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 Post Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2020 3:06 am 
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If you like space stuff and have Netflix I highly recommend Mars. It is a documentary and drama joined together. It flips back and forth between the science needed to visit Mars and a movie type actually setting up a base on Mars. It is REALLY well done.

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 Post Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2020 3:51 pm 
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Jay, thanks for the heads-up :)
I just watched the trailer and i'll certainly watch at least one episode later.

If you haven't seen it already, i recommend "Challenger: The Final Flight".
It's a 4 part documentary that i simply couldn't stop watching, i put the first episode on a couple of nights ago not expecting to see much i didn't already know, how wrong that assumption was, i eventually crawled into bed at 3am having watched all 4 episodes!


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 Post Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2020 6:40 pm 
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YW. :) It starts out a bit slow but gets better and better.

I can't remember if I've seen Challenger: The Final Flight or not but added it to my list on Netflix.

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 Post Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2020 2:38 am 
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Odd thing about this docudrama. It was done from 2016-2018 yet it talks about COVID-19. No, of course, not by name but they found living bacteria in an area that a civilian mining outfit is ignoring the 'scientific rules'. People are dropping. With how COVID-19 supposedly started the parallel is a bit amazing. This is in season 2, episode 4. We have been on Mars for 9 or10 years. Oddly the 'Mars infection' also attacks the lungs.

It is odd how some sci-fi, which this largely is, seems to be a prophesy of science to come. I say that just a bit tongue in cheek but is not a cell phone an early model of Star Trek's communicater? Was not Jules Verne's Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea obviously a nuclear sub? The movies Electric Dreams and Tron spoke of computer artificial intelligence which we are using today to drive cars and aircraft. If you remember the comic Dick Tracy the two way wrist radio seems a lot like a Skype video call. Going back to Star Trek they used 'warp drive'. Today we have computer models of a possible warp drive.

I'm not saying that the people that wrote this stuff were prophets but could it not be a case where it has been, in cases, a self imposed prophesy? What if the person that designed the first cell phone was a Star Trek fan and liked the communicator and decided that it could be done.....

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 Post Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2020 6:34 am 
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@ Doddie: I'm starting the third episode of the Challenger: Last Flight documentary.

In late 1985 I gained access to NASA Lewis Research Center's data computers in Cleveland Ohio through a contest for writing a secure password entry system for their user terminals. I happened to win and got $1500.00 and access to their data systems. I used Boolean Logic for the code. Boolean Logic is seen as four states being And, Or, Not and Exclusive Or with all conditions being either true or false. Using a combination of the four I built a system that their people could not break. This was on 16 bit Motorola 68000 systems and what I wrote equated to 128 bit encryption or possibly better. It was written entirely in Assembly. Ya, I used to do some pretty serious stuff. ;) While I could not duplicate this on a modern system without a bunch of research I still remember the outline. A floppy disk was used as a the key and everything was there on the floppy. The thing was that the actual password was messed up with any of the four Boolean options randomly selected. On a specific sector on the disk was the key to know what Boolean mode to use to decrypt the actual password, also randomly selected. This key sector on the disk was also messed up with another Boolean method that was keyed by another sector which allowed things to go backward to the actual password. The final security was that, if the disk was accessed other than on a boot, it would self format. An odd thing about the 16 bit Motorola 68000 systems was that they were only 16 bit externally. Internally they were 32 bit. Sorry, got a bit nostalgic...

Anyway it got me access to their data computers which resulted in my young kids having some really good science projects. As to the Challenger explosion I probably learned more about the situation than most including the history of O-Ring failures. Still this documentary is showing things I still didn't know. I'm just starting the third episode. For one thing I never knew that Russia refused to use the solid fuel boosters considering them too much of a safety issue. This actually makes sense as, once lit, they cannot be shut down no matter what.

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 Post Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2020 4:31 pm 
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jaylach wrote:
Sorry, got a bit nostalgic...

No need to apologise, even though i don't understand the computer language or maths, it was still a fascinating read :)

jaylach wrote:
Still this documentary is showing things I still didn't know. I'm just starting the third episode. For one thing I never knew that Russia refused to use the solid fuel boosters considering them too much of a safety issue. This actually makes sense as, once lit, they cannot be shut down no matter what.

Oddly i somehow knew about the Soviet refusal to use boosters but there was a lot more i didn't know... probably because in Europe we were dealing with the radiation fallout from the Chernobyl disaster that happened in April of '86 leading to our news coverage of Challenger dropping out of the 'news'.

As an aside to that, monitoring of radiation levels caused by radiation from Chernobyl only ended in Scotland in 2010 with the last livestock movement restrictions lifted (as far as i can tell) in 2008...:
https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/farmingrural/Agriculture/Livestock/Meat/Sheep/chernobyl

Which leads me to another fantastic mini-series, HBO's Chernobyl, it isn't currently on Netflix this side of the pond but if you haven't seen it yet it really is a must-see when you get the chance to watch it, it's equally chilling and historically accurate.


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