So they're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still? So what? I have more respect for Keanu Reeves after seeing the recent film A Scanner Darkly, and anyway he's much better an actor than Will Ferrell, who did such a good job in Stranger than Fiction to my surprise.
But why angst over a remake? The 1950s version was wooden, didactic and naive. Michael Rennie played it like a cheap TV actor. Sure it was fun and imaginative in its premise, but whoa, dude, it ain't art. So I say go for it. There are only a dozen or so SF plots anyway, so there's no harm in redoing it.
But then, I also thought that the remake of War of the Worlds wasn't bad, despite its lead actor.
On a more topical note, John Hawks is asking the "five best scientists of all time" meme that's doing the rounds, but he leaves the fifth place blank for us to answer. I agree with his choices, so I will add the fifth - the greatest mind of the twentieth century, in a century of great minds, was Alan Turing.
Turing defined the notion of computation, imagined the logic of digital computers, built one of the first of them, basically saved Britain from the U boats by breaking the Enigma code, started AI research, and contributed the Church-Turing thesis. What more can one ask of a genius? He has had more impact on our lives than anyone else, period.
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Actually, it was a Post Office engineer called Thomas H "Tommy" Flowers that built Colossus. Mostly with his own money, too.
Memory fails, but IIRC Colossus wasn't a full digital computer. I was referring to the one they built at Manchester (I once knew one of Turing's assistants there, a fellow named Trevor Pearcey).
> But why angst over a remake?
Easy. Because we have to be able to sing "Michael Rennie was ill the day The Earth Stood Still".
A dozen? Hmmm, let's see...
Super-intelligent AI/alien probe/computer takes over ship/planet/galaxy. Smart captain crashes not-so-smart-as-it-thought-it-was AI by challenging it to resolve paradox/compute value of pi to nth decimal place/ sing "Daisy". Cue showers of sparks and clouds of smoke.
Captain falls in love with beautiful alien girl (BAG). Captain loses BAG. Captain finds/rescues BAG. Captain and BAG live happily ever after (movie version)/BAG gets 'red shirt' treatment, leaving captain free for further amorous adventures (TV version)
Ummmm...
OK, I just assumed you were talking about Colossus...
Colossus was digital, electronic, could store programs (unlike ENIAC) ... but was not Turing complete, even though Alan Turing was working at Bletchley park at the time. He worked on the design of ACE (1947, I think), the first Turing-complete stored program computer designed and built in Britain. (He left the project before it was built, however.) (Babbage's difference engine No. 2 was designed in Britain, long before, but the physical machine was not completed. A complete difference engine No. 2 was not built until 1991.)
Oh, by the way, Turing was convicted of 'acts of gross indecency' (or something like that) in 1952, after he admitted having sex with a man. His security clearance was revoked, terminating his participation in cryptography and computing, he was forced to take oestrogen injections, and in 1954 he was found dead of cyanide poisoning, mostly likely suicide.
Homophobia (likely religiously inspired) destroyed one of history's greatest computing minds.
I suppose that most readers of this blog took first year Chem in which they were introduced to 'kinetics', the rates of reactions. Turing was interested in the topic and derived the equations for the production of stripes and spots in the animal kingdom: leopards, zebra and so on. The equations are complicated and involve a deal of feedback, activation and inhibition. Philip Ball covers the topic in his masterly book, "The Self-Made Tapestry, Pattern Formation in Nature."
Turing was at least 20 years ahead of the rest.
Indeed, his was a tragic tale, a dark blemish on a country that has produced men like Newton and Darwin. I simply cannot imagine a country being more ungreatful to one of the greatest minds it ever produced than how Turing was treated. It is one of the great historical travesties.
Mr Hawks' list doesn't have a single Renaissance scientist so I wish to nominate Vesalius who with his book De Fabrica almost single handedly revolutionised the science of medicine. It took a couple of hundred years before the changes had a real effect but Mr Wesals started the ball rolling.
The world's first programmable Turing-complete computer was build in Germany by Konrad Zuse in 1941. The first one in Britain was the EDSAC built in Cambridge by Maurice Wilks in 1949 the Ace was finished later.
Babbage's Analytical engine was never fully constructed in the 19th century but a version of his Difference engine was manufactured in Sweden by Per George Scheutz from 1855 onwards.
Hey, I never knew about Zuse. But let's also not forget Stanley Jevon's "logic piano". I doubt it was Turing complete, though.
I think the terms of reference John set himself were modern scientists. But let's not allow that debate to spill over into this thread...
Alan Turing might still be alive today. Imagine what he'd have achieved.
The remake of The War of the Worlds was okay to pretty good, but did you see the horrible travesty of the re-made The Time Machine? Ugh.
Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds was awful - and it wasn't Tom Cruise's fault.
The first incident shown involving the Martian attack featured, amid much other chaos, a spectacular rupture of an urban water main. Cruise survives all this and makes his way home, a few blocks away - then promptly goes into the bathroom to wash his face.
The internal self-contradictions just accumulate from there. If TWotW demonstrates Spielberg's sense of consistency, he ought to take over the director's chair for Expelled.
Best line in a science fiction movie, "I'm a quantum mechanic". Boys and girls, who can tell me what movie it's from?
I'm going to guess it's "Buckaroo Bonzai across the 8th Dimension"?
And I like the actor in the latest Time Machine, but it was pretty lackluster, I agree.
Hawks is asking for scientists who had the greatest impact. One of my choices would be the ancient Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta. If he may not have discovered the "zero", he was the first to systematically study it and "popularize" it. Where would we be without it?
Another one who attracts my attention is Jules Henri Poincaré who influenced many physics and mathematics fields, topology to relativity to chaos.
English language sources on the history of computing tend to be rather bad on Konrad Zuse. I met his son Horst when we both held lectures in a series on the history of computing "Von Abakus bis Quantum Computer" (I did Boole and my friend Rüdiger did Turing). Horst is a software engineer who teaches at the T U in Berlin, he does a really good lecture on his father's life and work but is also not free of prejudice, he denies that the Colossus was a computer.
Let's hear it for the Stanhope Calculator.
Michael Faraday made discoveries in the field of electricity and magnetism which led to magnetic deflection of streams of electrons (old style TV picture tubes and computer monitors), electric motors, generators, and transformers. Surely we would be in a different world without these? Maxwell gets (and deserves) the credit for systematizing these facts and others in a coherent theory, but the discoveries came first, and Faraday made many of them. Faraday also did wonderful work in chemistry, but that's another post.
The movie is "Forbidden Planet".
Damn! I guess I don't know the classics as well as I should.
Wait for that to be the next Hollywood remake.
Re: #3
I guess nobody caught the quote. We geeks seemto be far more into SF than musical films/theater but I'm an exception and I know it's from one of my favorites: Rocky Horror Show/Rocky Horror Picture Show. The phrase "Keanu Reeves was ill the day The Earth Stood Still" breaks the metric from "Science Fiction/Double Feature".
Ribozyme wrote:
"I guess nobody caught the quote. We geeks seem to be far more into SF than musical films/theater but I'm an exception and I know it's from one of my favorites: Rocky Horror Show/Rocky Horror Picture Show. The phrase "Keanu Reeves was ill the day The Earth Stood Still" breaks the metric from "Science Fiction/Double Feature"."
Jinkies, it was the first thing I thought of, but you could fix it a little by making it, "Well, Keanu was ill the day the Earth stood still..." and it would still scan okay. Besides, nobody's going to wonder who "Keanu" was; my gosh, who else IS there?
As for Turing, I very much enjoyed Alan Hodges' biography, which to my mind captured a great deal of the emotional agony Turing labored under.
Finally, I wonder if we might one day recognize the impact of Garrett Hardin, perhaps solely on the basis of the "tragedy of the commons" concept he so lucidly described. Of course he was over the top about some things, but the increasingly obvious relevance of his "commons" analysis is inescapable.
Maybe because it's late here and I'm irritable, but I'm a bit tired of lists of "great men" who did some clever thinking. Not that I want to take anything away from their accomplishments. It's just that it pulls the focus away from what's important toward what an individual happened to accomplish.
For example, who gets credit for the science of ecology or ecological economics? Or the recognition of anthropogenetic global warming or limits to growth? Then there is the work done in sustainable agriculture and sustainability in general. With concerns of today in mind, seems to me that even a paritial contribution to fields like these should count more toward a list of greatest hits than shining the light on the amazing individual feats of great men.
Perhaps after getting some sleep I can play along more in the spirit of John's post.