Strong agree: Upstream Color is poetry Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges. It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed. Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis) Also dialog-less movies:…
Let’s just cut ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ down to 40 minutes, because - why couldn’t Kubrick just compress all that slow motion classical music stuff down to the actual point of the movie? ‘Humanity makes first contact. They send out a spaceship to the source. The AI on the ship becomes sentient and murderous. One man escapes, and arrives at the source. He exits his 3 dimensional existence and enters a psychedelic-esque state whereupon he transcends humanity as we know it.’ Okay, now nobody needs to see ‘2001’ again - ever! Symphonies - what the fuck? Why couldn’t Mozart have just written a…
Yes, an f/0.7 aperture is a ridiculously wide aperture (thus, it lets in a lot of light[1]), two stops brighter than f/1.4 (a "stop" means a doubling of the amount of light; f/1.2 lenses are the fastest lenses commonly available, and they'll cost around $2k), or four stops faster than f/2.8 (which is what the fastest commonly available zoom lenses are, and they're expensive too). Leica make a very rare f/0.95 lens that would set you back $11k, and it's appropriately called Noctilux. As for conspiracy theories, what makes it even better is that Stanley Kubrick also made 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was indeed when I first noticed this effect. It was dramatic and cool and all that, but pretty obviously an effect. Coupling it with Raiders of the Lost Ark and the effect almost pigeon-holes a film to be of that era. I'm unsurprised Douglas Trumbull was behind the Close Encounters effect since his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey captured his earliest experiments filming tanks of liquids with fluids added. They were fairly effective in Kubrick's film when they appeared to resemble fantastic nebulae, globular clusters… (And never mind the mind-bending…
"In the summer of 1968, a friend and I went to see the blockbuster movie of the year—2001: A Space Odyssey." So did I, and in the same year—1968. And I went with a friend from uni to see the movie. The next day the physics prac teacher spent much of the lesson whingeing that our behavior was unacceptable and that he did not expect to have to lecture to an empty class. The film had a profound effect on many of us and I still reckon it's the greatest science fiction film ever made. Even as a kid I liked classical music having been brought up in a household where it was the norm—both my…
It all seems to be predicated on the argument that many users will not understand that they're not dealing with a sentient entity, and that this can have negative results. In the OP this is most clearly summarized in this paragraph: > Human beings have historically tended to anthropomorphize natural phenomena, animals and deities. But anthropomorphizing software is not harmless. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a pioneer chatbot designed to imitate a therapist, but ended up regretting it after seeing many users take it seriously, even after Weizenbaum explained to them how it worked.…
> "Why not stay in Albuquerque then?" Couldn't find the tech talent there. > "which has a top-ranked Computer Science program" You do realize this was 40 years ago and as I had already pointed out, things change? Those that have watched the Arthur C. Clark & Stanley Kubrick movie, "2001 A Space Odyssey" know that HAL was created in Urbana, Illinois, home of the Univ of Illinois which is one of the top engineering and computer science schools. If you examine the chart near the end of this article, you can see that U. Illinois receives $170 million per year in CS NSF funds. #2 Cornell is…
You know the sound of very old records, most people today can't listen to them. Now, imagine there were technology to make them sound clear, and that therefore you hear errors by musicians. It can break the illusion you had about the music of that particular record, but it actually reflects more exactly the event that was recorded. It's the same with the films. With our new algorithms, what was once flickering "action" suddenly becomes "some people doing something that is obviously in studio, and wow I can see how sloppy their make-up is too." Which is something that we can more easily see…
The wikipedia page mentions this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_%28film%2... Deleted scenes Kubrick filmed several scenes that were deleted from the final film. These include a schoolroom on the moon base; Floyd buying a bush baby in a department store for his daughter; additional space walks; and astronaut Bowman retrieving a spare part from an octagonal corridor. The most notable cut was a 10-minute black-and-white opening sequence featuring interviews with scientists discussing extraterrestrial life, which Kubrick removed after an early screening for MGM…
"To the Swiss government, the people of the country (or, the impact to the people of the country) are/is considered before an external interest." How would you consider the American music industry an "external interest" in the USA? While the RIAA and the labels aren't citizens, they're generally comprised of citizens. That is, when a music label gets special treatment, that means those citizens who work for that label get special treatment. I'm not advocating the craziness that is current copyright law in the USA by any means, and while the above statement might sound like justification…