Movies and other things.

I saw a bunch of movies in the recent past. The most memorable was 2010, Odyssey Two. I disagree a wee bit with Roy Scheider being cast as Heywood Floyd. Floyd, in my mind is an altogether older and much more established character. He is the typical physicist who gets things done (for your information, such people exist). But having said that, he did a good job. Moskvitch was his friend and not some random Russian science administrator. And again, Clarke had envisioned a much nicer world than the one that the scriptwriters had given us. Typical 80's paranoia. You people should have had more faith in old Mikhail and his glasnost-perestroika. There was never any naval blockade over the Honduras. And lastly Chandra has been shown as the American idea of what a geeky scientist should look like. He was not one. He was a meticulous person, someone whom my man Hercule would have described as a 'man of method'. Remember his office at the University of Chicago? All it was supposed to contain was a terminal to SAL 9000, and two photographs of the the Gods of the computing pantheon: Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The movie showed his office as a cluttered rubbish head from which scientific ideas are presumed to jump out. Bullshit. Oh yes, the entire scene in which HAL is resurrected simply does not carry the impact it has in the book. The first time I read that, it was quite eerie and downright spine tingling. Here it was just... tame. And one last thing: Lagrange point refers to a physicist called Lagrange. It does not refer to a place called Grange in France.