Happy Birthday HAL !

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(01-13-2020 08:45 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Can anyone commenting hear "The Blue Danube" and not immediately be drawn into this scene.

Hearing "The Blue Danube" rather reminds me of endless evenings after school when we had to take dance classes - our parents thought that it would do us children good if we learnt the associated skills as well and not only mathematics and phyics.

So there we were, on hot summer evenings in Italy (these courses took place in the last week before the summer holidays), sweaty schoolboys stepping on the feet of sweaty schoolgirls, and vice versa, to the hammering beat of the Blue Danube. Played from a worn vinyl record on a portable player that the dance instructor - a very fine lady who must have been around 75 years of age then - had carried with her all over the continent. This was over 40 years ago and I have not danced to the sound of a Walzer ever again. And I spared my son the experience as well :-)

BTW: On "Rotten Tomatoes", one of my favotrite movie sites, "2001" only scores rank 29 among the 110 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time (https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/gui...-all-time/). This is probably around where I would place it as well. And yes, I later saw the film full length after my first sleepy attempt...

And regarding that docking maneuver: A society that is able to build a space station of that size should be able to program the autopilots of their spacecraft in a way, that the matching of the various relative motions and rotations involved can be achieved in one single elegant move. An HP71 with a MATH module is all that is required to perform the necessary calculations :-)

Live long and prosper
Max