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Aug. 16th, 2008
Getting It Right
Aug. 16th, 2008 03:57 pmMany people have examples of movies or television shows getting something egregiously wrong: bad science, bad linguistics, bad history, whatever. Rarer are examples of getting something unexpectedly right.
In the otherwise forgettable movie It's My Turn, Jill Clayburgh plays a math professor, and there is an early scene in which she gives a lecture, proving a theorem, a rather abstract result called the Snake Lemma. (It really deserves Theorem status - it's absolutely central to its sub-branch of mathematics - but it's always been called a lemma.) Now, in the proof of the Snake Lemma, there is a step where an alert student will look up and say, "Wait a minute...": something fishy has just been done. The professor, having probably been that alert student, has the response prepared: it is fishy, yes, but there's a justification for it in this case. ("Good. You are quick, but not yet quick enough." Brownie points for sourcing that one.)
In the movie, Clayburgh comes to that step. One of the students immediately raises the right objection; Clayburgh gives the right response. Letter-perfect. I didn't watch the movie much past that, but that scene has my love forever.
So, what's your favorite Getting It Right example?
In the otherwise forgettable movie It's My Turn, Jill Clayburgh plays a math professor, and there is an early scene in which she gives a lecture, proving a theorem, a rather abstract result called the Snake Lemma. (It really deserves Theorem status - it's absolutely central to its sub-branch of mathematics - but it's always been called a lemma.) Now, in the proof of the Snake Lemma, there is a step where an alert student will look up and say, "Wait a minute...": something fishy has just been done. The professor, having probably been that alert student, has the response prepared: it is fishy, yes, but there's a justification for it in this case. ("Good. You are quick, but not yet quick enough." Brownie points for sourcing that one.)
In the movie, Clayburgh comes to that step. One of the students immediately raises the right objection; Clayburgh gives the right response. Letter-perfect. I didn't watch the movie much past that, but that scene has my love forever.
So, what's your favorite Getting It Right example?
I bought a number of used books at Denvention, and in reading them I keep running into the unexpected. Two examples:
- Northwest Smith includes a couple of references to a song entitled "The Green Hills of Earth". The stories were written in the 1930s.
- Early on in The Lathe of Heaven, Dr. Haber muses on the fact that snowcaps have disappeared from the great mountains, even Everest and Erebus, as a result of the Greenhouse Effect. (Le Guin capitalizes the words.) The Lathe of Heaven was published in 1971.
