"Hidden Figures," The Movie

Last night I saw Hidden Figures (twice). This excellent film focuses on three African-American women who worked at NASA in the early 1960s and whose extraordinary math skills helped launch astronaut John Glenn into space aboard Friendship 7.

I have the book by Margot Lee Shetterly on which the movie was based and I plan to read it very soon.

I hope to obtain the DVD of the movie when it becomes available. I'm sure bootleg copies are already on the street. But I'll wait for the official version with all of the features that are sure to come with it: commentary by the director, screenwriter, and actors, a documentary about African-Americans at NASA (with an on-screen interview with the book's author), etc.

The Movies Taught Me How To Read Roman Numerals

When I was in high school, we didn't cover roman numerals all that thoroughly and so I didn't feel the need to learn any more about them. What got me interested in deciphering roman numerals were the movies. I always wanted to know the year a film was released and didn't always have a copy of TV Guide handy. I noticed that at the bottom of the screen below the film's title, was the release date in roman numerals. I got out an old math book and brushed up on the roman numeral section so I could read them fast in the few seconds they appeared on screen.  If the numerals read MCMXLVI, I knew the film had been released in 1946. Now I can even read the cornerstone dates on buildings.