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NASA Names Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time
mvar writes "Working through the year-end best/worst movie lists can be a feat of Olympic proportions, but there's one list which is so damn cool you'll definitely want to give it a whirl. NASA and the Science and Entertainment Exchange have compiled a list of the 'least plausible science fiction movies ever made,' and they ranked the disastrous (in more ways than one) 2012 as the most 'absurd' sci-fi flick of all time."
I can't argue with it. It was an insanely awful movie, both for the absolutely retarded "ooh, look, Africa just rose a mile", but just as importantly because it was just a plan bad film.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If I recall correctly, 2012 was the disaster movie that caused hundreds (maybe thousands) of overly emotional retards to call NASA directly and ask whether the world was actually going to end. I think one caller even asked NASA if they should kill their child now, in order to save them the pain of having to deal with the 2012 apocalypse. I know if a particular movie turned my work phone into a spam pot for dipshits I would declare that movie the ultimate fuck up of all time as well.
I think next we'll see NASA using it's orbital lasers to melt John Cusack's for his role in that film, at least, I can dream.
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Not since Congress won't approve anything good and keeps forcing them to work on bullshit they already cancelled until the money runs out, since apparently that makes good economic sense or something. Besides, NASA probably has one of the highest concentrations of nerds anywhere in the world. They probably know a thing or two about SciFi (as opposed to SyFy).
Well, now I know why we never returned to the moon
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They don't even list "Capricorn One".
Even when I saw the name here, I was like: "wow, is that another 2001, like 2010? I should see that" Then I looked it up on IMDB. :(
I'll have to post without RTFA (what a shame). Gattaca is cool, but come on... instant sequencing of genomes?
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
I've always thought there were two forms of "Sci-Fi". We have Sci-Fi, and then we have Sci-Fantasy. It would seem we have far and way more of Sci-Fantasy and rarely any good Sci-Fi.
Life is not for the lazy.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it is money well spent. NASA faces huge uphill battles from people wondering why they aren't doing as much as they could be, and why we're not building colonies on the moon. SciFi movies are the primary tool to impression people as to what is technologically available to us. Bad movies give the public unfair expectations of what could happen, who controls it, and how it can be fixed. These people then write their congress people and complain that NASA isn't doing enough. Congress then gets onto NASA on how they're spending what they're spending, and how they should change priorities. The public is dumb, congress is dumb, and they're controlled by images given in SciFi movies.
Think if a majority of the people in this country were convinced by "2012" that the world would really end at that year. Their priorities for government spending would be dramatically different.
Yes, SF shouldn't have a moral message. It should just be shoot-'em-up.
Obviously Gattaca was done on a relatively small budget, but it told a pretty compelling story that isn't exactly a mile away from what we'll likely be facing in fifty years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Please, if the title of the submission includes the word 'names best & worst' in it, please provide the list of the best and worst.
I got distracted and started checking out the live webcam from the ISS.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
But not all sci-fi films were mocked by NASA experts, they did agree to praise 1982s Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. The movie which they said “convincingly portrayed a futuristic Los Angeles now only eight years away”
And the most “realistic” sci-fi film according to NASA, goes to 1997s Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke, Jude Law and Uma Thurman. The movie was about “a genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel.”
It looks like the smart guys at NASA agree with many of us 'dotters that the future is going to be a bleak, dystopian police state where the richer get richer and the poor eat noodles off the street. Ah well, at least we get Harrison Ford and glowing umbrellas right?
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Gattaca is a great film, for many reasons. Great acting, great photography, deep motifs, solid soundtrack, realistic depiction of a possible future, etc... It's a thought film about a not-too-distant future, not a futuristic space adventure. You think the future will be as flashy as Blade Runner or Star Wars? Maybe in 1000 years, but that's not what Gattaca was about...
I hate to break it to you, but (A) they didn't judge best or worst, but most absurd as science goes, and (B) they do have people qualified in several branches of science and technology. In fact, I'd expect that if anyone is qualified to judge woowoo doomsday scenarios based on stellar alignments and mysterious radiations from the galaxy, it would be NASA. That's, you know, the kinda thing they _are_ supposed to do: know what's happening up there.
Of course, don't tell that to the homeschooled idiots who'd rather wait for a "rapture" that kept being sold as any day now for 2000 years straight and never happened, than fix the real problems on Earth in the meantime. And who'll even take a non-existent Mayan prophecy as support for their Bible delusions. Or to the gang who just wants to believe any non-scientific idiocy, presumably because it makes them feel less bad about sleeping through Physics class high-school.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Think if a majority of the people in this country were convinced by "2012" that the world would really end at that year. Their priorities for government spending would be dramatically different.
This part of your comment reminded me of this article; NASA actually had to post a rather lengthy FAQ about 2012 because of the sheer volume of grief that movie was causing them.
Personally, I agree that NASA should take the proactive approach on this one. It shouldn't be part of their job to educate the public like this but it has proven necessary.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Wrong. Oh so wrong. Clever but wrong.
P.S. You want Columbia instead of Discovery.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
What is the point of writing about 2012 being "absurd"? It was a special effects action movie intended to entertain people in a cinema for 2 hours. Mission accomplished, for me and millions of other people. The same team that made 2012 also made films about alien invasions and giant lizards, so they aren't exactly aiming for hard realism and non-absurdity.
Someone at NASA isn't making an interesting or valid criticism, they are demonstrating their own lack of humour.
Worst Sci-Fi Movies
1. 2012 (2009)
2. The Core (2003)
3. Armageddon (1998)
4. Volcano (1997)
5. Chain Reaction (1996)
6. The 6th Day (2000)
7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)
Most Realistic Films
1. Gattaca (1997)
2. Contact (1997)
3. Metropolis (1927)
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
5. Woman in the Moon (1929)
6. The Thing from Another World (1951)
7. Jurassic Park (1993)
...I have to ask: doesn't NASA have anything better to do with its time (and our money)? ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Yes, SF shouldn't have a moral message. It should just be shoot-'em-up.
Sarcasm, I assume. The best SF, the best stories, always have a moral dimension. Part of what makes SF so great is that it can explore moral questions that aren't otherwise safe to explore or are beyond our current problems, but someday may become one of them.
Why would a government agency be rating movies, anyway? The only possible explanation is that they know something we don't about 2012, and it actually is going to be the end of the world. The top gubmint politicians and military brass are confident that they have their secret shelters and caves to flee to, but the masses are being psychologically conditioned to quietly walk right into their doom.
The worst thing is, the few brave voices that speak out against this stuff tend to get a bullet in the head without warni
Where is Duncan Jones' Moon on the best of list for science?
The trailer turned my off for seeing it.
Way to much over the TOP.
At lest the B movies are so bad they are good!
The major western governments were still functioning democracies in calendar year 1984, so technically the film would be implausible.
Well, I mean there's having a moral message, and then there's having the antagonist turn in one of the worst performances of his life, all of the secondary bad guys being the most cringe-inducing, mustache-twirling heavies this side of Snidely Whiplash. And then there's the completely lifeless romantic subplot, and the utterly non- ending where the leads settle their conflict with a swimming contest and the brother just commits suicide. Oh, and I'm sure that once they discover the guy on the mission faked his DNA tests, urine tests and skin scrapings in his computer keyboard, for, what, 20 years(!!!), I'm sure there will be no repercussions that would endanger the mission...
It was a bad movie, only the subject matter, and then only an elevator pitch of the subject matter, was remotely interesting. The execution on a basic storytelling level was... no good. And I say this as someone that really liked Niccol's Lord of War, but you do see some of the same problems, where he just MUST make his moral point and so he has characters do things that are completely unbelievable in the context of the story.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Don't they have something more important to be working on?
Not in the last 40 years.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It does not happen.
+1
Thanks for the list. I'm a bit surprised that 2001 didn't make the most realistic list. I mean, sure, the idea of an above-human-level AI and aliens might be a bit on the less realistic side, but no more so than The Day The Earth Stood Still.
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It's not only NASA vs. SciFi Movies. That problem can be seen in a lot of genres. The more and more movies and shows try to claim they are "authentic" and are seen as such, the more people start to wonder why what they see in their shows isn't done in real life.
A friend of mine is in forensics. You might be able to imagine what he thinks of shows like CSI. To quote: "If they killed the prez, we wouldn't get the money needed to do half the tests they do routinely there on a hunch". Not to mention that the tests (those that ARE actually working as they do in RL, by far not everything they do has anything to do with reality, deus ex machinas are a staple of the later CSI episodes) sometimes require machinery so expensive that you couldn't get your hands on it if you blew your annual budget on just renting it. Not to mention that petty things like constitution or human rights seem to be non existent in the world of CSI.
But people see it as genuine and start to demand that forensics can flawlessly identify every culprit. That's not the case. By far not. Having a piece of hair or a cigarette butt doesn't mean you also have a suspect to match it against.
It's very well spent money if such claims are debunked so people do not have irrational expectations based on movies and shows. What people have to learn is that their main focus is entertainment. Not education.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
mod parent troll,
that was clever 30 years ago when i watched challenger explode live and the NASA acronym was first coined...
They do not judge artistical quality or entertainment value. They judge credibility, feasibility and scientific accuracy of the "science" portrait.
And given that they are mostly doing science in space, I'd say they're qualified to judge the quality of how science in space is described.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hush! Not 'til the next start!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not so much the movie as the conspiracy theory to which the movie draws some vague inspiration.
The NASA take is informative, but for something more informative, with Gary Coleman no less, start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN5sNXxe498
Article slashdotted so I can't RTFA but I find it hard to believe that NASA really think Tron, Avatar, and Mars Attacks! are all more feasible scenarios than disastrous environmental effects from global warming.
It seems NASA saying 2012 was most unrealistic was more than slightly motivated by proagandist politics.
If I were at NASA I'd have voted Capricorn One as the worst SciFi movie of all time. After all this film claims the moon landing was faked.
Well, science in space is not really as exciting as people think it is. Weightlessness is certainly nice, but I'm sure it gets old after a while. And then, well, what's left is doing your job and trying to figure out how to shit in a vacuum cleaner. And I'm pretty sure that sucks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The 'alien lifeform debacle' as you chose to propagandize it, was a very important and interesting discovery regarding the fundamental ingredients for life that is still being reviewed by major microbial scientists worldwide. Not recognizing the significance of that announcement just because it wasn't the discovery of alien life (something that NASA never advertised, but, rather, a speculation that the media over-hyped) does little more than betray your ignorance on that particular matter.
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Just this week I have been searching for something Sci-Fi to watch that I haven't seen.
I'm looking for something like Firefly, Battlestar Galatica, Farscape, etc. Spaceships, alien planets, etc. Or something with worlds inside computers like The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Caprica, etc.
I have seen most of the Star Trek TNG episodes and honestly didn't like it all that much. Same goes for the original Star Trek.
I have not seen much of Babylon 5 but I really didn't like what I saw. It's like watching a bad soap opera on the Spanish channel. The production values and acting are total crap. People have told me it gets better in season 2 but I watched some of that and it was barely any better. Not watchable if you ask me.
I have not watched any of the Stargate TV series but as far as I can tell it's not much of a spaceship show is it?
Anyone have any other suggestions?
The ratio of people to cake is too big
and not the updated version Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)?
Since people wowed a lot more a remote-controlled car landing on Mars than an orbiter mapping its underground compositions and finding the areas of dense water-ice, NASA decided that entertainment was where the future was.
/rant
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I always figured that shows like CSI worked best as propaganda. People watch it religiously, conditioning themselves to think that they could never get away with even the smallest crime, no matter how intelligently planned.
Of course, the truth is that more crimes go unsolved than are figured out. That's not even taking into account crimes that never even bring attention to themselves... after all, the perfect crime wouldn't even be suspected as something worthy of investigation to begin with.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
You're forgetting to mention that the main character cheats. On medical and performance tests determining his suitability for a space mission.
Maybe it's dumbassed attitudes from people who reply without understanding the opinion of who they're replying to?
Parent has NOT said you're not allowed to criticize. Parent was saying he agrees with what NASA is doing and he stated why.
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Great acting,
Paltrow is listless and doesn't seem to know what she is supposed to be doing half the time. Ethan Hawke seems to have zero passion in anything, his desire to go into space is almost completely by attribution.
great photography
I think people have been trained at this point to identify low-key, backlit sets with liberal use of high color-temperature lighting as "great photography."
deep motifs
(Translation: College sophmores use this movie to write B+ papers.)
solid soundtrack
Yes I remember when editors were using it as temp score for atmospheric scenes in good movies. It was great because it was this moody vamping mush that had no theme and could work under anything without being recognized.
realistic depiction of a possible future
A future where characters are, to put it bluntly, idiots who don't think. And maybe that was the point of the movie, but it's a shitty way to do drama or tell a story.
You think the future will be as flashy as Blade Runner
I confess I don't find the prospect of a Blade Runner future to be "flashy," but that's a film with pretty awful story problems, too. It's basically 10 or 15 awesome spec TV commercials cut together at the seams.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I keep reading the new on the net, but all i see is some journalist pretending the "NASA" named the worst SF film from science POV, but no link whatsoever to NASA.GOV and certainly a search there turn out nothing.
So is it really NASA ? Or some people from NASA in private/unrelated to work ? Or even it was made up ?
The correct answer is Forbidden Planet.
As for the worst, the list is way too lengthy even to contemplate.
>>>Sci-Fi, and then we have Sci-Fantasy
I've started calling it Science-based Fiction versus Futuristic Fantasy (like Star Wars). A lot of people call stuff set in the future "sci-fi" even if there's not an ounce of science in it. If Harry Potter had been set in the year 2100 instead of now, would people be calling that science fiction too? Most likely. That's silly.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It was so bad everyone at NASA had blotted it out of their memory?
Apparently you're unaware of Newton's 4th Law. "Any natural disaster travels at the speed of the transportation you happen to be in at the time." Of course later Einstein showed that relativistic effects could add or subtract 10 or 20 miles per hour, but only in faster vehicles which weren't available in newton's time.
Oh yeah, the brother and Jude Law were different characters. I can't imagine how I could have combined the two in my mind, they were both so well drawn-out and differentiated, with their own motives, dreams, signifying traits... (heh).
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This part of your comment reminded me of this article; NASA actually had to post a rather lengthy FAQ about 2012 because of the sheer volume of grief that movie was causing them.
That's nothing. Pluto Nash was causing so much trouble that astronomers downgraded it to a dwarf planet.
Here is the CORAL link to this:
http://ramascreen.com.nyud.net/nasa-names-2012-the-most-absurd-sci-fi-film-gattaca-is-the-most-realistic/
And here is the link to the movies with bad science:
http://ramascreen.com.nyud.net/check-out-bad-science-in-movies/
Willie...
Ignore the plot of Gattaca, the morality lecture on genetic engineering and ask yourself this: In the future are human beings going to start tampering with the human genome? If the answer at any point in the future is yes, then the science in Gattaca is likely realistic. I actually agree with their assessment, the future portrayed in Gattaca where genetic information is used to discriminate and people begin to improve the human genome is VERY realistic. It will start with where they said it would start in the movie, the first tampering will be to remove disease, then it will be a slippery slope to make people smarter, stronger and more gifted. As the techniques improve testing will become so quick and routine that a microchip that can read out your entire individual genome in seconds is possible. Once improvements are made those that are "improved" begin to discriminate against those that aren't. From the first time I saw Gattaca I realized they accurately predicted the future of genetic engineering.
Even more nerds than Nestle/Willy Wonka?
It's even worse than that, really. It's not just "who cares about Mayans". It's that, really, they're trusting a calendar from back when the Mayans were as primitive as to not even figure out the length of a year (the Long Count uses 360 day years; seriously) and a culture who even at its apex only managed to count the days in the cycles of Venus (you know, the most bloody visible thing up there after the Sun and Moon) to tell them about galactic events. And they turn the end of a Mayan century into some kind of prophecy, although the Mayans never made such a prophecy. It's so fucking stupid, it's depressing.
To repeat a previous post (hey, it's Slashdot, you're used to dupes), for those who happen to still not know what that mayan thing is actually about:
Let's start from the start. The Mayans didn't count in base 10, but in base 20, presumably because they could count on their toes too. (No, really, look at their digits.) Thank goodness they didn't come up with a male-only maths, eh?
So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.
Then came the Long Count calendar, which was 360 days long, or 18 months of 20 days each. (Told you they were big on 20.) This is actually the calendar used in the 2012 (non)prophecy.
Yes, that's right. Those poor idiots are actually trusting a civilization to tell them about galactic alignments... who isn't even advanced enough to figure out the length of the year. Nor had the smarts to reset it to some equinoxe or such each year, like the lunisolar calendars used around here by even the most primitive ancient cultures. Yeah, that's the guy to trust with galactic calculations, right? ;)
To make it more stupid, even the Mayans eventually got a better calendar than that, the Haab calendar. Which finally padded the year to 365 days long, putting them finally on par with what the Egyptians had had, oh, only a couple of millennia before them. But anyway, a doomsday calculation based on the Long Count is already based on a calendar which is obsolete and crap even by Mayan standards.
So, anyway, a Long Count year was 18 months of 20 days each.
From there it went kinda like for us with decades, centuries and milenia, except in base 20.
So for us a decade is 10 years, for them a katun is 20 years.
For us a century is 10x10 years, for them a baktun is 20x20 years.
For us a millennium is 10x10x10 years, for them a piktun is 20x20x20 years.
All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another couple thousand years or so.
That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.
And again that's _all_ there is to it, because there is no actual Mayan prophecy for that date.
But I guess that won't stop the doomsday idiots from waiting for their Rapture on that day. What else is new?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The site is slashdotted, but is 2012 really worse than Tron or Tron: Legacy? At least in terms of believability.
I'm pretty sure Nasa has some sort of PR department and plenty of geeks who are not only able to describe why movie science is bad, but would love to do so. Combine the two and you end up with a PR release that would do more for NASA than spending thousands on some other press release that not even the geeks will care about.
Idiocracy
Think if a majority of the people in this country were convinced by "2012" that the world would really end at that year. Their priorities for government spending would be dramatically different.
The federal government's budget between now and 2012 could subsidize a hell of a lot of hookers and blow!
I would more like assume that they're not serfs, and don't work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There'll be enough time for them to do their job _and_ watch a movie now and then. Sometimes even together with a few co-workers and start comparing notes.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Isn't some public education a mandate of all science agencies? (If not, it should be.) Given the public's infatuation with entertainment, this seems a decent way to drum up interest.
If that $14T was all spent on actually worthwhile endeavors like NASA, we'd be having this idiotic argument on Mars.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I am not sure this list is real. I couldn't find anything on NASA's website about it, and the Science and Entertainment Exchange say they were not involved: http://blog.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/2011/01/note-to-our-web-visitors-london-sunday.html
Star Trek predicted that decades earlier with the future history of the Eugenics Wars.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
"GATTACA" is considered the "most realistic." The fact that its politics is so obvious, its smarmy moralizing oozes from every frame, and it's "space mission" at the end consists of people in 3-piece suits entering what looks like an elevator in the lobby of a modern office seem not to weigh against it. I think we're seeing at work the presumption that in order for a film to be considered scientifically-accurate, it must first be considered a terrible bore.
If nothing else I think GATTACA is worth it for the unintentional comedy - for instance, watching Vincent, the morning after sleeping with Irene, frantically rummaging through the bed looking for any DNA samples he may have left behind...
Bow-ties are cool.
Realistic right down to the refrigerator full of urine and blood that Ethan Hawke will somehow smuggle onto his space mission.
There's a lot of technological realism in the film, to be sure -- the cars don't make noise because they run on electricity, Maya Rudolph is able to determine at birth the probability of an infant developing disease, DNA tests are accomplished with small, handheld devices and Gwyneth Paltrow is able to take designer drugs that keep her alive, etc. All of this is good, but it's all a hodgepodge that isn't held together by a compelling story. Everything is so heavy with symbolism and flat -- the characters are just more very well-machined props in the end.
I mean like, we don't have a disagreement here -- but I can think of a lot of very realistic sci-fi films, and I can think of a lot of really good films with good characters and plot, but never the twine doth meet.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
None of those movies really stretch the science *fiction* very far at all. And they were all pretty good movies.
Gattaca - the most realistic sci-fi movie where a mission to Titan is a once-in-a-lifetime matter (so much so that the director of a space center murders his subordinate with a computer keyboard just to launch it). Yeah right.
We must have seen different blade runners. Because other than the flying cars and replicants it was a pretty grimy, gritty, future. Max Headroom is perhaps the best Sci Fi about a not too distant future, and holds up well today.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Personally, I agree that NASA should take the proactive approach on this one. It shouldn't be part of their job to educate the public like this but it has proven necessary.
It's only necessary because of the complete dumbing down of the science curriculum in schools. That's what happens when you let a bunch of religious nutbars dictate what kind of science is taught to children.
It's time to ignore the religious crackpots and start teaching real science without fear of backlash.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
It should have continued for another five minutes, to the point where his heart explodes from the stress of launch. Remember that, for all the way the movie attacks genetic discrimination, he was still barred from applying as an astronaut because he had a medical condition which would have a small but significent chance of proving fatal under extreme conditions like space-travel.
That was Mystery Science Theatre 3000 material. I think they should bring back MST3K just for the purpose of skewering it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Also, there are no hot chicks in space. Seriously. Prolonged microgravity screws with the lymphatic system, causing a redistribution of water which results in the face swelling. Maybe if you could spin the ship.
And which is now being subject to criticism of the science too, as some microbiologists suspect it may be a false result steming from improperly cleaned samples. Still, it's not entirely unexpected: NASA's funding and continued existence depend upon the good will of Congress, and getting politicians to spend money requires NASA retain a high public profile. The moon landings are far behind them, and the average voter couldn't care less about analysing rocks on mars or the irregularity in the heliopause. What they want is excitement - spacemen and aliens! How can the reality of science compete with the fantasy of movies?
Read again. It did.
I know! I'm feeling soooo deceived by the movie's I've seen lately. I mean, I was at the hospital the other day, and the nurse was not wearing a form-fitting white uniform with a plunging neckline. She didn't come on to me or tell me how naughty she'd been. She didn't even have enormous breasts! B-cup, tops! All she did was poke me with needles and bring me terrible food!
Think if a majority of the people in this country were convinced by "2012" that the world would really end at that year. Their priorities for government spending would be dramatically different.
Yeah, they might start throwing trillions of dollars at all sorts of useless stuff!
Oh, wait ....
And my last doc was not quipping, didn't order a multitude of pointless tests and downed a few packs of Vicodine while belittling his team. I felt kinda cheated.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That "they always get their man" is nothing new, that's been the staple of crime shows since the beginning of TV. What's new is that what is depicted as "science". In other words, the problem that only the sci-fi genre had to deal with is invading other genres now.
(tinfoil hat on)
Maybe it's an assault on science by its enemies. When we can discredit science and "scientific working", people will lose their faith in science and instead look for other sources for answers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, chicks throwing up from dizziness are sure more sexy than chicks with swollen faces.
Keep your strange sexual fetishes for yourself, please! :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well how much effort do you think that took them?
The term "space opera" is already around for that purpose. When George Lucas is giving an interview with a degree of candor, he'll usually use that term to describe Star Wars. Naturally, Lucas doesn't give many interviews with a sense of candor anymore, but I seem to remember him using it in the interview with Leonard Maltin that was in the VHS versions in the '90s.
Not a typewriter
First Elijah and his family drove a car to some mountain, along with the rest of humanity, where Elijah did an about face, left his family, and somehow miraculously returned to his home. He then proceeded to steal a motor bike and commence driving to find his girlfriend somewhere in the United States.
Only after finding his girlfriend among the 10's of 1000's of vehicles on a particular highway system did the meteorite impact occur, causing a tsunami, which they at first out ran on motorbike, and then finally on foot.
What's the problem?
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
The point was not that he'd bring the blood and urine and skin scrapings up into space.
He was denied entry into the space program (or any real job, for that matter), because of a slight irregularity that could appear in his heartbeat.
He proved through his own effort that he was fit enough by completing the workouts (although wore the heartbeat metronome to fool the testers into thinking he was a god), and that he was a good candidate to get on the ship.
The point was that once he's in space, they can't just "bring him down", and that he had thus disproven and broke the system. Once he's in space, he can then tell them "haha, I'm this other guy", and society would crumble as the previously inferior masses would revolt against the genetically perfect.
If Harry Potter had been set in the year 2100, they'd probably still be calling it juvenile fiction.
Any comment mentioning moderation is automatically Offtopic.
Science fiction seems like it has to be in the form of a novel to really qualify as sci-fi; movies seem to always be movies regardless of the source material or subject matter. Like comic books which should never be made into movies. ("Danger: Diabolik" being the exception that proves the rule.) IMHO
Brave New World predates that by a few decades.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Hardly:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
Lately I've begun splitting what people call sci-fi into three different subgroups.
Yes, I'm a bit bitter, Hollywood is butchering sci-fi with every new movie and if I ever open my mouth about it to friends and acquaintances they immediately start namedropping movies from the third category as examples of how there are plenty of good sci-fi movies being made...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
How is it NASA is qualified to judge the best and worst Sci-Fi movies of all time? Don't they have something more important to be working on?
Are you saying you have nothing important to work on, Mr. Angry Slashdot Nerd?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I've always thought there were two forms of "Sci-Fi". We have Sci-Fi, and then we have Sci-Fantasy.
That'd be a lot more meaningful if the term was used in circumstances other than "I didn't like that stupid movie".
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Had to completely rework my Netflix queues...
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
I'm almost certain the joke is older than that, going back to the seven astronauts of the original Mercury program. Some of the early (unmanned) prototype rockets didn't exactly get into space, and these failures were more public than many of the USSR's failures.
Not a typewriter
I have to say, I am glad this wonderful film found some recognition, and from the most unexpected, but very highly admired institution.
What I keep telling and kept telling about Gattaca for a long time, is that Gattaca has already started. You have people selecting embryos and discarding ever healthier ones, sometimes just to have a donor for a previous child. Gattaca may just happen little by little and we, our imperfect generation, find ourselves right smack in the middle of it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
How is it NASA is qualified to judge the best and worst Sci-Fi movies of all time? Don't they have something more important to be working on?
Drawing public attention to the fact that some movies are scientifically accurate and some are not. Sounds pretty important to me. Part of NASA's remit is to educate the public after all, isn't it?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I think it's pretty clear that Niccol was implying the two years of urine were intended for the mission. It was a clumsy and inept beat to cap a film of clumsy and inept beats. Any implication that the Hawke character was going to reveal himself and launch a revolution from space is completely your exegesis, it's just not in the film.
Your reading of the themes is nice, but it's irrelevant because the story is implausible and the characters aren't believable. The story has to make sense a be interesting before you can have the luxury of having it "mean" something.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This has been written up in the Toronto Star, Wired UK, The Australian and a few others.
Interesting, and saddening, that overseas media has picked this up and US media doesn't seem to be terribly interested. From one of TFAs,
But why has Nasa taken the day off from searching the galaxy to try its hand at movie criticism? Well, the agency argues that bad flicks can worry viewers. In fact, so many people wrote in to the agency, worried about potential 2012-related catastrophes, that Nasa had to publish a special website just days before the film's November 2009 release.
The myth debunking page reads "Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."
Scientific illiteracy is becoming a big problem in the US. Kudos to NASA for tackling it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
They missed Krakatoa, East of Java (Krakatoa is West of Java).
Though perhaps NASA left this for the USGS to villify...
Other than a few minor wrinkles, 2001 still is the most realistic representation of space travel (the most notable error, to my understanding, is that Bowman should have exhaled so there was little or no air in his lungs before he blew the pod door and was exposed to hard vacuum, but compared to every other fucking SF movie having roaring thrusters and energy weapons that go "bing!", it's completely forgivable).
Yes, the beginning and the end are obviously where a lot of the SF elements of the story come into play, and in some respects Clarke was far too optimistic about advances in computers and space colonization. I suspect, if we through enough money at the problems, we could probably approximate the space station and moon base, and maybe even a computer system that was HAL-like, if not a really artificial intelligence, though you'll note that even in the movie and the book Clarke leaves things a little ambiguous about just what HAL's capabilities are. It's the later books that outright turn HAL into an sentient being.
As to the wormhole and the aliens, while certainly "out there" by our standards, I think they still sit more firmly towards the hard SF. I think the aliens were essentially energy beings, and it's in 2010 that we get a better picture of what they are via the Bowman Star Child. As to wormholes, while I think most physicists think if such structures exist, they're likely too unstable and short-lived to ever hope to transport anything, but I'd say that possibility isn't absolutely closed as of yet, and from 1960s physics, it probably represented for Clarke the most likely means of FTL travel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh, and it's Uma Thurman, not Gwyneth Paltrow who was the female lead in Gattaca.
You're absolutely right. I think my point still holds mutatis mutandis.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Inside the station they walk at normal pace and what appears to be Earth gravity.
Outside everyone moves in slow motion.
Also, no delay in telecommunication.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I thought it was 2 years until the mission launched? Yes he was selected, but IIRC the plot was the new director that was murdered was going to cut funding and the mission would never go forward. Now if they were at the stage where they could still cut funding and actually save money the rocket couldn't have been built even if the mission team was selected. Hence the actual launch would take place in 2 years and the blood an urine would be needed until the launch where he could do his ahah moment and reveal his real genetics.
I thought it was well understood in SF fandom that "Sci Fi" was movie-style action-oriented futuristic fantasy (and some pronounce this "skiffy"), while "SF" was actual science-based fiction, which is extremely unlikely to appear in any visual medium.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Marooned should've been listed as one of the most realistic movies since it almost happened just a few years after the movie was made (Apollo 13).
One of my favorite scenes from Moral Orel:
Doughy: Hey Orel, what did you put for number 3 on the science test?
Orel: Jesus!
Doughy: [slaps forehead] Of course!
That could be Texas after the state board of education with the "leadership" of creationist Don McLeroy molded public education in the image of his chosen god and political party.
Is that sarcasm? Hard to tell because some people think Mars is worthwhile...
Going to Mars has no practical benefit to anyone on Earth outside of the few people employed by NASA.
The flip side of these bad science movies is that it keeps people thinking that going to Mars is not an utterly ridiculous waste of resources. If you debunk all the bad science, people might realize that and NASA would lose some funding. It's the dreams that keep their money coming in...
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Um, Star Wars was set in the distant past, and hence, is not futuristic.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Eugenics and the concepts predicted in star trek have far more mundane origins with the real eugenics movement of the 20's and 30's that was partly the basis for Hitler's assertions about racial purity. There is a book on the Guttenberg project called How to Analyze People on Sight by Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30601) that was likely one of the key publications in the eugenics movement (I'm not sure on that, but if you read it you will see how absurd the "science" is). The entire premise of the book is that you can tell everything you want to know about someone by their body structure. Simply reading about the "Alimentive" type (or Fatty as the book calls them frequently) and you will see just how absurd eugenics was.
This all predated the discovery of DNA and I'm not sure of the time-line of the star trek episode with the discovery of the double helix but there was likely very little real DNA information when the episode was produced and it's origins are far more likely tied to the previous eugenics movement which was used as the basis for a LOT of discrimination, a topic Gene Roddenberry liked to tackle very frequently with his social commentary masked as sci-fi.
Wait a second, didn't anyone ever notice that Ethan Hawke and Jude Law look different? How did they deal with the fact that Ethan Hawke is walking around spilling someone elses DNA everywhere?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Or it could go the other way - ever see Idiocracy?
Ahem. Congress prefers the terms page and freedom powder.
It's utterly ridiculous to those who have different priorities. There were people who believe that going to the moon was utterly ridiculous, that the billions spent on the manned space program were better spent on other priorities. Others of us believe differently, that those billions were spent on pushing frontiers that would otherwise remain dreams. For us, not everything has to have a positive financial return to be worthy of doing.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The whore is becoming more and more desperate, and behaving more and more strange.
The science of GATTACA does not seem very sound to me. Many traits cannot be simply related to one gene and an aweful lot of them are only partly genetic (and partly dependent on the ambient) or not genetic at all.
On a side note, if you have some time to spare give Schismatrix (by B. Sterling) a try, I enjoyed his attempt to depict a posthuman society.
I dunno, I was reading the wikipedia plot synopsis and it says that the 2 years of urine were right before the flight, Jude Law's death and the launch were at the same time, and that Hawke just didn't bring any urine to the last test because he wasn't expecting it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The term "space opera" is already around for that purpose.
I've always thought that Star Wars would make an excellent on-stage opera. Imagine everyone singing their parts--the droids already do--and the orchestra making all of the laser, starship, and lightsaber noises as part of the score.
Hmm, maybe it's time to launch a Kickstarter project....
I actually read through that book. It's a classic, solid example of "stuff that makes a lot of sense unless you think about it". It's sad that that sort of thing (much like 2012) actully makes more sense to people than actual science, but them I think most people don't actually care whether their beliefs are true - they care whether their beliefs are popular. After all, the popularity of your beliefs affects you on a dialy basis.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
2012 fails in the science. I can believe the global conspiracy to hide the truth while trying to save "selected people", so it must fail in the science (which is crap). So how then does Contact get marked realistic?
That cuts both ways though. I've read about the police's and prosecutors' frusteration at the "CSI effect" and I'm fine with it, despite the fact that the details depicted on the show are sometimes dodgy or exaggerated. And beleive me, I know the frusteration. I know enough science to sit there and kibitz when the show gets things wrong. And, working in computers, I've had to explain that, "No, computers can't/dont actually do that." my share of times.
But juries demanding to actually see hard physical evidence of a crime, instead of just taking the word of some random guy who said: "he done it." is a GOOD thing... a VERY good thing! Peoples' freedom and sometimes their lives are at stake in a criminal trial. And if the government is going to take away either; we should damn well be a whole lot more sure about that than we are now. "Innocent until PROVEN guilty." and "Better a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent should suffer a trial." and all that.
And boo effing hoo for the cop who's PO'd that his version of events is not golden anymore, or for the DA who's seen his conviction ratio drop. It's almost routine now for DNA evidence, for example, to exonerate people who've spent years in prison, falsely convicted after some crooked cop lied in court to frame him and the DA went along with the sham just to get his numbers up. How many innocent people have lost years of their lives because of this? Have we executed anyone because on this? Even person, even one year, is intolerable. (And does anything ever happen to the cop and DA who set someone up for the crime they didn't commit? Nope.)
So yeah... I'm all in favor of anything that conditions juries to expect to see real evidence... even if that expectation is unrealistically high... as opposed to taking the word of a human who may be lying. It's absolutely better than the alternative.
And as a purely practical matter; your friend, frustrated though he may be, still comes out as a winner and should be happy. Said "CSI effect" is also generating more demand for forensic evidence in order to convict. Higher demand means a higher budget and more cool toys for him to play with... and better job security as well.
Looks, to me, like a win-win across the board.
Imagine all the people...
> Science and Entertainment Exchange
S.E.X. ?
"Better a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent should suffer a trial." and all that.
The sad part is, if you polled the American people today, I bet 80% would disagree with that statement.
After all, that guy just *looks* shady, I bet he did *something*! /sigh
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Went to see True Grit. A trailer started up - Apollo capsule approaching the moon - hey, looking pretty good - titles: For 40 Years NASA Kept The Secret (or some such) - oh, no, a fake landing movie - then Eagle is down on the actual moon, so okay - then the two astronauts pogo over a crater to see a huge alien craft crashed and half-buried in the dust - hey, this could be a cool movie - never heard of this in production - what could it be? - then the ominous signs: Michael Bay. Steven Speilberg. And the killer: Transformers 3. Audible groans of disappointment from the audience.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
didn't have a medical condition.... just a gene increasing the risk of having a medical condition.... big difference
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
My memory is flaky too so you are probably right, didn't notice that hole in the plot previously. In answer to your DNA thing that's why Ethan scrubbed all his skin and hair aggressively every day (including using a rock and a stream after he borked Umma) so that he didn't inadvertently spill DNA anywhere.
Scary book if you ask me, the first part of the book they discuss holding seminars with thousands of attendants in New York and that this was possibly used to discriminate against millions of people before WWII. The "science" is absurd, they assert because they asked a single candy shop owner how much of their sales was the result of fat people (and that most Hebrew's are fatties) and that's considered evidence is just scary. Eugenics was a very scary movement, it led to a LOT of bad things not the least of which was Germany's move to extinguish certain ethnic groups.
It's so refreshing to see an actually good ranking of movies here, instead of the usual half-assed commercial flotsam made by some journalist who just plays a geek on the Internet.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Don't they have something more important to be working on?
How much time do you think this took? Do you think someone billed the government a day's work to compile this list? If I ask you about the worst science movies ever and you answer, does this make you an irresponsible employee? (Hint: you probably shouldn't answer this question, or even read it - oh, oops!) My point is that this takes an instant, and it's not at all out of line given that educating the public is an explicit part of NASA's mission.
Right but he's leaving Jude's DNA everywhere and claiming to be Jude. Wouldn't people notice he didn't look like the famous swimmer?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The Creationist shit is, well, shit. But even in a more liberal/evolution curriculum, the educational system is still shit. It's not what you learn, it's how you learn. And in the current system, it can be said that the students don't learn well.
How about 2001 2001 Space Odyssey vs Avatar?
Life is not for the lazy.
Eh - real science fiction appears fairly regularly on screen. Bicentennial Man, Gattaca, Children of Men, Minority Report, Blade Runner, Logan's Run, I Robot, etc. It seems more likely to appear as movies though, rather than serialized television (you do have some exceptions - I'd consider Dollhouse a true science fiction - not GOOD science fiction, but still true to the genre).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The least plausible movie of all!
An insult to idiot level intellects!
Beyond stupid!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/plotsummary
I especially like the portrayal of the superdense 8,000 degree+ radioactive molten iron/heavy metal composite of the earths
core as a kind of transparent gas in which you could move!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
And boo effing hoo for the cop who's PO'd that his version of events is not golden anymore, or for the DA who's seen his conviction ratio drop. It's almost routine now for DNA evidence, for example, to exonerate people who've spent years in prison, falsely convicted after some crooked cop lied in court to frame him and the DA went along with the sham just to get his numbers up. How many innocent people have lost years of their lives because of this? Have we executed anyone because on this? Even person, even one year, is intolerable. (And does anything ever happen to the cop and DA who set someone up for the crime they didn't commit? Nope.)
As an engineer in R&D, my job involves asking questions to physical systems in the form of experiments and interpreting the results to get my answers. I can tell you with very high degree of certainty that nature lies as often as cooked cops do. Alternatively, you could say I am as often stupid in interpreting the results of an experiment as a crooked cop lies. If I were to tell a jury what CSI's GC-MS results mean, my explanation would probably be just often as wrong as when I am interpreting the results of my GC (I am lucky or rich enough to have a GC-MS in my lab.) No *thing* is evidence, only the interpretation of the physical world is "evidence" and that interpretation might be wrong. It might be honestly wrong, or it might be the lab technician is crooked just like a cop might be. There is only one way to avoid executing innocent people: don't execute anyone. That is actually a simple and very effective way.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Well, jury wanting "hard evidence" cuts both ways too. Because of CSI and their "foolproof" DNA testing, presenting a DNA test means that this test will dictate the verdict.
In other words, if you plan a crime, make sure you collect a few cigarette butts first, then make sure to drop them at the crime scene. Either to prove your innocence ("the DNA on the crime scene does not match the suspect, the three witnesses must be wrong"), or to frame someone ("no matter how many people saw him 50 miles away, his DNA is at the scene of crime").
The blind reliance on "factual evidence" made it much easier to pull a well planned crime off. Sure, you can now much more easily convict the dumb criminals. And it certainly helped against hearsay and prejudiced witnesses. But it also made planting evidence much more powerful than it ever was. And since CSI made it almost mandatory to show ANY kind of DNA if you want the trial to go somewhere, they now take whatever they get their hands at that might contain any, and use it.
As most things, this swings both ways. It's a good thing that "hard facts" are getting more and more important in trials. But relying only on them is equally dangerous. If the rest of the events don't add up, even "hard facts" have to be considered with caution.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, the paper was also just bad science, and deserved no special spotlight. Nothing to do with alien life, just bad methodology.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I would probably enjoy having a doctor with House's personality, but damn do they ever stumble around in the dark...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I largely agree with their list. contact is, imo, the best and gattaca is second. i think, however, that they missed 2010. its way different than the original, but as a realistic sci-fi movie it stands on its own and has aged well
My kids actually like the Star Wars holiday special.
Wow, a site which doesn't load anything without javascript being enabled. It's been a while since I saw one of those.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
The term "space opera" is already around for that purpose.
I've always thought that Star Wars would make an excellent on-stage opera. Imagine everyone singing their parts--the droids already do--and the orchestra making all of the laser, starship, and lightsaber noises as part of the score.
Hmm, maybe it's time to launch a Kickstarter project....
I believe it would look something like THIS.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
No, I mean 2001 is (to me at least) Sci-Fi while Avatar is Sci-Fantasy. Two polar extremes.
Life is not for the lazy.
When the system is rigged, honesty is for suckers.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
And then there is Siffy... a bold new kind of SF ("EsEff") that includes Wrestling, "B" grade CGI monster movies, Ghost Hunting, and perhaps the occasional odd infomercial!
Siffy is Spiffy!
(I do thank Siffy for the many decent to outstanding SF shows it produced before it turned into this weird thing it is today. It's not that SF wasn't profitable-- it just wasn't as profitable as Wrestling and Ghost Hunting Shows.)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Cusack is a fine actor. This movie is more than enough to forgive his agent's recent lapses.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
Wasn't that kind of implied in the ending of the movie? That for all his hard work, in the end it was actually wrong for him to of done it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Maybe this book was absurd but eugenics is in no way absurd. Has it been long enough that we can talk about it without bringing long dead people into it?
"a science that deals with the improvement of hereditary qualities of a race or breed"
It's evolution. You're saying evolution is absurd?
I find being offended by me offensive.
For many of us, having a positive financial return is hardly a reason to do anything at all.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I prefer to call the latter "syfy" (pronounced Siffey). Though note that neither group properly includes blatant action films with a somewhat technological prefix. Resident Evil is no more sci-fi or syfy than is Night of the Living Dead, regardless of the genetics / technology aspects of the former.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I think I remember one of the episodes it was lupus, still took him all episode to figure it out. If they are extremely rare disorders/diseases, then doesn't it follow suit that they are extremely rare?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Sure, we can blame some of that on standards and requirements laid out by the legislatures. "Add this to your 5th grade health class." "Add this to your 7th grade math class." Teachers are spending a lot of time pushing crap that a politician thought was important, not what's actually important. I wouldn't be surprised to find that 10% of classroom time is wasted on political agendas instead of learning. But it's not the entire problem.
A big part of the problem is refusal to accept discipline as an appropriate path. (Note that discipline does NOT mean corporal punishment.) If little Johnny Trouble is disrupting class again, the rest of them just sit there and read 'Dick and Jane' for the 17th time while the teacher spends an hour trotting him down to the behavioral psychologist's office. Little Johnny is talked at without effect, then put back in the classroom where he then disrupts it for the 18th time. Little Johnny needs to be efficiently removed from the classroom setting without the parent's approval, and without concern for his "feelings", as every other approach rewards his bad behavior. And yes, his teacher should be able to tell the other kids that little Johnny was kicked out because he was being naughty. Stigmatize the offense. It works.
I'm not blaming little Johnny here. I'm blaming the system for deciding that accommodating little Johnny's every whim is a viable approach to education. If little Johnny has to end up in "special school" for a month to work out his issues, that gives 24 other kids the chance to excel. If Mommy or Daddy feel that little Johnny is being stigmatized by being placed in special school, Mommy or Daddy can hire a specialist to work with little Johnny to figure out his problems and get him cooperating so he can return to the classroom. The schools don't have to abandon him, but they also don't have to keep him slowing down the mainstream.
School boards have to step up and recognize they must represent the 95% of kids who aren't little Johnny. They also have to stop acting as the supreme court of schoolhouse behavior, and stand up to the whiny parents who think their kid shouldn't have been singled out. "Sorry, ma'am, that's a decision between the teacher and the principal, not us. They were there, we were not. Their decision is final. Your alternative to special school is to move out of our district, and take little Johnny with you. Now if you would please sit down and shut up, we won't send your new district a full transcript of little Johnny's discipline issues. Have a nice day."
Another big part of the problem is refusal to accept failure as a possible outcome for a child. Instead of moving the class along and leaving little Johnny behind, the entire class is held back to little Johnny's level of non-progress. If little Johnny can't keep up, alter little Johnny's schedule, not the whole class. There can be a standard pace, and it can be set to the pace of the average student. It doesn't have to be hyperaccelerated, but without the anchor of slow students, it will certainly speed up.
"No child left behind" takes the Garrison Keeler joke of "Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average" and tries to apply it legislatively, which is absurd. 5% of the children will always be the bottom 5% of the children. So far all it's accomplished is that we've proven that we can't squeeze 5% up into the bell curve without squeezing down the middle 90% to hide them.
John
In fact this is what defines SF according to a lit professor from whom I took a class on SF. Absent from his definition (which was accepted by some award group . . . Hugo perhaps) was any mention of "future", or science as a device. What was most critical was the recasting of the human condition in a new paradigm as a way to examine it. One of the best books from that course was "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. LeGuin. Of course SF != SciFi.
It's only necessary because of the complete dumbing down of...
Everyone and everything. I mean seriously it's not just schools look at the media it's totally patronising and just keeps getting dumberer and dumberer every day. Even documentaries are so seriously rewriting history I feel genuine woe for the ignorance being inflicted on the human race. We basically don't get good quality politicians because, after all, what sane person would try to do something the dumb ignorant masses don't understand just to get pummeled into submission by a frenzy of ignorance.
It's time to ignore the religious crackpots and start teaching real science without fear of backlash.
Yeah good luck with that. The greater irony is that even the bible describes the masses as sheep. baaaa baaaaa. I think it was Hitler who said "What great fortune for tyrants that men are so easily led"
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Moderator: don't you believe this "news" story is false? You should and here is why:
1. You cannot find a link to the listing on NASA website.
2. You will see The Science and Entertainment Exchange [www.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org] says this on its homepage:
"Note to our followers: The article in the London Sunday Times on January 2, 2011 “To Absurdity and Beyond: NASA damns flaws in sci-fi films” incorrectly attributed a top-ten worst sci-fi films list to the Science & Entertainment Exchange. We were not involved in creating the list."
3. You will find that The Science and Entertainment Exchange is NOT a part of NASA, but rather is part of "NAS". Where NAS is the National Academy of Science [www.nasonline.org].
Please consider removing this article because there is little evidence to support the claims of attribution to these 2 well known institutions.
IMO: I think some unknown entity created this list and attributed it to these institutions in order to spur comments and reposting of their article.
Paranoid Opinion: someone wants to shine a spotlight on these institutions to make them appear wasteful.
I could be wrong and will welcome correct links to the real articles on the actual websites mentioned (NASA or The Science and Entertainment Exchange). However, if I am right that this is "false news"... please remove this whole thing so others will not form opinions on these institutions based on false attributions.
I watched that crappy movie all the way to the end because Woody Harrelson said there would be spaceships. A couple of times they cut to the China compound and showed us vehicles that looked a lot like spaceships. They got on the damn things and started talking about "pressurization" and "life support".. then it turns out they're just regular old ships. Cunts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
More importan, why is there no record of NASA actually doing this and the other website cited says they had nothing to do with it?
Well, use all of your super movie-making skills and give me a call when you've made a movie that beats Gattaca on RottenTomatoes and I'll buy a ticket...
Well, I did the sound effects for 2012, but I assure you that has NOTHING to do with my annoyance at this article :)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
They are not. They are however qualified to judge the most and least realistic Sci-Fi movies of all time.
We Muslims have an interesting take on yaumul qiamat (doomsday). If my memory of religious schooling is correct, doomsday won't happen until everyone stops believing in the doomsday. So, as long as there are people believing that the doomsday will come in 2012 or whenever, then it will not happen. Of course there are all sorts of signs of the end times is nigh, but no one knows what "nigh" really means, whether it is 1 year, 50 years or 50000 years etc.We will only realize that it is coming when it is too late. And in Islam, doomsday means the end of the universe, not just the Earth.
well.... i don't see why, we didn't lose anyone in mercury, scratch 3 for Apollo 1, 7 for chall and then 7 more for columbia... i wasn't alive for apollo or mercury so i couldn't really tell you...
as for the USSR.... WTF cares? they cheated anyway...
Gagarin and Titov faked it....
Eugenics is absurd in its assertion that selective breeding can "improve" people when there is no scientific way to determine which genes are "better" than others, or which genes belong to a "race" or "breed" - categories that are more cultural than biological in humans.
The pre-WW2 eugenics movement had very little to do with genetic science and a lot to do with encouraging the "fit" to reproduce more, or preventing the "unfit" from reproducing so much...as determined by powerful people who assume the right to decide who the "fit" and "unfit" are, of course.
I highly recommend Edwin Black's The War Against the Weak for a detailed look at the sordid history of eugenics. It's one of those ideas that sounds good in theory, but in practice is doomed by corruption to cause suffering.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
And Le Wrath di Khan from the same show.
7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)
It was worth reading this thread just to see this listed as one of the worst.
I come here for the love
"School boards have to step up and recognize they must represent the 95% of kids who aren't little Johnny."
1/25 is 4%, not 5...
but i agree with you.
i approve. you've gotta test this shit on SOMETHING. coming from a 3d background, i'd be highly disappointed to see yet another teapot as the first thing made by a new piece of kit.
people will lose their faith in science
science should not need faith to avoid being discredited.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
they should wait for 2013, sequels suck even more in 99.99999%
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
The US public education system has low science scores even compared to homeschoolers--yeah, that means it turns out that somebody who believes in Creationism scores better than somebody who...believes whatever got taught in the public schools. I have no idea what it was, just that it was not the modern synthesis of evolution. (For those who do not know: the modern synthesis of evolution is the, well, modern version of the theory. Aside from a few tweaks, it's over half a century old. It's not terribly hard to understand, especially for people used to computer technology: microevolution is the biology equivalent to version changes. Macroevolution is how species fork. You are now ahead of most freshman biology majors...)
I'm reminded of this: “The Sound Barrier” (1952)
At the end of this famous film, a British pilot solves the mystery of the sound barrier by reversing the controls at the critical moment during the power dive. There are just two problems with this account. It was actually an American, Chuck Yeager, who first broke the sound barrier (see “The Right Stuff”) and reversing the controls in the transonic zone is likely to kill the pilot. In his book “The Right Stuff”, Tom Wolfe describes how Yeager was invited to the American premiere of the movie and, when asked afterwards for his reaction, responded that the picture was “utter shuck from start to finish”.
Thanks to http://www.rogerdarlington.co.uk/afilms.html for retaining that piece of info.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
"No child left behind" takes the Garrison Keeler joke of "Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average" and tries to apply it legislatively, which is absurd. 5% of the children will always be the bottom 5% of the children. So far all it's accomplished is that we've proven that we can't squeeze 5% up into the bell curve without squeezing down the middle 90% to hide them.
I'm not from the US so I can't comment on the particular absurdities of your education system.
However, in the rest of the world, the idea is that even though by definition half the people are below average, you can at least do two things:
(1) push up the average so that everyone is better educated and (2) ensure that the shape of the curve remains the same, i.e. the bottom 5 or 10% don't fall any further behind than they already are.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think you are missing the point that this film is a work of dramatic fiction, not a documentary.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
>>>space opera
Yeah but you can't label Harry Potter in 2100 AD a space opera can you? It's 'future fantasy' which is an all-encompassing term that includes both HP of the Future and Star Wars.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I guess STVI is so bad that it is not even worth mentioning.
as for the USSR.... WTF cares? they cheated anyway... Gagarin and Titov faked it...
Talk about being a bad loser, you Yankee running dog of imperialism.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I had 1:20 as the original ratio, but 20 was an unrealistically small class size in today's schools. Didn't change the percents to follow, sorry.
John
trying to figure out how to shit in a vacuum cleaner. And I'm pretty sure that sucks.
Better than if it blows, I'd have thought.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you think eugenics is the same thing as evolution, you clearly have no idea of the meaning of either.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think your post more appropriately applies to your position.
Forget what one small group of people called eugenics.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Eugenics is absurd in its assertion that selective breeding can "improve" people when there is no scientific way to determine which genes are "better" than others, or which genes belong to a "race" or "breed" - categories that are more cultural than biological in humans.
This is quite simply completely false. We've been successfully using eugenics for thousands of years. You don't need to know the exact gene.
As I said in my last point. Can we move past the fucking nazis already and what they did.
There's nothing in eugenics that says you have to prevent the unfit from reproducing.
And again "sordid history". When can we move past what one group did and approach it without the goal of destroying groups of people?
I find being offended by me offensive.
> There's nothing in eugenics that says you have to prevent the unfit from reproducing.
Yes, there is. It's the branch called "negative eugenics," and not only did many American eugenicists support it, they actually succeeded in getting American citizens sterilized.
Seriously, check out the book. There was a lot going on at Cold Spring Harbor well before the Nazis took up the mantle.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
I'd rather see criminals go free than law-abiding citizens jailed. Our society's in bad shape when those in power believe otherwise.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
So NASA is saying that human interaction with Aliens is more "realistic" than natural disasters, a large comet hitting earth (which has been speculated to have happened in the past), a natural volcano going off, a new energy source being created with huge ramifications, or the potential for human cloning? I will call the burrowing train into magma a wash.
I think either NASA is really rather optimistic and bullish on actually meeting ET, or perhaps they should all be fired and replaced with safety cones.
That's complete nonsense.
Your book describes the actions of one group. Why do you feel that set of actions is the only viable set of actions?
Why because they had "negative eugenics" must every one have "negative eugenics."
This is the problem I'm talking about. People are too focused on the bad things that some small group did. It blinds you. You assume everything has to be that way which is a complete lack of critical thinking.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Nah, then they just look for the fat guy.
We're not talking about some offshoot of the movement that got off track, we're talking about the founders of the movement, who defined what it's about. It's about deciding for other people what their genetic heritage should be.
You can defend it as a positive idea in the abstract all you want, but in practice it will never work. As a science, a philosophy, and as a political movement, Eugenics is fundamentally flawed. I agree with Capt. Reynolds when he said "sooner or later, they will come back around to the idea that they can make people 'better.' And I just don't hold to that."
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Why do I suddenly have to think of Sunshine? Oh, right. Because it's more of an allegory for how Hollywood trats SF than an actual SF movie.
Warning, spoilers follow.
The first half is actually a fairly decent example of category 2: The premise is a bit silly and the special effects don't make any sense at points but at its heart it's about how incredibly hostile an environment space is both phyically and mentally. The technology we see seems like something a sane engineer could have come up with. You really get the feeling that they listened to their advisors.
Then we enter the second half and Hollywood happens. Yeah, the first mission they sent? They failed because apparently NASA didn't do any psychological screening before selecting their crew and one crewman decided that the dying sun was God and killed everyone. Sure. And everyone from the new crew, including the semi-sentient computer, becomes a drooling idiot so that we can cram more random deaths and pointless action scenes in. (I'm not kidding here, they could've prevented most of the carnage by closing a single door, not to mention the computer informing them of the unknown person entering the ship.) Oh, and let's not forget the detailed shot of the crazy guy getting the skin ripped off his arm. Can't have a science fiction movie about the enormity of space without that.
It's really as if they first produced one half of the movie and then remembered that Hollywood doesn't do "sensible", so they added in heaps of bullshit in order to turn it into a bad slasher movie. (More likely, they decided that a movie without a clear villain character would be too abstract for the audience and since slashers work well without a plot they just put that in as a plot-neutral action part.)
And that's actually the problem with Hollywood SciFi: Hollywood is conservative and intelligent movies don't sell as well as bullshit bonanzas with enough special effects to give Michael Bay a pause. Of course this isn't helped by "smart" movies like the 2002 Solaris remake being giant turds (although in this case it was because the director tried to turn it into a love story). We won't see much good SciFi out of Hollywood simply because stupid movies are known to sell and Hollywood doesn't like risky investments.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Wait a second, didn't anyone ever notice that Ethan Hawke and Jude Law look different? How did they deal with the fact that Ethan Hawke is walking around spilling someone elses DNA everywhere?
He was supposed to have been in a car accident in France or something similar (outside the normal police-state tracking level), and had facial reconstructive surgery that there was magically no record of.
This is the evidence of the deus ex machina that is supposed to make the situation feasable.
Again nonsense.
I ask again.
How exactly did they make it unchangeable?
Why do we have to do and believe exactly what they did?
I find being offended by me offensive.
I agree with Capt. Reynolds when he said "sooner or later, they will come back around to the idea that they can make people 'better.' And I just don't hold to that.
So you're against education?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Eugenics is selective breeding of humans. If you're talking about improving individuals' fitness by modifying their genes directly, that is not eugenics. That's genetic engineering.
Now, you can use breeding to "improve" the human race by selecting for positive traits, or against negative ones. Of course, that means someone has to decide (usually not you) what is "positive" and "negative" in your genetic makeup. Some genes that cause or contribute to disease have been identified, but beyond that we really have no idea what traits are matched up with what genes, and by recombination there is a good chance you will lose "positive" traits or gain "negative" traits in mating a subject with another person who has other "positive" traits you are trying to select for.
Evolution works by natural selection to form a "fitness landscape." There are no "good" or "bad" genes in nature, there are just genes that aid or inhibit fertility in a given environment, or are neutral.
What this comes down to is, do you get to choose for yourself whether you want to have children, and with whom? You can leave it up to eugenicists, but there is no scientific basis for the selection they will be doing. Essentially they will just choose what they like and don't like, and even then the offspring will be something of a mixed bag. If you get to choose for yourself, well, people already do that in selecting a mate. They look for traits they consider positive, they don't need a eugenicist's help.
You really should read up on the history of eugenics, you might change your tune. It's one of those ideas that sounds good in principle, but it doesn't work and someone inevitably abuses the power it bestows.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
> So you're against education?
Don't be disingenuous. You know that's not what I mean.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
That's a nice speech but you completely failed to address either my question or my point.
Why does there have to be negative traits?
Yes I understand some group labeled some people as bad. Why do you feel we still have to do that. Why can't we just not do that?
You have this idea that we can only do it like they did it in the book. Why is that?
I find being offended by me offensive.
It's disingenuous to use overly broad quotes to summarize your position.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I don't know how I can be more clear - the central problem with the idea of eugenics is that someone can decide for you what traits are good or bad in a mate. Or, from from the proponents' point of view, that you can decide for someone else.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Oh, come on. You want to play games and pretend you don't understand, you can piss off.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
There are two types of people in the world, those who like Gattaca and those who ain't too bright.
It's NEVER lupus!
That's basically why it took them so long to figure it out. It's like those = instead of == mistakes you never make.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Clearly they did not count John Travolta's acting in Battlefield Earth as "least plausible."
Once Congress gets done with the Federal budget, the only people in DC who'll be able to afford hookers and blow are the lobbyists. They'll be the ones whom congressmen go to in order to get their fix, and the lobbyists will be all "What does a bitch do to get a fix, Congressman?" And it kind of goes all grindhouse 'sploitation-film bad from there.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
But it was far far away, so I think that cancels out the distant past stuff
thanks! that's actually my indian name... "running dog of imperialism"