"The Divide": life in a foxhole after NYC gets nuked

The enigmatic film “The Divide” starts with a sepia view of a nuclear blast in lower Manhattan viewed from about Chelsea.  Almost immediately, residents are scurrying in panic to a cellar.  After some perambulations, eight survivors wind up testing each other out in an endurance game.

The film had one Friday midnight showing at Landmark E Street in Washington and then waited for the DVD in April.

Anchor Bay’s official site is here. The film is directed by Xavier Gens.

The film keeps the ragged, sepia look of living underground, but has some excursions that sound like real sci-fi.  Men in white radiation suits attack as if they were “aliens”.  An excursion “beyond” leads through some bizarre white tubing and experimentation areas.

After they capture a man who might have some intel as to how to get out, they practice “extreme rendition”, and the man, while losing a finger, makes particularly offensive comments, comparing homosexuality to cowardice and pariah status, eventually bragging that he has nine more fingers. But pretty soon the group really descends into all imaginable behaviors.  They make a ritual of the buzz cuts, in anticipation of radiation sickness.

 But then the eyebrows go, too.

This is a confining, unpleasant film, that misses the opportunity to portray, what if we somehow let it happen. Well, maybe the final walkabout above ground says something.  Life will not go on as it had. 

With Michael Biehn, Lauren German, Vilo Vintimiglia.

IMAX Short film shows the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, volunteer rescue efforts

The 26-minute IMAX 3D Short, “Rescue 3D”, directed by Stephen Low, has the most graphic disaster scene that I have ever witnessed close up. A significant amount of footage in the film, now shown at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, shows, from the air at low altitude, the devastation in Haiti shortly after the January 2010 earthquake.  One sees several miles of tenements, pancaked and imploded.  People are herded underneath huge warehouse like structures near the ocean. A church is shown crumbling to the ground.   Naval surgeons are shown performing surgery under battlefield conditions.  I don’t know how the filmmakers got this footage as it happened.  How could they be set up for it before it happened?  The film also has a scientific explanation of the Haiti earthquake, where the ground underneath slipped six meters.

The film also depicts several individuals in several different military and volunteer groups that offer assistance.  A female Air Force pilot, Lauren Ross, flies a C-17 cargo plane.  Maj. Matt Jonkey of the Nevada National Guard helps rescue a hiker stranded on a rocky prominence about Lake Tahoe (this may be training).  Commander Peter Crain of the Canadian Navy trains on a cutter (more like a US Coast Guard boat) of the Nova Scotia coast, the Athabaskan. Stephen Heicklen drills as a volunteer fire fighter in Bridgeville, NJ, in a scene that recalls Ron Howard’s “Backdraft”.  The hospital ship USS Comfort is also shown. 

One wonders about the altruistic motives to volunteer for such duty, particularly outside the military (as with volunteer fire departments). 

At the end, the volunteers and military are headed for the tsunami disaster in Japan in 2011.

The Smithsonian link for the film is here. 

There is a volunteer information exchange site for people interested in volunteering, which is difficult, link here. 

Wikipedia attribution link for USCG picture of damage from overhead, similar to film. 

Could black holes a few dozen light years from Earth cause mass extinctions?

When reading a book by Lewis Darnell “Life in the Universe” (April 17, 2012 Books Blog) I encountered some speculation that earlier extinctions (over 1 billion years ago, not the dinosaur wipe-out 65 million years ago from the asteroid hit) could have been prompted by encounters with moderate or small black holes as the Sun revolves around the galactic center.  Not close enough to suck up the solar system, but maybe close enough to unleash destructive gamma radiation on Earth.  A supernova 30 light years away could unleash destructive radiation within a few thousand years.  There are some speculations that supernovae as far away as 1000 light years, enough to form black holes, could result in extinguishing advanced life on Earth.

I looked up a few videos on YouTube in the subject. 

I found one by Thomas Lucas and “space.com”, 18 min,  “The Largest Black Holes in the Universe.”  He notes that some black holes formed very early in the history of the Universe, and that some coalesced to form quasars.

But a more interesting short, 10 min, narrated by Michael, produced by Numberphile, is  “Travel Inside a Black Hole”.

If you approached a black hole, you would experience time dilation, so it could seem like a long time before the tidal forces started to “hurt”.

An outside observer would see you approach the Schwarzchild Radius, and seem to stay there, because of time dilation.  Your image would be “red-shifted” out of sight, gradually.  He also explains the “Cosmological Principle”, that the Universe has no “center”, but that from any point, everything seems to be moving away from you at the same rate.

He also discusses “acoustic black holes” or “dumb holes”.  He also says that if the Universe got big enough through expansion, there is a good statistical chance of “Another Earth” (as in the sci-fi movie by Brit Marling) actually existing.

You can also try this 1 hour video, “The Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe”, by Dr. Paul Francis at ANU (Australia).   There is some mathematical theory that says that all the information in a galaxy will be stored on the surface of black holes in the galaxy.  When people die, their “information” will be stored there forever (as a kind of afterlife).  But there is a problem that the surface area may not be large enough to house all the information (because of the way volume and surface area work out in high school solid geometry!)

There is also the controversial idea of “Micro Black Holes”, which, in theory, could wreak havoc by “hacking” information in bizarre ways if they really existed, Wikipedia reference here. 

Marburg virus outbreak depicted in ABC's "Body of Proof" in 2-part "Going Viral"

Christopher Murphey’s show “Body of Proof” on ABC featured (on March 27 and April 3, 2012) a two-part series “Going Viral”, in which Philadelphia experiences an outbreak of Marburg virus, related closely to Ebola.  At one point, there is an electron microscope picture of the virus with the “shepherd’s crook”.

A former disgruntled employee of a virology lab gets a job with WHO and infects himself with the virus, and then infects areas in the city where many people must touch a common surface (incidental blood contact). 

Marburg and Ebola cause horrific hemorrhagic disease with internal organs like pancreas, liver and eventually the brain disintegrating.  But some people survive with lasting disability.  Richard Preston (“The Hot Zone”) and Laurie Garrett have written books on the virus.  There was one strain, Ebola Reston, an outbreak in 1989 in animals, thought to be airborne.  

In the fiction scenario (about 85 minutes, a typical length for a feature movie) there are about 100 deaths in at least six clusters in Philadelphia.  The “typhoid Mary” is tracked down, ironically, through bedbug bites.

   

Samples of the virus would be present in very few places in the world, such as Ft.. Dietrich in Frederick, MD.   However, we all know that there is strong suspicion that an employee of that facility was responsible for the anthrax outbreak in 2001, as has already been covered in several television documentaries.

ABC’s main link is here.  I have covered the "Body of Proof" show on my TV blog, most recently March 28, 2012.

Here is an 18-minute documentary film on YouTube from Journeyman pictures, “Marburg Virus – Angola”, dating from 2007:

"The Big Picture" examines climate change the day after the Joplin tornado; what about the March 2, 2012 outbreak?

 "The Big Picture" by Thom Hartmann (link), on May 23, 2011, looks at global warming (or climate change), on the heels of the horrific EF5 tornado multiple vortex outbreak in Joplin Mo. May 22.  I pulled up this YouTube video today to see what has been put out there about the relationship between climate change and huge tornado outbreaks, particularly in early Spring, as have happened twice this week. 

Mr. Hartmann’s approach is very similar to “Professor” Al Gore’s in Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth”, from Paramount Vantage in 2005, and it's a bit of a college lecture.  (Gore’s movie was almost the last film that my late mother saw before her passing in 2010. )  Hartmann uses timeline graphs (I don’t mean Facebook timeline here), to show how the world’s carbon dioxide levels were below 350 for all of history until the 1980s, and now are around 400.   A level this high persistently means that the ecosystem of the Earth will change permanently, in a way that humans are not adapted to.  He says that the city of Chicago no longer plants certain trees that it believes will be affected by a warmer climate, and that Chicago expects to have a Gulf like climate within a half century.

He also criticizes the denial in the Republican Party, and says that conservative think tanks and oil companies have hired bloggers specifically to spin their denial.  I would never accept payment to write someone else’s false stories to support their agenda. He mentions the movie "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" in discussion politicians' approaches to climate change. 

The global warming portion of this broadcast takes the first 13 minutes, and also includes comments on Japan’s progress in solar energy.

The storms on March 2, 2012 did lessen in severity as they approached the mid-Atlantic states, partly because colder air was dammed up against the Blue Ridge, and partly because the most severe part of the squall line had to cross the highest part of the Allegheny Front in WVa, often over 4500 feet. On the Weather Channel, I watched a severe squall line around Spruce Knob W Va die as it crested the Eastern Divide and become much less severe as it moved toward DC.  Later in the Spring the DC area would have been more exposed.  Mountains do protect the Washington and Baltimore areas somewhat, but not the Virginia and lower Maryland or Delaware tidewaters, where storms are usually more severe. 

Will this Spring be the worst ever?  Could long-tracking tornados occur in the mid-Atlantic states and major cities the way they do in the Midwest? Or will the tornado season “end” sooner and mid-summer drought begin earlier?

Remember, this year we had no winter in most of the US, but Europe had the worst ever.  The jet stream, under La Nina, moved north over the Americas but south over Eurasia.

There have been other years with mild winters in the East but cold springs.  In 1957-1958 we had a mild January but huge storms Feb. 14 and March 20.  In 1959-1960, when I was a junior in high school, we had “three white Wednesdays” with school closings in northern VA in March after a mild winter.  On April 20, 1961, the day of a Senior class hike, we had the latest snow ever, one inch. In 1990 we had a very mild January, February, and early March, but had two 2-inch snows after the first official day of Spring. In 1992-1993 we had a mild winter, which started to deteriorate in late February with two or three little snows, and then we had the Blizzard of 1993, on March 13. That storm was similar to the outbreak yesterday but about 100 miles farther East.  Had yesterday’s low tracked much farther East, there would have occurred an East Coast blizzard instead of a tornado outbreak.

The biggest East Coast blizzard ever occurred in New York City in March of 1988, but that was before climate change.  But it came suddenly after unusually mild weather.

In 1998, when I was living in Minneapolis, we had a tornado outbreak in Minnesota on March 30.  I had been up north with a friend that Sunday and came back through sleet before encountering the heavy storms. 

Wikipedia attribution link for NOAA picture of Jan 22-23 outbreak. 

More videos appear on H5N1 and the controversial Erasmus Experiment

There are a few credible videos on YouTube now about Ron Fouchier (website url bio) and his experiments at the Ersasmus Medical Center in making an H5N1-like virus that can be transmitted among mammals (ferrets) after transmission from birds or poultry.

One link, "H5N1Virus Can Kill Half of the Human Population"  from mrgreen416 is here (5 minutes), link, mostly still photographs and lecture.   The main controversy now is full or partial (redacted) publication of the methodology and results of the experiment.

NusuralUSA has a 22 minute film, 8 months old, “H5N1: The Next Pandemic?”  in two parts.

The first part starts in 1997 and covers the basic paradox: people in developing countries live close to the land in what we now think of as a sustainable model, but because of their mixture of people and animals, they present a risk of incubating and cross-pollinating new diseases – which can then spread to the modern world through air travel.

The second part covers a mini-pandemic in Vietnam starting in 2004. 

The film covers the point that bird flu has not been able to sustain a chain of transmission among mammals for long (which is why the Erasmus Experiment above, creating such a virus that terrorists could exploit, is so controversial).

The film was produced with the help of the FBI and Homeland Security, according to end credits.

One question: why are we dragging our feet on vaccine development?

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close": the impact of 9/11 on a family with a gifted child

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was touted as one of the most important films of 2011, but it has been held back for very limited release and started in the DC area today.

The main elements of this film are a gifted but mildly introverted boy Oskar (Thomas Horn, 13 when the film was made), his family in NYC, and the loss of his father (Tom Hanks) in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Sandra Bullock plays the mother, who has to deal with the fact that she was not as “with it” on Oskar’s gifts  (and emotions) as the father had been. 

Oskar displays most of his talents in the physical world, with scrapbooks and art, as well as mathematical calculations – in the film, he shows little interest in computers, even though kids were already very fluent in them by 2001. His father had invented a “Santa Claus” myth of a sixth borough of NYC, somewhere else in space time. As the film starts, Oskar (narrating) says there are more people alive today than have passed away, which I don’t think is actually correct.

Sometime after 9/11 (Horn’s voice was just starting to change when he acted in the film, and scenes had to be shot in real chronological sequence), Oskar finds a key in a vase in the house, almost by accident, with a note from his dad to look for the lock where it fits. Oskar takes it to heart, and enlists the help of an elderly mute renter (Max von Sydow), living in his grandmother’s house across the street, with a mysterious connection to the family. Oskar has learned from dad that he was not “up to having a family”.  Oskar manipulates (even regiments) him into helping, and in an odd exercise of human relations by someone with very mild Asperger’s, almost has to play disciplinarian with the old man. He even asks him some personal questions from a printed list (including, do you have children?)  A family secret will be on the line, and then so will one for another family.

But the backdrop of the film is the unfolding of that “worst” day, when Oskar found six messages on his phone’s answering machine, from his father, caught in the North Tower above the area of the plane strike.  (Cell phones were more primitive then.)  Much of the horror of that day is reenacted (even visually) in relation to these messages (especially the very last one), and that plot device forms the basis for other metaphors in the movie.  Oskar challenges his mother to make sense of what happened, why the perpetrators would do what they did, and she says it doesn't make any sense; it never can. 

Stephen Daldry directed this film for Warner Brothers and Paramount, with script adapted by Eric Roth from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Under a Steven Spielberg, the film might have been a bit lighter.

At the end, you hope Oskar will go on to become another high tech superstar as a young adult, something his father and grandfather never had the real opportunities to do.  (That playground swing reminds me a bit of the spinning top of "Inception".)   Or, maybe more likely, an artist and novelist, maybe a filmmaker.  That scrapbook is pretty impressive. “My dad said, the way I saw the world was a gift.”

The official site is here.