Hacker Cinema
Hidden Figures
2016 · Film · 127 min
Directed by Theodore Melfi
The untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson – brilliant African-American women working at NASA and serving as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history – the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.
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59 comments on Hacker News
I don't think they do hate it, any more than they hate "A Beautiful Mind" which is a pale shadow of Nash's real life, or "The Man Who Knew Infinity" about Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Breneditch Cumbersome's interpretation of Turing in "the Imitation Game" or any other mathematician in film. "Hidden Figures" was a wreck. So what!
They think "yea, thats not very real" and then in a Gell-Mann Amnesia moment pass over the other aspects of film which are utter bullshit, but filmicly necessary like camera pans through walls, 32 year old people playing high school kids, you-name-it.
"that artifact should be in a museum" my arse. Archeologists would be lamenting the lack of contextual work mapping the scene before you disarm the rotating knives, the implicit cultural burdens mis-understood, the grim reality of funding to get a crystal-scull hunting project up in the first place.
A good movie drama about some of the human computers for NASA, and some of the prejudices that these particular ones faced:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
Strange to see this come up now - when Accounting was cleaning out some office space down the hall a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a Friden electromechanical calculator, sadly without power cord. I didn’t think I needed more history stacked in my house, and my boss “gave” it to our new CFO for budget time as a joke. It is similar to the one used in the movie Hidden Figures. Surprised not to see Friden mentioned at some of the other web sites posted.
Computers were girls.
"Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. And for a time, a large portion of them were women."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/
Also, the movie:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
Everyone going through STEM needs to see the movie Hidden Figures for a variety of reasons, but one bit stands out as poignant: I believe it was Katherine Johnson, who is asked to calculate some rocket trajectory to determine the landing coordinates, thinks on it a bit and finally says, "Aha! Newton's method!" Then she runs down to the library to look up how to apply Newton's method. She had the conceptual tools to find a solution, but didn't have all the equations memorized. Having all the equations in short term memory only matters in a (somewhat pathological) school setting.
In your first example, you appear to assume that for calculations where "each mistake could cost $millions or lives", engineers who calculated by hand typically didn't double-check by redoing the calculation, so a second check with a 95% accuracy tool is better than nothing. This assumption is false. I suggest you watch the 2016 film Hidden Figures to understand the level of safety at NASA when calculations were done by hand. You are suggesting lowering safety standards, not increasing them.
Your third example is unclear. No calculators can perform factoring of large numbers, because that is the expected ability of future quantum computers that can break RSA encryption. It is also unclear why multiplication and division have different difficulties, when dividing by n is equal to multiplying by 1/n.
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.
You've probably seen it, but you'd definitely love the movie "Hidden Figures".
They do seem to get the adding machines more or less correct.
The movie is called "Hidden Figures".
Movies tend to exaggerate for a dramatic effect.
Yes, racism existed, segregation existed. The situation you described didn't happen. Katherine G Johnson simply used the bathroom for whites.
Sadly many of the situations depicted in the movie were entirely fictional.
There were plenty of critical moments and plenty of drama. Ironically, for all of the manufactured scenes about discrimination and rejiggering of timelines by decades in the movie, John Glenn apparently did ask for Johnson to check some calculations ... he just didn't do it during final launch prep.
The wikipedia page on the topic has a great list of "things that didn't happen that way" in the movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Historical_accuracy
I always likened "engineers"[1] to "people who are proficient in calculus"; and "computers"[1] to "people who are proficient at calculations".
There was brief sidestep from late 1980s to early 2010s (~2012) where the term "software engineer" came into vogue and completely ran orthogonal to "proficiency in calculus". I mean, literally 99% of software engineers never learned calculus!
But it's nice to see that ever since ~2015 or so (and perhaps even going forward) proficiency in calculus is rising to the fore. We call those "software engineers" "ML Engineers" nowadays, ehh fine by me. And all those "computers" are not people anymore -- looks like carefully arranged sand (silicon) in metal took over.
I wonder if it's just a matter of time before the carefully-arranged-sand-in-metal form factor will take over the "engineer" role too. One of those Tesla/Figure robots becomes "proficient at calculus" and "proficient at calculations" better than "people".
Reference: [1]: I took the terms "engineer" and "computer" literally out of the movie "Hidden Figures" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Plot
It looks like ever since humankind learned calculus there was an enormous benefit to applying it in the engineering of rockets, aeroplanes, bridges, houses, and eventually "the careful arrangement of sand (silicon)". Literally every one of those jobs required learning calculus at school and applying calculus at work.
Thats a very specific example, and I confess I don't know say ex-calculators to ask. Let me substitute with a more main-stream example. Secretaries.
My mother trained as a typist. She worked in a large open plan space doing, well, typing. From there you got promoted to being a secretary, taking dictation, typing, scheduling, and so on.
Today "secretarys" in that sense are mostly gone. I write my own emails. I manage my own schedule. We now have 2 "impersonal assistants", or "office managers" (or whatever else we should call them). They answer the phone, organise catering when needed, do a million admin-type tasks, process orders, keep the kitchen stocked and a bunch of other things that keep the office moving smoothly.
My point is the at the bottom end, roles morph. There are lots of useful things to do, and when done well you notice. (Ours are very good, we pay them well.)
AI is a tool. Just like any tool it will replace some jobs and create others. Change can be scary, but as one who has lived through many changes I can encourage by saying that change also brings opportunities. We can't predict the future but we can adapt to the present.
[1] Annecsotally the movie Hidden Figures showed them transitioning to programmers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
> Did humans with computer replace humans without computer?
You're obviously not aware that "computer" was a profession, a job before becoming a machine, just watch the "Hidden Figures" movie. Have you seen a human computer later?
as depicted by the cool movie Hidden Figures
".. Based on the unbelievably true life stories of three of these women, known as "human computers", we follow these women as they quickly rose the ranks of NASA..."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/
> A reckoning is coming. You can't intentionally make an entire generation stupid and not feel the consequences eventually.
There are more things to learn today at school. They teach feelings for a start, that didnt happen in my day which perhaps explains why skills in computing are dropping. Not only that, people are no longer concerned with what part of town are they going to live in, settle down etc etc, now they consider what part of the world they want to live in. The constraints of family & school friends, region and country are being battered by globalisation which is mainly being driven by the internet.
Watching the BBC news, here in the UK and you could be forgiven for thinking the population in the rest of the world are just criminally insane terrorists, but thats what the UK press portray the rest of the world as to the British people.
I think they are using Project Fear to keep people here, in a desperate attempt to maintain GDP amongst other things.
So all in all, beside computing, today I know more about finance and biology than I would have ever learnt if I didnt have a job that gave me easy access to the internet, and the GP's hate me for it, when I have to deal with them, rattling off info is like a game of top trumps, until they lose and storm off! But they only know what they have been spoon fed, look at Wimbledon champion Andrew Murray, if his nutritionists and the NHS were any good, he wouldn't be the only player with an artificial hip playing tennis at Wimbledon, and yet for some mad reason, people think thats a good thing and something to be proud of!
I'm sure the women who were portrayed in the Hollywood film Hidden Figures have probably lamented how the skills to land a man on the moon have been lost to mainframes, its a human trait to point out problems and then discuss them, but when will we be discussing these things with AI's and get credible advice back from the code?
Is it happening right now?
You're right it could've been a lot greater however you should apply the same analysis towards the USA as well.
If you're black you're all but barred from participating in the space program. This was only recently acknowledged in a Hollywood feel good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
The space program was bootstrapped by Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
I'm saying they achievements could've been a lot greater if the system didn't try to mutilate and murder it's subjects: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-experimentation-america-tuskegee-study
I'll give a couple historical and current examples:
Star Trek was always woke, starting with its at the time quite "woke" black communications' officer and many plots with aliens as stand-ins for different races or nations. The initial show got cancelled (as is often the case with even successful sci-fi) but it gave birth to a giant franchise that continued to be at least somewhat "woke" by contemporary standards. Definitely not a flop.
The Apple TV series For All Mankind is going into season 4 and is relatively popular. I found it pretty good. It's full of "woke" stuff but is well written and is based on a really good premise. My favorite fan theory is that it's an unofficial prequel to The Expanse. Not sure I'd call The Expanse "woke" but it's also not not-woke and has a number of background elements like the popularity of polyamory and bisexual characters sure to trigger right-wingers.
Sci-fi in general has always been kind of on the woke side of things.
Films, lots of them. There's many films about civil rights and social justice struggles that are quite good and did not flop: Mississippi Burning, Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave, Hidden Figures, etc. Disney has recently made a bunch of Pixar films that are pretty woke and didn't exactly flop.
IMHO the woke flops we're all familiar with are just bad writing. Boring plots, uninteresting characters, and shitty writing is gonna be crap regardless of whether it's "woke."
I liked this film dramatization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
I think the "actual" here means something like "in contrast to the movie Hidden Figures, which gives only a superficial view of what Katherine Johnson actually did". So instead of a few minutes in a movie with some equations scribbled on a blackboard, this is the actual work in context.
It may not have been only women, but
> In 1935, the first group of female human computers were hired. Before electronic computers, all mathematical equations and computations would be done by hand by people, often known as human computers. With the advent of World War II, many male employees at NACA left to fight overseas. More and more women were needed to fill their roles, and soon African American women were hired to help with the shortfall.
> These African American women were sent to a segregated computing section known as the West Area Computing Unit, which was the center of the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. In April 1942, a memo was passed around stating that, “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.” The women computers were becoming increasingly more valuable and doing incredible work along the way.
https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/women-nasa
Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places:
- The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects.
- We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of WWII.
- Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good one.
- There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model.
- "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days.
- There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07PhW5sCEk
- The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
- The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran.
- The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the century. We also watched a "Berkeley in '68" doc on Kanopy to set the stage before this one. Interesting, but a tangent.
- The "8-bit Guy" is also great, he dissects and rebuilds old home computer hardware from the same era, and teaches their history as he does it. Even his tangential videos on why there are no more electronics stores (besides Apple) in malls is great.
- There are good docs on the "dead ends" of the industry as well, such as "General Magic" and "Silicon Cowboys."
- "Revolution OS" a doc about the beginnings of FLOSS and Linux.
Hacker Culture, to me atleast is somewhat broad.
Here are some places where I found good representations:
1. Halt and Catch Fire: 70s/80s tech scene. Full stack hackers building products, companies. Depicts the hackers, code monkeys, visionary types, managers, financers- everyone. Also shows the transition of the business scene from analog to digital.
2. Westworld (Season 1 only) is brilliant. It depicts the ambition, the hubris involved in creating something new and grand.
3. The Travelling Salesman: P vs NP is solved. What are the implications, what are the uses, how will the State react? What is the role of the people imvolved?
4. Primer: Mind bending movie on time machine.
5. and 6. Imitation Game and A Beautiful Mind: I believe most people on HN will like these.
7. Agora is a hidden gem not many know about. It is anout Hypatia.
8. Dangerous Knowledge is a documentary about paradigm changing science. Godel, Turing, Boltzmann are covered.
9. Fractals is also a nice documentary with interviews from Mendelbrot.
10. Codebreaker is a mich more accurate biography of Turing that covers other aspects of his, not limited to his codebreaking and homosexuality.
11. Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz: very nice and left a deep impression in me.
____
I am yet to watch:
1. Hidden Figures
2. Stand and Deliver
3. I'm In
4. TPB: AFK
5. Pirates of Silicon Valley
6. Triumph of the Nerds
____
Harvard Professor Oliver Knill has a list and clips from movies where math appears: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/
____
I came to know a lot of these movies through Kagi search and Reddit search. "Best movies for mathematicians and computer scientists" and similar searches.
> So how did we lose the women in computing? They did not just leave; they were pushed out.
The problem is how we define "computing" in the first place.
The movie "hidden figures" [0] comes to mind. The three main characters are all "women in computing" and work as "computers"... meaning they perform computations manually [1] alongside other female computers (the term used at the time).
Computers before the 80's required a lot of support staff to operate. Programmers and Engineers didn't directly interact with the machine; typically programs were written on paper and then transcribed into punched cards by secretaries (who at some places would be referred to as "programmers" or "computer operators") and then organized to be batch processed. The results would then be retrieved once the computation actually happened as they tried maintaining the machines close to 100% usage.
That's where most of the confusion stems from. These were all accounted as "computer related occupations" back in the 50's through 80's. The personal computers and minicomputers made most of these positions obsolete, since the engineers could simply use the machine interactively.
But years after years people find this "collapse" of "women in computing" and interpret it as woman getting pushed out of engineering or proper programming positions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
[1] With the advent of the first numerical computers, they eventually learn programming, but it is implied that the human computers won't be needed once the machine can be directly programmed by them or the engineers.
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.
> […] or you have designated Oscar-type fare, which as of late means something extremely depressing that says how bad humans are.
In the 2020/2021 season, the nominations included The Father about a man suffering dementia (from his perspective) and Sound of Metal about a drummer going deaf.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/93rd_Academy_Awards
For 2019, we had the best picture nominations include Ford v Ferrari, Little Women, and 1917:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/92nd_Academy_Awards
Previous to that, Bohemian Rhapsody:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91st_Academy_Awards
Going back one more year, Dunkirk and Lady Bird:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90th_Academy_Awards
Lastly for this discussion, Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge, Hidden Figures, and La La Land:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/89th_Academy_Awards
I think these are good counter-examples to your claim that only two types of movies being made.
Honestly that movie is a lot of why I got into math and engineering.
Jim Lovell was undeniably a badass but I watched that movie and thought the heroes were the ones reading telemetry off a computer screen and using their slide rule to figure out what to do. I hope Hidden Figures does that for another generation.
Wasn't it extremely common on the contrary? There was even a movie about this, where all programmers were women (the movie is called Hidden Figures).
Edit: the article spells this out.
She was the junior of the three starring characters in the movie Hidden Figures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
After the movie Hidden Figures, I'm not sure where the "obscura" comes in.
I invite everyone to watch the movie Hidden Figures.
i also enjoyed the movie, but there was a bit too much creative license applied to push an agenda (for my taste). for something based on a real person and real events, bending the truth for dramatic effect does not sit well with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures#Historical_accuracy
My Dad and I watched 'Hidden Figures' a couple of weekends ago. Its such a great movie. To think that this one person was able to do that floored me.
I told my Dad how lucky we are to be born with various abilities that we then nurture and develop. The sky's the limit when we do the things we were "born" to do.
This lady's mind was really meant to doing such calculations. So good!
I'm not sure if she wanted that attention, but she deserved it. I'm sure, being 97 years old and now getting famous isn't that bad. I can't imagine people taking too many photographs and interviews of here.
I highly recommend watching Hidden Figures (2017) which tells an amazing story about how the human computers of the 60's emerged from obscurity and ultimately introduced NASA to software development. Katherine is at the center of the story, the rest is history.
My mom started as a data entry operator, who then became an accountant who had to pickup COBOL and FORTRAN programming on punch-cards for a time as part of her job.
In the early days of computing, women were only allowed to operate computers that were designed and programmed almost exclusively by men. To be a female programmer in the early days was rare, and to be an African-American programmer in the times of segregation would seem to be that much more difficult. The film Hidden Figures (2016) seems like a pertinent fictional-recreation/parable lesson in these barriers that were more prevalent in the past, but it's important to be mindful that biases are a constant of human nature and never disappear.
I saw the "Hidden Figures" film recently, and liked it. It seems like one of those things that are good for a lot of people to see, especially in tech.
The still image that the CNN piece picked wasn't very representative of the film, IMHO. The scene had a place in the context of the rest of the film, and perhaps conveys some of the spirit that helped them through, but picking that single still alone seemed to me (I could be mistaken) more likely a decision of an advertiser than the director.
One thing the film didn't and couldn't do, though I wish it could've: in some scenes, when one of the main characters is treated badly, I wish I could've been there in the real world analogue of it, and seen how all the others present reacted. The people who made the film convey a perspective on this, using the tools of film, and it's believable and helpful. But no one actually knows all of what everyone in the room was thinking and hinted at. What people were actually thinking, and how they acted, as wrongs were happening, also seems something important to learn from.
It interferes in multiple ways.
First, it's more spacious so people will almost always choose it before any of the non accessible stalls, and people will use it when they need to go number 2 because it's more comfortable. When I want to use the only accessible stall on my floor, at work, I need to either wait between 15 to 30 minutes for people to finish doing their business or come back later (later it'll still be taken by someone else, it's practically always taken.)
Second, because so many people use it, it ends up being much more degraded than non-accessible stalls. It's always dirty, and often plugged. The seat is broken and detached from the toilet itself (extremely important criterion for someone who can only sit and can't hover).
It's not isolated to my workplace either, it's so common that peeing is pretty much my main worry when going anywhere (aside from not being able to enter at all).
I'm reminded of the movie Hidden Figures every time I discuss this topic, it's set in the 60s and there's a scene where a black woman has to walk an outrageous distance to go pee because there's no colored bathrooms at her work. She starts crying after being scolded for disappearing so long multiple times a day, and after she explains the situation her white manager breaks down the "whites-only" sign on their work bathroom with a baseball bat in a climactic feel-good moment. Around 2014, 54 years later, all the handicapped stalls at my work were condemned because of the degradation. I had to roll 500 meters every time I wanted to pee for four months, nobody gave a shit. I've never had a nice manager with a baseball bat stand up for me in such a way, but I've met plenty of people throughout my life who're content to argue that "it's fair that disabled people should wait like everybody else if all the other stalls are taken because it's really not a big deal."
> Are women not as smart as men when it comes to tech?
I wouldn't say smart because thats a whole other can of worms but generally less suited, yes absolutely no doubt about it. It's weird but outside of the SV-buzzfeed-vice-huffpost filter bubble it's common knowledge that most women would rather do anything else besides stare at a screen all day and do something that neither involves people or art in any way.
It's not exactly rocket science but somehow it has become verboten to point out what everyone across cultures around the world (ex US progressives) and even science can clearly see.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8992639/Men-and-women-have-distinct-personalities.html
I will say that in the past what I mentioned has been abused to keep out and belittle women who clearly WERE suited to jobs like this. The excellent movie Hidden Figures shows how wrong and sad that is.
But two wrongs don't make a right. Focusing on gender parity is also going to make for lot of miserable women pressured into careers that don't really suit them.
There need to be more black engineers at NASA. There have been great successes, but there is room for improvement.
"Two NASA employees received awards at Saturday’s (Feb. 11, 2017) annual Black Engineer of the Year Award gala in Washington."
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-employees-honored-at-the-31st-black-engineer-of-the-year-career-stem-conference
The movie "Hidden Figures" showed some of the problems NASA culture had with integration, this Air and Space article shows more of that struggle.
"How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution Integration came to the nation’s space agency in the mid-1960s"
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/how-nasa-joined-civil-rights-revolution-180949497/
There are plenty of Hollywood films that promote those values. The Stephen Hawking biopic. Even the Harry Potter series. Marvel superhero films like Dr. Strange. Other biopics like Hidden Figures, etc.
As someone who actually learned to use a slide rule before pocket calculators became available, that's probably not the best example. Slide rules were good for getting "[EDITED: precise not accurate] enough" results in various situations where they could do so more quickly than solving by hand. You still needed to understand orders of magnitude, precision, and generally having a feel for numbers to use one.
Note also that a lot of calculations on the Apollo program were actually done in part by hand by human "computers." There was even a whole movie about it a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
Modern color treatment in film totally drives me crazy, independent of what it does to CGI.
It seems like every film coming out of Hollywood these days is processed exactly the same way:
* Crank down the low end so half the frame is solid inky black.
* Pick one or two key colors, and jack up their saturation.
* Desaturate everything else.
In other words, make the entire movie look like an over-dramatic poster for it. Throw any sense of naturalism or unique look out the door. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Here's the top live action movies of 2016:
Rogue One
Cyan and olive: http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story15.jpg
Captain America: Civil War
Yellow and red: http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civil-war-trailer-2-screenshots/cwttss03.jpg
Why they felt the need to make Cap's lip rosy red is beyond me. Even better is this shot:
http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Captain-America-Civil-War-cast-photo-Renner-Johansson-Evans-Sebastian-Stan.jpg
This is a daylight shot. Look at how the characters are all squinting. Look at the big white fluffly clouds that should be diffusing the light and softening shadows. And yet, magically, all of the shadows are jet black and almost all of the color is gone.
The Jungle Book
Green and red (to draw attention to Mowgli):
https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The_Jungle_Book_HD_Screencaps-23.png
Deadpool
Another daylight shot with nonsensical shading:
http://turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Deadpool-Movie-Screenshot-Brianna-Hildebrand-Negasonic-Teenage-Warhead-Texting.jpg
The light is clearly diffuse, if you look at the shadows on the ground, and yet there is this deep black everywhere. Deadpool took the look further by only picking one color (red, Deadpool's outfit color) for the entire film.
Lest you think this is just an issue with superhero movies, let's ignore those and look at the other top non-superhero movies of 2016:
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
More of the same:
http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp-content/2016/09/fantastic-beasts-trailer-screenshot75.png
It also suffers strongly from the "It's a period movie so we're going to sepia tone everything so hard it looks like you're watching the movie through an aquarium full of pee" effect.
Hidden Figures
https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/hiddenfigures.jpg
More of the period movie sepia along with an improbably jacked up complementary cyan.
Star Trek Beyond
If the past is warm, the future must be cool:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek-Beyond2.jpg
Blacks, grays and neon cyan, just like Rogue One. Look how unnatural his skin tone is! They wanted to jack up yellow to complement their primary blue so much that the poor dude has jaundice:
http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/star-trek-beyond-trailer-cover.jpg
La La Land
I'll give this one some credit for varying it up a bit. Also, dramatic spotlit stage lighting is a logical part of the movie's look. But it's still prey to the same cliched look in places:
http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot-from-2017-01-18-22-36-49-1.png
Ghostbusters
Ectoplasm green and spooky violet were the key colors for the whole film. Secondary colors tend to come across as magical or eerie to viewers since they're different from the safe and familiary primary colors. Of course, jacking up magenta doesn't do flattering things to skin:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbusters2.jpg
Also, what color is Melissa McCarthy's coat? Is it actually black? Who fucking knows.
Central Intelligence
The traditional comedy look is brightly-lit and saturated, so Central Intelligence didn't fare quite as poorly as the above. Whenever they had a chance to dim the lights, though, they revert to the same cliched look as well:
https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/centralintelligence2944.jpg
The Legend of Tarzan
http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg
Jesus, we get it, colorist. They're in the wet jungle. We don't need to be physically assaulted with the colors blue and green to figure that out.
...You get the idea.
Go back and watch a movie from before 2000 and you'll quickly realize how much more pleasant to look at most of them where, and how much more variety there was in look. Compare Alien to The Graduate. But it seems like ever since the rise of digital coloring and superhero movies, Hollywood has decided every single fucking movie needs to look like a comic book page, whether it needs it or not.
One recent movie I really liked that bucked this trend was Her. It was heavily colorized, but in a way that stood out. In shots like these, even though there's a strong color cast and a lot of dark, there's still always some color and detail in the shadows:
https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Her-Movie-2013-Screenshot-Theodore-Apartment.jpg
https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/her-screenshot-14.jpg
Always love seeing this, and recently watched a good film about the human computers who helped getting humans on the moon: Hidden Figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
Maybe. I only go see movies in the theater if the Rotten Tomatoes score is 90+ (otherwise I just wait for redbox). That is the reason why I went to see Hidden Figures. If it had been sub-90 I wouldn't have seen it in the theater and, frankly, by the time it got to Redbox I probably would have passed it right over (which would have been a shame since it was a great movie).
What I'm saying is that movies that would otherwise be ignored might be achieving surprise popularity due to strong reviews on Rotten Tomatoes - Hidden Figures as a case in point. It was the #1 movie in America, not some obscure art film, which is the fate I would expect for such a subject, told in such a way. I think popularity followed from quality.
Of course, any ol' movie labeled Star Wars will do well, by virtue of brand.
A flip side to this... is Rotten Tomatoes boosting movies that would otherwise be ignored, by virtue of excellent ratings?
I'm thinking specifically of Hidden Figures here. Who would ever have thought that we'd see a Star Wars movie (Rogue One) booted out of the #1 spot by a movie about black women doing math?
(This is in no way a criticism of either movie, btw. I loved both of them and consider them high-water marks of recent cinema.)
I just saw the movie Hidden Figures which is based on the incredible achievements of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. I was happily surprised to see this on HN. If you haven’t seen it, please do.
It was an eye opener for me as an non-American to see how normalized racism was in the 1960’s even at places like NASA where one might assume science trumps ignorance.
While reading I was imagining the movie "Hidden Figures" which I saw recently, and it turns out it was her. Was pleased to read she received the medal of freedom. Why did it take until 2015?
'In fact, interpersonal skills like collaboration, communication, empathy and emotional intelligence are essential to the job. The myth that programming is done by loner men who think only rationally and communicate only with their computers harms the tech industry in ways that cut straight to the bottom line.'
Linus Torvalds.
'Computer programming was originally considered a woman’s job. They were programmers of the Eniac during World War II and at NASA, as shown in the film “Hidden Figures.”'
So what? Programming now is not the same as programming then. Who designed the machines? It wasn't these women.
'“For a lot of these young men, a certain computer culture becomes an expression of masculinity,” he said. “These are people who aren’t doing physical labor, aren’t playing professional sports. But they can express their masculinity by intense competition, playing pranks on one another, demonstrating their technical prowess, in ways that don’t translate well to mixed-gender environments.”'
Or perhaps girls just need to be encouraged to enjoy computer games, for example? Like they need to be encouraged to study technical degrees?
' “Anyone who deals with a human being is considered less intelligent,” said Ellen Ullman, a software programmer and author of a new book, “Life in Code.” “You would think it would be the other way around, but the more your work is just talking to the machine, the more valuable it is.”'
If it should be the other way round, try sacking all your best autistic idiot savants and replacing them with a bunch of people persons, and see how long it is before your tech comes crashing down around your ears.
'Technical skills without empathy have resulted in products that have bombed in the market, because a vital step to building a product is the ability to imagine how someone else might think and feel. “The failure rate in software development is enormous, but it almost never means the code doesn’t work,” Mr. Ensmenger said. “It doesn’t solve the problem that actually exists, or it imagines a user completely different from actual users.”'
So does every geek need to be an extrovert social butterfly? No. You just need a small a few communicators in the mix.
'Some people in the industry say computer science students would benefit from more liberal arts courses. “We need future adults to be able to discern what it makes sense for machines to make decisions about, and is the code base fair and equal, and do they have a basis to even judge that,” said Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, a technology forecasting firm. “There’s no cool technology toy that teaches that there are different religions around the world and it’s O.K. to be tolerant.”'
I utterly resented being sent to a social science lecture purely because the degree course had been criticised for being too one-dimensional. Guess what - before long we were being told that men were bad. Thanks social science! Stop trying to indoctrinate me. Social science presents itself as being open and diverse, yet see how far that diversity goes when you hold beliefs that go against their orthodoxy. Hint: James Damore.
'When engineers build products with empathy, it can seem like magic: Technology seems to predict what people want before they know they want it. That was part of Steve Jobs’s genius.'
They are citing Steve Job's?! From what I've read he wasn't really that much of a people person.
'When people hear negative stereotypes about the skills of a group to which they belong, they are less likely to pursue those skills, according to a variety of research. In a study by Shelley Correll, a sociologist at Stanford, when participants were told that men had a higher ability to complete a task, women said they were less competent at the task and less likely to enter a field that required it. When they were told that men and women were equally good at it, those differences disappeared.'
Funny, I was taught by mostly female teachers and there was a strong belief prevalent and often communicated that girls were good, did their homework, behaved themselves etc. What message does that send? How often do you hear this mentioned in the media?
'“That nerd identity is really damaging to women,” Mr. Ensmenger said, “but it’s also damaging to minorities and to a lot of men who don’t want to subsume their identity in that.”'
And who labelled us as nerds? The same class of non-technical people and the same corrupt media that now attacks us once again.
> I believe we should be motivating girls who show interest, but is there harm if no interest is shown?
The question then becomes why interest isn't shown in the first place.
You could argue, as the "manifesto" writer did, that there's some kind of innate biological explanation. To me, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof. It's true that there are some differences between the sexes. Women do a bit better on some mental tests than men and vice versa. But how much of that is biology and how much is upbringing? For instance, from an early age, studies show parents make girls say "please" more than they do for boys, and emphasize sharing. So do women fair better on some emotional tests because of some innate biology or because we've emphasized that kind of thing literally since they could talk? It's really really hard to tease these things apart. And it's so hard because those differences are tiny. If we assumed those differences really are 100% biological (again, a big assumption), it might explain why Computer Science would be 55% men, and 45% women. It wouldn't explain the huge disparity we see today.
So if the reason women don't show interest isn't biological, what is it? A further complicating factor to the whole discussion is we're talking about why women aren't in computer science now. It hasn't always been this way. Historically, the field of computing had lots of women. A lot of women went from "human computers" who did math by hand to programming the early mainframes (the movie Hidden Figures shows a time at NASA when this was happening). While a gender gap has always existed, it used to be a lot smaller. Women made up about 1/3 of people with CS degrees in the late 70s and early 80s. But as the STEM gender gap has been closing everywhere else, it's actually gotten wider in CS, and only CS. Why? The "it's biology and girl brains are different" argument can't account for that. Biology didn't change.
What did change was society. Movies like Weird Science and War Games (my favorite) came out. The "cool hacker" entered Pop culture, and the stereotype they settled on was a boy. Girls were a lot less likely to have computers in the home as well. This is an interesting article (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding) that talks about how early home computers were marketed as a toy to buy for boys.
It's like we as a society decided that computers fell into the "boy stuff" category with GI Joe and baseball, not the "girl stuff" category like Barbie and softball.
I think it all adds up to a pretty convincing argument that biology has nothing (or very, very little) to do with it.
That's an excellent point! I can think of another example: In the movie "Hidden Figures" the black, female engineers at NASA are much better than their white, male counterparts simply because it was harder for them to get in. Perhaps the opposite is true today of engineering students at colleges with affirmative action?
The truth behind Hidden Figures was in some ways more heartening, but less amenable to a film centered around social-justice issues, than thr movie showed. For instance, Katherine Johnson never had to run all the way across the complex to use the colored bathroom. She used the white ladies' bathroom and no one batted an eyelash.
It was not all peaches 'n' gravy for these women and their contributions are unfortunately overlooked today. But Hidden Figures was made to make a point, and its narrative serves that end.
Great research, one tiny nit-picky thing about the writing -- I was a little disappointed at their use of "Hidden Figures" to make the point that "movies centered around women resonate with audiences."
"Hidden Figures" was a great movie. But it's a movie that centers around characters _being female_. I don't think we necessarily need more movies around "women," we need screenwriters to not automatically default to making their characters male when gender doesn't drive the plot/interaction with other characters.
She was recently portrayed in the film 'Hidden Figures', right? I haven't seen it, but it looks quite interesting.
In a few years they can make a "Hidden Figures" movie about the previously unrecognized men that worked on that Mars mission :-)
Ugh - come on, you seriously suggest only a feminist would have listened to a fellow human being and have been able to come up with a solution? She (Valeria) framed it that way because she is a feminist. That is just an anecdote, not science. There have been thousands, perhaps even millions of bugs fixed in Unix over time. What makes this one so special that only a feminist could have fixed it?
Likewise, you can not prove things with movie references. I haven't seen "Hidden Figures", but it was obviously made to make a certain point, so they would insert stories "proving" their point.
The thought that qualification has a direct correlation to perceived binary problems, like building a nuclear reactor, is exactly the reason why this problem exists.
I reference it in my talk (not on the last slide), but I invite you to read the story of Valeria Aurora (it's been referenced on HN before): http://bit.ly/1WZiNYQ
Her unique experience perspective to a mathematical problem is quintessential. The same is true for the women featured in the Hidden Figures movie.
Concluding that 'hard science' and 'hard math' realms don't benefit from diversity and only knowledge is why tackling this problem is so hard.
Which really isn't a bad thing. If we can kill off the big budget movie that is all terrible writing and only effects (Ben-Hur, $100 million budget, $26 million gross) and replace it with smaller budget movies with great scripts and acting (Hidden Figures, $25 million budget, $104 million gross), I'm completely fine with that.
Add in movie theaters like Metrograph in Manhattan, where I can buy an assigned seat for, say, a Kurosawa double feature, then I think we're moving in a good direction.
Hidden Figures is a must see film with an important social message, a great cast, and fine production values.
Hidden Figures is my favorite in several Oscar categories.
http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2016/09/06/hidden-figures-book-movie-nasa