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Favorite Film Scientists?
theodp asks: "From Rotwang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Wallace the Engineer in last year's Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Slate notes that scientists have long been a staple of the movies. So who are some of the more memorable scientist characters from your movie-going?"
Favorite Mad Scientist?
Winner: Dr. Evil
Favorite Scientist?
Winner: Einstein
RTF Novel.
Page 53 of the hardback (2 pages into Ch. 3, "White Noise", it describes Ellie sitting beside the billion-channel signal analyser and also using headphones to listen to a couple of channels at a time. And knowing it was futile to imagine she could find a signal in a few that the computer monitoring the billion could not, "but it gave her a modest illusion of utility".
Subsequent paragraphs make it clear she's also fooling around with different listening patterns - two narrow-band frequencies against each other in different earphones, two planes of polarization, etc - to hone her own ideas of what a pattern recognition approach might be. And also because one often hears pleasant "patterns" in the noise. (Sagan gets poetic here about stars that sing and glissandos of sound.)
It was a very nice evocation of the drives and thinking patterns of the curious scientist at work - poking around in the data personally, kicking it from every angle.