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posted by janrinok on Monday December 05 2016, @10:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-the-sequel-be-called-departure dept.

The new movie Arrival is drawing sufficient praise as a smart and stylish science fiction film [AdBlock unfriendly] that Kate and I actually went to the trouble of getting a sitter so we could see it in the theater Friday night. It is, indeed, a very good movie, and probably the best adaptation one could hope for of the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life" (which is one of the best science fiction stories in any medium over the last mumble years). I was, however, disappointed that they left out nearly all of the physics that's in the original.

First, a brief, non-spoiler summary, before diving into the details: In the film, Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist who is recruited by the military to help them communicate with the aliens in one of twelve "shells" that have appeared at random locations on the surface of the Earth. She's paired with theoretical physicist Dr. Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner), and the two of them spend a lot of time writing messages back and forth to the alien "heptapods," who appear only on the far side of a transparent partition. As Louise figures out the heptapod language, it leads to a transformation in the way she sees the world, one with significant emotional costs to her, but that might be the key to saving the whole communicate-with-aliens enterprise.

What's your take on 'The Arrival,' Soylent?


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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by ikanreed on Monday December 05 2016, @11:03PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 05 2016, @11:03PM (#437447) Journal
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   -1  
       Offtopic=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Offtopic' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 05 2016, @11:08PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday December 05 2016, @11:08PM (#437452) Journal

    Well, it's NoScript unfriendly, so I don't actually care about how it deals with AdBlock …

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:15AM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:15AM (#437569) Homepage
      Google gets round whatever they're doing:

      http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vYY5rr_dOMIJ:http://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/11/21/the-physics-that-got-left-out-of-arrival/%2Bthe+physics+that+got+left+out+of+arrival&hl=en&gbv=1&ct=clnk
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:58PM (#438025)

        You can make the URL shorter by removing the search string from that.
        &hl=en&gbv=1&ct=clnk is also noise.
        (Everything from the 1st plus sign onward is unnecessary--unless you want to purposely highlight something.)
        Note: The first plus sign, as displayed, is %2B.

        The http://www. from the target URL can also be removed.

        In fact, if you're going for maximum shortness, of the target, only the TLD needs to be in the URL (not the stuff specific to the page).

        If I was going to -add- something to the URL, that would be &strip=1 .
        That removes any scripts, CSS, audio, SWF objects, and images.[1]
        If this page presentation conveys the information well, I'd go with this version of the Google cache.

        [1] It also removes some legit basic markup like <strong>, which really bugs me.

        .
        Going to archive.li and feeding it the target URL can also be a solution.
        (They will also run any scripts on -their- machines, removing any bandwidth issues and any possible pwning of your system due to non-sandboxed junk.)

        If the .li CCTLD should stop working ( .is is already troublesome sometimes), then .eu (European Union) and .fo (Faroe Islands) are options.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:55PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:55PM (#437723) Journal

    I would rather that sites respect my wish not to be inundated with unwanted ads or, worse still, infected by malware than have to take part in a escalating war of software add-ons each trying to defeat the counters to the previous one. My solution is simply not to use that site, but as this was a submitted story I had no option other than try to load it as part of the editing task. It didn't load, so I tagged it appropriately.

    --
    I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.