Sunday 28 June 2015

Entertainment stuff from the week 22-28/6/15


Hi indominators,


So, i have seen Jurassic World (the movie) ...not Jurassic Park.

Well, i have seen Jurassic Park. But that was a long time ago, LOL.

I take it you want a sciencey nerdy review? Yes/no? You're getting one either way... :-P


[Beware: masses and masses and masses of spoilers!!!]


The film starts badly. I do not understand the first boom. I simply do not. Why? Why? Just why? #inappropriateboom :-P

But it quickly rises from there. The following birdy thing's a classic allusion to the evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

An evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs that quickly leads me to the subject of birds, and feathers. And their total absence from this movie.

And from there, to my own analyses of the film's scienceyness, and fictionyness.


Jurassic World is definitely sci-fi. We generally think of sci-fi being spacey and timey, but that's just physics-fi. Jurassic World is biology-fi.

What makes sci-fi such a difficult genre to compose in, is what makes it so respectable to achieve in: good sci-fi must always stick to the rules of reality, while constructing fictional scenarios that are entertaining. That's hard.

It's very hard, compared to, for example, Fantasy. In the Harry Potter Chronicles (as i insist on calling them) when Voldemort's defeated and the trio are standing in the rubble and carnage, instead of Harry waving his wand and cleaning everything up, he breaks the Elder Wand and leaves the job for someone else to do.

But hang on... this is magic we're talking about! What reason is there for him to need a wand at all?! How come people can turn into other people, or rats, or goblets of water, but goblets of water can't turn into them... or resurrected forms of Harry's parents, or now-dead friends!?

Writing in the Fantasy genre gave J.K.Rowling huge amounts of freedom, because she could make up the rules as she went along. Including, Dumbledore's ability to disapparate from somewhere he'd previously said it was impossible to disapparate from.

In sci-fi, you can't change the rules to suit - you have to stick with the ones in real life. So how well did Jurassic World do at being sciencey, and not just having sciencyness?

Back to the feathers.


We knew, long ago, that the dinos in this film would not have feathers. When it was still news, that information came as a disappointment to those who wanted the new film to reflect advances in evolutionary paleontology.

Since the original Jurassic Park film, birds have become widely recognised as avian dinosaurs, and more and more dinosaur species have been found to exhibit feathers. Not necessarily flight feathers, of course - just for display or insulation.

The original 'Jurassic Park' was lauded for its depictions of dinosaurs - with tails held high, and non-plasticene skin. But it was also slated on grounds of size, speed, and plot constructs: dilophosaurus' spitting and frill; velociraptor's hands; and T-Rex's running speed, were all made-up for show.

It's understandable that many dinosaur-literate people expected the franchise to advance, and incorporate what's been learned about dinosaurs, in the last two decades, and i agree that it's disappointing for the producers to favour continuity over realism.

But we should remember that the dinosaurs in the park have been genetically engineered anyway - their genomes were pieced together, from scratch, as reptile/amphibian hybrids. Which is another problem - genomes fragment over time, making 65-million-year-old genomes unworkable. Plus, they should have used avian genomes, for reasons that are now obvious.

Looks, however, were not their only problems. As you'll see, in one of the links below: 'How did Dinosaurs Sound', the sound-effects are quite dodgy too. Jurassic Park invented mammalian, throaty sounds, from mashing the calls of elephants and whales and things. Reptiles' throats are just different, and so they don't produce mammalian noises. Again, thinking 'birds' would have been the way to go.

But this is all about the old films. Jurassic World inevitably inherited a lot of bollocks from them. But where has it gone, from there? Has it really advanced?


My 'top threes' for goods and bads, in the 'science' of Jurassic World.

Bads:

Number one: Flying reptiles attacking. The most grating element of the movie, to me, was the trope of 'things from above' attacking. We flying reptiles, like birds, are reluctant to go near other creatures, let alone swoop around benches, buildings, and flailing humans, for the sakes of our fragile wing membranes. This trope seems to have been introduced, purely for the sake of The Birds style amplification of scariness.

Number Two: Indominus Rex communicating. Indominus being able to communicate with other raptors is risible, and the second most grating element of the movie. It was clearly written in entirely for narrative, and despite realism. A premise for the I. rex being a psychopathic killing machine was that it had never had the opportunity to interact with other animals, and so could not have learned any communication skills or self control. The regions of its brain responsible would have been redeployed to other functions. The pseudorationalisation for this is that it's "part raptor" but imagine if you were part gorilla and raised in isolation. Would you, on your first meeting with a gorilla, instantly develop such adeptness in communicating with them, that you could guilefully persaude them to do your bidding? I don't think so. Raptors are made out to be super smart - i think they'd laugh at its pidgin raptor and attack with disdain.

Number Three: Mosasaurus' tongue. Mosasaurus, being a marine lizard, would most-likely have had a forked tongue. The Mosasaurs, along with most marine beasts of the time, were not dinosaurs, and so there's no reason for them to be presented alike.

Goods:

Number one: Sciencey human was sciencey and human. The lead researcher, who'd done all the groundbreaking work into genetic construction, and hybridising modern dinosaurs to be like their distant ancestors, was not cast as a mad scientist. It was almost a minus when he actually said "i'm not a mad scientist" but i think, given the fact that he was defending himself from misappropriate blame, that that breach of the 'show, don't tell' rule (of thumb) can be dismissed. He showed enthusiasm for his work, acknowledgement of pleiotropy, and the human trait of doing what you're commissioned to do. He didn't do Evil Science because he was mad - he was commissioned, and insulted, and then fired, and consequently took the only exit made available to him, by the nauseating guy the raptors didn't like.

Number two: The fish are bigger. Yes, yes they are. But they're not always bigger in the films. The real Mosasauruses grew to 18 metres long, and, pardon my Australian, were built like brick shithouses. An Indominus Rex would have been no match for a Mosasaurus in its element - water. Modern orcas do beach themselves to grab prey, and Mosasaurus is thought to have had bad eyesight, making it more likely that it identified prey through surface shadows, such as I-Rex at the side of the pool. I think it would have been more plausible for the positioning to be slightly different than featured in the film, but now i'm knit-picking.

Number three: The Indominus' hybridisation. When i first saw the trailer, with Crocodile Dundee hypnotising the raptors, and the I-Rex made out to be Jurassic Godzilla, i worried for its design. But in-situ, it made a lot more sense. Its basic body genetics were clearly extracted, wholesale, from T-Rex, and so the look was hardly implausible - it wasn't just monstrously huge! I'm sure it's plausible to adjust genes relating to forelimbs, and to give it more raptory behavioural intuition through its neural development. And maybe, wariness and aggressiveness. Species like deer, that have to be fleet of foot (more like raptors) are far more anxious than, say, dodos, because they've evolved to be. There's clearly something genetic (or epigenetic) that can be engineered, in propensity for certain emotions. Both the pleiotropic elements mentioned are real, but i don't know enough about the specifics of genetics to know whether they're viable in practice. Nor though, do i think anyone else does, judging by the general infancy of genetic science. Cuttlefish do use camouflage, and frogs do emit infrared to cool down... but i'm not sure they can do it deliberately, to evade detection on thermal cameras. I think the way to do that is to stand against a hot background, so the camera can't tell the difference. Characters misjudging method, however, is perfectly plausible, as humans are not imperfect thinkers themselves.


Overall, the bio-fi of Jurassic Park has trod new ground, but not really advanced beyond the old movies. It's got more right, but it's also got more wrong, and it hasn't corrected old mistakes. If there's a single point to take away, about the biology in Jurassic World, it's that it's wasted opportunities to progress the Science in its content.

In answer to my two pointy questions: "has it advanced?" and "has it avoided scienceyness?" i'm going to say that it has advanced minorly, and that it has managed to avoid scienceyness. Or at least, it has advanced slightly more than it has disadvanced; and its scienceyness is mostly old, so what's new is mostly genuinely sciencey.

Does that make sense? I hope so. Whether you'll be happy with the content depends entirely on your expectations. I expected a JP I,II,III dino-romp and i saw slightly better than that, so i was happy with it. If you expect JW to have achieved massive advances over the old JPs, then you'll feel sorely disappointed.


That's the Biology and the History done. Now for the Sociology.

But do you really want that? To hear an egalitarian 'analyse' like a feminist? Examining all the BIGOTED tropes in which the girly womyn who's in charge is rescued by the man whom she employs, in a kind-of literal narrative rape. When a far more progressive narrative would have been to have all the grown men infantilised as victims, and a single, solitary 6-year-old girl fight off the I-Rex barefisted, and be worshipped by them as a GIRL AND A GOD the way proper men should. Know your place, and grovel before me!!! Rahhrrrr!!!!!

Nope. I'm not going to do that.

The only thing that really matters, is whether it's real. Is it realistic. Could it really happen that way? Entertainment doesn't have to pander to our optimist/pessimist fantasies to be entertaining, and entertainment never changed anything anyway. If it did, the murder mysteries that people love watching would say we were as murderously psychopathic as the I-Rex in this movie!

So, 'hetero-dontosaurus-normative' or not, how realistic were the tropes written into the characters? Who were they?

1 - The guy everyone wants to be or be with

2 - The guy who goes from zero to hero

3 - The kids that everybody hopes are going to live

4 - The hateable male adult that everybody hopes is going to die

5 - The owner of the shop who plays surprisingly little part

6 - The (level 2) subordinates who do stuff but not enough to care about them

7 - The (level 3) subordinates who are there just to die

8 - The (level 4) subordinates who are just extras

1: They did have a manly man save everyone, but frankly [whimpers] he was pretty good as a character, wasn't he. He wasn't mean. He wasn't a nymphomaniac. He wasn't even bland, goddamnit! He was a cross between Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, and Crocodile Dundee, and as 'fratty' as i've heard Chris Pratt is, the character managed to work. The key to constructing a central character in a survival setting, is to create someone you either want to be, or want to be with. Like James Bond. You care whether they live or die, despite their taste in drinks. Essentially, they have to not be Nicholas Cage :-P

2: The lead lady started low, in terms of likeability, but only so that she could grow infeasibly fast, as a character, as the film progressed... almost into Sigourney Weaver, in fact. But not quite. Character progression shows who's the real lead, receiving all the effort from the writers, and she certainly did that. But she didn't magically transform at any point either, which would have been as risible as the I-Rex learning a whole language spontaneously. She was more plausible, but clearly the secondary lead... after the I-Rex. Obviously.

3: The adolescent squabblers were resurrected... because kids in danger are far more emotionally appealling than adults in danger. I suppose them both being boys was an artefact of casting, but their scenes were in no way implausible, either.

4: The man from The Military was loathable, because he was supposed to be hated. He was the Dennis Nedry of this film. And he also wanted to use the raptors as instruments of war, as if sentient beings could be used like drones. [cough] dolphins [cough] bats [cough] dogs. This is not ridiculous - humans have done it before! It's quite plausible.

5: The owner of the project did die, but that was only because he was a bad pilot. Makes sense, really. Ever the optimist, he lived and died by his desire for happiness. A pseud would say he were an allegory for capitalism. Was he? I don't know - ask the writers.

6: There were some people in a control centre

7: The oh-so-English assistant lady died as well. Because innocent victims make heart string tuggers, and that's the point of entertainment genres like the one this film is in. In real life, innocent people do die.

8: 20000 people running around like lunatics, because there are dinosaurs about.

Queery themes were non-existent; but with so few characters, and even fewer sexualities written in, it wasn't implausible for the subject to not be featured. I mean, only three characters showed any heterosexual inklings! For all we know, all of the velociraptors might have been lesbians. So don't judge. Or they'll eat you. In a bad way :-P

Queeriness would have distracted from the survival theme, too. Minority interest things work best as subsidiary plots, unless the story is targetted at a smaller, minority audience. If you want to sell a blockbuster, you should appeal to as many people as possible. There's only room for two in an on-screen marriage, LOL. Otherwise the dinosaurs get jealous :-D

The romantic narrative that was present, however, was not implausible, as it had been backstoried. And there's a reason corporate 'suits' like sending each other on teambuilding exercises, in real life: going through crazy shit together does indeed catalyse emotional-bond-forming. Whether they stick together, when life's got boring, however, we might never know.

Probably the most cloying 'Bads' on the Sociology front, when i saw it, at the time, was the fact that Isla Nublar's, um... not English?!? It's south west of Costa Rica, and was populated entirely by South American people until InGen cleared them off, but the whole island seems to have gone very anglophone. Bloody tourists! You would have thought Masrani would have been more culturally inclusive, but no. Annoying, but not implausible, as Isla Nublar is a remote island accessible only by air or water.

So sociologically, the film works pretty well, too. As long as you account for how annoyingly trite real life is. Again, Entertainment doesn't have to comply with our optimist/pessimist fantasies. When i see some shitbag in a film, i don't think "i don't like them, make them go away", i think "yep - met people like that". Again, people like seeing psychopaths in TV&Film. It doesn't make them murderous, too. Sometimes, people like seeing things they hate.

There's a reason that this format gets used again and again and again... it works.

Like the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus construct gets used again and again in music. Why? Because it works. It's the specific details that make a song - not its generic structure.


Addenda:

I've heard people complain about the dinosaurs not having feathers. Not on scientific grounds, but because "They look more badass" with feathers, according to the SGUers. But i don't agree. Whether something looks good 'to you' is subjective, so it's really just more snobbery to say that the raptors should be feathered to make them 'look better'.

Personally, when i see feathers, i don't think "yipes, Scoob", i think "aww, look at the wittle fluffy-wuffy birdy-wirdies, aww", because that's what birds are like. I like birds. Birds are nice. Birds are cute. Reptiles are menacing and scaly. Their scales make them look armour-plated... because they kind-of are. That makes dinos look scarier, too.

I can completely understand why they decided to go with no-feathers dinosaurs: reptiles look scarier, and they don't look incongruous to the target market (everyone) which could dissuade some from seeing the film. Unfeathery dinosaurs are entertaining, but they're scientifically problematic.

The SGUers also complained about the characters being one-dimensional.

....um, it's not about the people. It's about the dinosaurs. This is essentially a survival movie - not a grungy arthouse drama.

I expect simplistic people, because they're not the main attractions!

Apart from the, um... plot 'inconsistencies', the film seems to work. But plot integrity's got to be key to the 'sci' element of sci-fi too, surely?

I shan't bore you with all of them, as i haven't even rememberd them all. I'm sure you can manage to find some for yourself.

Suffice to say, there were some rather boring tropes shoved into the film, but because they were all so minor and fleeting, i barely even noticed them in a first viewing. That's a good thing, because otherwise they would have distracted from the central theme.

Oh, and there were huge numbers of corny lines. But again, the high pace of the movie made them easily forgotten, and the experience more enjoyable than it would have been.


Away from the 'science v. shit' element of the film, there's the pure Jurassic Park geekyness of it.

Oh, i squirmed with nostalgia! So many back-references, so many props. Plus Mr DNA's return, and BD Wong's reprisal as the chief geneticist.

And the obscenely huggy, emotional moistness of taking the dinosaur 'baddies' from the first film, and employing them as the 'goodies' who rescue Crocodile Dundee et al from certain doom, in this one.

Never waste a T-Rex when you've got one :-D


My conclusion:


It's a good film. For what it is. But where the hell's the sequel going to go?

Jurassic World was intended as a blockbuster. It was intended as, designed as, and turned out as, a 2 hour 4 minutes dinosaur-athon.

It was not intended to be hugely intellectual. It was not intended to be hipster or arthouse. It was not intended to present dinosaur behaviour patterns like a parody wildlife documentary.

The simple truth is that, for a film to be a blockbuster, it has to be pretty bland. It has to be simple. It has to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the humans of the world. Jurassic Park did that. Jurassic World does that.

I've seen and heard pretentious, snobbish reviews of it, sneering at it for being 'dinosaur porn' (my words) and i've seen a nob-cheese at io9 condemning it for destroying the future of films. You have to LOL, LOL.

Read my words: you get paid money to opine on what other people make, to entertain other other people.

If you want to make some minority-interest super-'high' brow film about a world where racist asexuals run the world, subjugating the rest under a self-imposed dogma of self-loathing for how genetically modified they've made themselves, and milking selected males to provide seed through which the next generation shall grow, as a mirrored allegory for the world you think you live in... then you should expect a tiny audience.

Don't, whatever you do, expect it to be blockbuster, because nobody ain't got time for that. It's simple sociometry.

The more bland something is, the more people it appeals to. I remember being frustrated, in past times, wondering why my favoured musical acts didn't reach #1, or anywhere near. Hell, Red Light Fever was fantastic, and that scraped onto the charts, staying for one week, at #81!

The simple fact of life, is that what seems most amazing to you; what grabs you most strongly; what appeals most to your idiosyncrasies, is going to appeal to the fewest people overall.

Jurassic World 'going huge' at the Box Office is not a failure of the Box Office, to appreciate the things you really like - it's your failure to understand (and accept) that the 'best' stuff will not do well on scales of populism.

Jurassic World is, and will continue to be a popular movie. Which means you'll probably like it too. But it also means it probably won't make it onto either of our 'favourites' lists :-D


Jurassic World: good on roars, not so good on dinosaurs. There's a 90%+ chance you'll enjoy it.



In case you've developed a sudden urge to find out what Hot Leg sounds like, and whether our musical idiosyncrasies match up, here's a YT playlist of their songs,

'Hot Leg - Red Light Fever'

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHTQ7TPFYn2T3BqbhQ9OLJkr-YV4xqmWu

And here's where you can buy it from:

'Red Light Fever - Hot Leg'
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Light-Fever-Hot-Leg/dp/B001PNE0RU



Back in the dino world, here's Ri Aus' videos on the subject of dinosaurs, which they seem to have released at a very opportune time. Clever girls ;-D

'Dinosaurs on the Big Screen'

https://youtu.be/KMxjB-4Uz_0

'How Colourful were Dinosaurs'
https://youtu.be/h_KOxRvERsA

'How did Dinosaurs Behave'
https://youtu.be/Dr0VZbMJP2E

'How did Dinosaurs Sound'
https://youtu.be/Dr0VZbMJP2E


In-and-on-or-around-this-date-or-time-of-year:

Asteroid Day  is on the 30th of June, and as Dave Eicher says in this video, it's very important, because planet Earth does not have total coverage, watching for potentially dangerous asteroids. The earlier they're spotted, the better.
https://youtu.be/j2junQxCUDQ

The 30th of June is also the date on which one second will be added to our calendar, to account for the gradual slow-down in Earth's rotation, due to its surface water. In 1820, a solar day was 86400 seconds long, but now it's more like 86400.002, which means an occasional leap-second has to be added, to catch up with the physics of daytime.
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-nasa-june-extra.html


In other news:

Mermaids off the Queensland coast? Hmm...
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/council-investigating-reported-mermaid.html

It seems Jesus is coming back in food again. But by chance (and the law of buses) pareidolic superstition is not in the news just once, this week. I think we can be pretty sure that a fictional character in Religious mythology didn't attempt to communicate with modern humanoids, by stamping a miniature of its face into a tortilla... but did some people once carve a face into a rock? It's difficult to find, would have been even more difficult to make, and doesn't look like the other pteroglyphs that are already known. I'm saying this is pareidolia too - the narrative of design is purely a self-indulgent superstitious backstory.
http://arbroath.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/jesus-found-on-tortilla.html
http://doubtfulnews.com/2015/06/the-face-on-the-cliff-rediscovered/

And on the subject of hallucinatory misperception, some conspiracy theorists have found Las Vegas on Mars. Well, they haven't, but they think a bright patch on the dwarf planet Ceres must be a city, because Las Vegas looks similar in a grayscale aerial shot. The word 'lunatic' comes to mind (meaning a moon-gazer) because various religious superstitions have bronzed people's misunderstandings of the moon, in arbitrary scripture, due to those people's inability to distinguish light sources from light reflectors. The NASA guys think the patches on Ceres are salt or ice or something else reflective - but the favoured solution of the superstitionists of agency (conspiracy theorists) is that they must be light sources - not light reflectors. Just like the religionists have done, with the Moon.
http://doubtfulnews.com/2015/06/planet-dolia-pyramids-and-poles/

This is not a hallucination, however - it's something very strange and rare - a Crown Flash. From what i've read of it, it seems to be observable only under conditions where cumulus storms are strongly backlit. The collision of cold air and dusty warm air causes static electricity to build up, in the usual way, and possibly also producing lightning and thunder, but it also causes ice particles high in the cumulus clouds to be be thrown around. When ice crystals are thrown above the cloud, and into a position where they can refract light from the Sun, behind, down toward an observer on the ground, a flash of sunlight is seen from their direction. As the ice crystals are whipped around in the winds up there, it arcs and whips around itself, as seen in this video. To see some more, click this link, or follow the link in the article.
http://doubtfulnews.com/2015/06/very-strange-light-show-video-of-crown-flash-is-real-and-really-weird/

Ah, the cost-benefit analyses of life. Tourism can provide certain areas of the world with much-needed funding, to preserve local wildlife, for example. But tourism seems to have cost this snake its life. African rock pythons are usually fine, consuming porcupines, but according to Lake Eland Game Reserve's Jennifer Fuller, being pried-on by tourists made it stressed - a condition under which pythons are stimulated to regurgitate recent meals so it can escape. But porcupines, of course, with their quills, don't come out as easily as they go in.
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-python-dies-giant-porcupine-safrica.html

This is not a python. And it's not the holy grail, neither. West Mercia Police have received a broken, wooden cup, known as the Nanteos Cup, and purported to be The Holy Grail - the cup Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper, and taken to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea after her death. It's obviously not a cup made by/for a fictional person, and dating will probably show it to be medieval (like all the other religious relics) but it is at least some interesting archaeology. Similarly, the Guttenberg Bible is a book of bullshit, but it's a book of old bullshit, and the oldest book of bullshit ever made in Europe. That makes it worth something :-D
http://doubtfulnews.com/2015/06/not-the-holy-grail-recovered/

This is not a jellyfish. It's a sheep. Well, it was a sheep, until it was killed and eaten. A sheep with a genome containing exo-jellyfish DNA, apparently to see if it would grow see-through skin, has been 'lost' in being sent to an abattoir. The National Institute for Agricultural Research has apparently confirmed this, and the case been taken up with a public health court. It is, of course, just a sheep, so there's no reason to think it would be dangerous. It's not like it contained exo-hemlock genes, or anything like that! What makes this story suspect, is: why would anyone sell the sheep in the first place? It almost seems like virulent anti-GM groups in France have manufactured this whole thing to scare people about a benign technology. Hmm...
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-probe-gm-jellyfish-lamb-sold-meat.html

Tumblr seems to think that Bashar of the planet Essassani is a real thing, channelled from the future by a man called Darryl Anka, so that they can lay valid copyright claims on GIF images posted by people on its site, in the past! Don't believe me? Here's what Tumblr says: “Each claim is reviewed by a trained member of our Trust and Safety team”. Tumblr's either ahead of the game with advanced AIs, are lying, or are automatically believing copyright claimants as if they're some kind of SJW feminism hosting site that automatically believes fake victims along with the real ones, no matter how much harm they do.... oh, um, right. Might have an ideologically convenient point, there. Or maybe Tumblr's just shit at dealing with DMCA claims. Nah - SJWs run Tumblr :-P
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150618/14264131389/tumblr-complies-with-dmca-takedown-requests-self-proclaimed-future-alien-another-planet.shtml

And back to dinosaurs. Not quite. Pappochelys was a genus of early lizard (very small: <20cm long) that appears to have been a key ancestor in the lineage stretching up to modern turtles. The plastron (chest plate) of turtles has long been a developmental mystery... as has the shell on its back... but Pappochelys seems to be a developmental stage, in-between Eunotosaurus, of 260 mya, which had no plastron, and Odontochelys of 220 mya which had a fully-formed plastron. Pappochelys lived 240 mya, and is thought to have been a metaphorical stepping stone in the evolutionary bid to develop defence against attacks from below.
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-key-link-turtle-evolution.html

Phew! A solar flare, and a Coronal Mass Ejection hit Earth on the 22nd of June, causing mid-latitude aurorae, and the NOAA to rate the resulting geomagnetic storm as G4, for 'severe'. The harm done could have knocked out artificial satellites and fused electrical networks. Judging by the lack of disaster story press releases, and my ability to write this to you, and for you to read it, we 'got lucky' this time. To see some photos of the aurorae caused, follow the link.
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-earth-directed-cme.html

------------------------------------------------------ contemporary stuff

'Coded Mask - Sixty Symbols'
https://youtu.be/_ezhdhHNku0

'Klein Bottles - Numberphile'
https://youtu.be/AAsICMPwGPY

'Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and me ~ AA#8'
https://youtu.be/aGlItIRhmB4

'How To Detect A Secret Nuclear Test'
https://youtu.be/daZ7IQFqPyA

'ScienceCasts: The Good, the Bad, and the Algae'
https://youtu.be/3Wm3G8s8bxk

'The Curvature of Earth 4K 60FPS'
https://youtu.be/UceRgEyfSsc

'How Sunglasses Work - Are They Damaging Your Eyes?'
https://youtu.be/WVkZ8aj5V7Q

'Not the Confederate Flag'
https://youtu.be/ULBCuHIpNgU

'Malaysia Street Food'
https://youtu.be/OzkC8HRjHw0

'Detoxic | The Checkout'
https://youtu.be/CcWo7r1xoNE

'The Condiment Job | The Checkout'
https://youtu.be/oxNbmRhTM4A

'Signs of the Time Series 3 Episode 12 | The Checkout'
https://youtu.be/Z_JN6Q8EhTw

'Négo (Adrien Ménielle)'
https://youtu.be/Ig5Qn0hi2aQ

'Lights of an aurora from the International Space Station'

http://phys.org/news/2015-06-image-aurora-international-space-station.html

'NASA image: Flying over an aurora'
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-nasa-image-aurora.html

------------------------------------------------------ of the weeks

Word Of The Week: epicaricacy -- the English equivalent of 'schadenfreude'; from greek 'epi' (upon) 'chara' (joy) 'kakos' (pain), whereas 'schadenfreude' means 'harm joy'. Both therefore mean 'pleasure achieved through witnessing pain'.

Expression of The Week: 'Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one gets filled first' -- a statement used about appeals for the impossible/unlikely, meaning the equivalent of 'don't waste your time/effort'.

Quote Of The Week: “I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.” - Richard P. Feynman

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'The Simpsons (554 episodes at the same time)'

https://youtu.be/NEoPJBhdVOE

This is wonderful. But who the hell thinks of making all of these videos, and actually does it? :-D

This guy:

'Omni Verse'
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC26tkgJVv7cE5USCQYjrgfw/videos


'This sign has been bugging me all day. I have no idea what it means'
Whitesnake performing a song about chivalry?!?
https://twitter.com/RichardWiseman/status/605444532122095616
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1 comment:

  1. Update: I changed "Indiana Jones" to "Crocodile Dundee" when i remembered i'd somehow picked the wrong fedora every time. It's funny how that happens, isn't it :-D

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