Skip the beginning stuff up until the rocket ship takes off, and then stop watching after they fly into the black hole. There's also a bunch of stuff in between there that you could skip, but it's too scattershot.

Really, out of the 2 and a half hour runtime, there's about 40 good minutes, and that's just for the special effects.

I really don't see why so many people liked it. The directing was pretty good, the acting was good, but the script was awful. Mostly, I'm just salty because they were hyping it up as "hard" science fiction, but it wasn't too far removed from Star Trek, really.

The concept of the joke is on target, but I can't get behind using that actual footage for humor, especially from the concentration camps.

That's a black hole for comedy and just inappropriate.

I've always wondered: What happens to all those laser blasts that miss the target and are pointed out toward open space?

Do they just continue on forever until they hit something (asteroid, planet, star, alien spaceship) or get sucked into a black hole?

(Pretty awesome gaming technology btw.)

@RedSky

The need to be kept afloat by European funds is pretty high on the list of things Syriza is keen to do away with. Varoufakis was clear on this pretty early on, at least 2009 as far as I know. They treated it as a problem of liquidity instead of a problem of insolvency, and therefore any funds funnelled into Greece were basically disappearing down a black hole. They are bleeding cash left, right and center, and the continuous flow of credit from Europe doesn't help a bit in its current form.

As of now, they can't pay shit. Any additional credit has to be used to pay back interest on previous credit. Their meagre primary surplus is less than their interest payments. With that in mind, some of the ideas floating around sound rather intriguing, especially given the horrendous failure all the previous agreements have produced. These ideas include: cap interest payment (1.5% of primary surplus), use the rest for investment or humanitarian relief; no payments on debt below 3% growth, 50% of agreed upon payments at 3-6% growth, full payments at 6+% growth.

Yet even those ideas are purely theoretical, because there is no growth in Greece. The celebrated growth in Q3 2014 of 0.7% might very well be a fluke, as Bill Mitchell described here (prices falling faster than incomes). For Greece to be able to have any meaningful growth, they'd require not just a complete reconstruction of its institutions (structural reforms), but also massive investment.

And there's where it breaks down again, since you rightfully pointed out that the Germans in particular won't spend a dime on Greece, especially not with investment in Germany in equally dire shape (shortfall of about a trillion € since 2000).


Which brings me to another point: Germany vs France.

Productivity in both countries was en par in 1999, and productivity in France in 2014 was only slightly below German numbers. "Living within your means" is a very popular phrase in the current discussion, which basically means living in accordance with your productivity.

Subsequently, there should be a similar development of unit labour costs within a monetary union, with growth targets set by the central bank. In our case, that would be just below 2%. Like I've previously said, Greece lived beyond its means in this regard, and significantly so.

But what about France and Germany? The black line marks the target, blue is France, red is Germany. That's beggar-thy-neighbour. That's gaining competetiveness at the cost of your fellow Euro pals. That's suppressing domestic demand in order to push exports.

German reforms killed its domestic market (retail sales stagnant since early '90s) and created an aggregate trade surplus to the tune of 2 trillion Euros. That's 2 trillion Euros of deficit in other countries. And we're looking at an additional 200-210 billion Euros this year. If running trade deficits is bad, so is running trade surpluses.

Ironically, there's even been legislation in Germany since 1967, instructing the government to balance its books in matters of trade (and other areas). They've been in violation of it for 15 years.

With this in mind, everytime a German politician calls for the other countries to run trade surpluses just like Germany, I get furious. Some of them, on the European level, even have the audacity to say that everyone should run trade surpluses, and all it takes to get there is massive wage cuts. That's open lunacy and a failure of basic math. No surplus without deficits, no savings without debt.

And while we're at it, it's not the savings rate in Germany that bothers me. It's the moral superiority that is being ascribed to running surpluses in every way imaginable. Every part of society is expected to have a positive savings rate, because debt is bad. Well, if everyone's saving and nobody's accruing the corresponding debt, you get the current situation where there is no investment whatsoever, a gargantuan shortfall in demand given the national productivity, and a cool 200 billion Euros of debt a year that foreign actors have to rake up so that Germany can have its massive growth of 0.5-1.5% annually.

Finding borrowers for all that cash is getting more difficult by the day. The ECB's QE is basically one big search for new borrowers, since everyone either doesn't want to borrow or cannot borrow anymore.

If Germany wanted to help the Eurozone, they'd start by increasing their ULC vis-á-vis the rest of the countries. Competitiveness should be regulated through the foreign exchange rate, not this parasitic race to the bottom within the zone. Ten years of 4% increase in wages, annually. That ought to be a start.

Additionally, allow the ECB to fund the European Investment Bank directly, instead of this black hole of QE.

Or go one step further and seriously consider Varoufakis' ideas, including the old Keynesian concept of a global surplus recycling mechanism.

But all that is pure fantasy. I don't think a majority of Germans would support either of these measures, not with the overwhelming fear of inflation this society has. Add the continuous demonisation of debt and you get a guarantee that very few countries might be compatible to be in a longtime monetary union with Germany.

Spot the faux-black hole @3:20. I wonder what principles that shares, if any.

http://videosift.com/video/Interstellar-Building-A-Black-Hole

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by newtboy.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Interstellar-Building-A-Black-Hole

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by eric3579. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

We do see lensing, so we do know. It's also true that black hole lensing can be recreated with an actual lense setup if you really wanted, so we're not exactly talking about the mysterious here.

The thing with physics in games is that all you have to do is make sure you program the physical laws correctly - mass and light respond to gravity, etc. - and it'll look how it should look..

Wiki has a bunch of examples. Einstein's cross is great.

Well, nobody has ever seen a black hole so no idea. On the other hand, if there was no other matter around it, that's probably about what it would look like. Given the apparent size of the event horizon, though (the black dot), I think maybe if anything the lensing effect is exaggerated. The developers claim to be going for realism though, at least in the presentation of the galaxy, so they probably did work it out properly.

Your video, Elite: Dangerous - Gravitational lensing around a black hole, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Maybe the black hole is just an end of a half-vortex in space, or is that a wormhole?

Also, I'd let her move her curved coherent vortex line through my stationary matter.
badum, cha!

SO COOL!

Anyone else notice the shadows look like little black holes with event horizons?