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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: 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!