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Looks…interesting. Hope it turns out better than Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did.

Posted on February 20th, 2011 under Entertainment. Tags: adaptation, dirk gently, douglas adams, holistic detective agency, movie. Comments: 1

This would make a great drinking game at your next Objectivist book club meeting: spot the deviations from the book!

I guess one has to expect many differences from the source material, given that the producers don’t have a Lord of the Rings-scale budget with which to depict the “period” setting of the book — regrettably, since the “yesterday’s world of tomorrow” flavor of the book would have made for some noir/Deco/raygun gothic eye candy. The question is how well they’ve handled these differences and how consistent the differences are with the overall themes of the book — do the movies still tell the same fundamental story?

I am concerned a bit with the acting, though. It could be that the scenes shown just don’t match the urgent mood of the music used in the trailer, but the actors (particularly the one playing Dagny Taggart) seem a little too subdued for the lines they are speaking given the scenes in the book from which those lines are taken.

As for props, the one glimpse of the Rearden Metal bridge is intriguing (that has to be the single hardest object from the book to visualize, based on Rand’s description). On the other hand, the “device” from Starnesville looked pretty close to what I expected except for size — in the book, Dagny and Hank have to struggle to free it from the junk pile, and it is later shown wrapped in a tarp in Hank’s trunk. I guess I was expecting something about the size of a car’s engine block, but perhaps something the size of a coffee pot is actually more reasonable given that the device is an early engineering prototype.

Posted on February 12th, 2011 under Economics, Entertainment, politics, PPC, Science Fiction. Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, movie, trailer. Comments Off

Oh brother. Somewhere in Huntsville, Mike Griffin is doing a happy-dance.

NASA hasn’t yet (so far as I know) made a decision on a launch vehicle for Orion, a decision one would expect to be pretty straightforward given the two options on hand. The continuing resolution is probably the main factor, but my inner cynic wonders if knowing this was in the works is some small part of the reason it’s taken so long.

Posted on February 8th, 2011 under Economics, Enginastery, politics, Space Commerce, Space Technology. Tags: ares, Astrium, ATK, EADS, liberty, Mike Griffin, Stick. Comments Off