h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The first freebie film tip of the year: "Flatland: The Film":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyuNrm4VK2w

Maths buffs, prepare to get your brains pummeled. This is a film version of Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1882 classic novella.

The novella is what you get when you mix up mathematics and theology. (I just HAVE to read some of Abbott's theological work. He sounds like an erudite sort of lunatic...)

The film is what you get when you give a nutcase some off-the-rack software. A dedicated nutcase, I might add. This gentleman and his collaborators spent two years on the task. The result is both stunning and hilarious.

I suspect the whole family enjoyed this project: the filmmaker's wife and kids provided voices. He sent away for the score, which is quite good.

You will not believe the elegance of this film. Or how much it will make you laugh. And, er, yes, it is needlessly messianic. Seriously.

Thanks to the kind Youtuber who shared this gem. Let me know what you think about it.

I don't think you'll ever look at a geometry book the same way again.

Oh wow!

I love Flatland - it was useful (if that's the right word) to me when I was doing my PhD and decided to try to visualise hypercubes and doughnuts in 4 dimensions whereas my supervisor preferred calculations to visualisations so wasn't able to help.

The animation is detailed and impressive - I look forward to watching more of the video soon

Oh, great, another one. I always enjoyed the books - both 'Flatland' and 'Sphereland'. I may be mathematically hopeless, but I'm a visualiser, too, and I love a brain stretch.

I want to find the sequel. Allegedly, Martin Sheen is in it, which boggles the mind.

A great Film.

I remember once when I was a kid my brother told me a story about the flat people who built a bank with a secure vault. Of course they had no concept of a roof so one day somebody figured out how to go into the third dimension and steel all of their 'flat bucks'.

I never realised that triangles were so dangerous, I use them all of the time. The trapezoids are even worse

I have always believed that time is the fourth dimension, but there could be more

Thank you

F S

I like your brother's story there.

I really should make someplace to gather up the "must watch later" films... Flatland and Sphereland are a couple of the books that have survived several forced book culls in the last decade and a half (Sasha may remember a discussion Elsewhere regarding book choices for a sci-fi newbie )

Classical problem in four dimensions, given a demon who can jump forward or backward in time, how can you wall it up in a dungeon so that it cannot escape by means of jumpi g either forward or backward in time to a time when the du geon is open and unguarded?

~ ? ~ Is there a good or interesting answer ?, ITIWBS ~ ~
... . . . . If he jumps backward in time would he not just end up back in the dungeon sooner or later anyway ? ..

I must look at this when I get a chance. I never liked Flatland but it was interesting. I much preferrred Dewdney's The Planiverse which concentrated more on how life in 2d could actually work.

Ha, I just learned something new the other day and subsequently posted the following (on a social media not far from here):

"Consider the pheasant, for its brain is so small it cannot grasp concepts like past and future and thus lives constantly in the now"

How very Zen.

You say pheasant, I say operations manager.

Oh, man oh, man.

Loved the book will be watching this later. Sadly the Sphereland DVD is unavailable on Amazon, it has Kate Mulgrew as 'Oversphere'

I'll be keeping me eye out (not literally )

Smiley pun intended.

Good one, Icy

'Being in the now' is the main principle of defensive driving. If you accept things as they happen, without considering past causes or future consequences, it makes you far more relaxed a driver, and better at making decisions.

If the demon has got a definite limit it can jump forward or backward in time (one step at a time), brick the cell up solid to a depth farther than the demon can jump before confining it, unbrick for the term of its incarceration, then brick the cell solid again afterward.

Will see if I can find Dewdney's "Planiverse".

I've recently been looking at this book, rather old fashioned, but covers many of the basics.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45691

A special problem with time treated as a 4th dimension, taking it from George Airy's efforts to prove thermodynamic closure in time, time has to be incorporated into the diagram under an inverse square law rather than by means of the algebraic sums that sufficed for the three spatial dimensions, a discovery that later fell to Einstein.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Biddell_Airy