Lapsed Modernist

But why not? They would just have to fly South along the coastline, pretty much along the same latitude.

And what the eff are headwinds?

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You SAW PAYCHECK?!

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yes. it was fabulous.

I'll go see anything based on a Philp K. Dick story, even if Minority Report blew.

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I liked Minority Report!

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Why? How? Why? Why was the whole thing even called "Minority Report" since he didn't have one, and the movie did not develop the concept nearly as much as the story?

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um, I dont remember, but I totally saw it BAKED in the theatre and found it v. suspensful

Im a sucker for a good suspense flick

I climb the walls every time I watch BOUND in a fit of nail-bitong ecstacy...the lesbianism is just a cherry, really

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Your icon looks so familiar. It's not a detail of a de Chirico painting, is it?

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Dali, Impresssions of Africa

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Ah. I was sort of close. In a way. Lavin!

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You win a Food ReHydrator!

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Time for a little fun with my roommate's turtles.

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Paycheck was very suspensful! Like, paint-by-numbers suspensful, but in a really good way. You are trashing it without having even seen it, it was way better than Minortiy Report. I recommend smoking a doobie and watching it.

And yes, Bound is very suspensful as well.

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Ok, maybe I will

Some more high suspense must-sees are DePalma's Obsession, Ozon's See the Sea and Polanski's Knife in the Water

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the nemesis device conforms to some principles of physics, as i understand them. look through a telescope long enough and what you will see is the back of your head. the problem with affleck's machine is that it would see into the past and not into the future. it would take so long for you to see the light traveling around the universe that you'd have time to die many millions and billions of times over.

#2: look at this map (http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/loc-ame.htm) and you'll probably see that the distance between new york is actually shorter because of the way the continents are aligned. add in the fact that the earth is curved and the distance is even shorter than in this projection.

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it would see into the past and not into the future. it would take so long for you to see the light traveling around the universe that you'd have time to die many millions and billions of times over.

Well, that's why it's super-powerful. But how would he see the past? His own past of the past relative to the point of whatever present will have happened by the time the trip round the universe is made? Because the stuff he saw, the plague, the nuclear war, that stuff was in the future, but it had already happened in the future.

add in the fact that the earth is curved and the distance is even shorter than in this projection.
That's what I was trying to explain above, I am retarded when it comes to the curvature of the Earth. I understand that the Earth rotates, but then why doesn't the air rotate with it when the plane flies throught it? Isn't the atmosphere attached to the Earth by gravity? Does this mean if a plane just stood still high up in the air, eventually every point on that longitude will pass under it? If not, then why not?

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telescope: imagine this. you have a really powerful flashlight and a really powerful telescope. the flashlight is directly behind your head, pointing the opposite direction of the telescope. you look through it. now, since the universe is so large, it will take many billions of years for the light from that flashlight to reach the telescope. when you (or someone else) sees that light coming through the telescope, it will be many billions of years old. meaning you're seeing into the past. in other words, you can't use a telescope to see into the future.

when you look through any telescope, technically you're seeing into the past because it took a very small amount of time for that light to be reflected off the object you're observing. the bigger the telescope and the farther you're looking, the deeper into the past you're going.

now my head hurts....

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hadaly.livejournal.com

Well, the earth turns west to east, so Quito is coming toward you as you fly south. To fly straight south, you would also have to fly east to keep up with the earth as it turns.

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Ahhh, thi is the kind of stuff that makes my head hurt, I am bad with 3-D vectors, obviously my brain is female. (I am alright with Venn diagrams, though).

Wait, maybe I get it, though. Because New York is East of Quito it can just fly South and Quito will, like, rotate towards it?

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hadaly.livejournal.com

Exactly!

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that's not exactly true. you don't need to make any course corrections for the movement of the planet. as the earth is flying through space, it has this massive gravity (and also something called angular momentum). these things together keep everything on the planet in the same relative position to the planet unless they are moved by another force. so, your desk stays where it is because gravity keeps it on the ground. air happens to be light enough to float BUT it preserves the earth's angular momentum meaning it follows the earth everywhere it goes. it's like in an airplane. if you jump up at the back of the airplane, you don't fly into the cockpit door. that's because you preserve the angular momentum of the aircraft. this is why when a car stops suddenly if you don't have your seatbelt on you fly through the windshield. it's all the same stuff. it's also the same thing that keeps your drink from falling off your tray table when the plane banks, etc.

more on the other stuff in a minute....

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If air stays in the same relative position then doesn't it rotate with the Earth?

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yes. the thing that makes it confusing is that it seems the air is moving about despite gravity. the thing is the air is essentially fixed with relation to the ground. it moves when it is moved (it takes relatively little energy to move air as opposed to moving a desk or an airplane). heat and cold cause convection currents and other things have their effects causing wind and jetstreams, etc. but it's all rotates with the earth.

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mycrust.livejournal.com

Trajectories of things shot through the air, like cannonballs and airplanes, do have to be corrected for the Earth's rotation. A famous (though perhaps apocryphal) example is the miscalibration of the cannons of the British Navy when they fought a sea battle in the Southern hemisphere due to the opposite sense of the Coriolis force. The atmosphere doesn't drag airplanes along with the Earth's surface as though they were perfectly, rigidly linked.

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right. but in general, angular velocity is preserved. i think the general question was "if i get up in an airplane, and if i stay up long enough, will the earth rotate under me?" the answer is pretty much no, though we can equivocate, as you are right to point out.

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Hm. That contradicts what

hadaly said above.

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i'm inclined to believe this is not the most right i've ever been. :)

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Ok, the real question is not how bad movie physics can be rationalized. The burning issue is how can They sully the brilliance of Philip K. Dick with Ben freaking Affleck???

Also: what the hell happened to John Woo? Was he always this lame, but given some exotic but illusory cache as the reputed master of Hong Kong action?

Also also: speaking of John Woo, Face/Off becomes a reality (http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/05/26/face.transplant/).

Let us now bend our knees and daven for the future radness of Linklater's adaptation of "A Scanner Darkly."

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I like John Woo, even if he does use white doves fluttering in slo-mo to signify existential junctures.

Ben Affleck plays bland well, which worked in this film because he was, essentially, Everyman, a conformist who had an attack of equally bland ethics; there was nothing interesting about him as a character, but that did not detract from the movie in the least. As I said after seeing Lara Croft 2, some movies need less character development, and I am not being sarcastic.

And Uma Thurman is awesome, and I enjoyed the politics of the premise. I linked above, in my response to

3rdworldcinema to a post I wrote after seeing it, about what I liked about that genre and Paycheck specifically.

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Ohhh... is that what you think he's he's doing with the doves? I thought he was doing that to illustrate (beyond the slow-mo itself) the warped perception of time in a moment of self-actualization. Or something. Maybe he just thought it looked cool. I might have to rewatch some JW flicks with your interpretation in mind.

Did you ever see "Martin and Orloff"? It was a great comedy from the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe. There was a scene where they spoofed spoofed the guns and doves scene. Pretty funny stuff.

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chelvis.livejournal.com

hey, i know you're preoccupied with some TV fantasy show about vampires on the WB or something, and movies with ben affleck, but we conversed about this recently:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995061

oh, I'm being smarmy, up there. please don't be offended, i'm just kidding around.

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I'll swap you a link for a link.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0602-14.htm

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how are you determining your length of flights (the 7 and 11 hours)? are they calculated from airlines arrival and departure times? or has someone told you that the time in flight is that long? from what you've written, i'd guess it's the former instead of the latter. in that case, the discrepancy is probably just the change in time zones.

A. leave nyc: 8 am (local time)
arrive quito: 3 pm (local time, not nyc time)

flying time: 11 hours

B. leave quito: 8 am (local time)
arrive LA: 7 pm (local time, but the same time zone)

flying time: 11 hours

-mjm

p.s., of course, all of the interesting things everyone said about the coriolis effect (which causes hurricanes and water in sinks to rotate in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere from the direction they rotate in the northern) and the jet stream (for travel east versus travel west), plus "great circle" routes all can have some effect.

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