Review
grrlscientist | December 1, 2008
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do by Andrew Gelman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton; 2008) Brief Comment: Gelman and a group of fellow political scientists crunch numbers and draw graphs, arriving at a picture that refutes the influential one drawn by Thomas Frank, in What's…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2008tags: John James Audubon, Bird Art, ornithology, birds, avian, New York Historical Society, endangered species
Carolina Parakeet (Carolina Parrot), Conuropsis carolinensis,
by John James Audubon (American, born Santo Domingo [now Haiti], 1785-1851).
Havell plate no. 26.
Watercolor, graphite, pastel, gouache, and black ink with scratching out and selective glazing on paper, laid on thin board.
The Carolina parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, now extinct,
was the only native species of parrot in the United States. The last
known wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Florida in 1904 [larger size…
grrlscientist | January 14, 2008tags: Sir David Attenborough, Attenborough in Paradise, DVD review, BBC programming, nature filming, filmography
I've always enjoyed David Attenborough's nature programs and films when I've managed to see them on TV and now, thanks to several of my readers, I've been able to view nearly everything that Attenborough has available on DVD. But after watching the wonderful collection of films included in Attenborough in Paradise and Other Personal Adventures (BBC Worldwide; 2007), I have been transformed from a pleased watcher into an unabashed and enthusiastic admirer.
Attenborough in Paradise…
laelaps | November 5, 2007
Even though I didn't get to go to SVP this year, my friends Julia and Neil were in attendance and were kind enough to send me a *signed* copy of Don Prothero's newest book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. Although I was already in the middle of a book when Prothero's book arrived at my door, I dropped what I was reading and started tearing through the glossy pages, and I have to say that I was impressed. Aside from the excellent illustrations by the talented Carl Buell (plus tons of photographs and other diagrams), Prothero's book doesn't hold back when it comes to…
laelaps | November 5, 2007
A mother Tyrannosaurus rex and her offspring at the end of the WWD live show.
Robotic dinosaurs have long been a thorn in the side of students of paleontology; the rigid, roaring robots of the "DinoMotion" craze of the 1990's did little more than get more people into museums without providing them with any actual information about the extinct animals. Stephen Jay Gould laments this theme park treatment of dinosaurs in his essay "Dinomania" (compiled in Dinosaur in a Haystack);
As a symbol of our dilemma, consider the plight of natural history museums in the light of commercial dinomania.…
laelaps | November 3, 2007
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,…
laelaps | October 27, 2007
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-…
laelaps | October 20, 2007
I knew this movie was going to be painful, but Supercroc makes last week's film (Raptor Island) look like classic American cinema by comparison. I'm actually surprised that the film was not called "The Thing That Ate Los Angeles," although the film's super-sized antagonist seemed to accidentally step on/fall on its victims rather than consume them. At least it was short; mercifully, anticlimactically so.
Playing with relative sizes of organisms to make human beings helpless is a classic technique in science fiction and horror films, most notably seen in pictures like 1957's The Incredible…
laelaps | October 13, 2007What 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…