Great movie - but figuring out what's going on in that movie is at least this complicated.

Bryant

Philip Marlowe: Let me do the talking, angel. I don't know yet what I'm going to tell them. It'll be pretty close to the truth

General Sternwood: How do you like your brandy, sir?

Philip Marlowe: In a glass


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038355/quotes

...just kidding! I haven't actually read that much about it except that it brings back the glory days of pioneering scientists holding the answers to our problems. So I'm definitely taking my daughters to see it this weekend.

We need fewer action movies and more movies that make us think and reflect.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]All things in moderation, including moderation.[/center][/font][hr]

but I watch movies for escape . For thinking and reflection I try to figure out what the cat is thinking about as he sits on the kitchen table watching me - God, I got to get a life.

Or several, perhaps.







Doesn't matter. That movie was freakin' awesome. Literally, awesome--as in awe inspiring how they adapted it and put it all together.

He doesn't do simple, although he does do "layered" and thinks you should just sit back and enjoy your initial view and save the analysis for subsequent viewings.

I know I will see this movie, but I also know it is going to irritate me immensely. I've no trouble with willing suspension of disbelief, I thoroughly enjoyed Gravity in spite of it failing basic physics, in much the way I enjoy Star Trek or Dr. Who. They are telling a story and the "science and technology" is a stage set.

From what I've seen in the trailers, it's the premise of Interstellar that will offend me:

Bat-shit crazy tool monkeys flee the home world they've destroyed to spread like a plague across the rest of the galaxy.

No thank you, even if they patch it over with some feel-good Star Trek time paradox (Save the Whales!), X-Men epic time battle (they all die... No they don't!) or indication of human transcendence. (Man becomes god!)

I hate man-becomes-god movies. It's like, hmmmm.... Where have I heard that story before?

Fortunately, in real life, I think the physics of this universe prevents that sort of unsatisfactory outcome. There's only one speed in this universe, and that's the speed of light. There's only one time in this universe, and that's now. That means creatures such as ourselves either get our shit together and learn to coexist with our birth planet and one another, or we become extinct, a very well deserved extinction. Most species who become extinct are far less deserving of that fate.

The universe is very big, and humans are very fragile. We will never be a space-faring species. Creatures of our sort never do, that's why the sky is silent. Maybe, if we do survive, our intellectual descendants (machine or biological or both) will be at home in space, exploring the light years. But they won't be us, and they will not be visible to the tool monkeys, or have any special interest in our fate.

Just because the GOP doesn't mind a few billion people perishing doesn't mean the rest of us should acquiesce in our demise.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

We both have undergraduate science degrees, and we met as science teachers. One of us first dates was to visit the Galileo at JPL. (We both knew people who worked there.) My wife has graduate degrees, and science is the foundation of her work. Mine too. My grandfather was an engineer on the Apollo Project, he and I were pretty close when I was a kid. If you want a scientific label for me, I'm an eccentric amateur evolutionary/environmental biologist (keyword: eccentric) and radical humanist.

It amuses me, in a grim way, that the uber-wealthy classes believe they are the "most fit" and able to survive any impending environmental apocalypse and collapse of empire, when history shows us it always turns out the other way. It's the unknown, invisible people who carry on, but only because there are so many of them.

I'd rather humanity didn't have to go through more cycles like that, but the best I can achieve in my own mental space is a sort of hopeful pessimism, and yes, I do think science is VERY important.

We may yet break the cycle, however. The Information Age is only the beginning of us reaching for a better future. The uber-wealthy won't always be calling the shots.

Or so I hope.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

"Man, I should have gone to see 'Big Hero 6' instead."

And got tired of the star trek time "continuom" episodes. Won't be seeing this one

The one offered in Wikipedia is simplified - most of the timelines for the movie Primer are much more complex. Here is one of the better ones:

[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

Now I have to see the movie for that chart to make any sense.