{"id":12360,"date":"2007-12-19T17:55:27","date_gmt":"2007-12-19T22:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=12360"},"modified":"2014-01-09T17:42:03","modified_gmt":"2014-01-09T22:42:03","slug":"watching-the-skies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2007\/12\/19\/watching-the-skies\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching the skies"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post<\/i> recently profiled astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson<\/a>, someone whom I’d previously encountered only on The Daily Show<\/i>. I guess that speaks to my cultural illiteracy, since Time<\/i> magazine picked him this year as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tyson has become a media personality by stepping into the science popularizer role that used to be filled by Carl Sagan. <\/p>\n

Near the end of the piece, staff writer David Segal reported on Tyson’s encounter with director James Cameron:<\/p>\n

Tyson remembers watching <\/i>Titanic and noticing that the stars over Kate Winslet’s head as she floated in the ocean were a fictional hodgepodge of constellations—and that the right half of the sky simply mirrored the left half.<\/p>\n

“That’s just lazy,” Tyson grumbles. “We know the longitude, the latitude, the time that the <\/i>Titanic sank. A $50 software program would show you exactly what the night would have looked like.”<\/p>\n

When Tyson later met director James Cameron at a NASA conference, he picked this nit. Tyson still remembers Cameron’s reply: “Last time I checked, <\/i>Titanic sold $1.3 billion worth of tickets, worldwide. Imagine how many more tickets we would have sold if we’d gotten the sky right.”<\/p>\n

Touché, Tyson thought.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“What an ass,” Edelman thought. <\/p>\n

Fortunately, the next paragraph retrieved Cameron’s reputation from the toilet.<\/p>\n

But when the 10th-anniversary edition of the movie was being readied for release on DVD, a post-production staffer with Cameron’s company called Tyson for some advice.<\/p>\n

Rent <\/i>Titanic now and take note of the sky.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good thing I didn’t thrown down the newspaper in disgust before finishing the article!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post recently profiled astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, someone whom I’d previously encountered only on The Daily Show. I guess that speaks to my cultural illiteracy, since Time magazine picked him this year as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tyson has become a media personality by stepping into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[383,382],"class_list":["post-12360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-james-cameron","tag-neil-degrasse-tyson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12360"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12362,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12360\/revisions\/12362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}