This article repeats the story about the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter because of a mix-up in units. That's not really the story. The navigation team had figured out the problem well in advance, and requested an additional course correction maneuver that would have put the spacecraft back where it should have been. Their concerns were either ignored or overruled by management. https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-the-mars-probe-went-off-course
See also "A critical flaw was a program management grown too confident and too careless, even to the point of missing opportunities to avoid the disaster." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/809121
That’s not just a factor of ten out – it’s also an entirely different unit of measurement.
This is not a problem for multiple reasons. Firstly, if you work in a mechanical field you know that machines regularly combine metric and imperial parts. You may have to use a 3mm hex wrench and then sixty seconds later a 3/32 hex wrench. Right now you're using an OS that labels storage in one unit and storage devices labeled in another, gigabytes and gibibytes.
The second reason is even simpler: the display on the Nostromo's computer is in-universe and the title card for the movie isn't. The title card could label the cargo of the Nostromo as 11.7 trillion pennyweights of ore and it wouldn't matter.
Also I don't know why he thinks "old man" as slang for father is British. It was in common use in the US in the 90s.
if you work in a mechanical field you know that machines regularly combine metric and imperial parts. You may have to use a 3mm hex wrench and then sixty seconds later a 3/32 hex wrench.
Only in America. In the rest of the world, you won't have a 3/32 hex wrench.
The only case I know of is old British cars, from before they fully transitioned to metric. Some parts on Land Rovers, prop shafts for example didn't for a long time.
Anyway, mixing is just bad engineering. Which shows us that bad engineering is a thing for space craft of the future. Just why Weyland-Yutani's logisticians would cope with this mix of units for refinement capacity and / or payload is beyond me...
It's fairly common in the US for machines which aren't produced in large numbers. Specialized factory and scientific machinery especially. I encounter it with agricultural machinery and textile analyzers.
Just why Weyland-Yutani's logisticians would cope with this mix of units for refinement capacity and / or payload is beyond me...
...they don't. The title card is not in-universe. To the best of my knowledge there is no depiction of Weyland-Yutani themselves using imperial units.
There are several threads on bicycles that have metric diameter and TPI thread pitch. Off the top of my head, at least Italian bottom bracket and freewheel threads and French lock ring thread are like that but I'm sure there are more.
The gearbox casing on my 1965 Volvo Amazon was secured with Whitworth bolts! I've forgotten what size. In 1980 it was difficult to find the right ones.
It's one of my favorite sets. Unfortunately, it isn't available to purchase anymore. Signature Plastics said it would be coming back, but that was before the pandemic, and nothing's been said about it since.
Not sure what it is about this film, the aesthetics, story, atmosphere, the acting? I think it’s perhaps my favourite film. The first 20 mins or so in particular are outstanding.
I’m sure many know but the idea of having the mundane industrial theme transferred to space was supposed to have come from a student film called Dark Star[0].
Alien Isolation is also fantastic though hard to fully enjoy the atmosphere for the most part as it’s fairly terrifying.
There was a piece on hacker news a while back where a programmer talked through how he was asked to code up the graphics for the landing sequence.(3D terrain wireframe).
Something that I love about alien is the way John Hurt's character as the 'face into danger, get things done' soldier resolves the problem of horror movies - why do people do these stupid things that put them in danger? Hurt's character is smart and professional, and doing exactly what he has been trained to do, to put himself and his team into danger in service of a larger agenda. He's no an idiot, he doesn't waver near the danger, he charges straight into it. He's doing his job, as retconned in later movies the xenomoph is valuable asset, worthy of risking the nostromo and its crew for.
> Furthermore, this screenshot shows that the Nostromo has a refinement capacity of “200,000,000 tonnes”, and not the “20,000,000 tons” mentioned in the Foreshadowing Inventory. That’s not just a factor of ten out – it’s also an entirely different unit of measurement.
"Haha. Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder."
I wonder if its plot relevant. Its an empty tanker ship. You'd risk that over a full one.
This was also the last leg of the contract for the crew. Does that mean that Wayland-Yutani is actually exporting more minerals from Earth than importing?
Good catch! And a very nice fun fact. If so, or if that run was a bust, I wonder why WY was pissed at Ripley for blowing it up. Insurance money is good.
I'm fascinated by the work that was put into making this legendary movie. Is there a specific genre name given to movies that have only a few people throughout the entirety of the movie in a closed environment? If there was, Alien would definitely top the list.
The late Blake Snyder wrote a couple of books ("Save The Cat!", recommended) on screenwriting with the hypothesis that there are only ten basic story paradigms, and Alien is the classic "Monster In The House" example, along with Jaws.
In short, a MITH movie has our heroes trapped in a space due to a sin not of their making, there's a monster, and at least one character who is a wounded half-man harbinger of doom.
Once you know the ten categories, movies become pretty predictable after the first reel or so, so maybe you don't want to learn them.
Predictable movies are always predictable, but knowing the categories and Save the Cat structure is fun because then you can see when truly talented people subvert it and twist those "rules".
The tenfold categories are also a way to rescue a bad movie-watching experience, because you can at least debate whether (say) Ad Astra was a ROP or something else instead of just bitching about the science violations.
In Andromeda Strain, there's a bit of a twist in that as the situation with the pathogen in the lab deteriorates, the automatic safety systems start locking it down even more tightly. The lab is made up of multiple levels, with the lowest level (underground) being the most controlled. For plot reasons, one of the researchers has to try to get from the lowest level to an upper one and the security systems actively try to stop him.
Frustratingly, the subsequent seasons try to address different issues and questions without answering any of the quests raised in the previous seasons. It's almost like they want to jump from topic to topic so as not to spoil the potential of what's worked on so far.
> Is there a specific genre name given to movies that have only a few people throughout the entirety of the movie in a closed environment?
In TV this form is often referred to as a "bottle episode"[1], and there's at least one article describing Alien as a "bottle movie"[2]. Presumably, this was done to maximize what could be done with its $11M (!) budget.
It's not Alien but I think it fits in the (unknown) category really well... Buried, with Ryan Reynolds. It's a pretty good flick that's filmed almost entirely in a small dark box with only him in it.
And perhaps one of the only movies without the standard Ryan Reynolds quips and sarcasm! (I just watched The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard and was a little put off by just how often he still does this, knowing that he has acting chops that don't necessitate it)
> Is there a specific genre name given to movies that have only a few people throughout the entirety of the movie in a closed environment?
I seem to recall ebcountering one that is somewhat more specific than TV Tropes’ “Closed Circle” [0] but less specific than “Ten Little Murder Victims” [1] that fits this, but can’t put my finger on it right now.
Its why I like Oz (series) too. There is something to be said for understanding the boundary conditions in full. Funny thing is that my partner hates this kind of thing :/
Although the "Moon"'s font is less boring, it almost shouts "don't read me" when more than a couple of words are displayed with it. And it also seems grotesquely unrealistic - nobody would use such a font to display anything useful in real life, even in future.
It's about creating a feeling. Fonts like other graphic elements CAN communicate feeling in addition to whatever they spell out.
The case of Moon and Alien, it communicates a non-empathic "Company" that has a lot to hide. A company that is literally cryptic to it's own employees, of course they're going to have unreadable user-hostile fonts.
A real-life analogy might be something like UI's from Oracle EBS (enterprise business suite): Horrific, outdated, grey-blah swing interfaces from the 90's that have tentacles in every aspect of employee work-life from vacation-requests to procurement, to bonuses and customer relationships.
By the way I always loved Swing interfaces and always felt like they are incredibly cozy, emotionally warm and also tidy at the same time.
Here[1] is a picture of Oracle EBS. To me it seems beautiful (literally).
And if I look at the more classic Swing style here[2] I almost feel urge to run around naked and scream about how damn beautiful it is. I certainly want every app I use and the OS itself to be entirely in this design and I would even pay just for that (because I feel like that would boost my psychological well-being and productivity).
So, given our perception of this same UI is on the opposite extremes I conclude this is highly subjective.
Understood... yes, it's all subjective, even if that screenshot makes me vomit a little!
FWIW, you aren't showing that text often overflows it's textbox and you can't actually see what's in it without putting your cursor in and moving it to the end of the text. They didn't have the concept of expanding to fit content back then? or maybe most corporations can't afford the oracle consultant that will do it for them ! :-) It's OK though, most of the time you can just export to excel with a few clicks.
Of course, such applications require lots of tuning, and though they might have been cozy 20 years ago, they seem harsh and burdensome today because no one bothers to change stuff any more. You're just supposed to conform to it.
You can totally expand to resize based on content, among many other tricks. That would require someone to care to do so, which is probably the bigger problem.
While I don't share your enthusiasm for Swing, I understand it in principle because I really love the NextStep UI with its 3D effects and yet I've met people who think it is ugly.
That's the OCR-A font. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A). As you can guess from the name, it was designed for readability by both humans and computers.
These days it looks like that font is more popular for graphic design than it is for actual OCR applications.
If you're doing actual OCR these days, it'll be sophisticated enough that it doesn't need a dedicated font. OCR-A has no practical purpose anymore other than to convey a certain look.
The sci-fi font that showed up in the 60s was not MICR, but a bunch of typefaces inspired by it. Chief among these was Westminster [1] and Data 70. They were inspired by MICR, but the latter only has digits and a few control characters.
> That’s right – pounds are used by Liberia, Myanmar, and popular space-faring nation The United States of America. And by no-one else AT ALL.
Care to join the modern world?
> An aside for future-thinking Alien fans: should you ever need to nuke a planet from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure, after all – then don’t worry yourself about the number of megatonnes that your nuke’s detonation will create. Megatonnes aren’t based on any of the units mentioned above.
I didn't notice a single stereotypical space/future font in there. Lots of Helvetica and suchlike, plus a few display typefaces in spots where it makes sense to use a display typeface. And, of course, a bunch of computer fonts that look retro-futuristic now, but would have just been all they had to work with, because that sort of styling was what you had to do to make text legible on a vintage 1979 low DPI CRT display.
Alien was made in the 70s and at the time and was set in some time in the distant future. What fonts were we using back then? Will we be using the same fonts hundreds of years in the future? What fonts were the people in the setting using?
On top of that, part of the draw of sci-fi is to imagine a new, different world. That includes different fonts.
We weren't using fonts at all. Graphic design was done with stick-on lettering, not with computers. The type catalogs of the day offered a fairly typical selection of the styles used.
But most people paid designers instead of trying to DIY it, because place and paste was a difficult job.
I discovered type in the late 70s through these catalogs and I was instantly fascinated by the way the shapes of the letter designs somehow managed to imply mood, context, and meaning.
I still don't understand it, and I'm not sure anyone does. Professional designers understand it intuitively, but there's no definitive manual that describes how you get from a shape to an association.
Even with Eurostile - it's been used in science fiction for so long it wins by association. But it's only there because it works so well. Blocky, clean, functional, sans serif only gets you so far when you're trying to understand why.
It's hard to imagine doing the signage on a spaceship with Monotype Corsiva or Caslon. Of course you could... but not without generating severe cognitive dissonance.
One thing that comes to mind is freeway sign fonts in the US. They have recently started to change and I certainly don't like the new ones as well as the old ones. But, maybe that's just my human emotions avoiding change.
Designing a new font is a hard job, not something you just slap together for a movie. Even big corporations who want a custom font will generally hire a designer who bases it on something they've done before.
Interestingly, there's a font designed (relatively recently) for air traffic control use, where misreading glyphs can be catastrophic. I tried it as a terminal font.
In fairness, a shell is a very different use case from a flight deck. (You note below that this is a flight deck font, not an ATC font.) An aircraft cockpit is mostly using type to display small pieces of isolated information, e.g. a speed or a list of 4-6 letter approach names, not a big wall of text (ACARS messages notwithstanding).
Yes, but I had initially thought that the selection pressures would be similar enough, particularly around disambiguation, that good for one would be good for the other. Either that was untrue, or... they didn't do the design particularly well.
I had misremembered. It's not for air traffic control, but for aircraft cockpits. It's this: https://b612-font.com/
In particular I suspect that the '()' and '[]' glyphs are far more common in source code and terminal use than in cockpits. I found them far, far too similar. Also there's little distinction between 'O' and '0' , and between 'I' and '|'. Other than those problems, it's mostly fine - 'l' and '1' are usefully distinct, for instance - but the friction from those particular difficulties was enough to make me hate it.
Trivia: B-612 is the name of the asteroid home of the Little Prince of the eponymous story. That name is derived from the name of the aircraft flown by author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot.
Makes sense that a cockpit wouldn't need a clear distinction between brackets and parenthesis, or |. But I am surprised about the similarity of 0 and O. I recall when I went to the ATC academy they really drilled in using a horizontal slash through zeros when hand-written. Also had to underline the letter S in any case where it could be ambiguous with the number 5 (as in a plane's tail number). I think we also had to put a horizontal strike through the letter Z to distinguish it from a 2.
Probably more important in an ATC context than a flight deck setting. Tail numbers come to mind, as you said. Although I could see Part 91 operators mixing up airport identifiers with O and 0, airlines don't fly to airports where that matters... intersections and navaids are all alpha... approach names aren't going to have any ambiguity... so I guess one could argue it's ok? Still, you're right, it was a weird choice not to disambiguate them.
(Also, I'm super jealous you went to the ATC academy. By the time I seriously considered it, I'd aged out.)
I expect they will be cost-effective conglomerates of many manufacturers, possibly refitted multiple times. They may likely be a pastiche of decades of decisions about fonts and styles!
No way. The 0 and the O are essentially identical (with O being slightly larger but only distinguishable next to the 0), and the l, 1, and I are close enough to be easily confused.
