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the other one


- linda 4-24-2014 4:21 am [link] [1 ref] [2 comments]

Particle Fever

It's about the Large Hadron Collider. It's a gigantic discovery machine, designed to help peel back the layers that veil the fundamental laws of nature. It's also destructive testing. They destroy protons back smacking them into each other at very high speed.

The movie isn't about the science. It's about the excitement of human discovery.

In fact, there are details that go by too quickly if you are trying to learn the science. At one point, a speaker in a group meeeting presented a diagram of quarks, baryons and leptons in a format I've never seen before. As I tried to quickly mentally capture it for later recall, it flashed off the screen. But the details of the science in that meeting are not the point of the movie. It's about the people in that meeting, and about the thousands of people striving together to expand human knowledge.

Central to the movie is understanding the personal roles and dynamics of a few individuals on the project. The machine is humanized by exposure to the men and women who made it, controlled it, designed experiments, came up with the theoretical physics which is tested via the machine.

The group struggle and the multitude of individual struggles that interact, conflict and combine to effect that group struggle make for a compelling story of discovery.


- mark 4-13-2014 5:54 am [link] [1 ref] [add a comment]

A couple weeks back I got into a conversation with a dude who worked the snack counter at a movie theater. He was mentioning that some Christians had given him a hard time for merely being associated with the un-Biblical retelling of Noah's story. He added that he thought is was an awesome movie -- massive fountains springing from the earth, stone giants, ... 

Wait. Hold on one moment there. Did I hear "stone giants"? I may have been on the fence about seeing the flick, but stone mother fucking giants? Dude!

Back on the topic of the Christian approbation, I threw in my two cents that while it may be inconsistent with the Bible, the Bible, in turn, is inconsistent with the Epic of Gilgamesh. So they're both do overs. And the Bible doesn't even get the shape of the boat right. It's round, like a modern life raft. If you don't have a source of power, why would you have a long, skinny boat that could be turned sideways and rolled over by the waves? Those Babylonians were no dummies.

Anyway, expressed in the language of comic book literature, both the Bible story of Noah's flood and the current movie are retcons. And I think this is what has gotten the literalist Christian's panties twisted. It's not just the fact that Hollywood took liberties with their story. Whether or not the biblical literalists are aware of the concept of retcons, I think they are aware of the danger of their book being just so much fodder for story telling, like The Sleeping Beauty or The Amazing Spiderman.

Some would argue that there is nothing new with using this technique in mythology. Many aspects of the Abrahamic religions can be described using analogies to super hero stories.


- mark 4-10-2014 6:38 am [link] [1 ref] [1 comment]

If you're looking for a movie with a lot of gatling guns, Cap'n America delivers.


- mark 4-07-2014 7:45 pm [link] [3 refs] [2 comments]

LOVED this last nite


- Skinny 4-05-2014 2:44 pm [link] [1 ref] [1 comment]