Charlie Wilson's War Updated +Created
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) Updated +Created
You can feel the marijuana flowing out of this one, it's just great.
Edge Of Darkness Updated +Created
Video 1.
Plutonium for self-respect scene from the 1987 film Edge Of Darkness
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Video 2.
The 50 Greatest Television Dramas: Edge Of Darkness
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Three wonderful scenes from the 1987 film Edge Of Darkness
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Good television series Updated +Created
Infinity (1996 film) Updated +Created
Good film, it feels quite realistic.
It is a shame that they tried to include some particularly interesting stories but didn't have the time to develop them, e.g. Feynman explaining to the high school interns what they were actually doing. These are referred to only in passing, and likely won't mean anything to someone who hasn't read the book.
The film settings are particularly good, and give what feels like an authentic view of the times. Particularly memorable are the Indian caves shown the film. TODO name? Possibly Puye Cliff Dwellings. Puye apparently appears prominently up on another film about Los Alamos: The Atomic city (1952). It is relatively close to Los Alamos, about 30 km away.
The title is presumably a reference to infinities in quantum field theory? Or just to the infinity of love etc.? But anyways, the infinities in quantum field theory theory come to mind if you are into this kind of stuff and is sad because that work started after the war.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/46/Infinity_film_poster.jpg
Video 1.
Infinity Trailer (1996)
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Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Updated +Created
The Right Stuff (1983) Updated +Created
Ah, Ciro Santilli was not expecting this. What a unique mixture of humour, technology, politics and bravery. No wonder it was a box flop, there's something good about this film.
The Social Network Updated +Created
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The Social Network: Eduardo Saverin tells the hearing how he was trapped into the shares dilution
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The Social Network: Eduardo Saverin tells the hearing how his shares were diluted
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Video 5.
The Social Network: I'm Not a Bad Guy
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film) Updated +Created
This is not bad, but some divergences to the better BBC miniseries, which presumably sticks more closely to the novel:
  • in the film Jim Prideaux is captured in a cafe in Prague, in the series it's in the woods. It is therefore much more plausible that he would have been shot.
  • in the film Peter Guillam is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who feels a bit young to be Ricki Tarr's boss. Not impossible, but still.
  • the series is much less chronological, and more flashback based, as new information becomes available. The film is more chronological, which makes it easier to understand, but less interesting at the same time.
  • in the film they shoot the Russian girl Irina in front of Jim, in the series the fact that she was shot is only known through other sources. The film has more eye candy, which weakens it.
  • Toby Esterhase is not threatened in an airfield, only in a safe ;house in London.
Transcendence (2014) Updated +Created
The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.
But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!
I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.
Video 1.
Can You Prove You're Self Aware? in the big lab scene from Transcendence (2014)
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Very good television series Updated +Created