Shop OBEX P1 Docs P2 Docs Learn Events
Hexadecimals to the Rescue — Parallax Forums

Hexadecimals to the Rescue

Comments

  • There's an ASCII table as well just to add to the geekiness :-)

    Really good film and even better book.
  • Putlocker? The movie was just released in theaters, how can that be legal?
  • I would assume that posting a copyrighted movie to the internet is illegal -- at least in most countries. Now, is it illegal to watch a pirated movie on the internet? Probably. Anyhow, it is a much better viewing experience to watch "The Martian" on a big screen in a theater.

    I saw it a few days ago in the theater, and I liked it very much. There are several technical issues in the movie that violate the laws of Physics, but I accepted them as fictional enhancements to make the movie more entertaining for the general public. I'll have to read the book to see if it accurately follows the laws of Physics.

    After the movie my son asked me about the hexadecimal thing, and I explained to him how two hex digits make up an ASCII character. I think he learned something from that. I also told him there was no need to find an ASCII table as long as you know that the letter "A" is 41 in hex. All the other letters just follow sequentially after that.

  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    "big screen"? Nah, I just sit nice and close to my little one :)

    Much nicer than having to go to any movie theatre around here.
  • I would have to sit 12 inches from my computer screen to fill the same field of view that I had at the theater. For most movies I am happy to wait until they come out on Blu-ray or are available on Hulu or one of the cable movie channels. However, there are a few movies where I want to see them as soon as they hit the theaters. The Martian was one of them, and the upcoming Star Wars movie is another one.
  • I noticed that they had the 16 hex numbers, plus the question mark. Now *we* all know that there is an ASCII "?" and it was therefore redundant.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    A good Hollywood movie. Nice to see that normal laptops are still around in umpteen years from now (Heater, did you see the Asus Netbook? :) )There were a few cliché moments. I'm tired of seeing people jumping around outside space ships/stations untethered. And if I see one more Wall-E/Gravity/Martian "jetting around controllably in open space using a fire extinguisher or poking a hole in my space suit", I'm gonna be sick.

    It was interesting to see Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain in the same space travel movie again, on the heels of "Interstellar". And Damon was once again the lone inhabitant of a remote planet, waiting to be rescued at great cost and risk to his rescuers. He handled the situation better in "Martian". :)

    This is def a pirate movie, as you can hear people in the audience talk and see them walk around! These sites are in foreign countries and apparently not easily shut down. There are similar sites like solarmovie.ac , ffilms.org. FFilms seems more legit. Putlocker & solarmovie change their url extensions periodically.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    What? Me watch pirated content?

    Well, I never did get it to load. So no I did not.

    As good as it may be I can probably wait for it to pass by me on TV or DVD or whatever.
  • Hey, be nice, Wall-E is one of my favorite movies. It's a cartoon, after all. A robot trash-compactor we couldn't build falls for a female robot with a head that only hovers above her body and that can fly around supersonic. The fire extinguisher in space is at least Newtonian. It's probably the most realistic part of the film. That and the suggestion that 700 years hence, a Twinkie will still look new.

    Besides, think back to Ed White's space walk during the Gemini days. He used a little pistol-thing with gas jets, not too different from that fire extinguisher. And then there was the MMU, the Manned Maneuvering Unit. One astronaut, no tether.
    erco wrote: »
    I'm tired of seeing people jumping around outside space ships/stations untethered. And if I see one more Wall-E/Gravity/Martian "jetting around controllably in open space using a fire extinguisher or poking a hole in my space suit", I'm gonna be sick.

  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    Oh, I LOVE Wall-E, he did it first and best. But IMO he owns that move, now it seems cheesy in a real Sci-Fi film.

    I'm sure it's a thousand times harder than it seems, center of mass/center of thrust/tumbling notwithstanding. The guys in "Apollo 13" did a good job of showing how difficult it was to use real rocket thrusters in an improvised situation, and they were professionals!
  • The book does a better job with physics, explaining that there are super adhesives and super fabrics not just duct tape and polyethylene. Ink-based markers do not work outside the hab because of the cold, and the jetting about scene at the rescue is not there. The Hermes crew does dump the atmosphere for a little extra thrust but they also don't have the bomb or the untethered spacewalks.

    The movie is still good, far better than any other Mars movie and most other space movies. Movie + book is a killer combo because the book fills in a lot that the movie shortcutted. Well worth seeing on the big screen and in 3D if you're into that.

  • There were certainly some issues but overall I was pretty happy with the movie.

    Obviously the whole premise is shot in the foot with the density of the atmosphere, since there's no way so much dynamic pressure could be generated.

    That hexidecimal portion was probably the best of the movie. Really cool to see that.
  • It seems that most people don't realize that Mars has virtually no atmosphere. It's atmospheric density/pressure is similar to what we would experience on earth at an altitude of 100,000 feet. In the movie the astronaut's suits seem to hang loosely on them as they walked around on the surface. In reality, the suits would have been inflated with at least a pressure of 3 PSI, and more if there was any nitrogen or helium mixed with oxygen. They would have needed suits similar to the ones used for space walks or on the Moon.
  • They've actually been thinking spandex like suits could work to keep enough pressure on the skin. But yeah in the movie the suits seemed pressurized which should have made them walking balloons.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    All I noticed was Matt Damon's space suit was skin tight on his skinny calves (legs). Looked like the costume designer ran out of cash and settled for spandex.
Sign In or Register to comment.