Hacker Cinema
The Blob
1958 · Film · 82 min
Directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.
A drive-in favorite, this sci-fi classic follows teenagers Steve and his best girl, Jane, as they try to protect their hometown from a gelatinous alien life form that engulfs everything it touches. The first to discover the substance and live to tell about it, Steve and Jane witness the blob destroying an elderly man, then it growing to a terrifying size. But no one else has seen the goo, and policeman Dave refuses to believe the kids without proof.
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11 comments on Hacker News
The Blob: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/?ref_=fn_t_2
Well, hmmm, the word "blob" way predates the 1958 SF horror film of that name:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/blob
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob
The Blob is a movie from 1958 and the blobs in databases were named after the movie. Later, some people felt that blob should be an acronym.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231108173312/https://www.ibphoenix.com/resources/documents/history/doc_299
Edit: Dayton, not Columbus.
And as it's slightly on topic, a brief humorous story. At least one of the two annual Timonium shows was sponsored by the local Ham Radio (amateur radio) club. This was common because (I suppose) the radio clubs were typically bigger and more organized than the computer clubs. When I was in my 20's it was a rite of passage for some of my friends to get their Ham Radio license.
Fast forward to around 2007 and my sister and I are driving to Phoenixville in eastern Pennsylvania for Blobfest. Getting off topic, but it's an annual celebration of the classic 1958 sci-fi/horror film The Blob.
On the way back I notice a sign on the side of the road that reads "Ham Fest Today". I go a little crazy, telling my sister, "Turn there! Turn there!! I have to see this!!!" We turn and it's a bust. The show was the previous weekend and somebody forgot to take down the sign.
We get back on the road. About a minute later she turns to me, completely innocently and wide-eyed, saying, "I had NO IDEA how much you liked ham!"
There's a 3 CD "greatest hits" box set that covers some interesting ground.
There's a playlist on Spotify that recreates most of it though it appears to be missing his theme for the film "The Blob"
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2hHcMpLPZapS6EUBfNkwWu?si=qFZe1hsoQYu5muc2PedJaQ
His catchy theme from "The Blob", by "The Five Blobs" is here:
https://open.spotify.com/track/3UVxWDYfUSwtEfzN5QfE7Z?si=98-m_bS0Qmai_AezRkixsw
"Generally, our actions are subject to a speed-accuracy trade-off: the faster you do something, the less accurate you tend to be"
And interesting edge-case where that isn't true are professional athletes.
Maybe in the plant world the equivalent would be kudzu [0]. It has the speed thing down without issue, and as for accuracy... well, you grow like it does, you're hitting every target. It's about as close to a sci-fi gray goo scenario as we get, or the monster movie "The Blob", and one of the the prescribed methods of dealing with it is actually "kill it with fire!"
[0] https://www.appalachiabare.com/when-stephen-king-turned-into-a-plant-the-old-villain-kudzu/
You know where this leads?
The blob. A 1959s sci fi horror movie in which a radioactive fungus takes over the world.
If not today then very soon.
absolutely; any arthropod that was featured in a horror film (which admittedly covers a lot of ground;'them, it, she, and, the blob' (yes yes most of those aren't arthropods))
It is a context issue, but not quite as you say I think.
Blob only means binary large object in a database context. In every other context it just means, well, blob, a chunk of stuff.
Wikipedia tells me that even in the database context, it was originally used in this context, named after the Steve McQueen film and later backronymed to mean basic, then binary, large object.
Sigh, I wish I could make a Facebook with just the keep in touch with friends feature, and nothing else. Facebook itself it turning into a 70's horror movie, The Blob.
The Blob (1958) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/