Three documentaries of interest to engineers

California Typewriter [California Typewriter]

Tom Hanks explains why he likes the clapping of keys

We killed her. There are no people more responsible for the death of a typewriter than electronic engineers. We created computers and displays that gave birth to text processing, and swept away a hundred-year technology from homes and offices. True, in a sense, we have immortalized a typewriter, killing it, with the help of QWERTY keyboards, which still appear on smartphones if necessary to write something down. So it will be quite in place to see this documentary and honor the memory of typewriters. The film tracks three stories: a collector who hunts a surviving specimen of the first commercially successful typewriter; an artist who makes out cars and turns them into sculptures; and trying to survive a typewriter repair workshop in Berkeley. Personally, I liked the huge variety of schemes of the 19th century machines, reminiscent of the variety encountered during the boom of mini and microcomputers from 1965 to 1985. You may conclude that these mechanical devices still have life glimmering.

Alphago

AlphaGo tells the story of a go competition in which humanity lost [this film already has a Russian translation / approx. transl.]

As has been covered in the press many times, AlphaGo, the AI ​​program, was considered something of a knight fighting windmills when in 2016 she challenged Lee Sedol, the world champion in the go game board. Go - the game is much more difficult than chess, in which the computer became the winner in 1997. But AlphaGo was designed so that she would learn to play the game on her own, first based on the base of games played by people, and then simply playing against herself again and again. The result is a program that can play unexpectedly, which beat Sedol in three games in a row. The AlphaGo documentary is a great biography of this championship, with backstage footage and interviews with Sedol and the creators of the program. The result was interesting chronicles of mixed feelings, penetrating the day when the greatest player of the deepest game in the world lost to the car.

The Farthest: Voyager in Space [Next: Voyager in Space]

The film chronicles the ongoing mission missions of Voyager [Eng. voyager - navigator / approx. transl.]

In 1977, a mission was launched, the purpose of which was to take advantage of the situation that was repeated only once in 175 years: a parade of planets allowing us to fly past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in one "great journey". Mission Voyager, consisting of twin probes, made one discovery after another, transforming our understanding of the solar system. The film is an excellent documentary, timed to the 40th anniversary of the mission, which is still ongoing, becoming already interstellar.

Unlike previous documentaries, the creators of this were not too lazy to interview not only scientists, but also engineers who participated in the development of the mission, and mentioned events such as the 11-hour raid on grocery stores, where they bought aluminum foil to update electrical shielding of probes, and attempts to swing the stranded camera platform during a mission.

If you find fault with the film, it’s only that the uninitiated viewer may decide that the Voyager mission was the first to visit Jupiter and Saturn; but this honor belongs to the often forgotten missions of Pioneer 10 and 11. However, these samples are mentioned very briefly, and only in connection with their information records, the predecessors of the gold records carried by Voyager probes especially for curious aliens who can detect them.

The film devotes a lot of time to gold records, and this is justified. Although the chances of being discovered by aliens are quite small, these recordings demonstrate a play of imagination - that imagination, which pushes us to explore the surrounding space.