spacetime coordinates: 2009 – 2012 India, Washington, D.C. the White House, China / Tibet / the Himalayas, Los Angeles, Yellowstone National Park, the Las Vegas Valley, the Pacific Ocean
The film is set in the fictional town of Dante’s Peak where the inhabitants fight to survive a volcanic eruption from a long dormant stratovolcano that has suddenly woken up. Despite mostly negative reviews, it was a box office success and has since gained a cult following among disaster film aficionados. (wiki)
The first season of ten episodes debuted worldwide on Netflix on October 13, 2017. The second season was released by Netflix on August 16, 2019. In January 2020, Netflix announced that the potential for a third season was on indefinite hold as Fincher wanted to pursue other projects but may “revisit [the series] in the future”.
Mindhunter revolves around FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), along with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), who operate the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit within the Training Division at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Together, they launched a research project to interview imprisoned serial killers to understand their psychology with the hope of applying this knowledge to solve ongoing cases.
The second season takes place between 1980 and 1981, with Ford and Tench investigating the Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981, which included at least 28 deaths, mostly children. This is based on the real case of Wayne Williams, who was charged and convicted for the murder of two adult men but was never tried for the killing of the children and adolescents, causing mass outrage and questions over Williams’s guilt as the children’s cases went cold. The second season also features other infamous murderers, such as David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, played by Oliver Cooper, William Pierce Jr. played by Michael Filipowich, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. played by Robert Aramayo, and Charles Manson, played by Damon Harriman. (wiki)
Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world (read on aeon)
“… With some exceptions, this conception of automata and biotechne preceded the actual construction of robots, with legends about artificial life existing centuries before the accomplishments of a Renaissance engineer such asTurriano. Still, automata and artificial intelligence couldn’t help but have certain religious implications, whereby the ‘magical and mechanical often overlap in stories of artificial life that were expressed in mythic language’.
Even while simple mechanical beings were constructed in Ancient Greece (and the Islamic and Chinese worlds as well), legends about artificial life proliferated across cultures and centuries, and inevitably had a theological gloss to them. Kevin LaGrandeur, a professor of technology and culture, has written that ‘modern cybernetics is at least partially the product of a very old archetypal drive that pits human ingenuity against nature via artificial proxies.’ Witness medieval legends about constructed men, such as homunculi or the golem. In such stories, the emergence of an artificial intelligence allows for the exploration of creation more generally, where we can ask how unique the human mind is and in what way our cleverness can act as a surrogate for the divine.”