Blinded with Science
Maybe a month or so ago, T got an email announcing a pre-sale of tickets to "An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson". It sounded like fun, and we had no known conflicting plans, so we decided to go despite the lack of details about what, specifically, the evening might enail. The show was tonight, and it was just as great as we hoped it might be.
The first thing Dr. Tyson did after taking the stage was point out how trusting we were, to buy tickets and come out to the theater based on such a vague program title. The second thing he did was take off his shoes. And then, sock-foot, he introduced the topic of his talk: "An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies." It was a fun journey through the science of film, television, and a surprising number of beer commercials, what they get wrong, and what they get right. He talked about some of his more infamous run-ins with Hollywood and fandom -- his tweets about science errors in Gravity and The Force Awakens, getting James Cameron to change the erroneous night sky in Titanic for the 3D rerelease (although he tells the story somewhat differently) -- but there were some unexpected topics, too, like the topography of underwear in Zoolander, clever uses of surface tension in A Bug's Life, and how a mathematical equation helped enhance The Expendables 2. And he was hilarious throughout, as well as informative. If you ever get a chance to see him, I recommend it highly.
This entry is also posted at http://owlmoose.dreamwidth.org/733182.html. There are currently
comments on DW.
The first thing Dr. Tyson did after taking the stage was point out how trusting we were, to buy tickets and come out to the theater based on such a vague program title. The second thing he did was take off his shoes. And then, sock-foot, he introduced the topic of his talk: "An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies." It was a fun journey through the science of film, television, and a surprising number of beer commercials, what they get wrong, and what they get right. He talked about some of his more infamous run-ins with Hollywood and fandom -- his tweets about science errors in Gravity and The Force Awakens, getting James Cameron to change the erroneous night sky in Titanic for the 3D rerelease (although he tells the story somewhat differently) -- but there were some unexpected topics, too, like the topography of underwear in Zoolander, clever uses of surface tension in A Bug's Life, and how a mathematical equation helped enhance The Expendables 2. And he was hilarious throughout, as well as informative. If you ever get a chance to see him, I recommend it highly.
This entry is also posted at http://owlmoose.dreamwidth.org/733182.html. There are currently
comments on DW.