A for Andromda - the Era

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The Andromeda Anthology classic DVDs

A For Andromeda DVD 2006

More uptodate: [here (click)].

Cold-war tensions feature in A for Andromeda. The computer is able to gain more and more influence by pandering to the military and economic fears and hopes of the British -- producing a missile interceptor, and creating new drugs.

  • 1952: work begins on the 250-feet diameter radio telescope at Jodrell Bank near Manchester, England.
    Bernard Lovell (1913-) was the driving force behind the building of the Jodrell Bank Mk 1 radio telescope. Lovell and Clegg earlier built a 218' transit telescope, `the wire bowl', which Robert Hanbury Brown and Cyril Hazard used to show that M31 was a radio source. (From Eric's Treasure Trove of Scientific Biography.)
  • 1952, November: first hydrogen bomb exploded by USA.
    From the Virginia Pilot review of R.Rhodes' Dark Sun, 1995.
  • 1953: Watson and Crick discover the structure of DNA - the double helix.
  • 1953, September: USSR explodes its first hydrogen bomb.
  • 1956, 26 July: Suez Crisis, President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. British, French - Israeli attack (29/10/96). There were fears that a major world conflict could be triggered but a cease-fire was signed on 6/11/56.
  • 1956, 23 October: Hungarian uprising begins with a student protest march. Fighting follows and thousands are killed. Popular Imre Nagy resumes Prime Ministership. Soviet troops withdraw. 1 Nov - Hungary withdraws from Warsaw Pact [Eastern Bloc] and asks the UN to recognise Hungary as neutral. 3 Nov - Russian troops return to suppress the uprising. 4 Nov - 1000 (est') Russian tanks enter Budapest. (From The Age, 23/11/96).
  • 1957, 4 October: Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, launched by the USSR. It therefore becomes obvious that Russian missiles can reach any part of the world.
  • 1961, 12 April: Yuri Gagarin (USSR) becomes the first man to fly in space and to orbit the earth - the space race starts to heat up.
  • 1961, 3 October: A for Andromeda broadcast by the BBC.
  • 1962: Cuban missile crisis raises fears of a nuclear world war.
  • 1962, 28 June: The Andromeda Breathrough broadcast by the BBC.

After the Event:

  • 1963: Arecibo radio telescope (Puerto Rico) inaugurated. The telescope consists of a 1000 foot (305m) diameter fixed dish strung across an underlying karst sinkhole. A platform is supended over the main dish and can be moved to make the telescope track. The description in `A for Andromeda' of the (fictional) radio telescope at Bouldershaw Fell fits this type of design. (Hoyle was, of course, a professional astronomer.)
  • 1963, 22 November: President John F. Kennedy of the USA was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald. In the confusion immediately after the event there was speculation that it might have been a Russian (or Cuban) plot. (Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby on 24/11/1963.)
    Coincidentally, also the first broadcast of BBC TV's science-fiction classic, Dr. Who.
  • 1964: The black comedy Dr. Strangelove or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, Dir. Stanley Kubrick, with Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, spoofs those M.A.D. Cold-War years.
  • 1964: The film Fail-Safe, Dir. Sidney Lumet, plays it straighter than Dr. Strangelove.
  • 1967 August: Jocelyn Bell of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cambridge, England, discovered a pulsating radio source with a regular period (- from the Arecibo Observatory research page, 1996). For a short time there was speculation that what turned out to be the first pulsar to be discovered might have been a signal from intelligent life elsewhere in space.
  • 1968: Intel formed for real by Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, "Silicon Valley" California, initially incorporated as N M Electronics but quickly renamed to Intel - Integrated Electronics. (The name had been taken by a motel chain and Moore and Noyce purchased the rights - from Intel's 25th anniversay of the microprocessor 1996.)
  • 1969, 20 July: Neil Armstrong of the Apollo-11 mission takes a "Small Step" onto the surface of the moon.
  • 1989, 9 November: The Berlin wall comes down marking the start of the end of the cold war, perhaps.
  • 1995: The film Species, Dir. Roger Donaldson, with Natasha Henstridge and Michelle Williams as the adult/young `Sil': The Search for Extra-Terretrial Intelligence (SETI) picks up a radio signal, being a description for some DNA. When inserted into human DNA ... Sil, a creature who can change from a beautiful woman into a highly improbable killing machine develops. She must be destroyed before she can breed. (Also Species II (1998).) Poor, not nearly as subtle as A for Andromeda.
  • 1996 October: there are newspaper reports that the US has finally removed its last nuclear weapons from "aircraft carrier" Great Britain.
  • 1997: The film Contact, Dir. Robert Zemeckis, from a Carl Sagan novel: As part of SETI, radio astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) detects a signal from an alien intelligence. It contains the plans for a machine to travel to, or to communicate with, the latter.
  • 1999: SETI@home launched: "[...] a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data." (By 2003 it was said to be running at approximately a collective 66 tera-flops. No contact -- yet.)
  • 2004, September 10: Using adaptive optics, the 8.2-m VLT Yepun telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile) took an image of what might be a 5×Jupiter-mass planet[@eso][9/'04] in orbit at 55AU around the brown dwarf 2M1207 (about 230 light-years from earth).
  • 2006, February 9, a remake, BBC Press Release:
    Kelly Reilly, Tom Hardy, Jane Asher and David Haig to star in science fiction classic A for Andromeda for BBC FOUR
    [www]['06] "... Kelly Reilly as Christine/Andromeda; ... A massive 13 million viewers watched the original ... Filming completes on 21 February 2006. ..."
    After: @[BBC] inc. clips, and [imdb]['06], 90 minutes, UK release date 27 March 2006.
Coding Ockham's Razor, L. Allison, Springer

A Practical Introduction to Denotational Semantics, L. Allison, CUP

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© L. Allison   http://www.allisons.org/ll/   (or as otherwise indicated),
Faculty of Information Technology (Clayton), Monash University, Australia 3800 (6/'05 was School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Fac. Info. Tech., Monash University,
was Department of Computer Science, Fac. Comp. & Info. Tech., '89 was Department of Computer Science, Fac. Sci., '68-'71 was Department of Information Science, Fac. Sci.)
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