Wednesday, February 25, 2009

I'll bet that this looks good to the NSF as outreach....

Here is a neat little video of Prof. Jim Kakalios, who acted as a science advisor on the forthcoming Watchmen movie. Watchmen is a graphic novel by Allen Moore, set in a dystopian alternate 1985, in a world where there really are "costumed vigilantes". The story looks at what kind of people would dress up in costumes and fight crime (answer: damaged people), and what it would do to society if there really was a single being (who happens to be American) with godlike superpowers.

Anyway, it sounds like Prof. Kakalios had a great time, and helped the movie producers get certain things to look right (e.g., a 1959 physics lab; a 1985 physics lab; equations on chalkboards in the background). This sort of thing seems like it would be great fun. So, to all you Hollywood producers out there, call me :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Watchmen is exemplar historical patriarchal White Protestant European oppression of Peoples of Colour. Ms. Manish is multitasked tokenism; the redhead is Satan, big blue Yahweh is disinterested; everybody else is whitebread. We long for past days when the world worked for those who built it.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Entropy. Don't piss off the Gifted.

Anonymous said...

Kakalios is a wonderful professor, one of the top ones I have ever had. I had him for my stat mech courses and he was one of my advisors.

After handing out a test our class did particularly poorly at, he said we should all practice phrases that we will be using in our new jobs. Phrases such as "would you like fries with that?"