Showing posts with label 2001 Space Odyssey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2001 Space Odyssey. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Tech Tuesday: "Open the pod bay door, Hal"

There are people on Twitter (X) who ask questions for the purpose of generating engagement. Often it's about music, like what is your favorite album, or who is the greatest drummer, or what is the best guitar solo ever recorded. 

Today someone asked, "What movie have you seen ten times or more." A couple of films came to mind, and there are quite a few that hurdled the "five times" threshold, one of which I watched again tonight. But this one came first to mind, which I saw at Radio City Music Hall when it was released in 1968. How many times have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey?

It's a classic for many reasons, one being the realistic depictions of space flight. Another being Kubrick's mastery of visual storytelling. 

While looking up an image to go along with this blog post, I discovered a website in which someone has created 569 gifs extracted from this film, a pretty impressive feat. Here are a few of them, followed by a link at the end to the full catalog of 569 animated snippets.


 

 

CHECK OUT THIS SITE.... 

2001: A GIF Odyssey 

Friday, July 17, 2020

The Ten Principles of the Georgia Guidestones, America's Strangest Monument

Are you familiar with the Georgia Guidestones? When someone first mentioned it to me I thought it both interesting and strange.

Located 90 miles East of Atlanta, the monument consists of a set of 10 guidelines inscribed on a stone manmade structure in eight modern languages. At the top there's also a short message inscribed in four ancient language scripts. Some people are calling it an "American Stonehenge." The slabs and capstone stand just over 19 feet tall.

The creators of this monument have chosen to remain anonymous and the man who conveyed the instructions to the Eberton Granite Finishing Company 19 miles away used a pseudonym. Obviously it cost a pretty penny to produce and install. Purportedly the group behind this had spent twenty years in planning.

The inscriptions are in the following languages:
English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian.

The ten commandments inscribed there are as follows:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

A lot of it sounds "nice" but one gets a little concerned about the first two, the first especially. I'm curious how they propose to reduce the earth's population by seven billion in order to fulfill their concept of balance with nature.

Does the second statement refer to a return to eugenicists helping create a more perfect race? Is it Brave New World inspired, as if Huxley's book were a manual, instead of a red flag?

Heres what WIRED wrote about the Guidestones:
The Georgia Guidestones may be the most enigmatic monument in the US: huge slabs of granite, inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. Only one man knows who created them—and he's not talking.

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

You can find the rest of that story HERE.


In addition to the set of instructions on the stones, there were some very precise astro-physical instructions as regards the layout of the stones. You can read about that here at the Smithsonian magazine website.


A site called Atlas Obscura features the guidestones on this page. It highlights a few of the unique features of the stones in this paragraph:

The guidestones also serve as an astronomical calendar, and every day at noon the sun shines through a narrow hole in the structure and illuminates the day’s date on an engraving. The names of four ancient languages are inscribed on the sides near the top: Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

* * * *

Someone spent some serious time and money creating this thing. It's not hard to see how something of this nature could provoke some serious conspiracy theorizing. Now all we need is are receipts showing who paid for it. Any guesses?


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