television
laelaps | July 26, 2008A female Majungasaurus as envisaged by the creators of Jurassic Fight Club.Imagine, just for a moment, standing in the middle of a Cretaceous forest 70 million years ago. The sunlight streaming through the canopy catches dust motes in the hot Madagascar grove, the calls of birds making the scene feel familiar despite being from another time. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, they cease, the undergrowth just beyond your line of vision creaking and cracking with the footfalls of something monstrous. The predator slowly comes into view through the trees, a male Majungasaurus with a bright red…
oracknows | July 21, 2008In the celebrity vaccine wars, as we all know, Jenny McCarthy has become the de facto leader of the "vaccines-cause-autism" lunatic fringe. However, apparently she has managed to recruit another celebrity to help her out. Her choice is amazingly appropriate: Britney Spears, who was seen at a fundraiser for "Jenny McCarthy's autism charity Generation Rescue."
Because no one knows parenting and science like Britney Spears, I guess.
On the other hand, I have to wonder what J. B. Handley, founder of GR, thinks of having the Hollywood press refer to his baby as "Jenny McCarthy's autism charity"?…
laelaps | July 21, 2008Is it just me or is the History Channel mutating? I guess they've covered just about everything there is to cover in human history as I keep seeing more announcements for programs about natural history, particularly involving extinct creatures. On July 29 the new series Evolve will premiere along with Jurassic Fight Club and Prehistoric Monsters Revealed; it seems like the whole day will be full of prehistory-themed documentaries. (And I hasten to add that Darren recently appeared on an episode of MonsterQuest, too.)
As I promised I'm holding back on the crankiness, but the History Channel…
laelaps | July 17, 2008Ok, maybe the name isn't as catchy as Jurassic Fight Club but that's what it's all about; ancient critters ripping the guts out of other ancient critters and how we know they did it. I'll have a review of the first episode, featuring Majungasaurus, up next week, but in the meantime the History Channel has released a slew of videos and other materials to look over prior to the premiere (including a game that I'm sure will remind a few of you of Primal Rage).
The show itself features a number of experts but the main host is "Dinosaur George" Blasing, and while I'm not on board with all of his…
laelaps | July 12, 2008Majungasaurus is one cool theropod. Not only does is have a neat, knobby skull but the numerous remains of this dinosaur allowed for an entire series of papers on it to appear in the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoirs. Although it is hardly a household name quite a bit is known about this predator from the ancient sediments of Madagascar, and the Witmer Lab has recently put up some really cool 3D animations of cutting planes through the skull of Majungasaurus;
There's also some cool video of sagittal slices through the skull of Majungasaurus;
You can expect to be hearing more about…
oracknows | July 10, 2008What is it with the local news media in my hometown?
You might (or might not) remember when I noted back in February that there was one Detroit station that did an unbelievably, hilariously dumb and credulous story about "orbs" in photos and whether they are ghosts or spirits manifesting themselves to their friends and family. That story came courtesy of "reporter" Ama Daetz of the local NBC affiliate WDIV-TV (and I do use the term "reporter" loosely). It was so over-the-top, credulously stupid, so hard to distinguish from an Onion parody, that I even "honored" it with a spot on Your Friday…
oracknows | June 27, 2008...or maybe Sunday morning, as I don't know how long it will take to get this by BitTorrent, the penultimate episode of series 4 of Doctor Who (if you're a Doctor Who fan and haven't seen the last couple of episodes before this Saturday's episode The Stolen Earth, beware the spoilers--don't start the videos if you want to remain pure):
This looks like a Who fanboy's dream. Of course, even though new Doctor Who episodes make it to the U.S. to air on the SciFi Channel only around three or four weeks after they air in the U.K., this fanboy can't wait that long, especially after seeing this…
laelaps | June 19, 2008Today I'm going to be working hard on my book, but I submit for your viewing pleasure the first episode of the PBS Evolution special (in twelve parts). Not everything is exactly right (so keep your thinking caps on), but I still think it's a good mix of the old & new (I especially was impressed by the section on the evolution of the eye).
laelaps | June 13, 2008[Note: I know I'm about a month late coming to this one, but it still provided for some good blog fodder. It seems that the initial response at Pharyngula ended up changing the summary I discuss [see comments section], and that's definitely a good thing. The show has also been pushed back to July, it seems. Rather than scrap the post due to relative irrelevancy, I'll leave it up as I think it still speaks to some continuing problems in science communication.]
About a month or so ago I was contacted by someone from the History Channel about where to find some good images of prehistoric life on…
oracknows | June 10, 2008I admit it. Sometimes, my better nature notwithstanding, I can't help taking a bit of a morbid interest in celebrity scandals. I don't know if it's a weakness or just normal human nature. Like most "educated" people, I do know I tend to be vaguely embarrassed by falling for an interest in such "low' pursuits. Given that, how can I resist making note of a recent development in the ongoing nastiness between Charlie Sheen and his ex-wife Denise Richards? More oddly, how can it be that I find myself seeing Denise Richards as actually being rational?
It turns out that Charlie Sheen is apparently…
oracknows | June 3, 2008Tired of hearing me rant about antivaccinationists? Actually, I'm a bit tired of ranting about antivaccinationists myself, but a blogger's got to do what a blogger's got to do when an event like Jenny McCarthy's "Green Our Vaccines" rally pops up. Still, that doesn't mean I can't take a break and indulge myself for a moment. Apparently I missed it last week when it appeared, but a mid-season trailer for Doctor Who has been posted, and it looks really promising for a rip-roaring send-off to this season. I haven't yet managed to watch last Saturday's episode yet because of my sojourn to ASCO,…
oracknows | May 31, 2008Ever since it appeared as an "adult" spinoff of Doctor Who, I've had a love-hate relationship with Torchwood. The first season was about as uneven as anything I've ever seen, ranging from a truly execrable (and, even worse, unforgivably stupidly and badly written) "homage" to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Countrycide) that ranks among the worst hours of television to which I've ever subjected myself to a handful of pretty darned good episodes (Out of Time, Captain Jack Harkness), with a whole lot of mediocre episodes in between. This season was generally more consistent, but a lot of problems…
oracknows | May 16, 2008This is too hilarious for words. It's priceless.
It's Chris Matthews applying a little history smackdown--I mean lesson--to an ignorant right wing talk radio host named Kevin James, who was overjoyed at President Bush's use of the Neville Chamberlain gambit the other day and wanted to take the opportunity to throw the same gambit around too about the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular. Bad idea:
My only complaint is that Matthews didn't deliver what would have been the perfect coup de grâce. That would have been to ask (1) what did Neville Chamberlain do in March 1939…
oracknows | May 13, 2008...which Presidential candidate would make the best companion for which Doctor.
I have to agree with Phil, though, in that McCain is probably too old. In the show, the Doctor's companions are nearly always younger-appearing than the Doctor. McCain looks way older than the Doctor--and I'm talking about the Doctor's real age.
laelaps | May 13, 2008Since I've got a bit of studying to do for my osteology exam, here's some, erm, "vintage" television to keep things going here. It's an episode of Batman called "How to Hatch a Dinosaur";
laelaps | April 27, 2008If ever there was a documentary that made me want to be a paleontologist when I grew up, it was the Christopher Reeve-hosted Dinosaur! The stop-motion animation by Phil Tippet still looks good, but even though things have changed a bit since the show came out, it's still fun to watch and provides a good personal follow-up to Friday's open thread. Enjoy!
oracknows | April 27, 2008You didn't think I wouldn't take notice of this bit of news, did you? Even if I had, I would have had little choice, as readers deluged me with various news reports about this.
Yes, it would appear that there might very well be a new Blakes 7 series. Of course, I'll believe it when I see it. Only two scripts have been ordered, and there isn't even a cast and crew assembled yet. There have been attempts to resurrect this series before, and they have all fallen through. We'll see.
I suspect that most of my non-U.K. readers have no clue where the inspiration for the name of this blog or the…
laelaps | March 11, 2008You know documentaries have fallen into a sorry state of existence when their primary draw is the destruction of expensive objects just to fill up a few minutes (or even seconds) or airtime. I haven't seen the whole documentary, but the first installment of the BBC's The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs thought it would be fun to crunch up a car;
Of course, that clip is essentially a rip-off of a scene from the second Jurassic Park film, The Lost World;
The worst representations of the "destructive documentary," however, can be found in the Discovery Channel's "Animal Face Off" series. In…
oracknows | March 10, 2008Damn you, mercury militia.
I had had another topic entirely in mind for this week's post, but, as happens far too often, news events have overtaken me in the form of a story that was widely reported towards the end of last week. It was all over the media on Thursday evening and Friday, showing up on CNN, Larry King Live, the New York Times, and NPR. It happens to be the story of a girl from Georgia named Hannah Poling whose case before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which had originally part of a much larger proceeding known as the Autism Omnibus, was settled. This settlement…