Entertainment

Really, we don't need them, but the best ones can be amusing. Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.
I forgot to mention that I did attend the local screening of The Nature of Existence, the new movie from Roger Nygard in which he traveled the world asking various people grand questions about the meaning of life, etc. It was entertaining, and it is subtly subversive of religious views, so I will recommend it. But I do have a few reservations that I was also able to bring up in the Q&A after the movie. One thing that was alarmingly obvious when watching it is that almost all the gurus and authorities and religious figures that he interviewed were male. There were exceptions — the 12 year…
The University of Minnesota Morris has a special guest coming to town: Roger Nygard, the filmmaker best known for making the movie Trekkies, about the Star Trek culture. He's here as a guest of our philosophy department, though, because his latest movie is The Nature of Existence, in which he asks various people about the meaning of life. I don't know. Wandering around the world asking strange weirdos to explain why the world was created sounds like a lousy way to do philosophy, and an even worse way to do science, but it might be a great way to do entertainment. We'll have to see. He's…
Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won't name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I've read, anyway. The driving conflict of this story is supposed to be the horror of the undead: the protagonist is both tainted with the curse of partial undeadness and trying to protect friends from being similarly afflicted. This is a reasonable premise for a fantasy novel, and could make for a good story. However…
It sounds like Ricky Gervais was wonderfully caustic in his turn hosting the Golden Globes awards last night — so brutally acerbic that I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't many celebrities lined up to complain about their treatment to the organizers. I wonder if he'll ever host an award show ever again? Among the amusements, though, was his closing thank yous. God finally gets the credit he deserves.
Earlier I had claimed that cable networks had bottomed out by conspiring with the Catholic church to make an exorcism show. I was wrong. TLC is making a reality show with Ted Haggard. I will refrain from saying that now they've hit bottom, because if I do, some cable executive somewhere will step forward to plumb depths I can't even imagine.
It's because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That's all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they're all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won't learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn't even trying…
Oh, man, my least favorite pseudoscientific cliche from movies and TV is the hackneyed "zoom in on that reflection in the eye of the guy we caught on the el cheapo RS-170 B&W surveillance cam and recorded on VHS…if we blow it up enough, we'll be able to identify the killer!" It's painfully common, too, as you'll see in this montage of enhancing moments: "Do you have an enhancer that can bitmap?" Somebody slap those writers. (via Kevin Zelnio)
I got a request to collect participants for an online survey on science fiction — take a look and help out if you want. It's long, and a little depressing: it's a list of science fiction movies and TV shows, and you're supposed to rate their scientific accuracy. I think I'm rather picky about that, so just about all of 'em got slammed when I did it. I am conducting a small pilot-study on the properties of various sci-fi works (focusing on film and TV in particular). For the purposes of this study I designed two web forms (Web-form 1 & Web-form 2) that ask participants to rate sci-fi works…
Don't say I never do you any favors, acolytes of the endless thread. I'm about to spare you the need to see the latest cheap, unimaginative Hollywood dreck to hit the theaters by showing you the ending of the new Yogi Bear movie. Bring the kids around, tell 'em to see what the new kiddie movie is all about, and watch their little faces fall and the tears flow and the screaming begin. Of course, if they get really excited and demand to go see it right now, you'll also know that you need to book a psychiatrist, stat. (Current totals: 11,523 entries with 1,215,620 comments.)
Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn't put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series. And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck. So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?…
You want an atheist Christmas carol? Here it is. I still remember the shock when I heard the news on 8 December 1980.
This is a fascinating way to present data about global and historical economies: I'm also kind of blown away by the fact that the BBC has a documentary about statistics. How do they get an audience without blowing things up or the occasional sleazy sexual affair?
It's almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the deluge of Christmas carols is about to commence. This is the time of year when I dread turning the radio on, because I know I'll hear the same sets of songs over and over again, and the kind of uniform anti-eclecticism characteristic of Top 40 AM radio gets amplified and expanded and starts to spread everywhere. I'm always pleased to see something new, especially since it doesn't happen very often…Lennon's Happy Christmas (War is Over), Minchin's White Wine in the Sun? Some people get cranky about anything that isn't sufficiently…
…are fish molecular biology nerds.
I know Tim Minchin wants to tour the US, maybe this summer, but his agents weren't exactly frantically lining up the gigs for him just yet. Now you can light a fire under their butts and tell Tim Minchin where he should play. Vote for your home town! Vote for the nearest place with a giant arena! I voted to have him come direct to Morris, Minnesota, but I'd be fine with Minneapolis.
I don't know, because my eyes kind of glazed over as this review explained all the rules for Dominant Species. It doesn't exactly look elegant in its implementation — it's more for hardcore board-gamers than a family fun night, if you ask me — but at least it seems to be taking an ecosystem approach to modeling evolution which is far different than the usual 'battling individuals' concept you usually see in games.
It would be a mercy. George Lucas is preparing another release of all of his Star Wars movies, after yet again tweaking them. The new versions will be in…cheesy post-processed pseudo-3-D. When the first one was released back in 1977 it was phenomenal — a pulpy space opera with dialogue that had the panache of a Hugo Gernsback short story, and we liked it. Then came the sequel, and we were overjoyed…it was still good old fashioned science fiction, but it was better than the first. And from that point on, unfortunately, it was dissolution and decay, beginning with the Ewoks and ending in the…
There have been no science fiction movies that I know of that accurately describe evolution. None. And there have been very few novels that deal with it at all well. I suspect it's because it makes for very bad drama: it's so darned slow, and worst of all, the individual is relatively unimportant and all the action takes place incrementally over a lineage of a group, which removes personal immediacy from the script. Lineages just don't make for coherent, interesting personalities. io9 takes a moment to list the worst offenders in the SF/evolution genre. There are a couple of obvious choices:…
I am less than tantalized by the latest trailer for this awful SyFy movie, but I'll probably tune it in anyway. I suspect I'll also tune it out. Cheesy, schlocky giant monster I can understand, but why all the implicit misogyny in these things? It always looks like women's purpose is to wear a bikini and die horribly.