Hacker Cinema
Flash of Genius
2008 · Film · 119 min
Directed by Marc Abraham
In this David vs. Goliath drama based on a true story, college professor Robert Kearns goes up against the giants of the auto industry when they fail to give him credit for inventing intermittent windshield wipers. Kearns doggedly pursues recognition for his invention, as well as the much-deserved financial rewards for the sake of his wife and six kids.
4 positive1 negative13 neutralfrom 18 commenters
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19 comments on Hacker News
> ... uncopyrightable works you create ..
But there's the rub, right? If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable - so what is it that is this act of creation?
As posed elsewhere in this thread mentioned, how come taking out my phone and pressing the camera button with no authorial intent whatsoever is considered to be creative, whereas setting up a camera in a particular location and fully determining its settings, but letting an animal depress the button is considered to not be creative?
Part of the reason that this is on my mind is that I recently watched "Flash of Genius" [0] and found the legal arguments there about what merits an invention versus being obvious entirely silly. Essentially the movie (and my experience) shows that it all boils down to who has more time and money to spend on the legal system. I'm not saying that I have a clear solution myself, but I would really love to have something that is more than just "I know it when I see it".
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/
> windshield wiper movie
Flash of Genius
There's a scene in the movie 'Flash of Genius'. The movie tells the story of a guy who invents the mechanism for intermittent windshield wipers and has the design stolen from him by Detroit auto makers.
In a court scene the main character is on the stand, and he reads the first few words from 'A Tale of Two Cities' and asks the lawyer for the other side if Dickens had invented any of those individual words.
That always stuck with me; it's the configuration of over-the-counter parts or ideas that makes something novel. Sometimes articles explain ideas with a twist, a different order or a different interpretation, and furthermore, when you yourself reconfigure a set of ideas under the shower or in a comment section, you should realise that you're doing worthwhile creative work.
I see the two ironies here: I might be explaining things that you already knew, and this comment will probably be skimmed over (as the article puts it) as another pull of the slot machine. :-)
Great suggestions here, many that I've either never heard of or never considered - I look forward to checking them out and please keep them coming, I'm hopeful this can turn into a masterthread to keep coming back and discovering motivational media.
Should maybe have done this earlier but adding a few of the ones I've already watched.
Technical Motivation:
- Silicon Valley (TV show, 2014-2019) - The Social Network (2010) - The Imitation Game (2014) - Halt & Catch Fire (TV show, 2014-2017) - Iron Man (2008) - Primer (2004) - The Martian (2015) - Hidden Figures (2016) - Flight of the Phoenix (1965 original or 2004 remake)
"Sales" Motivation:
- The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - Door to Door (2002) - Underrated straight-to-TV film about a man with cerebral palsy who wants to become a door-to-door salesman - Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Pure sales, persistence and Pacino - Salesman (1969 documentary) (As above, but instead of Pacino it's real door-to-door bible salesmen and what they go through)
Honorable Mentions:
- Mr Robot (2015-2019): probably the most thrilling and technically accurate depiction of technology and hacking ever put to a screen, but as someone else said it's also very dystopian and depressing, and not too motivational except in the brief bursts that they show Elliot setting up a hack. Either way no VisualBasic GUIs here.
- Flash of Genius (2008): about the inventor of the modern windshield wiper who had it stolen from Ford and sued them. The premise is motivational, but I personally found it more of a cautionary tale on what you can lose for your principles when you go up against the giants.
Flash of Genius[0], "The story focuses on Robert Kearns and his legal battle against the Ford Motor Company after they developed an intermittent windshield wiper based on ideas the inventor had patented."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_Genius_(film)
The same is true of any patent, even the hardware patent in Flash of Genius [1]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
There's a good movie called, "Flash of Genius" about the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper and his efforts to defend himself against the theft of his idea.
I am not taking sides, because today's Ford Co is not saddled with Henry Ford's controversies, and both MIT and Ford are large organizations. I don't know who is right, a jury might decide.
There is an interesting movie, "Flash of Genius," about Robert Kearns, an inventor and his interactions with Ford over the "delayed windshield wiper."
I won't reveal any details over the movie plot but there is a short scene where Kearns is lecturing his engineering students about engineering ethics, which reminds me of a documentary by PBS: "NOVA: Holocaust on Trial" (2000)
I cannot find this last movie anywhere, but <youtube> has it available. Should be mandatory viewing for engineers, but it is difficult to watch or listen to the details.
From the movie "Flash of Genius" about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper:
"I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives. Another man helped kill millions."
"Now, I don't know what any of you are going to end up doing in your lives," Dr. Kearns says, "but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you have a decision to make. And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber."
To me this is incredibly valid for Silicon Valley engineers these days.
This reminded me of the movie: Flash of Genius http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/
Also, I must say I am very surprised of some of the comments made here. It is obvious that the professor stole from his/her student; and some people here are trying to blame the student for that. A little empathy please.
As in the case of Robert Kearns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns) whose story was the inspiration for the film Flash of Genius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_Genius_(film))
It took this man the majority of his adult life to win out in opposition to the Ford Motor Company's "acquisition" of his design for the intermittent windshield wiper.
> just charge a capacitor to a certain voltage, then use it to power the motor; adjust the charge rate to adjust the wiper rate
Actually, the circuit is a variable oscillator controlled by the adjustment of a potentiometer that controls the charging of the capacitor; that RC constant controls the oscillator (similar to a multivibrator), which is configured to dump the charge to activate a transistor that activate the relay which connects the wiper motor to the battery (there's also a switch contact involved that opens when the motor has completed one revolution). A simple circuit details this:
http://www.eleccircuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/index.gif
Kearns' patent essentially shows the same kind of system:
https://www.google.com/patents/US3351836
I find it interesting that he did design it this way, as production transistors at the time were still fairly "new" on the market, and would have been an expensive component. There are probably ways to design it back then that wouldn't need a transistor - perhaps based on a bi-metallic switch plus resistance for adjusting the time for a heater to heat up (basically, re-using an automobile blinker in some fashion?) - though maybe this was the direction Ford was trying to take, and Kearns was able to use the "new-fangled part" to his advantage?
Oh - in case it hasn't been posted yet - the New Yorker article the movie was based on:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/01/11/the-flash-of-genius
Coincidentally, I just watched a good movie called "Flash of Genius" on Netflix yesterday. It's a drama based on the true story of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Highly recommend it if you liked this article.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/
There is an interesting movie about the guy who invented the intermittent wiper mechanics called Flash of Genius.
I was planning to watch that tonight on Netflix.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/
From the movie "Flash of Genius" about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper:
"I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives. Another man helped kill millions."
"Now, I don't know what any of you are going to end up doing in your lives," Dr. Kearns says, "but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you have a decision to make. And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber."
>The truth of the matter is that ideas are cheap; the hard part is capitalization.
First the law expressly forbids a patent on ideas.
As to the second half of your sentence, I am not sure if you meant execution is the hard part of having an invention or literally having capital to bring an invention market is the hard part. If you meant the later, I agree. Moreover, I think that is one of the strongest reasons for patents in most industries.
The Movie Flash of Genius provides a good example to highlight my point why patents are good and level the playing field for the little guy. Professor and part-time inventor invents the intermittent wipers for cars and brings his technology to Detroit only to have the existing car manufacturers simply steal his idea.
Kearns never intended to manufacturer the wiper much less manufacture cars to install his wiper, rather just license his awesome invention...that fits the definition of troll, but was he a patent troll? What if he did want to manufacture it, but simply didn't have the capital to begin mass production on the Detroit scale...would that make him any more or less a troll because of his subjective intent? Finally, if he did have the capital to actually take his wiper to market, in a world without patents why would he invest in bringing the invention to market when the big car manufacturers or existing wiper manufacturers are simply going to eat his lunch?
The whole concept of Apple, the most valuable company in the World, calling anyone a patent troll is crazy and basically the same corporate strategy the big car manufacturers used against Kearns, claiming his invention was obvious and just combinations of known prior art. Yet Apple and the big corps escape being consigned to being patent trolls themselves despite the fact that they hold more patents that are either complete bs or purposely withheld from the stream of commerce (like oil companies buying up alternative energy patents to keep them from coming to market). Like when Apple defensively extracted nearly $2 Billion from Samsung for violation of their rectangle with curved edges patent (which was subsequently over turned). Apple is sitting on over $200B in cash, they could have licensed or bought this patent, just as Ford and the others could have done with Kearn's wiper. But lets get serious, these are the same companies that determine if faulty parts should be replaced by comparing the cost of a recall compared to the projected cost of anticipated wrongful death claims. These big companies make the same calculated risk in stealing other people's intellectual property versus paying for it.
Perhaps the great irony of Apple's unwillingness to pay for someone else's invention, it forced Apple to innovate and ultimately produce a competing technology that didn't violate the patent. Moreover, this patent actually fostered innovation for a competing product, and while Apple and others may claim Apple's innovation isn't as good as the patented invention, it shows Apple's true colors where they aren't really claiming the patent is stifling innovation so much as stifling their ability to simply violate someone's better invention without paying for it.
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
Reminds me of debates in the movie en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_Genius_(film)
About what is to invent or not.
if anyone hasn't seen it, the movie flash of genius is a great story about the patent battles of the guy who invented intermittent windscreen wiper.