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from the kids-ask-'what-is-a-sliderule'? dept.
Ars Technica has a story and a link to the trailer of an upcoming movie, Hidden Figures which is due in theaters on Friday, January 13, 2017.
This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.
Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson, now retired, was a mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. The movie is your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise, including college at the age of 15. She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.
[...] As anyone who has ever watched NASA TV during a Mars landing knows, a spaceship is only as good as its makers. There is intense drama going on behind the scenes during every flight and landing, and that's why Hidden Figures looks like such a great ride. The movie hits theaters on January 13, 2017.
I am struggling to fathom having to perform manual calculations of orbital trajectories all day — with nothing more than paper, pencil, and a slide rule — and knowing that if you make an error, there's a good chance something is going to go BOOM and probably take some lives with it. Gives fresh meaning to the term meeting a deadline.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:09PM
This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire:
Yeah well, you'd be surprised. Somehow I predict there will be a certain segment of people on these supposedly nerd sites trying very hard to not desire this. I wonder why...
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:54PM
Probably. Not me this time. Success stories are good. We need more success stories. I like success stories. I like stories about women who succeed. The Misogynerd Narrative is about people who never even tried bitching about what other people who never even tried didn't accomplish in a field that has a barrier of entry these days of a whopping $300 to get a refurbished laptop. People spend more than that on phones every other year.
Mostly off topic follows.
I'm thinking I need a Greasemonkey script or something to let me “disappear” Misogynerd Narrative stories from this site and the old one. “Disappearing” crap on Google News like the run-up to Ghostbusters release would be good too (notice how they all got very quiet now that it's out and it's crap). The idea is that if I disappear an article one place (articles linked by TFS for Soylent and the old site), the article will get disappeared the other places it knows how to disappear things. I'm hoping I won't need to write a full-blown add-on, and I hope I'm not misunderstanding what's possible and what's not.
I'll post a journal when I have something to publish. Probably won't be fancy and certainly won't be automatic (don't want it to be).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 16 2016, @07:04PM
Basically you want to hide news articles that contain certain keywords? Shouldn't be too difficult (aside from the nuisance of pre-fetching articles, if you don't stop at scanning headlines), might even be an existing extension that you could adapt. I'm sure the list of keywords you come up with would be amusing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 16 2016, @07:36PM
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 16 2016, @08:56PM
Thanks! I'll hunt it down!
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 16 2016, @08:52PM
I'm not sure a keyword list will capture it. Biggest problem would be that I'd want to see this article, but I wouldn't want to see the two yesterday. On the other hand, “Ada Lovelace” would be near the top of a keyword list I'd generate, but on the odd chance she's not being used as a cudgel I'd want to hear about it. I was thinking I'd need to manually add or flag the articles I want to disappear.
I've been following some of the developments in natural language processing from a great distance, and while I don't have the time or desire to grok it at present, it might be an interesting exercise to use that stuff to create some kind of extension that could reliably flag stuff that's Misogynerd Narrative.
Mostly I just want an article-by-article /ignore for my news browsing that doesn't try to be too clever.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:01PM
I think your Greasemonkey echo-chamber script should scan for links instead of keywords, since it's a specific story you want to blacklist rather than a topic.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:38PM
I'm not sure a keyword list will capture it.
Mostly I just want an article-by-article /ignore for my news browsing that doesn't try to be too clever.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 16 2016, @10:11PM
Right, but once you've identified a specific story that you don't want to see on other sites EchoChamber.user.js needs to recognize that story between different sites even when the content and headline are different. If you're thinking about matching articles using machine learning, that sounds quite a bit cleverer than seeing if they share a given link or links. Both methods will yield some false results, of course.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:09AM
My apologies. I wasn't being very clear at all. I definitely don't want anything fancy like machine learning. This is sort what I've been throwing around in my head.
- Ban something on Soylent from the echo chamber.
- Then add all article links in TFS (BBC, WaPo, etc) to the echo chamber blacklist along with the specific Soylent article.
- If I'm later browsing the old site out of boredom and one of its articles links to something that's banned (BBC, WaPo, etc) from the echo chamber, that article and all the ones it links to get auto-blacklisted as well. Vice-versa from Slashdot to Soylent.
That could be open to some heuristics since it happens that something will be presented in a clickbait, inflammatory manner on one site and more rationally on the other. 9 times out of 10 it's the old site being inflammatory and Soylent presenting a more well-rounded version of the same thing.
I don't think there's too much danger of the blacklist auto-removing the entire internet from the echo chamber even without heuristics. I'd be relying on the fact that linked articles are rarely repeated in different Soylent articles. Of course, that will need to shake out in testing.
Perhaps I could replace the article on Soylent or the old site with small indication that something is missing, but I probably don't want to know what once I'm confident it's not going to blacklist half of the internet.
Google News is a little different.
- Those specific articles from BBC, WaPo, etc also get disappeared on Google News.
- If I ban something on Google News from the echo chamber, it only gets disappeared on Google News. I'm usually pretty happy just scrolling clear past the entertainment and sports sections.
- It could add some kind of warning, maybe one of these ⚠ to the headline, if something appears here or the old site that links to one of those.
- So at a minimum, I'd need to track the URL and the reason it was banned/source of the ban.
Soylent and the old site are my go-to time-wasters, and I probably should find a better curated aggregator than Google News.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:21AM
Gotcha. I think we're basically on the same page (besides wanting to use the proposed script, but to each their own).
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @07:37PM
bitching about what other people who never even tried didn't accomplish in a field that has a barrier of entry these days of a whopping $300 to get a refurbished laptop
Barrier of entry to the internet these days is effectively zero, but that doesn't mean everyone finds acceptance. The barrier to success socially is still as high as it always has been. If you don't do and say what everyone else is doing and saying all the time, you'll find yourself in an uphill defensive battle for absolutely fucking everything you attempt. Try to make a movie about successful men in a social climate when only women have value, and you will be wasting your time, effort, and money. In such a situation you might as well just go online and scream ALL WOMEN ARE BITCHES.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @08:43PM
Does the movie actually focus on the nerd things?
More likely, it's a chick flick. It probably focuses on race, sex, and especially feelings. It's probably loaded with emotional content, including internal conflict. It probably even contains romance.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:29PM
You know, all those race, sex, and feels they had up in the Apollo mission control room full of white, middle-aged dudes.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @10:04PM
the Apollo mission control room full of white, middle-aged dudes.
I saw that film. Wasn't Tom Hanks in it
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 16 2016, @10:12PM
After all, the reason NASA won the Space Race was that their German scientists were smarter than the Soviet's German scientists.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:51AM
If by won you mean the good ol' U.S. of A. has to use russian rockets to get stuff into space and has to pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the space station, then, yeah, win we did.
Sorry, pal. Stop watching Fox and face reality.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:09PM
We did win the race. We just stopped training afterwards and are now flabby bastards.
Whereas the Soviet Union kept paying their gym fees until they went bankrupt, but continued exercising at home and are still relatively in shape.
(cue Rocky II music)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:18PM
Come to think of it, the USSR actually beat us to every space milestone except a man on the moon. First satellite, first dude in space, first orbit, first hard landing on the moon, first soft landing on the moon...
Although apparently it took them like 8 tries to get their first moon impact. Nobody said they were efficient ;)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:41PM
Have to wait and see it. You are probably correct on what sort of movie it is. However, they can make one movie seem like a totally different one in the trailer. It also struck me as a movie with an agenda to teach something.
It also looked intensely dull to me. The tone of the commercial reminded me of 'A Beautiful Mind'. Which is a good movie but I found it very dull. I enjoy movies more along the lines of Michael Bay, low on plot and big on explosions and a good car chase.