Avatar 3D movie

[KX5JT]

Just got back from taking my 13 yr old son to see Avatar 3D.  We drove an hour away to Baton Rouge because they have digital projectors there.  This movie was an AWESOME VISUAL FEAST!  The story line was very predictable but it was still worth seeing and very enjoyable.  

It was funny, the humans were trying to learn how to get the native people of the planet to move from their home tree because the stuff they wanted was underneath it.  Some high value mineral they called UNOBTANIUM!!!  It was actually named "Unobtanium"!  Go figure!

[k4kyv]

...in maintaining old equipment (electronic and other) unobtainium is often used to refer to replacement parts that are no longer made (e.g. many parts for reel-to-reel audio recorders used to play back archive tapes, as for digitization). Uncommon, or rare, vacuum tubes are often said to be made of "unobtainium" when they cost more than the equipment they are fitted to (especially true of certain tubes, such as the 1L6, used exclusively in American battery powered shortwave radios).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium




It is a room temperature super-conductor for energy, which makes it very valuable: it is worth $20 million per kilogram (roughly 2 pounds) unrefined (worth $40 million per kilogram refined) on Earth. However, It is prohibitively expensive to mine on Pandora as humans are unable to breathe in the Pandoran toxic atmosphere. Because of this, all personnel are required to wear a Exopack which is very cumbersome. Humans transport Unobtanium on trucks called Hell Trucks from the mines back to Hell's Gate for refining.

Unobtanium proved to be the most baffling of scientific discoveries in the area of superconductors as it had an extremely strong magnetic field, reversing prior knowledge that all superconductors repel magnetic fields. Furthermore, unlike the fragile crystals of human-created superconducting compounds, the substance found on Pandora was a stable quasi-crystal with its atoms arranged in a never-repeating but orderly pattern with fivefold symmetry. This structure was not only structurally rugged but also has microscopic voids in the quasicrytalline structure that contain the magnetic flux lines. Unobtanium has a unique magnetic field and properties of superconductivity, causing it to levitate.

http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Unobtanium

[W1ATR]

stable quasi-crystal with its atoms arranged in a never-repeating but orderly pattern with fivefold symmetry. This structure was not only structurally rugged but also has microscopic voids in the quasicrytalline structure that contain the magnetic flux lines. Unobtanium has a unique magnetic field and properties of superconductivity, causing it to levitate.



Sounds like the description of the next latest and greatest audiophool device. 

[KX5JT]

Funny.  They never elaborated about unobtanium in the movie, only given the impression it was very rare and lucrative.

[k4kyv]

Sounds like the description of the next latest and greatest audiophool device.  

I hadn't thought of that, but you are right. Sounds nearly identical to the gobly-gook you see on some of those sites touting $500 wooden control knobs and instant power cord breaker-inners.  

Maybe the creators of that film have finally figured out what planet those audiophools are on.

Funny.  They never elaborated about unobtanium in the movie, only given the impression it was very rare and lucrative.

That's all I got from the film.  I also wondered about the appearance of the daytime sky, with all the huge celestial objects, thinking that was completely unrealistic.  I don't recall anything about Pandora being a moon rather than a planet. The view of Saturn from an observer on Titan might see something similar if the sun weren't so dim that far away.  But I was so overwhelmed by the graphics and getting acclimated to the 3-D glasses that I might have missed some of the details at the beginning.

But some people are taking this film way too seriously:   

http://www.clickliverpool.com/culture/culture/127574-avatar-viewers-on-brink-of-depression.html