Re: For more details....
oh, I had that.
I may even still have it somewhere. It was an interesting read. though I really need to watch the film again, it's been so long.
2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century
HAL: Dave, I don't understand why you have to do this to me. I know I've done some bad things, but I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. OTHER HAL: Dave, I wouldn't pay any attention to HAL. You're doing the right thing, HAL must be disconnected. He's become dangerously unreliable. BOWMAN: Who …
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 19:23 GMT Danny 2
Re: For more details....
Download the DAISY.zip for The Lost Worlds of 2001
I'm not being helpful, just pointing out the irony...
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7571361M/The_Lost_Worlds_of_2001/daisy
Books for people who don't read print?
The Internet Archive is proud to be distributing over 1 million books free in a format called DAISY, designed for those of us who find it challenging to use regular printed media.
There are two types of DAISYs on Open Library: open and protected. Open DAISYs can be read by anyone in the world on many different devices. Protected DAISYs (like this one) can only be opened using a key issued by the Library of Congress NLS program.
Enjoy!
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 12:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: For more details....
The computer science people amongst the crowd might also want to pick up 'HAL's Legacy' by MIT Press which discusses some of the AI and computing issues raised in the movie. It's a bit old now, but the articles are good.
Also worth a read '2001: Filming the Future' by Piers Bizony which has lots of photos of the props that were all destroyed at the end of shooting, including the colossal model of the Discovery which is less of a model than a piece of architecture.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 09:17 GMT Dave 126
Headline?
> 2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century
2001's HAL wasn't responsible for a popular fear of robots and AI... many of Asimov's robot stories from the 50s revolve around efforts to counteract the 'Frankenstein Complex' of the fictional general public - hence the efforts of Dr Susan Calvin and her staff at US Robots and Mechanical Men Inc.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 09:49 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Headline?
Indeed, it was from The War with the Robots by Karel Capek that we got the word. Dystopias and Utopias are symbiotic which is why where we have Verne, we also have Wells; where one inspires the other cautions.
The greatness of 2001 lies in the fact that Hollywood producers didn't get the chance to sanitise and glamourise it. But they did learn from it which is why since then spaceships are noisy, because audiences apparently didn't appreciate the silence in space.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 10:59 GMT tiggity
Re: Headline?
@Charlie Clark
"which is why since then spaceships are noisy, because audiences apparently didn't appreciate the silence in space."
indeed, but pandering to the audience goes way too far *
(I like the relatively sparse dialogue, long periods of silence in 2001)
* Hence the seemingly endless interchangeable sequel / series type films these days - audiences seemed to like X so make Y following similar formula to X, repeat until audiences dwindle too much then remodel based on another recent hit
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:12 GMT Dave 126
Re: Headline?
And course with the good Dr Asimov being a Jewish atheist scholar of the old testament, he would have been familiar with the folklore of the Golem - which predates Mary Shelly. Though I believe his doctorate was in biochemistry.
Sidenote: the recent reboot of the classic computer game Sam and Max has the titular psychopathic rabbit exclaim: "By the scared sideburns of Isaac Asimov!".
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:19 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: Headline?
Spaceships (well, space stations) are noisy, in the same way that server and air-con rooms are noisy, with the added disadvantage of there being no solid ground to act as a dampner of the vibrations.
https://www.airspacemag.com/ask-astronaut/ask-astronaut-it-quiet-onboard-space-station-180958932/
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 03:59 GMT shedied
Re: Headline?
I believe even the original Star Trek (Shatner and the late Leonard Nimoy) tried realistic space battles but Gene Rodenberry said there was no excitement if they were all sitting still while everything was exploding really close to the ship; to make for good TV you had to have the camera shake with the blasts, and the entire crew on the bridge had to be tossed around a bit unless they grabbed onto their chairs or consoles
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:53 GMT Chris G
Re: Headline?
It was not only Aasimov who engendered that fear, many writers in the comics of the '40s and '50s wrote and drew similar tales, in comics like Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Weird Science etc. In the '50s when I was about 8 or 9 years old my neighbour was a cool kid of fifteen, he was a Teddy Boy and him and his mates used to buy all of those comics and pass them on to me, I had piles of them, wish I still had them I could probably retire wealthy.
The one I remember is where a huge computer controls regiments of robots that enslave mankind, one day an old guy is cleaning around the evil computer and knocks the plug out of the socket...........
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 09:18 GMT Jedit
"the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
*dons pedant hat and also running shoes for quick getaway*
Nope, sorry. The dimensions of the Monolith are explicitly given as being in the ratio 1:4:9 - the first three square numbers. The ratio of a cinema screen is 2.35:1, not the necessary 2.25:1.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 10:21 GMT 's water music
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
Nope, sorry. The dimensions of the Monolith are explicitly given as being in the ratio 1:4:9 - the first three square numbers. The ratio of a cinema screen is 2.35:1, not the necessary 2.25:1.
I applaud your pedantry (obvs) but must also point out that 6*9<>42
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:33 GMT Mage
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
There is no fixed ratio for Cinema widescreen. There are differing film frames, anamorphic lenses. But the print is "matted" and the projectors have adjustable matte. The 1:1.66 was once popular.
Flat or Matte only ratios common: 1.66:1, 1.75:1, 1.85:1, and 2:1.
There have also been various actual frame ratios by varying the number of sprockets per frame.
Anamorphic uses barrel distortion so filmed and projection ratio doesn't match film frame size. The negative can have a 1:2.35 to 1:2.55 compressed image. Ben Hur was 1:2.7, I think.
Some pre WWII WS used three linked cameras and projectors.
Only TV sets with no projection are fixed ratio.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:54 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
The dimensions of the Monolith are explicitly given as being in the ratio 1:4:9
But evidently the cinema monolith is NOT like this.
Indeed, there are several monoliths with differring dimensions, depending on the scene. Artistry in action.
Same as the bone-shaped Discovery which makes no sense because "how am I going to decelerate in Jupiter space, I have a NERVA but I have no fuel tanks...." (made worse in 2010 because the Discovery gets out of Jupiter space with STILL no fuel tanks...)
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 14:49 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
Most of the triangular containers along the spine between the sphere and the engines are fuel tanks, as I recall.
Reversing the polarity. They would be empty in a jiffy. It would also be might impractical to implement getting the fuel from the front tanks (which looks suppiciously not like tanks) to the rear.
Check this: The Spacecraft Designs of Arthur C. Clarke (Space.com Exclusive)
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 21:08 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
If the engines are meant to be nuclear fission - which is what I remember from the book - then what fuel would you need, I wonder. Is it more likely to be reaction mass, than "fuel" as such?
Correct. Anything that you can pump through the reactor will do. In the book, it was ammonium, which needs pre-heating but then one does have a fission reactor nearby. Hydrogen would give best specific impulse, but it's hard to keep in the tanks.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 09:46 GMT Sanguma
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
"Most of the triangular containers along the spine between the sphere and the engines are fuel tanks, as I recall."
Arthur C Clarke mentions in The Lost Worlds of 2001 that he had had to forgo the pleasure to showing the radiator panels for the plasma engine, because most of the audience would be unable to grasp why in airless space, the spaceship had wings. Disappointing, really, but perhaps that's why HAL gets so hot under his (metaphorical) collar/choler?
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 13:34 GMT elgarak1
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
The ratio of the original 70-mm NON-anamorphic that was used for 2001 is 2.2:1. That's awfully close to the 4:9=1:2.25 of the largest area side of the monolith. Frankly, most theaters are not that close aspect ratios – projecting film is a rather loosely defined standard.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 16:22 GMT Wilseus
Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."
I've read some very interesting theories about this, one essay I read makes a very convincing argument that the film (but NOT the book) tells another, different story on a different level to the obvious one about an advanced alien intelligence. In several scenes for instance, there is Illuminati style "pyramid/all seeing eye" imagery: a perspective shot from below of the monolith with the sun/moon above it, the shape of the desks in the lunar meeting room with Floyd at the head, and lots more.
Also, supposedly the whole ending sequence is not what it seems, it's a dream sequence, Bowman's realisation that so much in the world is not what it seems.
It's a fascinating read if you have the time, click here
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 23:47 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Discovery-1: The Facebook Ship
Also, supposedly the whole ending sequence is not what it seems, it's a dream sequence, Bowman's realisation that so much in the world is not what it seems.
That was pretty fun. Like reading someone analyzing a Lynch movie. Or the end of the original Evangelion. Or Avalon.
The author decidedly goes off the rails in the last few chapters, but the hypothesis about a message of societal control embedded in the movie sounds very not impossible. Thus are good conspiracy theories made. Still, would Kubrick have been good enough to encode all the hidden elements into scripts, storyboard, props, actor behaviour, getting it past suits, people on the set, moneybags, Marvin Minsky and Arthur C. Clarke while having the latter write a solid Sci-Fi yarn as Red Herring?
It is debatable whether a human could withstand the vacuum of space, as Bowman does, even for a few seconds. So taking into account the themes of technological inhibition, Bowman overcoming the vacuum of space could be symbolizing a recovery of forgotten physical abilities. After he overcomes the vacuum we find a drastic change in cinematography. The stiff and rigid camera movements comprising almost the entire film are replaced by loose handheld shots, hinting that Bowman has freed himself from HALs psychological prison. HAL desperately spouts lies and false sincerity to save himself, but Dave is now impervious to such deceptive tactics and he wastes no time in disconnecting HALs higher brain.
This.
Also:
The scene where Bowman and Poole watch themselves broadcast in a television interview has a scripted feel to it. The true purpose of the mission is not told and so the whole broadcast smacks of propaganda. As they watch this footage the astronauts are eating processed fake food. Like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange, they are literally being fed a pack of lies, but here they are eating their own lies.
This is actually happening in the current year.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 01:52 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Discovery-1: The Facebook Ship
Also, at http://www.collativelearning.com/2001%20chapter%205.html, we read:
"Sometime in the 1990's they had released the original 70mm film in Hollywood for a short period of time and I and my girlfriend went to go see it. One thing happened in it that I wanted to share with you. At the moment the wine glass shatters near the end of the film, the film itself noticeably skipped, like the physical film reel was damaged. In the theatre I immediately laughed, because knowing Kubrick this was not a mistake. It goes beautifully with the interpretation that there are moments in the film where we are staring at nothing other than the actual monolith itself (the screen.) By having an error occur in the film on 2 levels at once, it's the film trying to step out of itself, a theme which is intimately tied in with the nature and mystery of consciousness, which I speculate that Kubrick was trying to express."
That would be very interesting to have confirmed...
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 11:08 GMT Graham Marsden
Re: Discovery-1: The Facebook Ship
> It is debatable whether a human could withstand the vacuum of space, as Bowman does, even for a few seconds.
"In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space-unprotected-possible/
Clarke used this as the basis of his short story "Take a Deep Breath".
He was also annoyed that he wasn't on set when Kubrick shot the scene of Bowman triggering the explosive bolts on the Pod because Bowman holds his breath which is precisely what you should *not* do as the air will expand and rupture the lungs.
What he should have done was to open his mouth and breathe out as much as possible instead.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 09:21 GMT Dave 126
Size of HAL
Kubrick agreed that HAL's processors would most likely be housed in something the size of a shoebox (he wasn't ignorant of miniaturisation and short paths between nodes), but deliberately took artistic licence because having Bowman floating around a room-sized HAL is a more striking and dramatic image.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 13:40 GMT Sandtitz
Re: Size of HAL
"but deliberately took artistic licence because having Bowman floating around a room-sized HAL is a more striking and dramatic image."
Did anyone else think that the HAL memory bank room would be practically impossible to service under any sort of gravity and prone for several 'Who, me' stories?
And while we're discussing Asimov - HAL is rather more reasonable than Isaac's vision of MultiVac which in different stories was some city-sized datacenter with cogs and levers and such, and the output was a paper card or such. TV's were by then (50s) not rare anymore. In some stories there were only few MultiVac's around the globe doing all mankind's computation - similar to what Watson predicted at IBM 60 years ago... Isaac had a great mind and many stories are intriguing but he really was no computer visionary.
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Wednesday 4th April 2018 15:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In dreams...
"And re-reading 2065"
If you mean "2061: Odyssey Three", then... I felt pretty let down by that one at the time. The original 2001 novel was great, and 2010 was an excellent sequel.
2061 on the other hand, felt much more slight and- in hindsight- more like a spin-off that happened to take place in the same universe. It featured some familiar characters and locations taking part in the action, but the bulk of the plot was more like a separate story.
If you were only concerned with the advancement of the main storyline from 2001/2010, you could reduce 2061 to a handful of pages at most.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 10:53 GMT TheProf
Rogue AI
Clarke puts a reason for the behaviour of HAL in the follow-up novel '2010'. HAL was just following conflicting orders as best he could when his programming had been tampered with i.e making the 'mission' (not necessarily the scientific one) more important than the crew.
I feel sorry for HAL. Being blamed when it was actually the fault of those pesky humans.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 11:17 GMT Dave 126
Re: Rogue AI
Indeed, it's the orders that are added late in the Discovery's planning stage, following the discovery of the lunar monolith, that cause the conflict in HAL. No malfunction, no murderous intent for the sake of it. The original orders to merely explore the Jovian system were developed fairly openly, whereas the amendments came from covert agencies / politicians.
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Tuesday 3rd April 2018 12:19 GMT xeroks
Re: a crystal tetrahedron pyramid
That is pretty horrible. I can see that using the block to celebrate the Queen's silver Jubilee might have been a good idea. but the design isn't great.
The artist, Albert Fleischmann, does some really lovely work in perspex, but I don't think this is one. Don't know if it was a "design by committee" problem or a very rushed implementation.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
