Earth seen from space is\u00a0a lot less\u00a0accurate than the Moon or to a certain degree even Jupiter!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Fascinating to think that during the production of 2001\u00a0Kubrick\u00a0might have had better access to Moon or Jupiter telescope images than Earth. It\u00a0was still a few years before Blue Marble<\/a> would be\u00a0taken: Earth\u00a0looks like an artist rendition of how they imagined\u00a0it to appear\u00a0from orbit.<\/p>\n During the flight to the Space Station, a flight attendant turns off the In-flight entertainment for Heywood Floyd while he’s taking a nap.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It looks like a very simple gesture, almost motherly, yet it made me think of our very contemporary struggles with energy consumption and resource optimization. It might be an overreading since the cabin seems to be unnecessarily\u00a0illuminated, but who knows. Maybe\u00a0Kubrick was aware of the preciousness of energy in space.<\/p>\n Use of the color red for the innards of spacecraft.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s possible that Kubrick was trying to simulate\u00a0night vision (rod cells\u00a0are insensitive to red light), which is common\u00a0for several nocturnal applications from cockpits to star-gazing screens, but it’s equally possible to think about the\u00a0symbolic meaning of the color red in this case. The redness inside those vessels is similar to the redness\u00a0inside the\u00a0vessel of our minds, blood.\u00a0One of the most important characters in the movie is a computer which is effectively the mind of a spacecraft: it looks like Kubrick is warming\u00a0us to the notion\u00a0that those man-made machines are not too different from ourselves.<\/p>\n The sadness of looking at the Clavius cover up story in 2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the future imagined by Clarke and Kubrick, people at the top invent a cover up story for the sake of adequately preparing the population towards a cultural shock. The key concept here is that the lie is benign and with the intention of protection. Now compare that with the present situation: nothing epitomizes the closing of this decade quite like the\u00a0surge of conspiracy theories and “fake-news”. For every piece on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, there is seemingly another giving fuel or anyhow talking about the so called “Moon landing hoax”. The worst part is that there doesn’t seem to be a specific direction from where these stories originate. They seem to be coming from a cross-section of the human species and mostly seem geared towards destruction (status quo, world order, etc.) instead of construction. I, for one, long for the\u00a0time when conspiracies where real, well architected and coming from a far-looking top.<\/p>\n The question on whether machines can have feelings is immediately dismissed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A\u00a0BBC journalist asks Frank Poole: “Do you believe that\u00a0HAL has genuine emotions?”, to which his response is: “Oh, yes. Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But, as to whether or not he has real feelings… is something I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer.” I find it mesmerizing that in what is probably one of the most philosophical movies ever made, this question is explicitly posed and dismissed in 3 seconds. My understanding is that Clarke was familiar with the Turing test and with the emerging philosophy of artificial intelligence, and understood that much of these questions stop making sense when treated in human terms. In the words of E. W. Dijkstra: “the question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as\u00a0relevant\u00a0as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim”.<\/p>\n A bicycle built for two<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In what has been described as the most poignant scene of the movie, HAL 9000 slowly loses his “consciousness”\u00a0as David Bowman unscrews\u00a0its memory banks. The last thing we hear from HAL is its singing of a “Bicycle built for two” while its voice slows down. I was already aware that this was a reference to the\u00a0IBM 7094 speech synthesis demo,\u00a0one of the earliest of this\u00a0technology. But only now I realized\u00a0how much\u00a0the first thing of its kind<\/em> always ends up influencing and being referenced by what follows. Other examples: the Utah teapot<\/a>,\u00a0which is an in-joke\u00a0in countless 3D productions; or outside academia, the overwhelming amount of DeepDream<\/a> generated images that look like dogs (because Google trained its model on a subset of the ImageNet database which contained “fine-grained classification of 120 dog sub-classes”). Perhaps the only thing that saved Lenna<\/a> from becoming an oft-quoted meme was the sexist controversy<\/a>\u00a0surrounding the image. I am curious to see what will become the standard test for technologies that do not even exist today.<\/p>\n The\u00a0unbearable lightness of mistakes, or: How I Learned to\u00a0Stop Worrying\u00a0and Love the\u00a0Error.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Kubrick was a genius. And a meticulous one. He took his time to film the way he wanted and often\u00a0shot the same scene over a hundred times. He wanted everything to be perfect. And essentially, that’s what people saw watching his movies. A friend who happens to be a director once confessed me to dislike Kubrick’s oeuvre because, in his words, “it’s too perfect”. I suppose it can become daunting, if you work in that industry, to compare yourself to Kubrick’s level of quality. Yet, perfect it isn’t. If you watch 2001: A Space Odyssey as many times as I did, the\u00a0imperfections start surfacing. Wrong lights, rubber bones, continuity errors, very obvious non-Russian actors, weird cuts… the list goes on. It’s impossible to think that Kubrick was not aware of at least some of these issues while he was filming\u00a0the Proverbial “Really Good” Science-Fiction Movie. But it’s a positive message for all of us. If a genius like Kubrick could cut himself some slack, then\u00a0perhaps we on planet Earth can do it too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pushed by the recent flurry of articles on Apollo and the history of space flight, I went and watched for the millionth time 2001: A Space Odyssey. Every time I go back to Kubrick’s masterpiece, there’s always something new to find and notice. This is what caught my eyes this time. Earth seen from space …<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jamez.it\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/a41faaad-9164-4ce5-83da-ede4f1756aa9.png\")
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