I was agreeing with you. Did not see any slide rulers in evidence.
Aha! Understood! 
Damn. If I’d seen this thread sooner, I could’ve been the guy to answer it in no time flat, thanks to my multiple rewatches of Mystery Science Theater.
Same here. I knew it would be Lloyd Bridges right off the bat.
How many items there give the clue this is going to be a really bad picture?
Just a note about the slide rules, which should have been used. The slide rule does not show where, in the final answer, the decimal point should go. So they’d have had to do the calculations by hand with rounded off figures in order to establish the order of magnitude of the answer.
Also, one possible reason to have two people calculating would be to compare the two if there was a difference in the answers. Put them side by side and see where they diverge and then you have one operation to check, not all of them. Assuming that they both use the same standard calculating process and that there isn’t another mistake (or that there’s time for the second person to recalculate and recompare).
I haven’t had time to watch the picture yet, so let me ask: Is there an average Joe who’s drafted into the crew at the last minute to replace some momentarily disabled specialist because he has a technical skill that’s required? This was a favorite means of including someone the audience could identify with and who needed every aspect of the mission explained to him in great detail (“Night here on the Moon is actually two weeks long!” “Oh, I see. I didn’t know that!”). :rolleyes:
If there is, my money is on Noah Beery.
Placing the decimal point takes only a negligible fraction of the time needed for the whole calculation (and I speak from experience here).
And two people doing a calculation can make sense, if you’re going to check to see where they disagree. But the commander here outright said that he wasn’t going to take the time to do that. I mean, at the very least, when two answers disagree, you want to do some basic sanity checks on both of them, things like units checks, or comparison to order-of-magnitude estimates.
His were definitely wrong; they used them and ended up on Mars so I think we can assume that hers were right.
It’s not actually that bad a movie; I for one quite like it. Lloyd Bridges is personable, and it has the courage to have a downbeat ending (everyone dies)
If you’re looking for sexism in cruddy old sci-fi movies, I can also recommend Project Moonbase.
You said it, Bright-Eyes.
It’s interesting to look at how various forms of SF has handled issues of bias.
The Star Trek franchise has become famous for presenting egalitarianism of various sorts as an ideal. The original series was particularly against racial and ethnic bias - you had a Russki as a main character who was accepted as an equal at a time when the Cold War was in full swing for the viewers, and you had that racial war episode with the multicolored bodies whose point was to illustrate how stupid racial bias was, clearly intended to reference current events. It wasn’t until the 80’s that they really started to get into gender issues, and they ended up doing some funny/neat stuff such as the matriarchal planet where men have no rights, and they had a period of a few episodes where male characters started to appear in skirts/dresses based on existing ones that female characters had worn with no commentary on it (as if it was perfectly normal in the 24th century, it being a golden age of equality for humans etc.), then they dropped that. Even later, they got into religious issues and tolerance of other belief systems and really got that into full swing after 9/11 and the war on terror (Xindi Arc). In the end, the point is that these stories can and are used as vehicles for expressing the agenda or viewpoint of the author or authors.
Good point.
A few years ago, I was part of a team that was nominally supposed to do a cost/benefit analysis to determine the most prudent decision on what third-party vendor to use to buy certain components for our product. The problem was that Management had already made their decision and we were subtly but clearly steered toward finding numbers that supported that decision.
Yeah, that bothers the piss out of me. Why did I waste my time doing calculations?
…
Where do you want to be in five years?
I’ll calculate that number. You go ahead and calculate too, and then we’ll check our figures.
Yes, it really is stunning. It’s not just dismissive (as I remembered). It actually gets down into the sexism and rolls around drooling. I can’t see any reason at all for having a second person do the calculations other than to set the stage for completely disenfranchising her.
Perhaps this was a strategic effort to stroke the fragile male egos of what they projected would be their paying sci-fi customer base.
On the other hand, perhaps some crappy writer was trying to reconcile some kind of a grudge with zero self awareness and imagination.
Thing is, his calculations, from what I understand,
[spoiler] … were in fact incorrect. They wanted to go to the moon and, using his calculations, they end up on Mars!
If the movie-makers were making a sexist point, seems a damned odd way to go about it - makes it look like they shoulda listened to her. [/spoiler]
Assuming hers are right just because the captain’s were wrong is pretty sexist. Well, maybe not sexist, but it’s still a hell of an assumption. For all you know, they could have BOTH been wrong. Hell, maybe if they’d used hers they would’ve wound up in the sun. You just don’t know.
Gee, how many more BS feminist clichés can you come up with? :rolleyes:
C’mon, admit it – you, too, misread the thread title as “What old sci-fi movie had the sexiest scene?”