Ben Craven gave us a talk about quick and easy maths that can be done before a project even starts. This can tell you how realistic an idea is. He gave us a few simple problems that could be worked out fairly simply, without the use of a calculator.

The first of which was fairly simple, we had to work out ‘If you cycled from Glasgow to London, how many times would your wheels rotate?’ Myself and Nadia worked out that they would rotate 300,000 times using an estimated distance between the two cities and the size of a bike wheel. This was pretty easy to do and a fairly good estimate.

The next question was ‘How many breaths do you take in a year?’  we did this by seeing how many breaths Nadia took in 10 seconds then multiplied that by 6, then 60, 25 and 350 (yes we rounded the numbers… not that good at maths). We got 1 million breaths… which was a bit of a underestimate or Nadia’s a really slow breather.

The final question Nadia and I received was ‘If you piled everyone in the world into a cone with 45 degree sides, how high would the cone be? How long would it take you to walk to the top?’  We both imagined every one piled into an ice cream cone – the poor person right at the bottom crushed to death. After a long time we just managed to get an answer of 1km just before the end and we were right! However my guess of 20 minutes for walking to the top was a bit lame…. I was thinking of climbing up a mountain.

Overall the exercise was fun and good to use to see whether a future project is viable or not. Definitely useful for me because my logic is not very good under pressure…

[stag_button url=”http://bencraven.org.uk/” style=”light-blue” size=”small” type=”round” target=”_self”]Ben Craven’s Website[/stag_button]

[stag_intro]I think this 2001: A Space Odyssey can only be defined by my classes reaction when it finished. This was complete silence (with the odd ‘WHAT?!’).[/stag_intro] For me the film was of 3 parts, the first ‘Ok, I get it, but where is this going?’ the second ‘This part makes sense!’ and the last ‘Um, did someone slip something in my drink?’.

Despite the lack of storyline for half the film, I really enjoyed it. Mainly because of others reactions to it, and the very human manner of trying to interpret something you don’t really understand. That seems to be how Kubrick wanted the film to be taken; to quote –

‘You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.’

Another reason, and I guess why our tutor made us watch it was the technology side of it. Considering the film was released in 1968, the idea that Kubrick and co came up with are crazily similar to what we have today. The ‘Picture Phone’ in the space hotel is exactly like Skype, FaceTime and other video phone software. TV screen on the back of plane seats, the velcro like ‘grip shoes’ and flat screen tablet devices that you can what TV on. HAL 9000’s ‘eye’ brings thought to the CCTV that is on every corner of our city streets.

This film has been so well thought out, and is very much scientifically accurate, and I love it for that. The psychedelic nature of the end was obviously radical at the time, the cinematography involved was revolutionary. You can see many other sci-fi films have been influenced by it such as Blade Runner. As much as the storyline was lacking I would watch the film again for its attention to detail and radical visual effects.