A BS in Physics was my primary degree (I double majored so I also had a BA in a language that has never been of any professional use to me).
Python is so ubiquitous that it's a great tool to know for a multitude of applications, and it pairs well with a physics background since that increases your usefulness as a generalist.
It is important to make the distinction between a programmer with a hard science/math degree and one with a computer science degree. The former will likely struggle more with building up larger libraries, following best practices for modularity/extendability/backwards compatibility, and other computer science sort of stuff that the latter will ingrain much better. The flip side is that computer science tends to not have as much of an emphasis on a math background, so analysis and Data Science applications often benefit more from the science/math background than the comp sci one (please note that I'm making highly generalized statements here based on what I've observed).
To summarize, if you want to build an app to do something, you want comp sci, but if you want to build a statistical model and have the ability to rigorously validate it and explain what it's doing, you're going to need that math background.
Nope, the movie takes place in Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska, which is one of the northernmost populated areas on earth. From the Wikipedia page:
Edit: to OP's point, most depictions of the Arctic aren't that far north. 30 Days of Night happens to be one that really does have that level of continual darkness. Even so, while it's night for several months, it's really just the day shortening to the point that you don't see the sun with that civil twilight reducing to a few hours, and then as the "days" get longer eventually you start to see the sun again. The reverse happens for the summer, where eventually the sun doesn't set enough to be out of view.