Entertainment
pharyngula | February 27, 2007You are going to have to make a choice about tonight's educational experience. You could come out to the Common Cup Coffeehouse in Morris, Minnesota at 6:00 to attend our Cafe Scientifique, in which Arne Kildegaard will make the electricity industry and current renewable energy policy fascinating, OR if you happen to be in London at 7:30, you could listen to Lewis Wolpert debate William Lane Craig on "Is God a delusion?" There is a six hour time difference between London and Morris, but I don't think it's possible to both attend the debate and fly across the Atlantic in 4½ hours, so you…
pharyngula | February 5, 2007Are you a voice talent? Want to participate in an online drama? Sign up for a part in a podcast recreation of parts of the Dover trial. It should be fun, if you're into that kind of thing.
I'm not volunteering, I'm afraid. I can't act, and I'm also afraid that the closest match to my voice would be Michael Behe, and I'd die of mortification.
pharyngula | January 15, 2007He's singing about theistic evolution, so he must be one of those appeasers…but since he's funny, I'll forgive him.
pharyngula | January 9, 2007At least I freely admit it…so here, for your viewing pleasure, a brief musical interlude:
pharyngula | January 2, 2007There's some pulse-pounding high speed insect racing action going on in this animation, and one excellent dipteran crash, but otherwise, not much resolution to the story, and the nice spider gets shafted.
And I was rooting for the spider.
pharyngula | December 29, 2006You can find several loving closeups of Davy Jones at this site—there's also some text, but it's all High Geek as near as I can tell.
pharyngula | December 27, 2006They seem to sneak past the alarms that my bluntness usually sets off. Mike Dunford has a nice quote from that subversive radical, Terry Pratchett:
"Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath. "Wherever people are obtuse and absurd . . . and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach . . . and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the…
pharyngula | December 22, 2006Well, if we can't find the new Architeuthis video, we can at least enjoy a little Cephalopodmas carol, Squid and Whale.
If you'd like something more traditional, here are the lyrics for the Twelve Days of Cephalopodmas. You already know the music.
Lastly, should you really want to get into the festive spirit of the holiday, here are some photos of a whale necropsy. Warning: there is blood, there are guts. How much? Well, they used a large backhoe as a retractor.
pharyngula | December 12, 2006Revel in the crankiness: Charlie Brown Must Die. (If that link doesn't work for you, here's a direct link to the Quicktime movie)
P.S. I do not endorse incinerating blockheaded kids. After all, I'm one of those Christmas atheists.
pharyngula | December 9, 2006I finally saw Borat last night, and I'm afraid I was unimpressed. There were a few funny moments, there were a few horrifying moments where he raised a mirror to our culture to make us squirm (the cheerfully eliminationist cowboy at the rodeo, for instance, or those appallingly stupid frat boys), but mostly it was incoherent, weird, and rude for rude's sake. There was a scene with two naked men wrestling in a hotel that was nothing but vulgar slapstick, and while I've got nothing against a little slapstick now and then, it just didn't advance the film anywhere.
I think Sacha Baron Cohen is…
pharyngula | December 8, 2006We have a splendid double feature weekend of liberal extremism here at the Morris Theater: Borat and Happy Feet. This is going to be one of those events where I'll see all these people I know from the university lining up for the show, and the only community people will be the fervent DFL contingent…oh, and swarms of kids for the early penguin cartoon, whose parents don't realize it's going to brainwash them into being tap-dancing gay godless communists.
(Yes, I know, everyone has already seen these movies ages ago, but this is Morris. At least I'll get to see it in a real old-fashioned art-…
pharyngula | December 7, 2006Medgadget had a Sci Fi contest, and they've just posted the winning entries. The results are your usual mixed bag of amateur SF, but since it is a medical gadget site, one of the interesting outcomes is that all of them are focused on science and engineering and medicine, and not so much that other literary stuff. There's a whiff of nostalgia there—they read like 1940s scientifiction, before that scary contentious New Wave stuff came along.
Anyway, it's fun writing about science ideas—just don't go in expecting much in the way of character development or mood.
pharyngula | November 30, 2006If you've been wondering how it would turn out, the first review of the Left Behind video game is online. It doesn't get any thumbs up.
Don't mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it's a Christian game. Mock it because it's a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the…
pharyngula | November 23, 2006It's our very own Thanksgiving carol: Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant.
pharyngula | November 23, 2006
The BBC is going to be showing a program with images of developing embryos (there are some galleries online) generated from ultrasound, cameras inserted into the uterus, and largely, computer-generated graphics. It's all very pretty, and I hope it will also be shown in my country, but…these pictures violate all the rules of scientific imaging. The images are clearly generated by imposing artistic decisions derived from the conventions of computer animation work onto the data that was collected—I can't tell what details in these embryos were actually imaged, and which were added by the CGI…
pharyngula | November 18, 2006
A reader conspires to make me feel old—I don't have any little kids running around in my house anymore, so I've completely missed this new cartoon, Peep and the Big Wide World. It's a science program for pre-schoolers! They've got sample videos online, and a list of science-related books. It looks like they do exactly the right thing, encouraging kids to observe and experiment and most importantly, ask questions.
Darn kids. Why'd they have to grow up and stop being my excuse to sit down and watch morning cartoons?
pharyngula | November 13, 2006Here's a useful tip: if ever you are attacked by giant monsters, you want to call a Minnesotan for help. I think it's the summertime practice in fighting off insectoid swarms that helps.
pharyngula | November 10, 2006So this is a sorta random music list, but not quite. The new version of iTunes has this "iMix" feature where it will generate a web-based collection from any playlist, so I selected the first 10 from my randomized library, threw it into a new playlist, selected iMix, and…discovered it only builds a list from music it can find in the iTunes collection. Only 3 made it. So then I threw the next ten in—seven or so made the cut. A dozen more…suddenly it spits up 16. Bleh, I wasn't going to fuss with it to get exactly ten.
So here it is, the subset of a random subset of my iTunes library that Apple…
pharyngula | November 1, 2006I caught most of South Park tonight, and it certainly was topical: it wasn't so much about evolution as it was RIchard Dawkins and The God Delusion. Unfortunately, as South Park seems to do whenever I see it, there wasn't much thought behind it at all. Richard Dawkins is made to have sex with Mr Garrison, there's something about intelligent sea otters, and a future world where everyone is an atheist and different factions are having a war. Trey Parker and Matt Stone aren't exactly masters of subtlety, I'm afraid, and it was their usual frenetic mish-mash.
Oh, well. It's a two-parter, so there…
pharyngula | November 1, 2006On Halloween, I gave a short presentation as our first Cafe Scientifique of the year. The main intent was to introduce our schedule for the year and to give an amusing introduction to the media image of scientists by showing a few movie clips…and to say a few things about how we really ought to be seen.
I've put most of the clips on youtube, so you can see what I was talking about below the fold.
Here's the schedule for the 2006-2007 year.
Fall:
28 November : Theodora Economou: Causation in law and science
Spring:
30 January : The Chemistry Discipline: Chemistry in the home
27 February :…