The Movie 2001, A Space Odyssey

One of the best science-fiction movies of all time was Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. Many people nowadays wonder what the big deal was with this movie. They have only seen it on the small screen. With digital special effects in more modern movies, the special effects seem ho-hum. In 1968, in a theatrical release, it was spectacular. I was one of the lucky ones who saw it in Cinerama in a wide-screen theater. It was nothing short of mind blowing.

The film deals with thematic elements of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life, and is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering special effects, ambiguous imagery that is open-ended to a point approaching surrealism, sound in place of traditional narrative techniques, and minimal use of dialogue.

In my opinion such movies as Star Wars and Alien probably would not have been made were it not for the success of 2001. It was the first movie to show that a serious SF film with great special effects could draw a large audience. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that the Apollo space program and other NASA space probes were gaining popularity. It was only a year later that Lance Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon. Four years later Pioneer 10 had reached the planet Jupiter.

For those of you who had never saw the movie, here is a synopsis (warning, it contains spoilers): The movie starts millions of years ago when a group of subhumans are competing with tapirs and other hominids for food. One morning a tall, thin, rectangular black monolith stands among the rocks. The ape men are excited but touch the object and calm down. By touching the monolith, they have learned to use bones as weapons and tools.

In the next scene the action moves to the near future where travel to the moon is an every day affair. A similar monolith is found on the moon and sends a signal towards Jupiter.

Eighteen months later a manned spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to investigate. Two of the team are awake to run the ship with the aid of an almost human AI called HAL. The other three are in hibernation. Hal announces that there is a problem with the AE-35 unit and it will fail with 100% certainty within 72 hours. The astronauts go EVA to replace the unit. The two astronauts scan the removed AE-35 unit but can't find any defects. Hal suggests putting it back in service to let it fail. Mission Control believes Hal has made an error because their HAL9000 unit, a twin to the one aboard Discovery, finds no flaw in the AE-35. Hal denies any chance of computer error. The astronauts go to a pod to have a private chat and decide to disable Hal's higher functions without disturbing the automatic ship control functions. Hal can see the men through the pod's window and reads their lips. When Poole goes out in the EVA pod, the pod murders him. When Dave uses a pod to recover Frank's body, a computer malfunction alert goes off and the life signs of the three hibernating astronauts flat line. Hal refuses to open the pod bay doors for Dave, explaining that he knows Dave is planning to disconnect him because he was able to read Frank and Dave's lips when they discussed it. He says the mission is too important to allow humans to jeopardize it. Dave releases Frank's body and maneuvers the pod to the emergency airlock hatch. He uses the pod's arms to open the door, holds his breath and jumps over to the ship. Dave goes to the computer room and shuts down HAL.

A much larger black monolith floats in Jupiter orbit,. Bowman leaves the Discovery in another EVA pod and enters a wormhole. The pod ends up somewhere in time and space in a bedroom with luminous white walls and floor and furniture in the style of Louis XVI. Dave ages swiftly until he is a dying old man. A monolith appears and transforms him into a star child.

If all of this sounds sort of mundane, it is because there is no way to describe the marvelous cinematography, special effects, music and emotional impact of the movie.

The idea for the movie was taken from an Arthur Clarke short story, The Sentinel. Clarke also wrote the script.

A sequel to the movie was released in 1984 called 2010: The Year We Made Contact starring Roy Schneider. The plot is based on Arthur Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two.

It is a rather good movie itself, but nowhere as spectacular as 2001.

Traveling Through New England

There are many places of interest to visit on the coast of New England. Out trip starts in the Hudson Valley of New York State. As we head east through Connecticut, the first place of interest we encounter is Gillette Castle, a mansion built in the form of a castle. The interior is beautiful with many interesting rooms.


Next we head east to the coast and Mystic Seaport. Mystic seaport is a recreation of a New England seaport town of the early 1800s. It includes demonstrations of the types of shops and industry such as a blacksmith shop that would be in such a village. In the bay is a recreation of the type of sailing ship of those days. That is me aboard it.


From Mystic we travel down the coast to The Breakers. Another interesting mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. The picture below the mansion shows the lovely gardens.





Also in Newport, Hammersmith Farm is where John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier were married.



Next we head north to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Here is the original Plymouth Rock.


Here my wife and two granddaughters are aboard a replica of the Mayflower.

We also went whale watching in Plymouth.

Here we are in Salem, Mass. where the famous witch trials took place. A recreation of the trials takes place on the weekends. There are also many shops displaying items associated with witchcraft and other occult stuff.


After leaving Salem, we headed for Cape Cod and Martha's Vinyard.

Driverless Cars and Other New Inovations

Technology is moving so rapidly now-a-days that it's hard to keep up. Here are some of newest gadgets either in the test phase or already on the market. First off, Google (of all companies) have been testing a car that drives itself. Six specially equipped Toyota Priuses and one Audi TT have logged more than 140,000 miles from San Francisco's crooked Lombard Street to Hollywood Boulevard. They use Google's map technology as well as "video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to 'see' other traffic." (All the vehicles have an engineer in the driver's seat who can take over control at any time).

Even criminal activity using technology has picked up. Now it is easier for counterfeiters to generate fake bills. For this reason, the US Government has decided to improve the latest $100 bill yet again and make it nearly impossible to duplicate (at least for the time being). The most unique part about the future currency is that when the bill is moved from side to side, the new images on the bill will appear to move up and down. When the bill is moved up and down, the image will appear to move from side to side. The expected release date for this new $100 bill will be sometime during the year of 2011.

One of the Air Force’s latest futuristic inventions, the Pain Ray (also known as the Active Denial System), has been designed for effective crowd control measures, similar to tear gas. The “Pain Ray” emits a powerful radiation beam that causes victims to feel a burning sensation and will send people running for cover. The potent beam is strong enough to penetrate clothes and lighter defenses, but it is not quite strong enough to pierce through walls.

A new military rifle called the XM25 is equipped with smart bullets including high explosive burst, armor-piercing, door breaching, anti-personnel and non-lethal. It allows a more options in tactical situations. For example, if prisoners are to be taken, the soldier can switch to a non-lethal round. Or if they need to take out an enemy sniper protected by a building or behind a hillside, an explosive smart bullet can be fired near the location of the enemy.

Most people would not expect a car that can go from 0-60 in under 3.2 seconds to be eco-friendly in the least, but the Porsche automakers beg to differ. This future car concept, the 918 Spyder, is supposed to be one of the fastest (if not the fastest) hybrid electric car on the market. It can teach tops speeds of 200 mph and gets 78 miles per gallon – double the amount most compact cars achieve on a good day.

Microsoft has recently announced an impressive addition to their popular X-Box video game system which will replace the standard controllers. Project Natal, has built in motion sensors that allows users to act out their moves instead of having to press buttons. If you are playing a fighting game (such as Street Fighter) you will actually have to do some physical kicks and punches to defeat your opponent. This new technology is also supposed to be equipped with voice and facial recognition software.

For the past couple of years the world’s top space program NASA has been working on a future design for the very first personal flying suit. The puffin, as they call it, measures to be 12 feet in length with a 15 foot wingspan. The aircraft module would land vertically, allowing for a person to step directly into it and has blades similar to that of helicopters. The puffin concept would relatively light weight and would use electric motors, allowing for high altitudes as well as being ecology-friendly.

I wonder what's next.

Misconceptions About Science

I don't know whether it's the way that science is taught in our school system, but many people have misconceptions regarding what science is and what it does. I believe this may be because most of what is taught in the lower grades and high school concerns the history of science, the achievements of science and known facts that science has discovered. To me, this absolutely the wrong approach. What science really is, is a process for discovering the truth about ourselves, our environment and the universe in general.

Like any human endeavor, to succeed it requires a method and the proper tools. The method is really simple, it starts with observations about the real world, from these observations the scientist forms a hypothesis, next he or she must perform experiments to determine whether the hypothesis is valid and true. The experiment must be repeatable by anyone using the same equipment and the same methods.

The tool that a scientist uses depends upon the particular science one is pursuing and the experiment required to prove or disprove the hypothesis. This may vary from simple observation, such as Jane Goodall has done in her study of gorillas, to sophisticated and expensive equipment such microscopes, computers, particle accelerators and high powered telescopes. The one tool used by all sciences is mathematics. It is the cornerstone on which all science depends.

Now for the misconceptions. The first one is that any theory put forth by science is totally correct for all time or is false. Critics of science often cite the fact that scientific theory is constantly changing as new facts are learned and our equipment becomes more sophisticated. We often speak of "laws," such as The Law of Gravity. This is simply a misnomer. There is no such thing as an unmodifable scientific law. Nonetheless, this does not mean the findings of science are not valid. Most of the great theories are still correct for ninety-nine percent of the cases for which they apply. It is only a few exceptions that cause theories to be modified.

The second great misconception is that science is anti-religion or anti-God. This is not true. It may show that what has been written in the past in so-called holy books is incorrect, but it neither proves nor disproves the existence of a First Cause or Supreme Being.

People into the occult or believe in ghosts, UFOs, big foot, telepathy, etc. claim that there is a conspiracy by the scientific community to ignore the evidence for the existence of such things. They have it all backwards. It is not up to the scientific community to prove their claims, but the people who make them to do so. For example, let us say that I claim that a ghost is haunting my house. To prove this claim, I need to produce the ghost for credible skeptical witnesses. At one time, a Professor Rhine claimed that he had proof that mental telepathy existed in certain people. It turned out that he fudged the results of his experiments. When others tried to duplicate his experiments, they did not get the same results.

Another misconception is to blame science for the misuse of the technology that results from scientific discoveries.  In the first place, scientists seldom know what will result from their discoveries. Most scientific discoveries have benefited mankind. Knowing more about the universe we live in cannot be a bad thing.