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To: riverdawg
Fair enough. You saw the movie, I choose not to.

1. While you defend the movie as taking "some liberties with the facts" - those warped "facts" are the core message and premise of the entire film. This isn't a case of an oblique reference to what type of car the lead character actually drove. This movie portends that Johnson's calculations were requested by John Glenn, and that the "heroic" numbers crunching of Johnson was responsible (in a very large way) for the success of a significant event in the space program. I called that "saved." You don't like that term. That's OK by me. But this story is largely fiction. And there are many articles that also believe it is nothing short of propaganda.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=hidden+figures+propaganda&*

2. That was more than enough to relegate her to the “colored” bathrooms at the Langley Research Center at NASA, which existed until 1958. And here we have victimization being played once again, and whites should cower in submission to guilt for the sins of the past - again. Sorry, but that card has been dealt too many times. I could re-hash the discrimination that my great-grandfather suffered for being an Irish immigrant, but Hollywood won't be interested in making a movie about it. I would guess that Johnson never made any statement about being discriminate by NASA because she didn't suffer any real discrimination. Moreover, she has never been cited in any contemporaneous or historical accounts as having any great contribution towards NASA, until now. That's because (I believe) her role and that of other "computers" was negligible. We are taking 10th grade math here, not something in the "genius" category. I am an Aerospace Engineer. Am I a "genius?" Hardly.

And since you are interested in skin tone

Oh please. Now you are just being ridiculous. This movie was made with an "in your face" weapon against "racism." It was also made in response to the #OscarsSoWhite protest of the black race hustlers. I believe that 100%. Those folks want race to be an issue - not me. By responding to it, we have to talk about the issue of race, because they brought it up.

136 posted on 02/27/2017 7:57:57 AM PST by SkyPilot ("I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6)
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To: SkyPilot

“This movie portends that Johnson’s calculations were requested by John Glenn, and that the “heroic” numbers crunching of Johnson was responsible (in a very large way) for the success of a significant event in the space program.”

In the movie, Johnson’s calculations (which were, in fact, requested by John Glenn) confirmed the trajectories produced by the computer, which Glenn didn’t trust. The movie did not portray her calculations as having “saved” Glenn’s orbital flight, in particular, or NASA, in general.

I don’t know what your high-school math courses were like, but in the movie a numerical approximation (Euler’s Method) for solving a system of differential equation was used to calculate the latitude and longitude at which an orbiting space capsule would land upon re-entry. Johnson had earlier co-authored a technical report at NASA on using such an approximation method for this problem.

I don’t have any “white guilt” about the racial discrimination of the era portrayed in the movie. I wasn’t old enough to have been responsible for it. But I am old enough to remember separate “white” and “colored” restrooms, public schools, and seating on public buses. That’s just the way it was in Virginia at the time, and the movie accurately portrays these facts and some of their unintended consequences. I can be opposed to the “race card” played by today’s race hustlers without burying my head in the sand about the indignities suffered *within my lifetime* by blacks simply because of their skin tone.

I read the book and watched the movie because it was set in my hometown, not because I wanted to see a movie about the overlooked contributions of blacks and women to the space program. “Hidden Figures” is not a “black” movie. I enjoyed it as a mostly accurate portrayal of the U.S. space program in the early 1960s, and the (until recently, largely) unpublicized role of black women in it. It’s a good (not great) film, and I urge you to go see it.


165 posted on 02/27/2017 9:01:54 AM PST by riverdawg
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