12 Comments

I think "Dunkirk" showed Hollywood that there's an appetite for stories like these - seemingly mundane, but not at all, just without firefights and so many explosions and whatnot.

I'd certainly enjoy a Christopher Nolan look at penicillin.

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Hmm, there is a Hollywood template for more abstract dramas. Money Ball, The Big Short, The Founder, The Imitation Game and The Social Network. And even an appropriate title for this discussion, Hidden Figures.

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I am enjoying The Invisible Shield immensely however I just can't get past the image of John Graunt they used. That is clearly not right, the image used is someone from the 19th century, not the 17th century.

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I mean the image used is all over the internet but the style of dress is all wrong for someone born in 1620. He would have looked much more like this, but this is the only source I can find.

https://alchetron.com/cdn/john-graunt-42d8fca2-76d8-46ad-99de-d4269dd184f-resize-750.jpeg

The incorrect image is also used in this document along side someone he worked with at the time who is presented in the correct 17th century garb.

https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/364288948/original/94c5557fc7/1710537795?v=1

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Your NotebookLM prompt makes me think of the book Life 3.0 I read a few years ago. In it, content creation in general, and blockbuster movie scripts are the first step towards the supremacy of AI. So far, this is as close as it gets to that fiction.

I also thought of "The Infernal Machine" when watching the dialog from Oppenheimer:

- Perhaps I'll have the same luck.

- A Nobel Prize for making a bomb?

- Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.

Very timely.

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What looks better on a 70mm screen with booming music: a mushroom cloud or a petri dish?

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Well, that the health establishment didn't exactly cover itself with glory during COVID isn't going to help.

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Maybe a movie about penicillin is needed all the more because of that. You could also say that the military-industrial-scientific establishment didn’t cover itself in glory in Vietnam/ Iraq/ Afghanistan/ Indonesia/ etc., but they’re still winning Oscars for the movies focused elsewhere…

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Apr 2·edited Apr 2

Civil engineer and planning geek here. Ever since reading The Ghost Map, I've thought it would make a great movie! An innovative, consilient thinker struggles to prove his hypothesis against the longstanding medical and engineering establishments.

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My dad used to talk about a man waiting with him in an Army demobilization center at the end of WW II. The guy was going back to his family's business. He was reading a business publication, Funeral Directors News, and saying "G-D penicillin"

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Until you can make a Petri dish explode, it’s going to be difficult to interest Hollywood.

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My only problem with Oppenheimer that I didn't notice until the second time I saw it: there is an Evil Genius speech toward the end by Robert Downey Jr. on how he engineered his dastardly plot to ruin Oppie. Just like Nolan's Batman movies.

Great idea about the penicillin history: as a young man I loved reading Microbe Hunters. In the early 80s, I read "New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers", another great book about public health and human parasites.

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