movie

Clearly, I am not a professional blogger. I am an amateur. This is because I was under the impression that only amateur bloggers could compete in the blogging olympics. When did they change these rules? Anyway, Adam Weiner did a physics-based analysis of the latest Star Trek movie trailer. Here is the trailer: In the trailer (oh, spoiler alert) a young Kirk jumps out of a car before it goes over a cliff. It does look odd, and that is why I had intended to analyze it. In Adam's analysis, at PopSci.com the basic approach was: Take the initial velocity of the car (from the clip) Assume the…
tags: Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Ghost Bird, movie trailer, streaming video This streaming video is a clip from an upcoming movie called Ghost Bird. This film is a documentary about the controversial rediscovery of North America's largest woodpecker species, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which went extinct early last century [3:29]. To learn more about the film, visit the Ghost Bird website. You might also be interested in reading this news article.
Sometimes, you find weird stuff on the internet. But sometimes you find even weirder stuff in scientific journals. To what do I refer? A paper in the Journal of Mathematical Geology back in 2000 entitled Godzilla from a Zoological Perspective, by Per Christiansen. This was written as a critique of the "new Godzilla" movie, arguing that it is not more biologically plausible than the "old Godzilla" of 1954. However, calculations show that his limbs and limb muscles must have been severely undersized to move his huge bulk around at even a leisurely pace, and most other biological problems with…
The one-year anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space is up at Why Homeschool? If only more homeschoolers were into space, Astronomy, and science in general, the United States would be a far superior place, I'm sure! Thanks to Henry Cate for starting the Carnival and coming back to host it one year later! My post on a black hole getting kicked out of our galaxy is up there; check it out and find out what's going on in outer space!
There's a movie coming out on Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution, called Expelled, and it's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein (right), a TV/film personality who is an overall intelligent guy (and used to have the TV show Win Ben Stein's Money), and used to be a Nixon speechwriter. Politically, he's quite conservative (for example, immediately following 9/11 he gave a speech where he called abortion "the worst form of terrorism"), but this movie is apparently one of the worst abuses of science since What the Bleep do We Know?! came out. The movie has an innocuous enough premise: is…
tags: movies, online quiz I think this is a low point in my online quiz taking because I disagree with this prognosis. How about you -- do you agree or disagree with your own results? Your Christmas is Most Like: How the Grinch Stole Christmas You can't really get into the Christmas spirit... But it usually gets to you by the end of the holiday. What Movie Is Your Christmas Most Like?
tags: dinosaurs, movie magic, streaming video This interesting time-lapse streaming video shows how the movie industry built some amazingly realistic life-sized dinosaurs [shockwave: 3:50]
During the 1990's I can scarcely remember a time when one television station or another wasn't playing at least one of the four JAWS movies, TBS, TNT, or WPIX often devoting an entire day to films about killer oceanic creatures. Still, of the four films JAWS 3 (or 3-D, if you like) was one of the b-movies that was always making the rounds, and it's gratuitous special effects make it an easy target for this week's cheesy movie selection. Although I didn't realize it as a kid, JAWS 3 picks up the story of the Brody family at a Sea World theme park (Sea World Orlando, a landlocked theme park, to…
Until I saw this 1972 film I had no idea that amphibians wanted to rule the world, but apparently they are cold-blooded masterminds bent on destroying Homo sapiens, or at least wrecking a crotchety old man's birthday. Oddly enough, however, Frogs doesn't even live up to it's own name, there being only one frog in the entire film (most of the "frogs" are really toads), but such considerations didn't stop the filmmakers from buying everything that slinked, slithered, or crawled from the local pet shops and creating a classic, putrid piece of movie cheese. The eco-thriller is a bit of a sub-…
What do you get when you put dinosaurs, terrorists, and Navy SEALs all in one place? The answer in "A mess," and in this case such a disaster carries the title Raptor Island. Starring Lorenzo Lamas, the film continues the long standing tradition of putting guns and monsters in the same place in the hopes that something good will come out on film. Indeed, it seems that more effort is required to serve up a plate of Hamburger Helper than was put into the story and dialog of this slice of movie cheese, and its painfully apparent from the very first scene. We meet our hero, "Hack" (Lamas) and his…
Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I having something of an affinity for cheesy B-movies. I probably acquired the taste during childhood, when Jaws II, III, IV, and most of the Godzilla series would be playing on any given weekend, and even though I would be hard pressed to give any of the movies more than 2 stars out of 5 I do like turning down the lights, grabbing some popcorn, and sitting down to watch something that I know is going to be nearly painfully bad. There are a few exceptions, a few creature features that stand out from the rest (i.e. Alligator, The Host), but by and…
Part of the joy of blogging about paleo is that there's always something going on, and this year there seems to be no shortage of prehistoric news. This also seems to be a year marked by lots of IMAX paleo films, so here's a quick rundown of what's out there right now; Dinosaurs 3D: Giants of Patagonia South America has yielded some of the weirdest and most wonderful dinosaurs discovered in recent years, in addition to some of the biggest. The "Giants of Patagonia" have shown that sauropods didn't just disappear at the end of the Jurassic and that South America has its own fearsome theropod…