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Speaking of Tolkien, I recall an interview where he said he was often asked why the eagles couldn't just drop the ringbearer into mordor, and he said his response was "oh... shut up!" (good humoredly). Elegant architecture can get away with logic fails in a way movies can't.
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I wonder what the most full-spectrum complex thing humans do that is driven by a single individual. I think it's a three-way dead heat between bleeding edge space missions, complex movies, and computer hardware (bottom half of stack from silicon to low-level system software)
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Top-half-stack software is more sprawling complexity of course, but it's not a singular vision and doesn't need to be. So the 3 wonders of the modern world are: 1. JWST or Perseverance 2. Recent chip like say Zen3 or Apple M2 3. LOTR
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I might add a modern aircraft carrier to the mix. A floating nuclear-powered city that's the closest thing we have to a deathstar.
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Something like LIGO I think belongs in a different event at the civilizational olympics. It's the 100m dash where the kind of complexity I'm talking about is probably the Decathalon...
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Replying to @vgr
LIGO achieves a strain sensitivity of better than 1 part in 10^22. In some ways it's the greatest achievement of humanity. It really ought to be impossible.
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Ah, didn't know this either. Still, I think even in the best case, no way the Hobbit can be stretched to 3 movies while staying true to the text. It would be 2/3 a different new story. Like say Cumberbatch version of Sherlock vs. Jeremy Brett
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Replying to @vgr
New Line fucked Jackson over on backend profit sharing for LoTR. Classic movie industry mob accounting where they made the profit disappear on paper. He fought them with lawyers for years and refused to sign on to Hobbit as leverage. So he had way too little time to prep.
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