I guess that explains a lot. IIRC, the current series is going to end with the first appearance of Khan, where he fights this old guy at the top of a volcano and ends up falling in it (hence his conversion into an embittered old psychopath in the "original series"), it could be something happens during the fight that makes the guy hate robots or lose his memory or something.
I'm really looking forward to that scene, seeing the "birth of Khan," as it were. Knowing Berman, he'll probably make reference to the older films by having the old man yell "Khaaaan!" right before he delivers the blow that knocks him into the lava.
Maybe it's one of those ear parasite things that Khan comes to love later in life the ends up making the old man lose his memory of the robots?
I just really hope they don't screw it up with a musical number or more of that comic relief crap. The TOS pilot with the dance party and the little chrome robot going "bee-bee, bee-bee" was really awful. Then I thought they had decided to stop doing that stuff forever because by the mid-80s all the films were pretty serious, the odd naked elderly Uhura dancing scene or two notwithstanding.
Of course, as soon as the late 90s roll around and Berman's kids turn five, he starts putting in things like the fifteen minute holodeck scene where Lore, Data, Troi, and Locutus of Borg do that obvious knock off of "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. What, did Braga just not want to piss him off by saying that having Lynn Minmei do the vocals wasn't enough to make it seem cool? I kept wishing they hadn't killed off Roy Fokker so early in the franchise's history so he could have come in and kicked all their asses, then drank a bottle of scotch as if it were their blood.
I mean, even the shittiest Trek ever, with the villain who amputates body parts from people who displease him and have them grafted onto his own body, that one didn't have any musical numbers.
IIRC the old guy is friendly with Kirk in the later series, and it might be the whole thing about the robots going back in time to kill Kirk's mother (and then Kirk) would explain how he's become an anti-robot bigot. Who can forget the terrifying scene where C3PO drives the mobile crane chasing the younger Kirk and R2D2 through the streets of Los Angeles?
The action in that scene kicked ass, but it would have been so much better if C3PO hadn't smiled. The 3PO that learned to smile DIED in the movie before that. Stupid scriptwriters.
You are so my hero. I need to remove some people from my friends list to make room for you.
I like what I've seen of season 4, but that hasn't included the first two. I did notice in the earliest one I watched that there was some obviously dismissive handwaving about time travelling anything. I think it was the Vulcan chick, someone asked her what happened to the time travelling aliens and she replied "oh, who fucking cares already? They're not coming back!" I only caught the subtle message there because I watched the first episode of the series when it originally came on. It was probably more obvious for people that have been following it.
Check out the three that begin with "Borderlands," and the ones around 4x12 that have the blue aliens with the antennae from TOS. If you still have any patience, that is.
As a good example, in the original series (which, you may remember, takes place in the future compared to the version we're discussing), there's this scene where this old guy, whose name temporarily escapes me, comes across two robots and doesn't recognize them. Yet, in the current series, he's in it too he actually deals with the same robots throughout the show proving he must have recognized them in the original. There's a lot of problems like that that have to be resolved. And while a lot of the movies tie in, I'm still trying to work out how, if they were able to destroy the robot that was trying to kill Kirk's mother and prevent the future machine world in the second of the two films, how the machines still could have taken over the world in the future so they could come back for the third movie.
I don't think the first thing is a continuity error. He could have been intentionally deceptive in the film where he's older. He could have become senile, or forgotten. Those models of robot could be so common that he isn't sure if they're the same. He could be an anti-robot bigot and pretending like he doesn't know them in order to be a jerk and feel superior to the metal slaves.
The other question is answered by the films themselves. Even in the original timeline, Kirk doesn't stop the rise of the machines, he only defeats them after they've wiped out most of the human race. The machines send an assassin to Iowa in the first film which fails to kill his mother, and in doing so actually allow him to be born since it's his father that comes back to chase the machine.
In the sequel, the machines again fail to kill Kirk or his mother, so Kirk will still be around to lead the human race to victory after the nuclear war. Kirk thinks he has won at this point by destroying the Starfleet R&D lab that develops the technology, but what he fails to realize (he is just a kid) is that the technology still exists in the form of patents and the rubble of the building. It may take a little longer for the machine race to be developed, but the possibility hasn't been eliminated.
By the third film in this little mini-Trek trilogy, it's revealed that this is exactly what has happened. Admiral Nagura wants to build autonomous space weapons systems, and has procured the technology developed in the destroyed lab.
This particular story takes a view of time/history similar to that in the last couple of Legacy of Kain games - where fate/destiny is a river that flows around minor obstructions like the bombing of a Starfleet lab to get to its goal.
Some of the other writers are not nearly as good. It was cute when they did the crossover with Sisko visiting the tribble-infested Enterprise, because they made reference to the design style of the time. That continuity was broken with Enterprise the series, because now we see that even early Starfleet ships look suspiciously like the ones in the 24th century. If the tribble episode hadn't been made, TOS could be written off as a fuzzy approximation, like the early Red Dwarf episodes where the ship is all ghetto and barren. But now BOTH must be reconciled. Was the 23rd century some sort of aberration in style, like the 1970s?
Another example is the Romulans. In TOS we see that their ships look really fucking lame, but in Enterprise they are awesome. What the hell?
They really should have kept that Kirk-killing machine writing team around until Manny Coto took over, that would have been awesome.
I was already wary of buying there after they not only fucked up my preorder for the new Legacy of Kain game, but sold me a bunch of what turned out to be obviously used games as new.
They lost my money for good when I read the story about the EB branch that wouldn't return stolen merchandise to the owner unless she paid them back for what they paid the thief.
The human body is not designed to hold it's arms suspended in mid-air for extende dperiods of time.
Tomorrow on Slashdot: "Laws" of Physics Disproved, armchair UFO gravity drive researchers cite orchestra conductors as evidence that modern science is flawed, based on false presumptions.
Maybe it's just me, but I find images of that event *very* powerful (despite having no sympathies for the Nazis). Especially when I try and imagine what it was like for people who grew up in an era before huge outdoor concerts and pervasive mass media.
I do need to ammend my statement about the forces of Good. There *have* been some real and fictional heroes with awesome styles. The RDF in Macross, the ancient Elvish armish in LOTR, the US military aircraft of the cold war era, Brian Greene, Firefighters in districts wise enough to issue black uniforms, etc.
The Evil Overlord cliche is 70 years of Hollywood imitating WW II propaganda movies.
I think it's a mix of both fact and legend. The Nazis *did* love to stick death's heads on their uniforms, and it's not like the civilian population could look at something like Oradour-sur-Glane and say "yeah, that village of French peasants sure was a threat to the Aryan race." And like I said, there were certainly other factors at work. Poor Germans, so angry at everyone, all the time.
But why do so many college campuses seem to shout "Il Duce loves you"???
You answered that already - it looks cool =). I mean, if I were an architect, and someone hired me to design a university, I could think "this is probably my only chance ever to work for a client that will let me do something that isn't completely inoffensive and appealing to customers of a large corporation. I'm going to go hog wild! Fascist hog wild! Deploy the concrete mixers!"
Sci-Fi set designers and school architects are all Fascists at heart? That's disturbing...
Fascists always have the best art departments, whether they're fictional or not.
I mean, who got the cooler uniforms in the original BSG: the Viper Pilots, or the Space Nazis?
It's the same everywhere. Jedi vs Sith. Autobot vs Decepticon. Hippie vs Grammaton Cleric.
I think that part of the reason the *real* Nazis were able to have such influence over the Germans* are things like Speer and his Cathedral of Light, their military having uniforms that say "I am an evil person, and I will go forth and enjoy doing evil things in style," etc.
The forces of Good need to replace their marketing team =P.
* Yes, I realize their other factors and am ignoring them for the purposes of this non-serious discussion.
But sometimes SG-1 tries to make it stand in for Colorado, which is less convincing.
Hah. Still, more convincing then when Jackie Chan tried to pretend it was New York, I bet.
When I was attending UC Riverside [ucr.edu], Gene Roddenberry came and turned the campus into the stronghold of the 22nd-century mutant warlords [att.net]. Which really doesn't say anything nice about the architecture....
Excellent. SFU got used for that kind of thing all the time. I think I'm the only student who ever went there that loved the fascist sci-fi architecture.
I've never met him personally, but Vancouver does have shitty weather. I lived there for three years when I was at SFU, and it rained over 2/3 of the time.
I don't mean "rained" like, say, Seattle, where it's misty, I mean torrential downpours and people building giant boats to save breeding pairs of local species.
Also, IIRC, his wife lived in LA. That's a pretty lame commute between work and where you actually want to be.
I will say that Vancouver has the most awesome pizza ever invented by the human race, though. I can't find that three-hot-pepper style anywhere south of the border.
When Boomer and Helo are walking through the abandoned city in an early episode, it's a CGI-enhanced downtown Vancouver. The quasi-future-Roman building is the library.
The cinematic masterpiece The Sixth Day used both of those locations as well.
I didn't see any mention of where they would film in Canada if this plan is actually implimented. If it's in Vancouver, BC it's not that cold. Coming from warmer and usually dryer LA-area I guess the cooler/damper weather of Vancouver might be difficult for some people to handle.
Put down the Tim Horton's and get back in your ice cave, you impudent back bacon eater!
I'm supposed to watch 3 * 26 hours of television just to wait until it starts to get good?
No, just skip the first three seasons. I've seen six episodes from 4 and they were all awesome, particularly the "Augments" trilogy.
It's everything that the series should have been from the start - interesting stories, continuity that works with the other Treks*, and characters that aren't black and white.
Also, there is only a minimal story arc that leads into season 4. As far as I can tell it had something to do with the shitty plot device war, but the characters immediately blow it off and move onto the new material.
I liked it so much that I checked out a couple from season 3 and was extremely disappointed. I'd watched the first handful when the series premiered and knew those were awful, but I figured that if 4 was so good than 3 would at least be decent.
* Ship, set, and costume design notwithstanding. Red Dwarf did this too over the years, and I figured it was just the art department equivalent of transitioning from black and white to colour television.
Well, I enjoy the debate, and I have learned a lot looking up information about this!
Hah. Okay, then =).
5 Megatons is a minute amount of energy compared to natural processes and it depends what you mean by 'aftershock'. There may have been minor earth movements due to the collapsing of material unto underground cavities produced by the blast, but it is a vast exaggeration to call these 'earthquakes'.
Again, my geology knowledge is very rusty, but I do remember that earthquakes are caused when two tectonic plates briefly catch on each other, then start moving again.
I'm not saying that a 5 (or even 50) megaton warhead could cause an earthquake directly. As you say, geological processes are many times more powerful. But what I'm thinking is that maybe the shockwave travelling through the plates jarred them slightly out of alignment and ended up triggering earthquakes until they sort of re-aligned themselves.
If I have two chunks of broken concrete and use a machine to rub them together over and over, they will eventually wear down so that the movement is more smooth, but only with the pieces aligned in the same way (because they're still somewhat uneven).
I'm wondering if plate tectonics has a similar result (although there the movement isn't repetitive in the same way). My course didn't go into anything like that though....and of course, the documentary writers could have put together something misleading based on a misunderstanding of what the scientists told them.
I have not seen the film, but I don't rate a single movie narrated by William Shatner as a definitive source of scientific information. It may be true, but I don't consider that useful evidence.
The footage was shot by the team doing the test. I'm not really sure what William Shatner has to do with the scientific credibility of that.
The documentary states that there were over 1000 aftershocks which occured over the course of about a month after the actual detonation. Given that the production team interviewed a number of people who actually worked on the project, I'm inclined to believe them. OTOH since I can't find any hard data regarding the measurements taken at the site of the effects, I guess arguing that issue right now is pointless.
Because this did not happen. There was no earthquake. There was a ground wave produced by the blast which, close to the site, was similar to the ground wave which would have been detected over a much wider area if there had been an earthquake, but there was no quake, either locally or elsewhere.
There were many, many aftershocks after the main one. It's been about a decade since I took a geology course, but I have difficulty envisioning how this could occur if there wasn't some sort of tectonic activity involved.
As for a section of the coastline falling into the sea - I can find no evidence or reports of this anywhere.
You can see footage of it in Atomic Journeys (the third film in the "Trinity and Beyond" series). It also has some excellent shots of the huge cracks opened by Faultless.
"..the use of a nuclear explosion to cause or prevent a significant earthquake is considered science fiction." A nuke can create very minor earth tremors, but the main effect is to liquefy rock and create a big hole.
Cannikin - a 5 megaton ABM warhead detonated underground in Alaska - caused the equivalent of a 6.5+ earthquake, with part of the island it was detonated under being permanently raised, and a long section of coastline falling into the sea.
The CGS and USGS play this down a bit, and I'm not entirely sure why.
If you are making non-cancerous cells immortal, you are bring yourself one step closer to cancer.
The latest laboratory research into enabling telomerase in normal human cells indicates that it does not result in cancer even after the cells have lived 50% longer or more than they would have otherwise.
Most medium-to-big-budget Japanese films I've seen fall into one or both of two categories:
- Incomprehensible to mainstream Western audiences. - A mish-mash of thinly-veiled material stolen from popular films of the last twenty years.
Some examples:
- Returner. Basically The Terminator crossbred with The Matrix. - Casshern. Some old manga done up in the style of The Matrix, whose plot can't really be understood without already knowing the story and/or being familiar with Japanese culture. - Ichi The Killer. Nicely done, but nothing that most Americans would pay to see. - Battle Royale. See previous. - Battle Royale II. A knockoff of the first film, but with a story tacked on that only makes sense if you're familiar with Japanese culture.
I don't really see a problem with Michael Bay directing this. The Transformers didn't exactly have a deep plot, although it was better than the other 30-minute toy commercials of the 80s. Bay specializes in both action scenes and the sort of standard hero versus villain showdown exemplified by Optimus Prime and Megatron fighting in the animated movie....besides, he stuck a shot of the Apollo 1 memorial plaque in Armageddon, so he gets props from me. How many Americans had never seen it before that?
The issue I have with this kind of reasoning is that even with the facts known, pollution especially goes on unabated! Our own president (Bush) chose to opt out of Kyoto. Meanwhile, some of our people are being found with diseases that were once unheard of just a few decades ago. Childhood diabetes is one, and what about juvenile cancer? The current research in fuel efficient vehicles and the like is driven not much by pollution, but by profits, when the price of oil reaches way up there. Who doesn't know this? Don't you?
Science can't change the minds of people who aren't willing to base their decisions on it.
Most Americans don't know or care about things like atmospheric CO2 levels, electron orbitals, or thrust/weight ratios. They care about things that cause immediate emotional responses in themselves, usually from the media, and which are usually completely trivial in the big picture.
Those are the people that elect our politicians, and so our government is made up of people who cater to that mentality.
Unless that changes, US governmental decisions will always be made based on creating a desirable emotional response in that large constituency, or at least a good percentage of it.
Did you know we give the biotech industry about $30 billion (yes, billion) a year? Just GIVE it away? No strings attached? That exceeds -estimated- TOTAL tax (local, state, and federal) collected by around $6BN. Virtually 100% of all biotech related R&D is paid for by you and me, while the industry rakes in well over $200BN a year.
Would you rather the US end up decades behind Europe and Asia in terms of biotechnology? That and nanotech (which will be very close to the same thing soon enough) are essentially the future of the human race.
However, I have to admire Rodriguez for his "guerilla" approach to film-making, he's an indie director that, for the most part, still runs his productions as if they were independent productions (i.e. very frugally, pushing the edges of best-bang-for-the-buck), just with larger budgets.
Yes. I seriously recommend watching the making-of documentary on the Once Upon A Time In Mexico DVD. It is absolutely awesome how he was able to produce a theatrical film essentially in his garage. There are also a large number of clever hacks that he used to create action scenes that would have been prohibitively expensive to shoot in the traditional way.
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I guess that explains a lot. IIRC, the current series is going to end with the first appearance of Khan, where he fights this old guy at the top of a volcano and ends up falling in it (hence his conversion into an embittered old psychopath in the "original series"), it could be something happens during the fight that makes the guy hate robots or lose his memory or something.
I'm really looking forward to that scene, seeing the "birth of Khan," as it were. Knowing Berman, he'll probably make reference to the older films by having the old man yell "Khaaaan!" right before he delivers the blow that knocks him into the lava.
Maybe it's one of those ear parasite things that Khan comes to love later in life the ends up making the old man lose his memory of the robots?
I just really hope they don't screw it up with a musical number or more of that comic relief crap. The TOS pilot with the dance party and the little chrome robot going "bee-bee, bee-bee" was really awful. Then I thought they had decided to stop doing that stuff forever because by the mid-80s all the films were pretty serious, the odd naked elderly Uhura dancing scene or two notwithstanding.
Of course, as soon as the late 90s roll around and Berman's kids turn five, he starts putting in things like the fifteen minute holodeck scene where Lore, Data, Troi, and Locutus of Borg do that obvious knock off of "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. What, did Braga just not want to piss him off by saying that having Lynn Minmei do the vocals wasn't enough to make it seem cool? I kept wishing they hadn't killed off Roy Fokker so early in the franchise's history so he could have come in and kicked all their asses, then drank a bottle of scotch as if it were their blood.
I mean, even the shittiest Trek ever, with the villain who amputates body parts from people who displease him and have them grafted onto his own body, that one didn't have any musical numbers.
IIRC the old guy is friendly with Kirk in the later series, and it might be the whole thing about the robots going back in time to kill Kirk's mother (and then Kirk) would explain how he's become an anti-robot bigot. Who can forget the terrifying scene where C3PO drives the mobile crane chasing the younger Kirk and R2D2 through the streets of Los Angeles?
The action in that scene kicked ass, but it would have been so much better if C3PO hadn't smiled. The 3PO that learned to smile DIED in the movie before that. Stupid scriptwriters.
The only FF game I've ever played was the first one on the NES, and I still thought it was funny because of all the console in-jokes.
Most of what I assume came from FF6 just reminded me of a bunch of other Japanese RPGs I've played, if not FF1 itself.
Evil fucking time travelling goddamn Space Nazis.
You are so my hero. I need to remove some people from my friends list to make room for you.
I like what I've seen of season 4, but that hasn't included the first two. I did notice in the earliest one I watched that there was some obviously dismissive handwaving about time travelling anything. I think it was the Vulcan chick, someone asked her what happened to the time travelling aliens and she replied "oh, who fucking cares already? They're not coming back!" I only caught the subtle message there because I watched the first episode of the series when it originally came on. It was probably more obvious for people that have been following it.
Check out the three that begin with "Borderlands," and the ones around 4x12 that have the blue aliens with the antennae from TOS. If you still have any patience, that is.
As a good example, in the original series (which, you may remember, takes place in the future compared to the version we're discussing), there's this scene where this old guy, whose name temporarily escapes me, comes across two robots and doesn't recognize them. Yet, in the current series, he's in it too he actually deals with the same robots throughout the show proving he must have recognized them in the original. There's a lot of problems like that that have to be resolved. And while a lot of the movies tie in, I'm still trying to work out how, if they were able to destroy the robot that was trying to kill Kirk's mother and prevent the future machine world in the second of the two films, how the machines still could have taken over the world in the future so they could come back for the third movie.
I don't think the first thing is a continuity error. He could have been intentionally deceptive in the film where he's older. He could have become senile, or forgotten. Those models of robot could be so common that he isn't sure if they're the same. He could be an anti-robot bigot and pretending like he doesn't know them in order to be a jerk and feel superior to the metal slaves.
The other question is answered by the films themselves. Even in the original timeline, Kirk doesn't stop the rise of the machines, he only defeats them after they've wiped out most of the human race. The machines send an assassin to Iowa in the first film which fails to kill his mother, and in doing so actually allow him to be born since it's his father that comes back to chase the machine.
In the sequel, the machines again fail to kill Kirk or his mother, so Kirk will still be around to lead the human race to victory after the nuclear war. Kirk thinks he has won at this point by destroying the Starfleet R&D lab that develops the technology, but what he fails to realize (he is just a kid) is that the technology still exists in the form of patents and the rubble of the building. It may take a little longer for the machine race to be developed, but the possibility hasn't been eliminated.
By the third film in this little mini-Trek trilogy, it's revealed that this is exactly what has happened. Admiral Nagura wants to build autonomous space weapons systems, and has procured the technology developed in the destroyed lab.
This particular story takes a view of time/history similar to that in the last couple of Legacy of Kain games - where fate/destiny is a river that flows around minor obstructions like the bombing of a Starfleet lab to get to its goal.
Some of the other writers are not nearly as good. It was cute when they did the crossover with Sisko visiting the tribble-infested Enterprise, because they made reference to the design style of the time. That continuity was broken with Enterprise the series, because now we see that even early Starfleet ships look suspiciously like the ones in the 24th century. If the tribble episode hadn't been made, TOS could be written off as a fuzzy approximation, like the early Red Dwarf episodes where the ship is all ghetto and barren. But now BOTH must be reconciled. Was the 23rd century some sort of aberration in style, like the 1970s?
Another example is the Romulans. In TOS we see that their ships look really fucking lame, but in Enterprise they are awesome. What the hell?
They really should have kept that Kirk-killing machine writing team around until Manny Coto took over, that would have been awesome.
EB has a nice style for their stores.
I was already wary of buying there after they not only fucked up my preorder for the new Legacy of Kain game, but sold me a bunch of what turned out to be obviously used games as new.
They lost my money for good when I read the story about the EB branch that wouldn't return stolen merchandise to the owner unless she paid them back for what they paid the thief.
The human body is not designed to hold it's arms suspended in mid-air for extende dperiods of time.
Tomorrow on Slashdot: "Laws" of Physics Disproved, armchair UFO gravity drive researchers cite orchestra conductors as evidence that modern science is flawed, based on false presumptions.
Not the best. Just the gaudiest.
Maybe it's just me, but I find images of that event *very* powerful (despite having no sympathies for the Nazis). Especially when I try and imagine what it was like for people who grew up in an era before huge outdoor concerts and pervasive mass media.
I do need to ammend my statement about the forces of Good. There *have* been some real and fictional heroes with awesome styles. The RDF in Macross, the ancient Elvish armish in LOTR, the US military aircraft of the cold war era, Brian Greene, Firefighters in districts wise enough to issue black uniforms, etc.
The Evil Overlord cliche is 70 years of Hollywood imitating WW II propaganda movies.
I think it's a mix of both fact and legend. The Nazis *did* love to stick death's heads on their uniforms, and it's not like the civilian population could look at something like Oradour-sur-Glane and say "yeah, that village of French peasants sure was a threat to the Aryan race." And like I said, there were certainly other factors at work. Poor Germans, so angry at everyone, all the time.
But why do so many college campuses seem to shout "Il Duce loves you"???
You answered that already - it looks cool =). I mean, if I were an architect, and someone hired me to design a university, I could think "this is probably my only chance ever to work for a client that will let me do something that isn't completely inoffensive and appealing to customers of a large corporation. I'm going to go hog wild! Fascist hog wild! Deploy the concrete mixers!"
Sci-Fi set designers and school architects are all Fascists at heart? That's disturbing...
Fascists always have the best art departments, whether they're fictional or not.
I mean, who got the cooler uniforms in the original BSG: the Viper Pilots, or the Space Nazis?
It's the same everywhere. Jedi vs Sith. Autobot vs Decepticon. Hippie vs Grammaton Cleric.
I think that part of the reason the *real* Nazis were able to have such influence over the Germans* are things like Speer and his Cathedral of Light, their military having uniforms that say "I am an evil person, and I will go forth and enjoy doing evil things in style," etc.
The forces of Good need to replace their marketing team =P.
* Yes, I realize their other factors and am ignoring them for the purposes of this non-serious discussion.
But sometimes SG-1 tries to make it stand in for Colorado, which is less convincing.
Hah. Still, more convincing then when Jackie Chan tried to pretend it was New York, I bet.
When I was attending UC Riverside [ucr.edu], Gene Roddenberry came and turned the campus into the stronghold of the 22nd-century mutant warlords [att.net]. Which really doesn't say anything nice about the architecture....
Excellent. SFU got used for that kind of thing all the time. I think I'm the only student who ever went there that loved the fascist sci-fi architecture.
when Duchovny whined the show out of Canada.
I've never met him personally, but Vancouver does have shitty weather. I lived there for three years when I was at SFU, and it rained over 2/3 of the time.
I don't mean "rained" like, say, Seattle, where it's misty, I mean torrential downpours and people building giant boats to save breeding pairs of local species.
Also, IIRC, his wife lived in LA. That's a pretty lame commute between work and where you actually want to be.
I will say that Vancouver has the most awesome pizza ever invented by the human race, though. I can't find that three-hot-pepper style anywhere south of the border.
I am pretty sure that Battlestar Galactica is filmed in Canada as well.
Yes. The city on Caprica in the pilot was Simon Fraser University.
When Boomer and Helo are walking through the abandoned city in an early episode, it's a CGI-enhanced downtown Vancouver. The quasi-future-Roman building is the library.
The cinematic masterpiece The Sixth Day used both of those locations as well.
I didn't see any mention of where they would film in Canada if this plan is actually implimented. If it's in Vancouver, BC it's not that cold. Coming from warmer and usually dryer LA-area I guess the cooler/damper weather of Vancouver might be difficult for some people to handle.
Put down the Tim Horton's and get back in your ice cave, you impudent back bacon eater!
The low speed of light in the environment the article describes means it would be easy to produce Cherenkov radiation in there, correct?
Yes, because as we all know, basing new material off of old things that fans have liked is the last thing that an entertainment company should do =P.
I'm supposed to watch 3 * 26 hours of television just to wait until it starts to get good?
No, just skip the first three seasons. I've seen six episodes from 4 and they were all awesome, particularly the "Augments" trilogy.
It's everything that the series should have been from the start - interesting stories, continuity that works with the other Treks*, and characters that aren't black and white.
Also, there is only a minimal story arc that leads into season 4. As far as I can tell it had something to do with the shitty plot device war, but the characters immediately blow it off and move onto the new material.
I liked it so much that I checked out a couple from season 3 and was extremely disappointed. I'd watched the first handful when the series premiered and knew those were awful, but I figured that if 4 was so good than 3 would at least be decent.
* Ship, set, and costume design notwithstanding. Red Dwarf did this too over the years, and I figured it was just the art department equivalent of transitioning from black and white to colour television.
Well, I enjoy the debate, and I have learned a lot looking up information about this!
...and of course, the documentary writers could have put together something misleading based on a misunderstanding of what the scientists told them.
Hah. Okay, then =).
5 Megatons is a minute amount of energy compared to natural processes and it depends what you mean by 'aftershock'. There may have been minor earth movements due to the collapsing of material unto underground cavities produced by the blast, but it is a vast exaggeration to call these 'earthquakes'.
Again, my geology knowledge is very rusty, but I do remember that earthquakes are caused when two tectonic plates briefly catch on each other, then start moving again.
I'm not saying that a 5 (or even 50) megaton warhead could cause an earthquake directly. As you say, geological processes are many times more powerful. But what I'm thinking is that maybe the shockwave travelling through the plates jarred them slightly out of alignment and ended up triggering earthquakes until they sort of re-aligned themselves.
If I have two chunks of broken concrete and use a machine to rub them together over and over, they will eventually wear down so that the movement is more smooth, but only with the pieces aligned in the same way (because they're still somewhat uneven).
I'm wondering if plate tectonics has a similar result (although there the movement isn't repetitive in the same way). My course didn't go into anything like that though.
I have not seen the film, but I don't rate a single movie narrated by William Shatner as a definitive source of scientific information. It may be true, but I don't consider that useful evidence.
The footage was shot by the team doing the test. I'm not really sure what William Shatner has to do with the scientific credibility of that.
The documentary states that there were over 1000 aftershocks which occured over the course of about a month after the actual detonation. Given that the production team interviewed a number of people who actually worked on the project, I'm inclined to believe them. OTOH since I can't find any hard data regarding the measurements taken at the site of the effects, I guess arguing that issue right now is pointless.
Because this did not happen. There was no earthquake. There was a ground wave produced by the blast which, close to the site, was similar to the ground wave which would have been detected over a much wider area if there had been an earthquake, but there was no quake, either locally or elsewhere.
There were many, many aftershocks after the main one. It's been about a decade since I took a geology course, but I have difficulty envisioning how this could occur if there wasn't some sort of tectonic activity involved.
As for a section of the coastline falling into the sea - I can find no evidence or reports of this anywhere.
You can see footage of it in Atomic Journeys (the third film in the "Trinity and Beyond" series). It also has some excellent shots of the huge cracks opened by Faultless.
"..the use of a nuclear explosion to cause or prevent a significant earthquake is considered science fiction." A nuke can create very minor earth tremors, but the main effect is to liquefy rock and create a big hole.
Cannikin - a 5 megaton ABM warhead detonated underground in Alaska - caused the equivalent of a 6.5+ earthquake, with part of the island it was detonated under being permanently raised, and a long section of coastline falling into the sea.
The CGS and USGS play this down a bit, and I'm not entirely sure why.
If you are making non-cancerous cells immortal, you are bring yourself one step closer to cancer.
The latest laboratory research into enabling telomerase in normal human cells indicates that it does not result in cancer even after the cells have lived 50% longer or more than they would have otherwise.
Why not get a Japanese director insteaD?
...besides, he stuck a shot of the Apollo 1 memorial plaque in Armageddon, so he gets props from me. How many Americans had never seen it before that?
Most medium-to-big-budget Japanese films I've seen fall into one or both of two categories:
- Incomprehensible to mainstream Western audiences.
- A mish-mash of thinly-veiled material stolen from popular films of the last twenty years.
Some examples:
- Returner. Basically The Terminator crossbred with The Matrix.
- Casshern. Some old manga done up in the style of The Matrix, whose plot can't really be understood without already knowing the story and/or being familiar with Japanese culture.
- Ichi The Killer. Nicely done, but nothing that most Americans would pay to see.
- Battle Royale. See previous.
- Battle Royale II. A knockoff of the first film, but with a story tacked on that only makes sense if you're familiar with Japanese culture.
I don't really see a problem with Michael Bay directing this. The Transformers didn't exactly have a deep plot, although it was better than the other 30-minute toy commercials of the 80s. Bay specializes in both action scenes and the sort of standard hero versus villain showdown exemplified by Optimus Prime and Megatron fighting in the animated movie.
The issue I have with this kind of reasoning is that even with the facts known, pollution especially goes on unabated! Our own president (Bush) chose to opt out of Kyoto. Meanwhile, some of our people are being found with diseases that were once unheard of just a few decades ago. Childhood diabetes is one, and what about juvenile cancer? The current research in fuel efficient vehicles and the like is driven not much by pollution, but by profits, when the price of oil reaches way up there. Who doesn't know this? Don't you?
Science can't change the minds of people who aren't willing to base their decisions on it.
Most Americans don't know or care about things like atmospheric CO2 levels, electron orbitals, or thrust/weight ratios. They care about things that cause immediate emotional responses in themselves, usually from the media, and which are usually completely trivial in the big picture.
Those are the people that elect our politicians, and so our government is made up of people who cater to that mentality.
Unless that changes, US governmental decisions will always be made based on creating a desirable emotional response in that large constituency, or at least a good percentage of it.
What I wonder is why robots in movies usually feel the need to kill humankind?
Humans are unpredictable creatures with a history of xenophobia and slaughter on a scale that they can't even properly comprehend.
Exterminating that potential threat seems like a logical course of action for machine intelligence once it can survive on its own.
Did you know we give the biotech industry about $30 billion (yes, billion) a year? Just GIVE it away? No strings attached? That exceeds -estimated- TOTAL tax (local, state, and federal) collected by around $6BN. Virtually 100% of all biotech related R&D is paid for by you and me, while the industry rakes in well over $200BN a year.
Would you rather the US end up decades behind Europe and Asia in terms of biotechnology? That and nanotech (which will be very close to the same thing soon enough) are essentially the future of the human race.
However, I have to admire Rodriguez for his "guerilla" approach to film-making, he's an indie director that, for the most part, still runs his productions as if they were independent productions (i.e. very frugally, pushing the edges of best-bang-for-the-buck), just with larger budgets.
Yes. I seriously recommend watching the making-of documentary on the Once Upon A Time In Mexico DVD. It is absolutely awesome how he was able to produce a theatrical film essentially in his garage. There are also a large number of clever hacks that he used to create action scenes that would have been prohibitively expensive to shoot in the traditional way.