- The Last Mimzy: On one hand, this movie fits into the infinite series of children movies about kids who find "something cool" and then "cool things happen". One the second hand, it is one level above the typical movie of that sort. On the third hand, the movie contained mambo jumbo (vague allusions to enviromental pollution, Buddhisitic mysticism, palm reading...)
0.9 squark stars - The Good German is an interesting movie. Set in post-war Berlin, it deals with moral dilemmas surrounding the war and the holocaust and governmental cynicism. Unsurprisingly, those dilemmas remain on the large unresolved.
0.8 squark stars - The new Star Trek is a fun movie. As in all SciFi movies, ridiculous things happened. I will point out those I found the most absurd.
1. Sword/axe/fist fight against Romulans: WTF?!
2. The exams on Vulcan: the questions were prepostrously easy. However, some were amusing, like: "What is the charge of the top quark?" The answer in the movie was "+2/3" which is correct, if measured in units of positron charge.
3. The black hole formed from the spacecraft in the end. Its gravitational pull was so strong the Enterprise barely got away. The mass of the black hole would be equal to the mass of the spacecraft + the mass of the "red matter" (an invention of the movie) from which it was formed. However, the gravitational pull of the later wasn't so bad.
This is a typical popular mistake. The large distance gravitational field of a black hole is equivalent to the large distance gravitional field of an ordinary body of the same mass. The gravitational "force" becomes exceptionally strong only in the proximity of the event horizon. However, a body with relatively small mass (e.g. the mass of the Earth) would have a very small Schwarzschild radius, (e.g. 8.87 mm), i.e. it's event horizon would be very "small".
0.85 squark stars [bonus question: what is the redshift of a squar star when moving with warp speed?]
* A squark star is the supersymmetric partner of a quark star. ;-)
8 comments:
Don't be so sure that the charge of the top quark is 2/3. Theoretically it can also be 4/3. The experimentalists are still working on it ;)
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0608044
Re: Star Trek
How about the fact that the black hole was actually a time portal?
And we don't know anything about the red matter. It looks that it was a new invention even in the 24th century. Maybe it can channel mass from the hidden dimension in JJ Abrams' rectum? Who knows?
Btw, did I understand it correctly? The rating system is unbound, but for 99% of the movies, it's limited to 0-1? That might be one of the hardcore-st rating systems I've ever seen.
Also, "the questions were prepostrously easy"? I loled, you precocious Vulcan, you :)
Genya: Theoretically, it has to be +2/3, for instance because the bottom quark has charge -1/3 and they are supposed to form a weak isospin doublet (more precisely the doublet is completed by a linear combination of the d, s and b quarks). A 4th quark generation with exotic hypercharge would probably generate anomalies. The experimentalists are searching for unlikely scenarios out of boredom ;-)
Eli: The time portal indeed doesn't make much sense. However, since we don't really know what happens at the black hole singularity, I give them the benefit of the doubt. :-)
About red matter, we can always make up an excuse along the lines of "the reason they use phasers instead of bullets although bullets are clearly better is that their suits generate a mambo jumbo field which blocks bullets although it doesn't interfere with punching someone in the face". I would still rather have them invent something a bit more sensible. :-)
About the rating system, I'm not sure we have enough statistics to make such bold statements. However, for any probability distribution on the real line, there is a finite interval the probability of being inside which is > 99% :-)
Oh come on, you don't think 99% of the movies fall between "a waste of time" and "superb"? Even if some are "I want to kill myself" or "the single best thing ever created by humanity", it looks like it'll be -0.5 and 1.5 on this scale.
Do you know any movie that would get a 2, for example?
Anyway, Star Trek is notorious for having "particle of the day" solutions, but "red matter" is a "particle of the day" to begin with! They didn't even bother to give it a scientific-sounding name like "pulledoutofassonium". It's just a "thingie" that creates black holes (how, btw? can't something that magically increases in mass be useful for something like this?) Relying on it to have any sane properties is doomed for failure - the only thing we do know about it is that it's a plot device to circumvent known physics.
Also, phasers have some obvious advantages over bullets. First of all, they have a useful stun mode. Second, Star Trek is a post-energy-scarcity world, so using free energy instead of still-not-free (until 24th century replicators :) bullets makes sense. And third, while there are no Dune-like personal shields, ships do have shields (that phasers can penetrate only when said shields are "hacked", wtf).
In Dune, shields were just a device to make the whole book more medieval-ish, but in Star Trek, it kinda makes sense - protecting the ship from asteroids and all kinds of space junk (let's ignore for a second the fact that the Enterprise is completely pwned by asteroids in the movie) is a pretty logical thing, even without phasers.
You might be right about the scale, although "superb" is a very loose term. I tried to think of a better definition of "1" but nothing came up. I guess I could try translating it into money, as in "watching that movie worths 100NIS" but that's a very materialistic approach to art :-) Also I know movies which would score below -0.5 (don't ask).
You're right that red matter is a sufficient excuse for everything. I wish they would invent things which have at least have some kind of clear inner logic, though. About the increase of mass, it's a bit problematic since that would violate conservation of energy which, in turn, is not consistent with general relativity. Hence it's hard to make sense of this without inventing altogether new physics.
Hmm, I think free energy can be used to produce bullets, e.g. out of interstellar gas.
Dude, don't use money - Guy Pines' movie critic has been doing it for years. I actually like the scale, because it's so fucked up. If only it covered imaginary numbers... (I guess most David Lynch movies?)
Btw, you could make bullets, but it's obviously less efficient than a "rapid nadion stream" (as I said, Star Trek is full of that shit). Besides, it doesn't solve the ship shield problem or allow easy stunning (unlike the remarkable stunning effects of nadions, obviously).
It also occurred to me that money isn't objective as well: people with more money are willing to pay more for the same thing.
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