Introducing our theme for May… SPACE! We will be watching four space-themed movies! Our schedule is:
May 6th - Interstellar
May 13th - 2001: A Space Odyssey
May 20th - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
May 27th- Moon
We hope you’ll join us in watching these four movies! And for paid subscribers, we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the movies, and on our podcast conversation.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
Sir, please tell me what you think about interstellar trying to be all science and stuff and then ending up with love as a force of nature that "crosses dimensions". Also what does the physicist turned programmer at molly rocket thinks about this. With a science advisor who is an actual physicist and actual papers being published from the black hole renderer made for the movie, all they could come up with was love? Why is the concept of love so important to these people. Can't a guy get a break even in a scifi movie? I think this is the paper they wrote: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/32/6/065001
I am no longer in university and can't really access that paper without paying. But here is the arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03808.pdf
I wonder if you can actually get your hands on the DNGR algorithm they developed and see if its even worthy of being made so much noise about even as software.
But my question is, why would you do this? Does it really matter how you render a blackhole that appears for a few minutes with accuracy if you are going to just abandon the sci-fi for what I think is closer to fantasy anyways? Its not a bad thing. It looks pretty. But why make a big deal about it? I guess I'm just saying that these people tried to sell the movie as being hard science fiction when it really isn't that. It happens again and again in scifi movies like ex-machina, Transcendence, HER. Please watch ex-machina too. I remember it was shown in our university in the arena and at least 1 computer science student was absolutely awestruck with it. And again, I felt like it was a nice story if I didn't try to question it, but just that. The Martian (Andy Weir) in contrast was a nice story (the book). Every seat grabbing incident in it is based in what at least seems to be plausible science and it doesn't try to masquerade as a sci-fi story while actually being a fantasy story.
The two best things about Interstellar are the ray-traced Kerr (spinning) black hole with its accretion disk and the soundtrack. It would be fun to do a Handmade Hero stream on doing that with compute shaders! Here is my version of a non-spinning one https://github.com/fernand/schwarzschild_raytracer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqnRs_xTWQ. The spinning one is a bit more work, but not too bad.