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I normally don't care when I miss television documentaries, but I'm going to have to find some way to see this when it airs in three weeks;
So... freakin'... cool... And remember some of those exclusive clips (which are not associated with the Discovery Channel program) that I told you about a while ago? The Houston Museum of Natural Science has been kind enough to upload some of them to the web. Here's Bob Bakker on "duckbills";
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As it stands now, I have the first 15 (of 31) pages of the whale chapter edited to my content, but the second half poses more of a challenge. Much of the first half is historical narrative, which pretty much writes itself. I can get creative with my prose but I generally don't have to "think" about what I'm doing so much as tell a story.
The second half, by contrast, is more about "how we know what we say we know." It is much more difficult to edit because there are no parameters for what I'm doing. There are several ways in which I could organize my arguments, but I want to make sure I have…
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Here it is, at long last, my take on the first part of The Genius of Charles Darwin. I've included each of the parts available on YouTube and recorded the running time to which each of my comments applies. This may require some scrolling if you're playing the home game. Now that I think of it, it would have been fun to do a Rifftrax-style commentary on each episode, but I don't have the means or know-how to pull that off. I'll also cover parts 2 & 3 in the days to come, but (as I've heard) the very beginning is a very good place to start.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress…
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I know I have been promising it for a while, but tonight I will finally be getting around to liveblogging my reactions to the recently-aired series The Genius of Charles Darwin, hosted by Richard Dawkins. The title of this post should already give you an impression of what I thought of the series, although I was tempted to come up with some sort of title involving "Richard Dawkins and Friends" given the presence of his adaptationist compadres Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett.
If you haven't seen the documentary already, most (if not all) of it is freely available on YouTube, and if you have…
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Update: Today a new report was issued with more details about the way Rutgers is shelling out big bucks for football and underestimating the repercussions. I urge you to read it if you are interested in this controversy.
Over the past few weeks I have been covering the controversy surrounding Rutgers University and the shared delusion that it has had a long tradition of football success. (Rants 1, 2, and 3) With the fall semester just a week and a half away you would think that school officials would be working hard to resolve some of the major issues exposed by the Star Ledger and being…
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Greg Laden already beat me to it, but the alleged Bigfoot in a freezer has (as predicted) turned out to be a hoax. The three men involved in the hoax, Matt Whitton, Rick Dyer, and "professional Bigfoot hunter" (i.e. B.S. artist) Tom Biscardi, have admitted as much, although both Whitton and Dyer were nowhere to be found when scheduled to provide a written statement.
It's a shame, really, especially since some of the most compelling Sasquatch footage ever seen has just come to my attention;
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Right now the website BigThink is involved in a DonorsChoose program where the company Pfizer has agreed to donate $1 (up to $10,000) for every vote the videos on the BigThink page receive. There are two weeks left and the tally so far stands at about $6,000, but I'm sure that they can hit the $10,000 goal before it's over. They need your help, though, so head on over and vote (you can vote for each of the 10 videos once, which means that you can make up to $10 for the program).
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I think I have finally reached the point where all of my arguments about whale evolution are finally in place. It has taken a long time to get to this point, particularly since every time I thought I had constructed a solid foundation I discovered some new fact or observation that was too exciting to be left out, but I should soon have a presentable first draft. As I learned during a quick clean-up of the first 12 pages, though, editing is going to be a difficult task. I am far too-attached to "however," "although," "while," etc. I have overused them and I don't want my argument to suffer…
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I haven't had much time to sit down and watch any movies lately, but this past weekend I did make a little time to watch at least some of the Jurassic Park films. There's a lot I could complain about in each installment, but I have to admit that it's nice to just sit down and watch what almost look like real-life dinosaurs running around on screen. Indeed, the films have had an immense impact on popular culture and ushered in a new wave of dinomania, and 15 years after the release of the first film (and 7 years since the last installment) paleontologists are still fielding questions…
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I typically don't pay attention to Dinesh D'Souza. As far as I can tell he is little more than a pundit, someone who manages to write books so full of various orders of fallacies that my head would probably explode if I tried to read any of his titles cover-to-cover (in fact, such a tragedy nearly befell me when I read the chapter on evolution in What's So Great About Christianity?). John Pieret has commented on some asinine assertions D'Souza has made in a recent interview, though, and I thought I would take this opportunity to jump in.
D'Souza's statements offer plenty to argue about, but I…
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Say what you like about the new History Channel series Jurassic Fight Club, but I have to give the network credit for putting up the full episodes for free viewing.
Sure, you have to wait a few weeks, but at least you don't have to worry about missing it. From what I heard this week's installment featuring Deinonychus was par for the course (which isn't a good thing), but at least now those of us without cable can watch at our leisure and be paleontological pedants.
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At this point it is clear that I am not going to finish the whale chapter by the end of the weekend. Had I only the information previously at my disposal, the books and articles cluttering the apartment and my hard drive, I might have succeeded, but a boon of new information has caused me to go back and revise much of what I had written. (One such resource, a translation of Albert Koch's journal of his American travels from 1844-1846, has been especially helpful. Ken Rose's The Beginning of the Age of Mammals arrived yesterday, as well.) A history of science paper might result from what I've…