Permeable sidewalks #FTW! It’s drenching rain in #WestSeattle this morning and look at the difference between these two surfaces. Better for walking and better for the water table!
Excellent review by @davekarpf
"The result is a bland, trite, uninteresting book, one that is destined to be remembered as the worst of Isaacson’s long career."
"Even though Isaacson was IN THE ROOM, they still read like a bland ChatGPT-summary of Casey Newton’s reporting."
@dgar
I miss Sir Terry So Hard
At work at the library yesterday and saw a guy looking at kids books like he wasn't sure what he was looking for so asked if I could help
He sd he was a teacher, just looking for fun books for kids. I sent him away with The Carpet People & Lemony Snicket #FTW
Revisiting Mira Bellwether's "Fucking Trans Women" because my mind is on trans sexuality, and being reminded of just how playful and brilliant her prose is:
"I'm talking about keeping an open mind...considering the distinct possibility you are looking at uncharted territory. Here be dragons and sea monsters, my fellow genital cartographers, and we have a lot to learn from poking them."
While I stopped being a young adult around the time I purchased glasses in order to be able to see small things up close, I am the perfect audience member for @pluralistic's brilliant "Little Brother".
Half "Nineteen Eight-Four", half introduction to privacy and cryptography, half hacker manifesto, half teen romance, half historical account, one quarter nostalgia hit and five quarters thrilling adventure well read by Kirby Heyborne.
Finished @pluralistic's "For the Win". For an illustrated lesson in economics from Professor Corey Karl Friedrich Adam John Docrow, this book has more chases and vicious fights than a Jason Bourne movie.
Broken ribs and videogame analysis notwithstanding, this book evoked long-distant memories of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children".
George Newbern conveyed the emotional journey and his subtle accents helped audialise the cast of characters.
I'm glad that the dystopian world depicted by @pluralistic's "For the Win", in which vulnerable folk are coerced into committing cybercrime while suffering inhumane conditions in economically disadvantaged parts of our world, is fictional.
This is an Italian-made sci-fi by Antonio Margheriti, who was a very prolific filmmaker. He was able to produce a lot of low-budget films very quickly, including this one which was his first film. I think most of the voice actors (who dubbed the English version) were actually pretty good in this film given the material. And there was a ton of special effects in this one, too.
This film seems to have a lot more science fact errors in it then the typical 50s science fiction film. I’ve put a few in this unauthorized trailer –- convert hydrogen into oxygen to make air; going to Globular Cluster M12 in a chemical rocket, rocket engines at “full RPM”; and of course lots of sounds in space. At one point they are at Mars and they get a call from HQ saying, “Hey, while your out there, stop by Venus, too.” (paraphrased)
I think the title of this film, “Space-Men” comes from a line in the movie about a woman who is on the spaceship (I’ve included it in the trailer). The English-dubbed version of the film that was released in the US had the title, “Assignment: Outer Space”.
For a low budget film, they really put a lot of effort into the props and special effects and sets. Actually, some of the sets are pretty well designed and the special effects were not bad for a low-budget 50s sci-fi. (It was actually shot in 1960, but it’s basically a 50s sci-fi.)
If you've never seen an Italian sci-fi this one’s a classic.
Accessible video description:
Old faded color film; A guy in a control tower talking about a space mission to the Globular Cluster M12, then a rocket blasts off with the movie’s opening title, Assignment: Outer Space and shows the surface of a planet and it shows the rocket again and it shows a guy in zero-g trying to maneuver and it shows some people in space near a space ship and then it shows the guy in a spacesuit floating through the void of space and a hose being hooked up to the back of a rocket that is floating in space then a guy playing around with a bunch of oscilloscopes and other guys floating around through space and a fiery meteor, not a meteorite, goes buzzing by; then some guy in a cockpit says he doesn't know what's going on; then another guy wants to commit suicide by jumping off of the spaceship and he jumps out and it shows a fake dummy falling down to the surface of Mars as the guy screams when he’s falling in space; and some other guys talk about going down to get the guy and they go down and pick him up and he's still alive for some reason; and then back to the guy who is in zero-g pretending to be floating around he's actually walking on the ground but he's moving very slowly and acting like he's floating but it actually looks pretty real considering; then the guy and some other people are standing around talking about some destructive thing; then there's a rocket that's trying to land at “full RPMs” (closed captioning says “four RPMs”) and the rocket lands but it tips over a little bit, 9 degrees and it sounds like a tree falling; then a man and a woman are talking about going 90,000 mph; then a guy's talking about the next solar system revolution; then a woman in a cockpit wearing a helmet says that they're very close now; then a man is talking to a woman who's in some sort of laboratory with plants that are turning hydrogen into oxygen; then a guy in a spaceship is talking about the Earth turning into boiling mud; then several astronauts in a cockpit and a guy’s talking about 16 gammas when he meant to say 16 G's; then there's an atomic spaceship with chemical exhaust coming out the back of it; then a bad actor talking about crashing into a Mars satellite; then a guy in a cockpit with a woman, the guys says nobody knows what they're talking about; then a man walks into a room and it shows him looking at a person's legs under a table but you can’t see the person and the person walks out and turns out that it's a woman astronaut, which apparently is shocking in 1950s; then a man is coming out of a suspended hibernation tank in a spaceship, cut to an o-scope and cut back to the guy standing up very slowly out of his hibernation tank; then it shows a rocket separating from its first stage and then the second stage separating from it and the surface of some planet; then a guy in a spacesuit is floating through space very slowly with fake stars in the background and all of the stars are blinking dim and bright synchronously; fade to black.
I’m going to pretend that media studies professors have influence over people whose principle requirement for choosing a social media platform is not having to choose a server.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads? The app is vapid, boring and destined to fail” | The Guardian
I'm currently rewatching Fringe, which is a great show. I believe it's also the first SciFi show my sister is actually willing to watch.
Now, the science of it is obviously bonkers, but it still bothers me when they use terms completely wrong. Like when they cite the Pauli Exclusion Principle as to why two objects from different universes cannot exist in the same place. The principle is about the quantum state of fermions, like an electron, not whole macroscopic objects.
I figured that that Fringe episode was probably about the "multiverse", multiple temporal dimensions created by branching alternative possibilities. [E.g., Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)]
After I tooted out that comment I realized that the point of your OP was probably more about stupid, inaccurate science facts in movies generally, than it was about any specific fact.
I'm about to drop another scifi #FTW about a film that is loaded with those silly factual inaccuracies.
I appreciate when a film actually makes an effort to get the science facts right.
One of the great things about drivers is, if a pedestrian or cyclist offends them in any way, they’ll drive more dangerously & threaten other pedestrians and cyclists. But if a car impedes them in any way, they’ll drive more dangerously & threaten pedestrians and cyclists.
Marathon Halloween French
Octobre commence, saison propice pour regarder des films qui font peur !...