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Ars Technica has an article about the new space race movie Hidden Figures which they describe as "A must-see film about using math to overcome adversity and send humans into orbit". The film centers around a mathematician named Katherine Johnson who played a key role in the Mercury and Apollo projects and the challenges she had to overcome.
There is probably nothing that lifts my spirits more than a movie about heroic scientists sending astronauts into space. Apollo 13 did this masterfully, and The Martian gave it a futuristic twist. And now Hidden Figures has revitalized this quintessentially American tale again, with great success, by focusing on the true story of a group of early NASA mathematicians who plotted Project Mercury's vehicle flight paths in the 1950s and 60s.
Hidden Figures is the perfect title for this film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's exhaustively researched book of the same name. It deals with an aspect of spaceflight that is generally ignored, namely all the calculations that allow us to shoot objects into orbit and bring them back again. But it's also about the people who are typically offscreen in sweeping tales of the white men who ran the space race. What Hidden Figures reveals, for the first time in Hollywood history, is that John Glenn would never have made it to space without the brilliant mathematical insights of a black woman named Katherine Johnson (played with what can only be called regal geekiness by Taraji Henson from Empire and Person of Interest).
Johnson was part of a group of "colored computers" at Langley Research Center in Atlanta, black women mathematicians who were segregated into their own number-crunching group. They worked on NASA's Project Mercury and Apollo 11, and Johnson was just one of several women in the group whose careers made history.
The movie is in theaters now.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TGV on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:57AM
If you read Ars regularly, you could have known the name of the writer of that article. She's always promoting the SJW agenda. Here's a fine example:
> But the genius of Hidden Figures is that it makes you feel keenly how racism is a series of small insults that pile up every day, little by little, until even a brilliant mathematician is on the verge of going nuts.
First, "even a brilliant"? Apart from the fact that Annalee cannot mention an oppressed person without adding some extremely positive adjective, making Turing look like some dabbling amateur, mathematicians are not known for their resilience to social pressure. But that's just style. The real problem in that sentence is that it equates racism to "a series of small insults". That phrasing is deliberate and utterly false: not only because racism doesn't follow from that definition (it leaves out "race", to just mention a tiny thing), but because one or two paragraphs above, it says "Johnson [must] race half a mile across the Langley campus every day, just so that she can use the only “colored” restroom for ladies." The film is set during the segregation. That's not a small insult. The use of "small insult" is merely put there to provide proof for fighting "white privilege". And if you think that's not on purpose, think again: this comes from a person who deeply believes that choice of words is of the utmost importance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @02:43PM
I don't know if Arse Technica still releases quality articles, but these kind of authors are the reason I never go on their website anymore.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @01:00AM
I haven't bothered going to Arstechnica since about, oh, 2014 or so when it was revealed that Kyle Orland was the head of a mailing list called "Game Journo Pros." GJP, by Orland's own admission, was inspired by the "Journo List" controversy where it was revealed that journalists from many competing news publications were conspiring with one-another to shape the news in favour of the Obama administration. The purpose of GJP was for tech and video game journalists to collude with one-another, promote people from their indie clique and push their toxic brand of progressive politics down on their readers and into the industry. The people involved in this pushed out the "Gamers Are Dead" articles and so much more--shattering many peoples' already flimsy trust not only in smaller niche journalist outlets but in the wider mainstream media. The mainstream media of course jumped in on the side of the corrupt clique and pushed a volatile political narrative about sexist, racist white males blah blah blah, you get the rest. As a result of all of this, people such as myself have been driven so far to the political right in such a short period of time that it would make your head spin.
So yeah. Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory! I just wanted to play vidya!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @02:12AM
Jesus christ how did you get a +5 for that drivel?
First you complain about some minor hyperbole that would only be noticed by the most hypersensitive.
Why is that only a problem when it comes to positive portrayals of minorities?
Have you ever once made a similar nitpicky criticism in any other context?
And then you flip it to complain that the author is underselling something and then impute it to mean something it clearly doesn't.
If you think having to walk fifteen minutes is not a small insult in the context of racism at the time then you know nothing of all the other indignities black folks suffered from. Like regular police violence, redlining, and as the article said not receiving credit for work that was integral to the program's success.
All you are doing is shitposting. You are the one with the agenda, not the author. And it doesn't really matter what what author might write, you'd find some molehill to make into a mountain.
(Score: 2) by TGV on Monday January 09 2017, @06:47AM
> If you think having to walk fifteen minutes is not a small insult in the context of racism at the time then you know nothing of all the other indignities black folks suffered from.
I think it's a fucking BIG insult, and beyond that, Anonymous Coward who can't even read properly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @02:36PM
> I think it's a fucking BIG insult,
That's because you've never had to suffer worse
> Anonymous Coward who can't even read properly.
Nonymous Coward who accuses others of his own failings