The Aeronauts

My daughter and I started watching this historical drama a while ago and found its beginning quite odd.  For whatever reason we didn’t continue to watch it on that day.  

Forward wind a few months perhaps and I resume the film.  

The movie approximates real life events of early hot air balloon expeditions but the film had a lot of fun with many dangerous adventure action scenes.  The film took many artistic liberties, but it didn’t take away from an interesting time of exploration and science discovery.  

I found the action scenes rather stressful and wasn’t certain of the future of the protagonists.  The chemistry between Jones and Redmayne worked nicely and the stunt work demonstrated the perils of high altitude balloon flight very effectively.  

I really enjoyed the mix of history, science, aeronautics, adventure and heroic pursuits.  Throughly entertaining for an inquisitive, adventurous type.  

Watched a few YouTube bits afterwards - Redmayne’s interview on Colbert was delectable and provided some juicy insight into the making of the movie.  

7/10

I was planning on using a beautiful still from the movie in this post, but I couldn't find a image that appears clear from copyright.  Instead I chose an image from The Smithsonian.

Does polling provide an accurate reflection of what we think - who do you trust to explain what is important to you?

Three examples of polling figures that at first glance could be surprising:

From Today's USA Today:

Which seems to conflict with one from a YouTube video I saw recently from one of my new favourite YouTubers: Johnny Harris on his latest vlog called Why People Think the World is Flat, Johnny shows a poll from Yougov...

Wow.

And finally, I found this while searching for Sanders  (funny many links to belt sanders were mixed with the politician) on DuckDuckGo this morning. 

Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-6250.html

I'm sure behind each of these are other stories of question bias, statistics and assumptions.  For example, I quickly found an article explaining the extraordinary flat earther numbers - "No, One-Third of Millennials Don't Actually Think Earth Is Flat.

These are all contributing artifacts to what I've been paying attention lately - we live in highly complex time and place and very few people truly understand the things they see in the news, see on their favourite YouTube channels, or skim books about economics or the reasons why they have such strong opinions about science, religion, politics or Lizzo.

Who do you trust to explain what is important to you?

Generator Toronto 2020 with Chris Hadfield

My wife saw this event last year and got tickets for both of us for this year’s version.  Although main draw, headliner Chris Hadfield only had three appearances, the variety, depth and quality of the other presenters and artists was top notch.  From leading edge science, maths comedy and societal commentary, there was so much I enjoyed.  The venue was the still awesome Roy Thompson Hall, the setting was casual and quirky, but the content was delivered with a strong level of integrity and relevance.

Accompanied by the techno groove of TWRP, Chris’ son Evan Hadfield started off the evening and relayed the themes of positivity, scientific integrity and the value of honest dialogue (I didn’t take notes, but that’s what I took from his opening and the presentations). Rob Ince was the fast-paced humourous Brit host and kept the series of speakers and artists moving along nicely.

It wasn’t all serious science, and Second City (with some sing-a-long), Aaron Chen (from Australia) and Matt Parker (loved the math laughs and now recall I’ve seen him on YouTube previously) interjected a good amount of comedic material and even Jae Rhim Lee (of mushroom death suit fame) and Shari Forbes (with an explanation of a body farm) lightened the heavy topics of mortality and human remains.  Some of the presenters had appeared on Ted Talks, including Adrian Owen and Brendan Frey who enlightened the audience with their important and innovative advances in health sciences.  The night concluded with Simone Giertz adding youthful fun with personal seriousness in a conversation with Chris Hadfield.

But it was Chris Hadfield that we all came to see and he didn’t disappoint.  He delivered a nice acoustic rendition of The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun after the break, but his main contribution was on the topic of map history and science.  His is one (rare) of those people that can make any topic interesting in his passion, delivery, humour and intellect.  Those few minutes were worth the price of admission alone.

A little melancholy thanks to Hawking

My wife has a headache this morning.  I'm missing her as she rests in bed.  The house is very quiet.  

I've just read a chapter called Is There Other Intelligent Life in the Universe? from of a new collection of Stephen Hawking writings called Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

Now my head hurts.

What Hawking says comes as a bit of a surprise and and I must say a little disheartening.  Perhaps on a more optimistic day, I would say what he says makes me feel very special indeed.

I've been listening a lot to a wonderfully insightful podcast called Make Me Smart with Kai & Molly and a question that they regularly pose is What's something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about?

Well, I've always had a strong belief (perhaps not a knowledge) that there was a high probability that we were not alone in the universe.  I had always thought that with the millions (billions) of galaxies in the universe, the chances of there NOT being a place like Earth that had some form of intelligence life has very low.  

But I think Hawking had a different view of the question and let's be honest, he's smarter than I am.  From Hawking I gathered that the chances that the apparent random possibility of the creation of DNA, mixed with the right timeframe, mixed with the chance of avoiding a asteroid collision, mixed with the fact that not all suns have planets and lastly, the chance that intelligent life has emerged from that DNA - that all points to very, very small odds.  Not to mention the fact, that if there was by chance, other intelligent life out there (at this point in timeline), then they are so far away, we'd never know.

And that's why I'm a little melancholy this morning.

Synapses

I just saw the movie Limitless tonight. My modest review on Facebook was:

I really liked it, lots of fun, action and an interesting premise. Plot could have taken a little more load, but all together, very entertaining. Gotta go and connect a few new synapses.

I then checked my Yahoo email and found an email from Luminato regarding the addition of the New Yorker series, which includes one my favourite authors and big thinkers - Malcolm Gladwell. I'm really excited about the opportunity to see him and hopefully hear about his new ideas.

Oh, and the coincidence ?  Limitless is based on the plot premise that what if there was a pill you could take that would allow you to use more/all of your available brain capacity.  And, if there's anyone who can quickly get your synapses firing and expanding your brain around new ideas, it's Malcolm Gladwell.  I'd highly recommend all his books, my favourite being Blink.

Pi and Einstein

I'm a mathy and I almost missed the geeky numerical date alignment of March 14th with Pi (3.14...).  Thank you to an old math friend from The University of Waterloo who posted this fun fact on Facebook.  On the 14th, my wife told me that Albert Einstein's birthday was March 14th which I hadn't heard before.  In the evening, my daughter and I watched a family movie called Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.  In a later scene, Jason Bateman's dry accountant character begins to feel the magic of the emporium and picks up an Einstein doll who appears to be talking to him.  Nice geek coincidence.

Exercise those neurons

As a result of getting my news through my new RSS feed, I'm enjoying some new discoveries. A few super-geek finds of late:

• Turning a sphere inside out - visual mathematics.
• A new computer game called Portal.
• The Most Complicated Thing That Humans Have Built So Far!

Resources: Exercising the human brain; what it is and how it works.