A curious bit of frivolity

There’s this game called Minecraft (oh, have you heard of it?) which is a kind of world-builder game — you gather resources like wood and ore and meat, and you craft stuff out of it. I’ve learned something odd about it.

You gather wool from sheep. You can make colored wool with dyes.

Nice revelation: you can dye whole sheep and harvest colored wool from them. That was unexpected: it grows back in the color you dyed it. That’s not physiological!

And then…if you dye a sheep and then breed it to produce more sheep, the color breeds true. Dye two sheep lime green, and you can generate a whole flock of lime green sheep.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or delighted. It opens the door to exploring rules of Lamarckian inheritance, except there doesn’t seem to be any room for any kind of selection or predation or variation in anything that affects survival or reproduction. Someone tell the game makers to get a biologist as a consultant, there are possibilities here!

(I hear I can breed wolves, too, but I haven’t tried it. Do they vary in any interesting ways? Can I select for sheep-eating wolves?)

The Dark Knight Rises

I saw this new Batman movie last night, and it was fairly good: complex and twisty and dark, mostly, the way I like ’em. It was far from perfect though, so I’ll send you off to this review that lays out the very same problems I had with the movie. No spoilers, it’s safe!

It doesn’t mention one big problem I had with the ending, though, and this one is a bit of a spoiler, so I’m putting it in rot13: Ongzna cbvfbaf bprnaf naq ungrf svfu! I just cringed at the solution to one terrible problem, which treated another serious issue cavalierly.

Also, the ending sets up the possibility of sequels, which is getting mildly annoying. Maybe these stories have roots in pulp serials, but I’d kind of like to see a story with a real ending someday.

Portland, Oregon is having a humanist film festival!

I wish I could be there. The Humanist Film Festival is happening on 26-28 October, and they’re looking for submissions. If you’ve got anything that fits their categories, send them in soon. They’re looking for films that speak to humanist themes, including:

  • Reason, Critical Thinking and Skepticism (such as claims of the paranormal, critical thinking education, rational living, etc.)

  • Ethics and Human Wellbeing (including human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, rational ethics, challenging scriptural ethics, sex education and attitudes about sex, etc.)

  • Science and the Natural World (e.g. science appreciation, science education, evolution, global warming, pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine etc.)

  • Freedom of Thought, Speech and Critical Inquiry

  • Challenging the Claims and Value of Religion (e.g. anti-apologetics, education about atheism and atheists, uncovering problems with religion, etc.)

  • Separation of Church and State

  • Joie de vivre and human thriving (art and aesthetics, living the good life, human progress etc.)

And here’s their mission:

The Portland Humanist Film Festival is an outreach event designed to broaden the understanding and acceptance of a secular, humanist world view. It specifically addresses audiences who are friendly to our views but who are not necessarily familiar with atheism or humanistic ethics, or why we value reason and scientific thinking. The Film Festival presents these themes through an accessible, entertaining medium.

Got any suggestions? If you’re a godless filmmaker, think about sending them something!

The wages of pseudoscience

I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.

It’s genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?

Here’s the answer:

ANIMAL PLANET SLAYS WITH BEST-EVER MAY IN NETWORK HISTORY

— Monster Week’s MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND Made Mighty Splash with More Than 3.4 Million Viewers —

(May 30, 2012, Silver Spring, Md.) – Animal Planet devoured the month with its best May ever, earning its strongest performances in both prime and total delivery among all key demos, including prime deliveries of 681K P2+ (+7%), 508K HH (+7%), 330K P25-54 (+21%), 301K P18-49 (+12%) and 193K M25-54 (+30%), and total day deliveries of 456K P2+ (+13%), 355K HH (+10%), 215K P25-54 (+26%), 203K P18-49 (+13%) and 120K M25-54 (+32%).

Animal Planet’s May victory was propelled its first-ever Monster Week (the week of May 21), featuring MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND, which made a huge splash at the “tail” end of the week. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND delivered nearly 2 million viewers (1.96M P2+) for its premiere, making it the most-watched telecast since the Steve Irwin memorial special in September 2006. The two-hour premiere scored a 1.3 HH rating and helped rank Animal Planet #2 in the timeslot, including 960K P25-54 (0.9), 482K M25-54 (1.0) and 477K W25-54 (0.9). The subsequent late-night airing of MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND earned the title of Animal Planet’s most-watched late-night telecast ever, delivering nearly 1.5M viewers (1.46M P2+), bringing the combined viewership to more than 3.4 million viewers. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND encores Thursday, May 31, from 8-10 PM ET/PT.

Brace yourselves. More of this will be coming…unless more of us protest by turning off the Animal Planet channel altogether. They’ve just been rewarded for epic dishonesty with peak traffic; what lesson do you think they’ll learn from this?

It’s almost always Muscle Man and Buxom Chick, isn’t it?

Here’s a kickstarter project to look at sexism in video games.

This is a project by a woman, Anita Sarkeesian, who likes video games and wants to see them improve, but as she says, “many games tend to reinforce sexist and downright misogynist ideas about women.”

Some of you will say that is an outrageous claim! Cite evidence! No, it can’t be true!

OK, evidence: she’s made a screen cap of youtube comments on her video. CASE CLOSED. It’s not just raging misogyny, it’s also screaming racism and stark raving idiocy.

I think we all better contribute to her kickstarter. The problem is worse than she made it out to be, and I think she needs a few million dollars. (Oh, and her blog is very good, you ought to read it.)

(via Lousy Canuck)

P.S. The definitive reply to asshole commenters has been created.

I don’t even know what this movie is about anymore, but I still want to see it

They keep teasing me with these little trailers that are all completely different in tone from one to the other…and you can’t even tell that they’re from the same movie.

So far, what I’m seeing is something about aliens, space travel, scientific hubris, the nature of self, fear and danger, some tenuous connection to the Aliens franchise, and stupid alien astronauts crapola. Whoever came up with their viral marketing campaign really knows how to tantalize.

The Pirates! With Charles Darwin!

In the UK, they released an exciting new movie a while back, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists. I have the book. It’s marvelous: it prominently features pirates, beards, scientists, and Charles Darwin, and is exactly the kind of story I like.

The good news! It’s just been released in the US. The peculiar news: it’s gotten a name change, to The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and they’re not mentioning Charles Darwin in the trailers. If you’ve read the book, though, you know that Darwin is rather central to the whole story.

Apparently, “science” and “Darwin” are box office penalties in the US. I’m going anyway, as soon as I can, because the content is presumably unchanged and I like science, beards, Darwin, pirates, and the funny, even if the marketing idiots are frightened.

“IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!”

There isn’t that much difference between a trained archaeologist and a professional wrestler, is there? Look at the new depradations encouraged by reality TV:

There’s nothing more exciting than digging for treasure, and that’s just what SPIKE TV’s new unscripted original series, American Digger is going to do when it premiers on March 20 at 10/9c. Former professional wrestler Ric Savage and the American Savage team have the tools, knowhow, and instincts, and are ready to show everyone what could just be hidden beneath your backyard if you give them the chance.

American Digger will showcase Ric Savage and his crew trekking across the country each week, from Chicago, IL to Jamestown, VA and everywhere in between. Once the team identifies an area they think is ripe with high-value artifacts and relics, they’ll have to convince the current homeowner to give them permission to dig up their backyard. If American Savage is persuasive enough, they’ll get a chance to dig up the tenant’s backyard using their state-of-the-art equipment, and divide the cash they get from selling the artifacts they find there with the tenant.

Savage and his crew definitely have an eye for artifact-rich areas, and will seek out historic sites as a result. These areas are home to great finds, as the team uncovers old relics in the show such as a 5 million year old Megalodon shark’s tooth. American Savage is the top artifact recovery company in the United States and is made up of Ric Savage’s wife Rita, who manages the business, battlefield historian Bob Buttafuso, recovery expert Rue Shumate, and Giuseppe, his 25-year old son.

Shark’s teeth aren’t a big deal, but having a team of hacks charge into a historical site to dig up and sell everything they find sounds like a horror story.

The Grammy Awards will be televised tonight

Do not watch them. Do something else. The Walking Dead season premieres tonight, and that stuff is going to be showing all day. You could read a good book. You could put on some good music and dance in your living room.

However, the Grammy Award organizers are apologizers for abuse. In fact, it sounds like the whole entertainment industry will look the other way when a thug like Chris Brown will batter a woman.

So I’m sure you could find something better to do.