Alan Rickman, Harry Potter and Die Hard Actor, Dies Aged 69

Post by eterm » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

philh wrote: post #78

at-fates-hands wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is also a theory that celebs die in three's which is pretty interesting. A lot of researchers say this is because we as humans love patterns: “Patterns in death, patterns in misfortune – those are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it,” explains John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who has written about the concept…

I recall seeing a suggestion that "everything" happens in threes, in a meaningful sense. Something along the lines of: you take events which happen according to a poisson distribution with parameter L, and you define a cluster to be "any group of events which happen with no more than time L between adjacent ones", and then the expected size of a cluster is a little less than three. I'm probably misremembering the det…

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

petejansson wrote: post #140

sp332 wrote: post #118

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Well there are still >7 billion people that don't fit your categorization, which means only 93% of people who have lived have died. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-li...

The article seems to say that the estimate of all who have lived is about 106 billion, so the number of currently-alive is estimated at about 6% of those who have ever lived. Arthur C. Clarke wrote "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." I wondered if that ratio needed updating. It does, but not, it seems, in the direction I expected.

Post by scott_s » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #116

Patient0 wrote: post #65

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My favourite bit of that movie (Rickman plays Sir Alexander Dane, a proud thespian whose once illustrious career has been destroyed by Galaxy Quest typecasting him into this humiliating role): Jason Nesmith: You WILL go out there. Sir Alexander Dane: I won't and nothing you say will make me. Jason Nesmith: The Show Must Go On. Sir Alexander Dane: ...Damn you.

.. riffing on not only Patrick Stewart and Alec Guinness, but also Rickman himself going from Serious Theatre to Hollywood action movies. Rickman clealy had a lot of fun playing villains; apparently he improvised or re-wrote most of his lines in Robin Hood , making it hilarious.

Post by jwdunne » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

verytrivial wrote: post #44

Vale Alan Rickman. Personal aside: When driving, my partner and I always refer to a certain town west of London as Alan Richmansworth, I think simply because it is nice to think about him. Sad news.

Post by arethuza » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

pierrec wrote: post #133

I once watched a streak of Alan Rickman movies, and can certainly recommend some of the less popular ones. Closet Land - HN should love this one: a dystopian science fiction film approaching censorship, surveillance, and torture. It's a single setting with only 2 actors, and sometimes feels like a very intense play. Truly Madly Deeply - An oddly appropriate film about accepting death, where he plays a tired ghost who…