Turning science into a party

Lucky Cambridge: a whole bunch of organizations, including Harvard, MIT, and the Cambridge public schools and libraries are collaborating to put on the Cambridge Science Festival—9 days of science activities around the town. That is exactly the kind of broadly supported activity in the service of science education that can make a difference in public perception. It’s an excellent idea…now if only more communities had that kind of concentration of scientific organizations to make that kind of sustained activity possible.

(via Science Made Cool)

300

The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I’d heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The arguments are all wrong. I could tell exactly what this movie’s hidden meaning was: it’s a retelling of the creation-evolution struggle! “But of course!” you’re all saying to yourselves, “It’s so obvious, now that you mention it!”

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The Mutant Variety Show

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It’s Thursday, 5 April, and you know what that means: today is the day of the Mutant Variety Show here in Morris! At 7:00 this evening, in the HFA recital hall, all of the local mutants will be exhibiting their bizarre phenotypes to the public. I’m very much looking forward to it, and anyone else in the region should swing on by.

Note: I am expecting mutants. I insist on mutants. If there are insufficient mutants to satisfy me* … well, I have an Illudium Q32 Explosive Space Modulator, and I’m not afraid to use it.

*Or at least a theremin.**

**I might settle for a kazoo. But that’s rock-bottom. No more compromises.

What do the godless do on Easter?

Well, Skatje’s going to Minicon next weekend—sending her off to hang out with intelligent nerds and geeks and people like Charles deLint and Lois McMaster Bujold and the Nielsen Haydens and Jane Yolen is probably the most responsible thing a parent can do. If any of my readers are also going, make sure she doesn’t just go hide in her room and knit or chat on the computer. She needs to get out and socialize! Make friends! Watch Dr Who! Something!

Unfortunately, although I’ll be providing the shuttle service to get her to and from the con, I’m going to be swamped with work for the next few weeks and just can’t afford to take the weekend off. I’ll probably get a day pass and hang out on Friday evening for a while, though, before Skatje shoos me away. Next year, though, I’m going to plan my calendar a little better and see the whole thing.

So my daughter gets to go to Minicon and she probably won’t even get me a lousy t-shirt.

Planet Earth

This evening, I caught most of some episodes of this series the Discovery Channel is airing, Planet Earth, which was advertised here for a while. It wasn’t bad. It had some spectacular photography, did a great job of displaying a wide range of environments, and showed off some of the amazing abilities of animals very well. There were a few things that irritated me, though (I admit it, I criticize everything).

The biggest problem? It’s a show for people with short attention spans. We got brief vignettes of a few minutes—you’d just be getting into the pumas and alpacas in Patagonia, and zip, we’re off to grizzly bears in the Rockies. It was popcorn biology, crunch crunch crunch, you’ve snarfed down a whole bag a few kernels at a time.

That quick glimpse of each biome also meant the focus was entirely on the biggest, most distinctive organisms in the environment, the ol’ charismatic megafauna problem of nature documentaries. For instance, several of the scenes featured whale sharks or dolphins or sailfish chowing down on these great schools of generically named “bait fish”…but hey, wait a minute, aren’t these “bait fish” a rather critical component of the ecosystem? Why not tell us more about them? Treating them as convenient clouds of meat for bigger predators didn’t seem to do them justice.

Still, it was worth watching, and maybe younger kids would have an easier time getting into it. After a few hours exposure, I was feeling a bit whipsawed by the too frequent changes in subject.

Arrrmageddon!

In a good pirate movie, you need flamboyant excess, so I guess it’s not surprising that the final installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is going to have every pirate in the world in a final climactic battle.

It’s going to give every pirate fan an arrrrgasm, I think.

Reviews of bad movies can be more fun than the movies themselves

Gary Farber has been collecting reviews of 300, the new movie about the Spartans at Thermopylae, and they certainly are amusing — I haven’t seen the movie, but I suspect my opinion of it will be close to Howard Waldrop’s and Lawrence Person’s. I saw the trailer, and while the cartoonish style is to be expected given the source, the lack of historicity and indulgence in fantasy grates terribly. At least the kitsch is generating interesting reactions.

Comedy and Science in Melbourne

Australian comedy may be a risky business — didn’t they give us both Yahoo Serious and Barry Humphries?1 — but in case you want to chance it, I’ve been informed by Ben McKenzie, The Man in the Lab Coat, that he’ll be doing a comedy lecture show about science this April.

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Here’s a cool thing: he has offered me comp tickets for the opening week. Since nobody is standing up to offer me comp flight tickets to Australia, or comp teaching stand-in to cover my classes while I’m away, he has said I can pass them on to any interested readers who might be willing to travel to Melbourne (surely there can’t be any readers who actually live anywhere near Melbourne, can there?). I’ll give them away2 to anyone willing to take them who will also send me a summary of the event — just sing out in the comments.

If you want to know more first, here’s the description and listing for the show.

1I know, an American has no right to mock, since we gave the world both Carrot-Top and Pauly Shore.

2The first Pharyngula Give-Away with Prizes! I should have invented a better contest.