy new thing and push the boundaries of what humans think is realistically possible again - after all its been like a whole year since they blew our minds last time.
All for the low price of ~.03 militaries. (Not including the fact that NASA does some stuff for the military...)
Perhaps I read their interactions differently, but even their "I need the springy jobber" and other more informal statements seemed far more professional and what I'd expect from a career astronaut than "I'm going to do the iron man thing".
My original comment was more directed at the actual crisis portions of both the movie and Apollo 13 (around the famous "Houston we have a problem" line) were drastically different. I certainly grant that a movie might not be as exciting if crisis resolution was largely reading checklists out of books and remaining exceedingly composed given the circumstance, but I'd find it a lot easier to buy into than the cacophony of yelling and cursing that took place at multiple instances during the movie.
Something additional and more tangible I remembered while writing this, I found myself agog at some of the items they had on mars; the commercial grocery store grape juice bottles were some of my favorites.
Edit: I'm normally not one to comment on this, but of all the things I've ever said, I had no idea disliking this movie would attract the silent downvote brigade so aggressively. I find this both interesting and entertaining.
To know what it's really like, as opposed to what movies depict, just read the transcript of the famous Apollo 13 incident. Remember the movie version? Read what they really said here (http://apollo13.spacelog.org/page/02:07:55:19/). For instance:
Okay. And we're looking at our S—SERVICE MODULE RCS HELIUM 1. We have—B is barber poled and D is barber poled, HELIUM 2, D is barber pole, and SECONDARY PROPELLANTS, I have A and C barber pole. BMAG temperatures?
Less dramatic than in the movies. A lot more engineering and detail-oriented.
In Apollo 13 the movie, there is a scene where the NASA representative is walking politicos on a tour:
JIM LOVELL - I'm slated to be the commander of Apollo 14 sometime late next year.
CONGRESSMAN - If there is an Apollo 14... Now, Jim, people in my state have been asking why we're continuing to fund this program - now that we've beaten the Russians to the Moon. [1]
The chasm between what NASA wanted, pilots down, was to keep on its trajectory, but the politicians saw monies to tender.
[1] https://sfy.ru/?script=apollo13
What a weird bunch of decades. This neurotic competition against each's own paranoia feels a bit absurd and sour. And I just finished watching a few NASA movies again (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, ...) .. similar reasons.
It's very easy to see patterns which aren't present. We as humans are quite good at doing this. How might I confirm that this pattern is present?
To start, let's look at movies that deal with "Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers, Inventors, Explorers and People who do Amazing Things", from http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ . These include Apollo 13, Fat Man and Little Boy, Einstein and Eddington, Shackleton, Creation, Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin, Jobs, and Reach for the Sky.
Of the 31 films (though two are not biographies or based on real-life), 2 are about women (Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin), and the rest are about men. Einstein is certainly high on the list of mythologized people, so mythologization is not limited to women. (Feynman would be another. Infinity (1996) is a biopic about Feynman, but it's not on the list.)
Women appears underrepresented in that list compared to their modern presence in STEM fields. To be fair, the movies include Pasteur from the 1800s, and Harrison from the 1700s. Women were often strongly restricted from doing research in STEM fields during that time.
I saw one non-white person on that list, Vivien Thomas, from the 2004 film "Something the Lord Made".
"Reach for the Sky" from 1956 is "The true story of airman Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs in a 1931 flying accident", and Temple Grandin is autistic. However, since 1956 is rather a long time ago, it does point out the need for a baseline - if the percentage of movies about disabled people has been stable, then it's not a growing pattern. As another example of someone who 'received the mythology treatment', consider "Helen Keller in Her Story" from 1954.
(Howard Hughes, in 'The Aviator' (2004), may also fall into the mentally challenged category, due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder which was present already by the 1930s. I haven't seen the film to see if it touches on his mental illness.)
Films about gay people would have been restricted under the Motion Picture Production Code, so not really seen in films from the 1930s to 1968. That would make it hard to establish a long term pattern. Still, as about 2% of the US adult population (1.2 to 5.6 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States ) identifies as LGBT, then about 2% of the films about famous people in STEM should concern someone LGBT.
It should not be hard to come up with an evaluation technique, like "all biopics about people in STEM done as movies/made-for-TV movies in the US from 1970 to the present", and redo this same evaluation to see if there is a pattern.
The tricky part is to normalize it. If 2% of the population is homosexual, then what percentage should we expect to see portrayed as they are in movies? If 51% of the US population are women, and 27.9 percent of the PhDs in the physical sciences are women, what patterns should we expect to see in films?
Otherwise you might just be seeing the secular trend that more women are getting involved in STEM, that policies like the ADA make it easier for people with disabilities to get advanced educations, etc.
How have you done the analysis to determine if the patterns you see are due to the expected shift in population distribution of people in STEM, vs. any special sort of mythologization?
Excellent site. Something's wrong with your Apollo 13 listing [1], the Amazon Prime link points to a documentary about Apollo 13, not the movie.
[1] https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/apollo-13
"There's nothing routine about flying to the Moon." - Apollo 13 Film
This isn't a moon mission of course, but I don't know if I would ever call something reaching orbit mundane. Especially for a company with only 5 successful dockings to their name.
OTOH, if you're TOTALLY into a four-hour MacGyver movie, you may be interested in this book by Raymond Malewitz where he breaks down a recurring theme of "object misuse" in contemporary literature that he calls "Rugged Consumerism." The book looks at things like Apollo 13, MacGuyver, Fight Club, the Whole Earth Catalog, Sam Shepard, etc.
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22814
Here's an article just about No Country for Old Men:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v050/50.4.malewitz.html
> Imagine what the film Apollo 13
Yeah, they would run out of battery juice way before reentry burn :-)
"You wouldn't download a $physicalObject, would you?" has been an annoying meme for quite some time.
Every year, that meme is becoming closer to reality. You can already download small plastic objects. And I look forward to the day when I can torrent a pirated Tesla to my garage :p
Imagine what the film Apollo 13 would have looked like with a fast 3D printer on board. Instead of trying to shoehorn a square CO2 scrubber into a round hole using all sorts of stuff that was never designed for the job, Houston could have sent them a perfectly designed adapter.
The article points to the short term goal being just to learn how 3D printers behave in space. They mention printing things in space and then sending them to the ground for analysis.
Long term, I think the goal would be to do metal printing in addition to plastic printing (most likely with separate machines).
3D printed plastic parts can do a lot - they aren't as weak as people make them out to be.
The obvious advantages are that complex things can be made on site with zero labor required (besides occasional assembly of things that can't be printed assembled).
It can be hard to speculate on what a general purpose tool will be most used for in the future, but I do think that there is something on-site printing offers that delivery from earth does not. As we send spacecraft beyond low earth orbit, sending from earth simply stops being an option.
Hell, from what I recall of the movie a 3D printer onboard Apollo 13 could have salvaged the mission entirely. 3D printing isn't just about making things you forgot, but replacing things or making new things. Maybe people get to mars and realize there is an experiment they want to run that needs some little assembly they could print.
I'm not able to predict what a 3D printer would be used for, but you can be damn sure I'd want the ability to fabricate parts locally if I was on a multi-year Mars mission. And that does seem to be our long term goal.
This is a time when you re-read Gene Kranz's famous speech to the flight control division after the Apollo 1 fire.
Gene Kranz is the gentleman sitting in the flight director's chair in the Apollo 13 movie, wearing the white vest. He helped create the Mission Control organization at NASA.
"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work.
Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.
When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."
Video re-enactment by Gene Kranz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zjAteaK9lM
It's hard to disagree, fiction is made-up stuff having only so much in common with actual reality. And sure there's good and not-so-good fiction and the movies show it. When he brought up the possibility of a great story not based on idiotic behavior I too immediately thought of Apollo 13, truly spellbinding in its entirety.
Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority, though if only limited to movies, there wouldn't be much to write about. The bigger thing it points to is the way really important discourse has increasingly become infested with the very same attribute.
After all, in recent years TV news has become more or less devoid of authentic news reports. Calling TV news "sensationalistic" is hard new, not only failing to qualify as factual, but even if intended as entertainment, it's lousy fiction every bit as idiotic as a B-movie. People do watch it though, and that what counts.
To the extent idiot plots are the standard in national and local politics, it's far more damaging than the movies, but perhaps the point is the same roots underlie a whole gamut of idiotic forms. But where are the rest of us who are not idiots? What trouble do we go to express our non-idiotic ideas where it does some good? (I suspect posting here is more or less like preaching to the choir.)
Ultimately fiction is so much less compelling than real life. I love a good story well told, but it pales next to the meaning of actual experience, provided one is tuned in to experience as it is. The article hints at something not quite said. We humans so often accept fiction and discard reality, we don't or even refuse to see what we are seeing. Maybe that's the definition of real-time "idiot plots" playing out all around us.
Easy enough with movies to know fiction when we hear it, the trick is to hear our own inner voice, and make that distinction within.
I highly recommend the Discovery Channel mini-series "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions". This mini-series covers the entire breadth of the NASA missions, from Mercury to the International Space Station. This series is available on Netflix: www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70218722
If "When We Left Earth" sparks your interest. I suggest watching "Apollo 13" and "The Right Stuff" next.
Lastly, I'm currently reading the excellent book "Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module". This book gives an insiders view of what it took to build the Lunar Module (LM). I particularly appreciate that the book covers a lot of the hard work, arguments, and drama that are often forgotten when we romanticize the past.
If they are actually able to rescue this space probe and get it doing science again, a week after a front page NY Times article reporting that it's hopeless http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/science/space/space-probe-might-lack-nitrogen-to-push-it-home.html , this will make a better movie than Apollo 13.
Could this be as simple as accidentally using the Tom Hanks recorded audio from the film Apollo 13 instead of Jim Lovell's actual words from the mission? That he misquoted it in the text has my attention, because Lovell actually said "we've had a problem" on the NASA loop. "We have a problem" was the interpretation and misquote in the film.
Not that I'm disagreeing with the article, just caught my eye.
I have a deeper appreciation for the amount of work that goes into an operation like that after having bought [Kerbal Space Program](https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/) and its mobile companion [Simple Rockets](http://jundroo.com/project/simplerockets/).
Engaging with those simulations also makes watching movies like "Apollo 13" into a whole new experience, too.
Congratulations to everyone involved, and I can't wait to see what they do next.
The fact that you can point to some credential that asserts that you learned something doesn't speak to your ability to actually use it effectively[1], much less achieve business objectives by using it.
Also, the people who you believe have been promoted by virtue of being the "oldest employee" may actually possess skills that you are unaware of -- perhaps even skills you are unaware are useful and important. Speaking as someone who has been around the block but prefers to work as an individual contributor rather than a manager, I have observed any number of important skills that are prevalent among effective managers that most technical folks start out unaware of. Risk assessment skills -- which are often based in having enough experience with both successful and failed projects -- are a good example. Another is the willingness to take responsibility for what often seem like nonsensical decisions that have to be made due to business or practical constraints. The latter is something that virtually no one likes to do, but often needs to be done in real life.[2] I could go on indefinitely, but I hope a couple of examples will suffice for now.
[1] http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh0blbt3bs1qz8yeno1_400.jpg
[2] I was too slow to pick up on this lesson in real life until I saw the way Tom Hanks told Gary Sinise he was being dropped from the mission in the movie Apollo 13. In the time since, this has been a useful observation about how managers can be more effective when they don't try to do whatever will make you like them the most (which is typically a negative trait in a manager).
If you like this, there's Spacelog, which is a neat way to view transcripts for a number of missions:
http://apollo11.spacelog.org/
http://apollo13.spacelog.org/
Browsing through the Apollo 13 "spacelog", it's interesting how a lot of the lines in the Apollo 13 movie are very similar to the ones in real life.
While the Woz might not approve of adding dramatic scenes to historically based films (and I don't blame him at all), it has a pretty big precedent in the movie industry. Apollo 13 comes to mind, when one of the crew yells at the other about the accident with stirring the oxygen (there was no such argument; all astronauts were very professional).
That being said, while I think most people on this site would prefer a more accurate portrayal, the non-hacker audience probably thinks it's good cinema.
Really? I thought the first Iron Man movie was a great depiction of iterating on a product design.
I guess it isn't quite as much an engineer's movie as Apollo 13 or October Sky, but I definitely view it as one.
Jim Lovell's account of Apollo 13, Lost Moon describes reprogramming the computers in-flight...in machine code. And there wasn't even a Workbench interface, just three digit messages for output. The programs were sent instruction by instruction to the crew, who wrote them down and verified each one - all subject to the delay caused by distance.
The book has so much more great stuff for nerding out than the movie, that it's worth a read.
"Failure is not an option!" is a phrase that automatically annoys me when I hear it, because almost nobody who uses it actually understands what it means.
It's usually used in the sense of "we have decided to rule out the possibility of failure." But that's not really what the phrase means. What it means is that you have exhausted every possibility other than succeeding. It means that, to borrow a poker term, you're "all in" -- you have gotten yourself into a position from which there are only two ways out: success, and utter ruin.
This is what the screenwriters of the movie Apollo 13 were getting at when they coined the phrase (it's usually credited to NASA flight director Gene Kranz, but that's incorrect: see http://www.spaceacts.com/notanoption.htm). When the Apollo 13 mission went awry, the NASA teams on the ground didn't have the option to accept failure, because failure meant the death of the three astronauts and probably the end of the moon landing program. There was literally nowhere else for the people involved to go. They were "all in" -- the astronauts especially, but even to some degree the men on the ground. (If you're a mission control specialist in 1970, and you get drummed out of NASA with the loss of three astronauts on your record, whaddaya gonna do, go work for the other space program down the street? Start your own? Your career is done.)
What most of the people who use this phrase miss is that rarely are they actually in that deep. If your social video sharing startup fails, you've lost a couple years of your life, and maybe some money. But you're not ruined. You're still alive; you still have your skills and talents; you can still go get a job somewhere. If you're smart, people will probably even lend you money to try again someday. You're down, but not out.
A true "failure is not an option" startup scenario would be one where, if the startup didn't take flight, you would lose every dollar and piece of property you own, all your academic and professional credentials would be revoked, and you'd be barred from ever working in technology again.
That's what "all in" looks like. It's fucking terrifying.
It's also much, much higher stakes than all but a few of us will every play for. Which is a good thing! But unless you're one of those few, if you go around talking about "failure is not an option," it makes you sound kind of stupid.
And if Earth is this basketball, and the Odyssey CM is this baseball, they have to hit a re-entry interface no thicker than this piece of computer paper.
(At least that's what Apollo 13 [the movie] said.)
I posted this on the site, posting it here too:
I would say a better metric would be "How much did you enjoy this film?" vs "How good is this movie?"
I've been grappling with this problem since subscribing to Netflix, wondering how I should rate a movie I personally did not enjoy that I also felt was incredibly well made. For example, "A Clockwork Orange" is an incredible movie by all means and I would give it 97 stars out of a hundred.... but I hated every single second of it. It's gruesome, sadistic, dark, miserable, and disgusting. But it was undeniably well made.
Rewatchability sucks in the aspect because many movies can't be rewatched, while still being both splendidly produced and enjoyable. Let me make this clearer with examples: "The Sixth Sense," "Rear Window," "The Accused," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "12 Angry Men," "Apollo 13..." The list goes on and on. There are great movies that just don't rank so highly because they're SUSPENSEFUL and that suspense doesn't translate will into rewatches. Rewatching suspenseful movies will make them seem boring and long-drawn.
Rewatching feel-good movies ("Seven Pounds," "How To Train Your Dragon," "Blind Side," etc.) however, is just as good the second time if not better.
tl;dr the rewatchability index will be heavily skewed towards feel-good favorites and epics, and away from dark, gritty, mysterious, and suspenseful. Not a good index.
I never found Apollo 13 to be a compelling movie. It's so true to life that you could just watch the documentaries and get the exact same experience.
I chose these movies not necessarily because I felt they were superb (although I loved them all) but because they were critically acclaimed and all received lots of oscar nominations. Almost by definition, they are the best films of the year.
If you compare it to nominated movies ten years ago, Braveheart, Apollo 13, I think they are comparably great.
Additionally, box office returns seem to be at all time highs. Black Swan and True Grit are two films that typically would be destined for "niche" audiences, but have returned hundreds of millions for reasonably small budgets.
Also, I think that Inception will be almost as influential as The Matrix, except in a smaller genre of films (eg: Matrix built upon action movies, whereas Inception was more of a psych thriller) - in my opinion.
I really liked it.
It's certainly not 100% accurate, and I don't think it's trying to be. It glosses over some major aspects of Facebook's history (like Zuckerberg's friendship with Graham, the heavy focus on Wirehog, the importance of Dustin Moskowitz, and so on), it compresses a lot of events into a shorter timespan than they occurred in real life (Facemash, renaming from Thefacebook to Facebook, the excising of Saverin from the company, the acquisition of VC, the move to real offices), and it fabricates a bit wholesale (it plays up one of Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriends, making it seem as if she was his only one; portrays Zuckerberg as having heavy asperger syndrome; implies that all of Facebook's funds came from Saverin; pretends Facebook was started because Zuckerberg wanted into Harvard's Final Clubs, etc.). That's true.
But it's not about vilifying Facebook; the dramatic license was taken to be dramatic, not to make some point about Zuckerberg or Facebook. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a total genius; his role as CEO is respected; he is not portrayed as having ripped off the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins, and while he does ultimately screw over Saverin, the movie goes to pains to make it clear that it had to happen for the success of the company. At the risk of sounding a bit truthy, I think that the movie did a superb job capturing the feel of a startup in Facebook's situation, even if some of the facts are slightly off.
While I think this review is slightly hyperbolic, I don't think it's crazy, either. The movie was insanely well-done from start to finish, and I don't honestly think that the creative license is much worse than, say, Apollo 13. I think if you were expecting to see geeks get vilified, you'll be very pleasantly surprised.
Didn't I see a Doctor Who episode just like this? The Doctor must defeat the head of the space program, who turns out to be the Marquis de Sade doing a Doctor Strangelove-flavored Werner Von Braun impression?
One of the most memorable scenes is the one where the Doctor and his companion sit down to dinner with the villain and debate literature. Suspicions are aroused when the villain laments the unhappy ending of Apollo 13. "Why couldn't it have been more like The Perfect Storm?"
In the end the guy is stalked and killed by the spectral ghost of Laika the dog.
"when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them."
-- Apollo 13 FDO Flight Controller Jerry Bostick regarding the source of the movie quote "Failure is not an option".
Touching the Void - I love this legendary true story of two mountaineers' first ascent of a peak in the Andes for the survival aspect of it. Grit, determination, and patience are three qualities I truly admire. It is a must watch even if mountaineering/climbing doesn't interest you.
Apollo 13 - for how ingenuity, teamwork, and a calm head can help you overcome the most challenging of problems. I wish I was born in that era and had the opportunity of working among that group of people. The pursuit of a cause greater than oneself.
Shawshank Redemption - much has been said about this movie.
Forrest Gump - odd choice I know, but it's a remarkable story of serendipity. We often fail to realize just how much of life is purely a matter of chance.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, I thought I was being deprived because my immigrant parents had a thing about not getting a TV in the house. This actually forced me to grow up as an avid reader, which I realized only years later proved a great long-term benefit.
Back then (and into the 60s and 70s), TV was wholesome enough but highly limited: mainly three networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) that gave us news, variety shows, and old style sitcoms such as the Beverly Hillbillies and a few local UHF stations that mainly featured old movie reruns. Apart from the "all-night" UHF station, most stations signed off by midnight and then went silent for the night, using an "Indian" image or some equivalent to alert viewers to the fact that they were off the air. I would say, throughout that entire period, that TV was for me what I would call a pleasant time-killer. I wouldn't watch that much of it but, after working like a fiend all week doing my studies and working odd jobs to pay my tuition, it was pretty relaxing to settle back into a sofa and just passively watch something - an old movie, a sports event, a stupid comedy, or whatever - without any demands being made upon me. That was the appeal: a mostly mindless diversion with occasional drama when some important news event captured the nation's fancy (e.g., the Apollo 13 drama).
Today, with cable and with digital channels, TV has far more variety with its countless channels and its ubiquitous round-the-clock presence but it remains for me a mostly mindless sinkhole for my time whenever I get caught up watching it, which is not too often. Network news has been largely displaced by wall-to-wall coverage by cable networks of whatever story it is they want to pound to death, with an emphasis on "reality" stories (e.g., what is today's tidbit of information that we can add to the story of the missing teenager who vanished in the Caribbean?). Reality-TV formats are everywhere, creating voyeuristic opportunities to watch people interacting with one another in this or that setting and featuring really nothing more than the personalities of the participants as points of interest. All this and more is for me little more than the "vast wasteland" that Newton Minnow called TV back in the 1960s, with the quality of programming having settled in at a level of almost mind-numbing banality.
That said, TV is nothing more than a medium and will always feature this or that item that is indeed interesting or stimulating. It just is not a good habit to find oneself continually caught up in it. Used selectively, it can be just fine for occasional entertainment or for particular items of news or commentary. Not normally very profitable but nothing to be too critical about either.
We went to the moon to beat the Soviets.
That's half the truth. The rest of the truth is: We went to the Moon out of sheer terror.
In fact, the Moon trip itself was a side effect. The space race took the form of a race to the moon because "the race to the Moon" was a much more joyful marketing slogan than "the race to design and build the next generation of ICBMs that will enable cities and towns like yours to be destroyed with even greater precision."
Remember that the Moon race was conceived in the early 1960s. ICBMs were a brand new technology. Everybody knew that we had to build more of them, keep improving them, stay ahead in them -- they'd seen the H-bomb tests. People who had lived through the 1940s -- Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Nanking, Bataan, Dresden, Nagasaki -- naturally found it difficult to have faith in human decency and restraint; they all thought World War III was inevitable, and probably imminent. This was several years before the Cuban missile crisis and a decade before the ABM treaty.
But it was hard to stay cheerful when talking about the world's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals, so the space race was portrayed as a game to get astronauts and/or cosmonauts to the moon, and everyone had a lot of fun playing along. Enormous quantities of money were poured into rocket research, the military on both sides of the Cold War got their high-tech missiles and spy satellites and electronics, and in the end we got to watch some truly amazing pictures of people walking on the moon and feel proud. Smiles all around. A big win for everyone.
But the Moon itself was a secondary goal. A Macguffin. The Soviets didn't even bother to go, and their effort seems to me to have been rather halfhearted. By 1969 they had long since achieved the important goal anyway: Better rockets. The USA followed through but quickly got bored with the actual "moon" part. The Apollo 13 movie talked all about that: Mere months after the first moon missions, the remaining ones attracted scant public interest.
So I find the space race fascinating, and I understand the nostalgia for it, and I'm glad some good came out of the cold war, but I don't want to live through anything like it if I don't have to.
Apollo 13 has some great hacker scenes. It has, in fact, my favorite hacker moment from any movie.
"We gotta find a way to make this [holds up square peg] fit into the hole for this [holds up round peg] using nothing but that [points to random assortment of crap that they know is on board].": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNDuGuerpf8
Dont forget:
- Forbin project ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
- E-Money with Cringely ~ http://www.pbs.org/opb/electricmoney
- Nerds 2.0.1: with Cringely ~ http://www.pbs.org/opb/
- NerdTV: Cringely interviews ... ~ http://www.pbs.org/nerdtv/
- Doug Englebart Mother of all Demos ~ http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/doug_englebart_.html
- More Doug Englebart ~ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
SEEN
- Startup.com: 9/10: How things get all messed up b/w friends in startups, 'lets get to work'.
- Revolution OS: 8/10: Nerdy interviews with the GNU, Linux & Free software movement. Worth it to see Bruce Perens hair & Eric Raymonds 'we are your worst nightmare' speech to an MS exec in a lift.
- Pirates of Silicon Valley ~ 8/10: Very funny take on Gates, Woz & Jobs http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122
- The Triumph of the Nerds ~ 7.5/10: Cringley doing his stuff with web1.0 startups. Great to see Joe Kraus with Excite ~ http://www.pbs.org/nerds
- Apollo 13; 7/10: Brings back memories of my childhood & Apollo missions. Not long after I got this on DVD I got to see Jack Schmitt talk (last man on the moon). Best bit was on how they handled the complexity.
- The Fog of War ~ 7/10: Robert McNamara, how smart people can get fooled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
- Walking with Dinosaurs: 7/10: Ok
- E-Dreams: 6.5/10: Dark, gritty and how did they get all that money?
- Project Aardvark ~ 6/10: Uneventful, nerdy guys building co-pilot ~ http://www.copilot.com/
Documentaries for geeks or about geeks? The ones about geeks will probably be really boring. They'll leave out both the technical stuff and the potentially actionable war stories. "Revolution OS", for instance, was a well-crafted film, but pretty dull if you read Slashdot.
Branch out a bit. Off the top of my head:
"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out": Richard Feynman talks. (Danny Hillis pops up for a bit.)
"The Fog of War": a smart, reflective person discusses how he presided over a huge disaster.
"Lost in La Mancha": Terry Gilliam takes a bunch of risks to get a movie started and doesn't make it.
"Around Cape Horn": Captain Irving Johnson describes sailing around the Horn on one of the last windjammers.
"Walking with Dinosaurs": Woo! Dinosaurs!
"Apollo 13" is not an actual documentary, of course, but it's fun and reasonably faithful for a big-budget movie.