laelaps | March 21, 2008The Bleiman brothers just mentioned Deep Star Six, which I fondly remembered from my video-store clerk days.
Believe it or not, I think Deep Star Six was better than the gross-out cheese-fest that was Leviathan, although the latter received a lot more airplay on UPN, TNT, and TBS when I was younger;
Leviathan, of course, was a much more direct rip-off of ALIEN;
Like JAWS, ALIEN was a terrifying film that everyone wanted to emulate, although some films (like Creature) were less shy about lifting bits of the plot;
laelaps | March 21, 2008I've seen the glossy, gussied-up magazine versions of the New Testament at Target, Ceiling Cat has delivered unto us the lolcat Bible, and no one can be without The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but The Manga Bible? I'm not sure I even want to look...
laelaps | March 21, 2008The other day I wrote quite a bit about science popularization (most of it as a result of being aggravated), but one point that I forgot to mention was how Darwin approached the problem of creationism in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Natural theology, especially of the kind popularized by Paley, was a bit of the elephant in the room; even though science was moving towards secularization and had rejected a strict Mosaic account of the formation of the world decades earlier, it was still a touchy subject. What was "the reluctant Mr. Darwin" to do?
As is well-known,…
laelaps | March 21, 2008Tomorrow the next edition of The Boneyard is going to go up at The Dragon's Tales, so get your entries to me or Will soon! I'm in need of a host for the next edition on April 5th, so just let me know by e-mail or in the comments and I'll pencil you in. And if you can't think of a science-heavy post to write, you could always come up with some LOLSauropods...
The deadline for the Accretionary Wedge #7 is also quickly approaching, and the theme is geologists in the movies. I'm sure we're all thinking Jurassic Park, but I'm sure there are a few other old crusty films I can dust off for this one.
laelaps | March 21, 2008
The skull of Nichollsia borealis.
Update: As Nick has aptly pointed out, this plesiosaur is going to need a new name. The genus name Nichollsia is occupied by an isopod, arthopods once again trumping prehistoric creatures. I wonder how many times this has happened; I'm sure an interesting review paper could be written if all the changes could be tracked down.
According to a press release issued by the University of Calgary (and adapted for ScienceDaily and redOrbit, with another summary at Palaeoblog), Patrick Druckenmiller and Anthony Russell have just released a paper describing a…
laelaps | March 21, 2008I made a bit of a tactical error in my viewing choices the other night. For some reason I thought that I could handle watching Maxed Out (a great documentary about the soul-sucking practices of credit card companies) and Nancy Pelosi's Friends of God in one night, but I ended up a bit depressed at the end of the evening. I would recommend both, but Pelosi's feature is especially good. Here's a clip from one of her stops to see our old pals from AiG, Ken Ham and Buddy Davis;
The documentary Jesus Camp also featuring some disconcerting footage of creationism being peddled to children;…
laelaps | March 20, 2008
This has to be seen to be believed; the creationists behind Expelled are so threatened by PZ that he was threatened with arrest if he attempted to see the film, but Richard Dawkins made it in without a problem. I'm sure the internet will be a-buzz with whatever Dawkins has to say about the film when he eventually posts his thoughts (the news about what happened to PZ is already making the rounds), but I can't imagine why the producer of Expelled singled out PZ. (Also of interest, "Nomad" has posted some thoughts on another recent screening of the film.)
And now for something completely…
laelaps | March 20, 2008According to tradition, Richard Owen is the great "villain" of Victorian biology; brilliant, arrogant, and jealous, the "British Cuvier" was the greatest threat to On the Origin of Species. In turn, his arch-nemesis was T.H. Huxley, a heroic young scientist who zealously defended Darwin and successfully made a fool of the creationist Owen. So goes the common treatment, anyway, and like most other quick-and-dirty historical synopses the popular caricatures of both Owen and Huxley present a rather jaundiced view of each figure and their importance to science. Much like Charles Lyell…
laelaps | March 20, 2008
I had a feeling that other people were going to weigh in on Chris Mooney's latest article about "enablers" when I hit the "publish" button and shut down the computer yesterday afternoon, and I guess I was right. ERV, PZ, and Mark H have put forth their take on the article as well (ERV's comparison of Mooney 2006 and Mooney 2008 is a must-read).
For your further enjoyment, Bora collected a set of links about communicating science yesterday, and Blake was kind enough to provide another link to something I wrote out of frustration in relation to a post T. Ryan Gregory wrote.
I'd love to say…
laelaps | March 19, 2008Chris Mooney has a new article out with the title of "Enablers" in which he charges that scientists are essentially drawing attention to creationism, global warming skeptics, etc. by actively refuting pseudoscience. What should we do instead? Well, there doesn't seem to be much of an answer to that;
Couldn't all the energy and resources bestowed on rebutting our enemies be better used to help promote our friends--perhaps, say, by devoting resources to getting the word out about individuals who have written pro-environment books? Rather than reacting, couldn't we be setting the agenda?
Given…
laelaps | March 19, 2008Last night I had one of those ideas that made my eyes go wide, wake my wife up, and try to explain what was bouncing around in my brain before it skittered away into the recesses of my thoughts. I think I was able to grab a fragment of the idea, but the more I turned it over in my head the more I realized that it represents a much bigger problem than I originally anticipated. I was hoping to have a blog post up about it today, but it's going to require a bit more work than I expected.
In the meantime, I suppose I can tell you this. The idea occurred to me while thinking about the diversity of…
laelaps | March 19, 2008...but I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the following headline;
Bush: Iraq has been 'longer and harder' than anticipated
[Story]
laelaps | March 19, 2008Yesterday a copy of John Brockman's The Third Culture arrived in the mail, and I was expecting it to contain a discussion about the modern mode of science popularization, or at least some insight into why many scientists decided to cut out the media middlemen and start writing books themselves. What I got was a collection of interviews (with the questions ripped out) and a whole lot of back-biting along the well-worn lines of evolutionary "pluralists" and "ultra-Darwinians," and the fact that the text is made up of interviews (rather than essays) undercuts the core of what the book is…
laelaps | March 19, 2008
Tai Shan, a giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
laelaps | March 18, 2008Remember "Dakota," the exquisitely-preserved hadrosaur that was the selling point of a book that barely featured it? (See here for more gripes) It turns out that it's an Edmontosaurus, although the species name is left off so I have no idea whether the specimen represents a new variety of Edmontosaurus or not.
There is some distressing news, though. According to the man who found the skeleton, Tyler Lyson, he's planning on taking "Dakota" on a world tour, eventually finding a home in a museum Lyson hopes to create in his hometown of Marmath, North Dakota. "Dakota" will first go on display at…
laelaps | March 18, 2008Last year, in a paper published in the journal Current Biology, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani reported on their observation of ten different chimpanzees thrusting wooden "spears" into holes in trees 22 times over the course of more than a year, presumably to stun bush babies that sleep in the hollows during the day. The report has been somewhat controversial, especially since chimpanzees often shove sticks and twigs into holes, but the observations are receiving some new attention in a National Geographic article about the Fongoli population in Senegal.
Before considering what the Current…
laelaps | March 18, 2008The Cambrian "explosion," the enigmatic phenomenon in which many of the phyla existing on the planet appeared in a relatively short period of time (at least 20 million years), remains a difficult event to study. Fossils are rare, intricate, and often represent creatures that are difficult to fit into one group or another. There are fossils of earlier creatures (and there may have even been an earlier, Ediacaran "explosion"), but at present it is the Cambrian event that is the most famous radiation of diverse forms of life. A relatively recent paper published in the Annual Review of Earth and…