The Terminator never deals with the plot hole present in many time travel movies: if you go back to change something then it never happened and you have no reason to go back, thus you never went back to stop it, so it ended up happening.

I found it to be pretty uninteresting—see my comment below—but I don't remember them discussing relativity (haven't seen it in a while), what did they say about it?

I tend to favour the alternate reality theory; If you go back in time any changes you make cause the timeline to diverge from that point forward, though presumably the place you came from carries on happily without you in it.

I bet that increased "dreaminess" or cinematic feeling of 24 fps is just a learned association though, kind of like how western adults associate minor keys with "sad" music but little kids and non-westerners don't hear it that way. If you showed two otherwise-identical versions of a movie to someone from the 19th…

It takes place in the same universe, the alien masterminds who built the structures they find are apparently from the same species that was seen in the chair in the original Alien (the space jockey), but aside from that we aren't going to see the famous alien (the "xenomorph") from those movies, and the story is…

The part about Chinese taking over probably isn't realistic, but it sounds like that's more just the framing device—the more scarily plausible part is more and more educated westerners being stuck in shitty jobs as more comfortable middle-class jobs become more scarce (see this post on trends in jobs for recent…

I don't think it's actually too realistic. Physicists who consider the issue of time travel usually argue the most plausible and paradox-free version is the theory that the timeline is fixed (the Novikov self-consistency principle, so that a time traveler could influence events in the past but these influences would…

Glad to see Time Bandits at #1! And I haven't see "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time", I'll have to check that out. I disagree with putting Primer on the list though, that movie has nothing much going for it in the character or story department, it seems like a purely an intellectual exercise in figuring out what the…

It's no Blade Runner, but I think this isn't too far from the kind of sets people would use in the early 80s to give a sense of "the future" on a lower budget. Looks kind of like the 1980 PBS adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven, for example, or lots of "futuristic" early 80s New Wave videos (the giant glowing triangle…

Thanks for the link; I've been curious about the prevalance of different resources on the moon.

I guess you enjoy being a jerk to anyone who politely disagrees with you? I still think your "original point" is misleading at best. A centrifuge doesn't create effects identical to those seen in a room standing still on the surface of the Earth, but those G-force effects in the room on Earth are understood to be…

The proof you link to seems to miss the point, there's no requirement that the function F(N), which takes a natural number N as an input and returns a number between 0 and 1 as an output, be equal to 1/N (unless you were just using that as an example in the informal proof, with it being implied but not explicitly…

His argument is invalid, simply due to the fact that there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1, just are there are infinite numbers between 1 and ∞, just as there are infinite numbers between 0 and 0.1, just as there are infinite numbers between any number and any other number.

I'm not talking about accelerating

You can only see the very ends arms near the wrists, so how could you be so sure? It's certainly possible for a person to hold their arms out so that their hands are at eye level (which you presumably weren't doing when drumming), not to mention the fact that they can tilt their head up or down towards the level of…

Well, they're not the "same" in the specific sense mentioned in the video, where two sets are "the same" in size if it's possible to find a one-to-one mapping between the elements of each set. You can't find a one-to-one mapping between the integers and the real numbers between 0 and 1, no matter how hard you try.

No it's not and you're apparently not understanding me.

Simply guessing that infinities might be different without providing any sort of valid mathematical argument for it (even a non-rigourous one) doesn't really qualify as anticipating Cantor. The "different types" described on that page, "Infinite in one and two directions, infinite in area, infinite everywhere and…

the segment from 0 to 1 is an aleph-1 set (I think, it's been awhile since topology class)

those infinities are exactly the same: Aleph-1