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Claude Shannon Documentatry, “Bit Player”, Released Today
- BenoitEssiambre 6y agoHere is the Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WmMSAxq8s&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WmMSAxq8s&feature=youtu.be
- simmons 6y agoGreat, I've been anxious to watch this! I literally just checked the web site yesterday to see if it was streaming anywhere yet. (And it looks like the web site still doesn't mention the Amazon streaming today.) There are probably business considerations I don't understand since I'm not in the industry, but I've often been perplexed that indie films seem to spend years making the rounds in the film festivals, when they could be making money for the filmmaker from people like me who are eager to stream them.
- syedkarim 6y agoI know someone who invested in the production of an indie film—actually, it was a documentary. I was told that in some cases (especially documentaries) the goal is for the film to be viewed as far and wide and possible. This requires lots of money dedicated to marketing, as well as someone who has the expertise and vested interest to generate a paying audience. The purpose of the film festivals is to find a distributor who will acquire exclusive distribution rights. For the producer who wants the film to be viewed by more than a niche audience on Amazon Prime, it makes more sense to find someone to market the film. If the film is immediately put on the streaming platforms, then the distributor loses the value and upside of exclusivity. Or so I was told.
- creeble 6y agoYes, I know several documentary filmmakers whose films eventually came out on Netflix after years on the film festival circuit. They all have high hopes for their films, and Netflix pays a maximum of $50k for a documentary, one-time, no royalties. So it is always the fallback consideration, while a distributor who thinks they can make a lot more, with royalties, is always the hopeful pick. So it takes years of trying to recoup what is often a few hundred thousand dollars by playing in festival circuits and sometimes limited on-demand streaming distributors. Then, finally, they almost all give up and take Netflix's money (and long-term exclusivity). If they wait too long, it often isn't even $50k, so it's all a big gamble. Of course, everything is changing now that there are no film festivals and theaters are closing permanently every day. Edit: spelling
- PeterStuer 6y agoAnd for the Prime subscribers outside the US, as always: "This title isn't available in your location".
- cjauvin 6y agoI am in Canada and it seems to be available.
- stared 6y agoIn my location neither. What is your favorite workaround?
- vmilner 6y agoI'm in the UK and can see it. (Though not via the twitter link )
- whytaka 6y agoI am in Canada and can't buy it. I have to subscribe to Prime to access.
- doc_gunthrop 6y agoLooks like someone further down in that twitter thread posted a link to the torrent: https://twitter.com/lolalone/status/1284140222582796293 https://twitter.com/lolalone/status/1284140222582796293
- melling 6y agoShannon’s: A Mathematical Theory of Communication http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...
- BenoitEssiambre 6y agoIt's a fascinating read IMO. The book edition starts with introductory notes by Warren Weaver that really drive the point of how broadly applicable Shannon's theory is: "The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior. In some connections, it may be desirable to use a still broader definition of communication, namely, one which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say a guided missile chasing this airplane)." You can also tell this was written around war times.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoNot a surprise. The entire fields of system theory, control theory (previously known as cybernetics), information theory and computing were originally developed with heavily influence from wartime problems, especially fire-control problems. Early fire control computers in WW2 were their earliest large-scale computers in practical use. Early torpedoes had control loop stability problems that can make them oscillate up and down between the programmed depth, which needed insights on control theory to solve. Same for information theory, cryptography was the driving force, see Bletchley Park. Also, one closely related result by Shannon was an analysis of cryptography and ciphers, see Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon [0], written in 1945 and remained classified until 1949. In this paper, Shannon proved the security properties of One-Time Pad. Also, the NSA made a digital computer in 1943 in Project SIGSALY. The computer itself was an engineering accomplishment, but even more, the system was the first implementation of digital audio in PCM, with its own audio encoding algorithm for compression. [0] http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf
- afkqs 6y agoAny good book recommendations on Shannon or the history of the information theory?
- briankelly 6y agoThe Idea Factory is a good intro.
- justin66 6y agoA Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.
- magoghm 6y ago"A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" is very good.
- randompwd 6y agoDidn't rate it. Seems as if Shannon did not have book worthy doings after the age of 30 or so
- BenoitEssiambre 6y agoDon't miss the original: "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" It's a surprisingly readable small paperback book. It's not a hard read if you have some familiarity with the basics of information theory. There aren't a crazy amount of equations or anything. https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Claude-Shannon/dp/0252725484/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GKA5PRNTMGEL&dchild=1&keywords=the+mathematical+theory+of+communication&qid=1594998088&sprefix=The+mathematical+theo%2Caps%2C191&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Cla...
- NiloCK 6y agoI enjoyed 'The Information' by James Gleick.
- mercer 6y ago
- loosetypes 6y agoAnyone interested in Shannon might enjoy reading Fortune’s Formula, a book that ties together Claude Shannon, Bell Labs, and information theory with horse racing, Vegas, and the stock market.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arawde 6y agoand for more of a focus on Bell Labs, with a good chapter abuot Shannon, The Idea Factory is a wonderful read
- cgh 6y agoThanks for this recommendation. I just bought the book. Years ago, I read Poundstone's "The Recursive Universe" and loved it so his writing combined with this subject should be great.
- s_dev 6y agoI've shared a documentary on George Boole before -- it's my comment history somewhere. I'll dig it up in a bit. Might be relevant to people. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEjzjLv-YjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEjzjLv-YjI
- pseudolus 6y agoThe full George Boole documentary has also apparently been posted to youtube [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hljir_TyTEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hljir_TyTEw
- s_dev 6y agoFair enough -- if anyone wants a more hi res version they can trawl through my comments but thats probably good enough for most people.
- xorcist 6y agoThe story seems to be this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10973682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10973682 There is however only a link to the trailer there too. The youtube link posted in another comment seems to work. Thanks for the tip!
- podiki 6y agoAnd a link directly to the documentary on Amazon streaming (Prime): https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08D291YQS https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08D291YQS
- justicezyx 6y agoShannon is the Eisenstein of the information technology.
- MikeCapone 6y agoIf anyone wants more, I liked the recent biography: "A Mind at Play" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32919530-a-mind-at-play https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32919530-a-mind-at-play The author is interviewed in the documentary.
- YesThatTom2 6y agoJohn Tukey coined the term "bit", not his contemporary Claude Shannon. They really could have picked a better title. That said... I look forward to watching this!
- madengr 6y agoWhere can I watch it (twitter is blocked at work)?
- keithwinstein 6y agoI saw this movie last August at a showing at the Computer History Museum and one thing really confused me. The documentary includes a dramatized 1980s interview between a fictional interviewer ("Michelle", played by Kaliswa Brewster, who I think represents a combination of the interviewers Anthony Liversidge and John Horgan who met Shannon at his home in the late 1980s) and actors portraying Claude and Betty Shannon. I'm totally on board with this way of re-enacting or dramatizing an interview when everybody shown is an actor. But later we see an interview with Shannon's real first wife, Norma (Levor) Barzman, who went on to become a well-known Hollywood screenwriter (and Communist!), and who amazingly was something like 97 years old at the time of the interview. Eventually (around 27 minutes in to the movie) we hear the voice of the same fictional interviewer offscreen. The interviewer shares a revelation with Norma: that Claude Shannon quit his fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study after only two months to go work for the war effort, apparently without telling her, and around the time their marriage went sour. This comes across as a big surprise to Norma (28 minutes in). The presence of the fictional interviewer interviewing the real Norma (who also doesn't look 97, but pretty sure that's really her) confused me -- are we meant to take literally that Norma Barzman never knew that Claude Shannon had quit IAS and gone to work for the war effort until 75 years later when Kaliswa Brewster, playing a fictional character, told her in the process of filming a semi-dramatized documentary about her first husband? Norma was interviewed for the book (which also includes this information) in 2014 -- did she really not know? Was this the first take of the interview or is Norma also "acting" here...? Why use the same "interviewer" in both a fictionalized interview with other actors and a real one? Was Brewster actually there interviewing her, or is her voice just dubbed in later so the audience doesn't have to hear the real documentarian's voice? Or am I just mistaken and the offscreen voice is somebody else? It really sounds like her!
- thephyber 6y agoI spent a few minutes trying to understand what was real footage and what was re-enacted as well. In the end, it looks mostly re-enacted with artificially aged footage. The scene you recall appears to be a real-time revelation, but in the end I'm not sure it matters much.
- 6y ago
- dmd 6y agoSuper happy to see this come out. My wife (of the MIT Museum) did a ton of work on obtaining and preparing the props for it and it was neat seeing her and some of her coworkers in the credits!