Movies Reviews

There are plenty of “Biblical” or “Christian” movies lately. Noah, God’s not Dead, Heaven is for Real…  There are many reviews and opinions posted as Christian point of view – some good, some bad.

Many of the Facebook friends recommend or criticize these films. The major arguments are – this part is scripture; that part is not.

What do they mean? When someone says, “This is scriptural”, what he/she means is “this is the way how I would interpret the Bible.”

“This is not scriptural” actually means “This is not how I see it according to my understanding of the Bible.”

In any adaptation from any book into a movie, the storyteller needs to modify some parts of the story in order to fit the surroundings. It may not fit how some readers’ ideas of the events. It may even have to modify the story. It is the nature of storytelling.

Individual’s life experience has an effect how someone interpret an event. How we interpret an event should be our own. Why should we judge another person’s personal feelings or experience in a dream or near death experience? When we read a story, we react differently because we are individuals. One may call a particular elucidation scriptural; another person may call it heresy.

It is a movie. Do we have to take it so seriously?

Noah, the Flood and Calculus

I saw the trailer of the movie Noah. It inspired me to ask my students in my calculus class a question as a bonus assignment.

If it rained for forty days and forty nights, the water filled up to the peak of Mount Ararat, how much water fell on earth by using the disk method of calculating volume of revolution in calculus.

Some of the equations may not display correctly on the browser.

Here are the assumptions and numbers:

The earth is an ellipsoid with an equatorial radius of a=6378.1 km and polar radius of b=6356.8 km.

Mount Ararat has a height of 5.137 km.

Here is the solution:

Equation of an ellipse: x^2/a^2 +y^2/b^2 =1 or y=b/a √(a^2-x^2 )

dV=πy^2 dx, ∴V=2π∫_0^a▒b^2/a^2 (a^2-x^2 )dx

I will not type in all the detail of the calculation,

for a_2= the radius of the earth plus the height of Mount Ararat,

and a_1 = the radius of the earth,

volume of water should be approximately 2.623×10^9 km³ or 2.623×10^18 m³

The mass of the water should be approximately 2.623×10^21 kg.

For forty days and forty nights, it is a total of 960 hours, the rate of rain fall is 535.1 cm/hour or 8.9 cm/min.

Volume of water coming down from heaven is 2.732×10^15 m³/hour.

Noah does not need an ark. He needs a submarine!