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Numbers are as close as we can get to the handwriting of God
Thank you to everyone who commented last night for Abbie—if you sent wishes, thoughts, love, or just the recognition of reading, thank you. Rob has an update on the situation here. The short version is that we are to consider the cat on hospice care. The salient fact is that there is still a cat. We were very surprised: we did not expect him to live until morning, and then we did not expect the veterinarian's house call to end in anything other than the difficult decision Rob had spent the night accepting he would have to make. Instead, there's a cat under Rob's bed as I write—it's one of his traditional hangouts on hot days or nights. He is still not really eating, except for a little licking of tuna liquid, but he has been seen to drink water, wander around the downstairs in an aimless, jingling fashion, and when we got home from a 2-D showing of Pacific Rim (2013) tonight, Abbie was in the dining room, being made much of by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ratatosk and laura47. We are waiting on some test results from the veterinary hospital where he spent an overnight this weekend and then we will see what comes next. For the time being, however, a cat is here.
The thing to understand about Pacific Rim is that I cannot write a comprehensive review of it tonight. I want to write a post just enthusing about all the major or minor details, the realization of the world in in its casual scruffy lived-in-ness and the way it begins where a stupider movie would have tried to throw a late-act twist, the coherently staged fight scenes that are of genuinely epic, elemental scale. The kaiju do not move like weightless computer modeling; they shoulder up out of the sea, snap bridges like wires, grind skyscrapers to ash-glass with the awful immensity of volcanic eruptions or tsunami, things that overwhelm. There is something a little frightening about the Jägers, too, with their nuclear chest-cores and huge sliding hydraulics: I got little flashes every now and then of the God Warriors from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The film never loses track, though, of the fragile human bodies being slammed all ways within the blind metal armor as they animate it, or the even greater vulnerability of the three-way neural link that allows two pilots to bear the strain of controlling a Jäger where a solo operator would start to bleed from the brain (even if I would have liked the script to take a little more time over what the Drift actually entails and the implications of its slightly Cronenbergian form of telepathy. There is a casual, haunting mention of a dead pilot's memories remaining within the mind of his surviving partner, because they were in the Drift together when he died: there's an entire story in there that is not quite this film). The character backstories have been pared down to the strictly functional, but the worldbuilding is sprawling and meticulous. The genre shout-outs are so numerous and so affectionate that I'm almost waiting for the drinking game. The World War II echoes are almost more intriguing to me: there is nose art on the Jägers, ration cards and work projects, Burn Gorman's kaiju-predicting mathematician is nearly a cartoon of a Bletchley eccentric right down to the tweeds and sweater vest. I did not expect to see a perfect realization of St. Michael and the dragon iconography in a grappling-tailed monster and a giant robot. (I did not expect to see, either, the closest I ever will to the Sea's Tooth of Deep Wizardry (1985) where the Lone Power lies burning in a basalt-stacked canyon at the bottom of the sea, the water bursting into sullen blue flame all along its lava-black and deadly length. I do not believe this is an allusion Guillermo del Toro intended, whereas I'm pretty sure about the other, but it was still an amazing thing to find on my screen.) There are splashy horror-comic setpieces and moments of unexpected understatement. Ron Perlman plays a Tom Waits role. And it's a movie that knows exactly which clichés it wants to honor unashamedly and which ones it wants to subvert or entirely ignore, meaning Rob and I applauded our way through a number of scenes. It's not a romance, for example. Except for the alien monsters rising from the deep, it's not a movie with villains, either. The recurring motif is the sharing of memories, the bridging of minds. Rob noted afterward, approvingly, "Nobody gets betrayed."
We went to the movie in the first place because Abbie was stable and we needed to do something completely different. Pacific Rim was exactly the correct thing to do. About a minute in, I started grinning. I don't think I stopped until the house lights came up. It is dedicated to the right people.
I am going to bed.
ratatosk and laura47. We are waiting on some test results from the veterinary hospital where he spent an overnight this weekend and then we will see what comes next. For the time being, however, a cat is here.The thing to understand about Pacific Rim is that I cannot write a comprehensive review of it tonight. I want to write a post just enthusing about all the major or minor details, the realization of the world in in its casual scruffy lived-in-ness and the way it begins where a stupider movie would have tried to throw a late-act twist, the coherently staged fight scenes that are of genuinely epic, elemental scale. The kaiju do not move like weightless computer modeling; they shoulder up out of the sea, snap bridges like wires, grind skyscrapers to ash-glass with the awful immensity of volcanic eruptions or tsunami, things that overwhelm. There is something a little frightening about the Jägers, too, with their nuclear chest-cores and huge sliding hydraulics: I got little flashes every now and then of the God Warriors from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The film never loses track, though, of the fragile human bodies being slammed all ways within the blind metal armor as they animate it, or the even greater vulnerability of the three-way neural link that allows two pilots to bear the strain of controlling a Jäger where a solo operator would start to bleed from the brain (even if I would have liked the script to take a little more time over what the Drift actually entails and the implications of its slightly Cronenbergian form of telepathy. There is a casual, haunting mention of a dead pilot's memories remaining within the mind of his surviving partner, because they were in the Drift together when he died: there's an entire story in there that is not quite this film). The character backstories have been pared down to the strictly functional, but the worldbuilding is sprawling and meticulous. The genre shout-outs are so numerous and so affectionate that I'm almost waiting for the drinking game. The World War II echoes are almost more intriguing to me: there is nose art on the Jägers, ration cards and work projects, Burn Gorman's kaiju-predicting mathematician is nearly a cartoon of a Bletchley eccentric right down to the tweeds and sweater vest. I did not expect to see a perfect realization of St. Michael and the dragon iconography in a grappling-tailed monster and a giant robot. (I did not expect to see, either, the closest I ever will to the Sea's Tooth of Deep Wizardry (1985) where the Lone Power lies burning in a basalt-stacked canyon at the bottom of the sea, the water bursting into sullen blue flame all along its lava-black and deadly length. I do not believe this is an allusion Guillermo del Toro intended, whereas I'm pretty sure about the other, but it was still an amazing thing to find on my screen.) There are splashy horror-comic setpieces and moments of unexpected understatement. Ron Perlman plays a Tom Waits role. And it's a movie that knows exactly which clichés it wants to honor unashamedly and which ones it wants to subvert or entirely ignore, meaning Rob and I applauded our way through a number of scenes. It's not a romance, for example. Except for the alien monsters rising from the deep, it's not a movie with villains, either. The recurring motif is the sharing of memories, the bridging of minds. Rob noted afterward, approvingly, "Nobody gets betrayed."
We went to the movie in the first place because Abbie was stable and we needed to do something completely different. Pacific Rim was exactly the correct thing to do. About a minute in, I started grinning. I don't think I stopped until the house lights came up. It is dedicated to the right people.
I am going to bed.
no subject
Movies will almost never explain why conventional tech won't work, making the super ridiculous tech necessary. To some extent, this is because in real life some elements of the military also don't care that conventional tech will do the job just fine (see also Air Force Research Labs projects colloquially referred to as the "shit cannon," "rods from god," and "voices of god" just to start with. I wish I knew the actual honest to god codenames for these). But none of those projects ever make it past vaporware.
So the Jaegers? 260 feet tall, according to the pacific rim wikia, made of titanium or iron core, depending on model year. Let's skip the bit where "all titanium, no alloys" is utterly ridiculous because titanium is always alloyed with something because that improves its tensile strength. Anyway, the wiki claims it's 1,980 tons, but assuming pure titanium, which weighs in at 4.5g/cm^-3 (and keep in mind, an alloy would be heavier) and let's say the thing is about a fifth as wide as it is tall, and a fifth as deep, I'm totally making up the second two dimensions here and assuming there's only 20% empty space inside the kaiju, and also being really lazy and assuming the kaiju is roughly cubic rather than cylindrical, and ignoring things like the weight of the "50 diesel engines per muscle fiber" (which is its own bit of staggeringly unlikely engineering) because I want to be able to do the math in my head and not go looking for my calculator, but these numbers are at least vaguely in the right ballpark. Anyway, that's actually 72 billion kilograms. Or about 80,000 tons. Or 1,100 M1 Abrams tanks, which get less than half a mile to the gallon fuel efficiency to move their bulk! Only 9,000 M1 Abrams have ever been produced, over the entire history of the US military industrial complex.
But anyway, let's accept the quoted number of 1,980 tons, which the footnotes on the wiki tell me were taken from the officially licensed art book for the film, even though it's a factor of 50 too small, or budgeting for my fantastically lazy handwavy math above, at least a factor of 20 too small. Whatever. Very small.
I can't find numbers online for the top speed of any of the Jaegers, and I'm too lazy to get film clips and measure how fast they move, but let's be conservative and say they have a maximum ground speed of 50 mph, based on how Gipsy Danger got to Knifehead, seven miles off the coast of Alaska, in the span of a few moments of jocular banter. I'm sure it wasn't seven full minutes in film-watching time, but as I said, I'm being conservative. Anyway, that's something like 17 trillion Joules to move the thing, or 4.5 million kilowatt-hours, or 4,500 megawatt-hours. It's actually not completely unreasonable to move the thing if it has a nuclear reactor in its chest: according to the US Energy Information Administration, the smallest nuclear power plant in the US produces 478 MW, and the largest about 4,000 MW. So you'd just need a core the size of the facility in Palo Verde, Arizona, which resides on 4,000 acres of land. For comparison, that's the area of 2,500 Somervilles.
(comment exceeded LJ's maximum length)