Dodos of your own

You may recall that I reviewed Flock of Dodos last week—it’s good, you should all see it if you can. The movie now has a distributor, so maybe you can. Unfortunately, this isn’t a release for private use yet, so what you need to do is get an institution to fork over $345. Yeah, that’s steep, but it includes public performance rights. Maybe you could convince your local university to get it for a Darwin Day showing…? Recoup the cost by selling tickets?

The Morris Café Scientifique lurches to life again!

Once again this year, I’m setting up our Café Scientifique-Morris, which is going to be held on the last Tuesday of each month of the university school year. This time around, that means the first one falls on…Halloween! So we’re going to do something fun for that one: maybe some costumes, lots of clips from classic horror movies, I definitely think we’re going to need some bubbling retorts of colored fluids, and the chemistry department is tentatively going to provide some treats (ice cream made with liquid nitrogen—chemistry and treats don’t usually go together in people’s heads, I know.) This is the announcement for the first talk:

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I’ve been ripping a few DVDs from my collection with classic portrayals of scientists—the Universal Frankenstein series, Re-animator, the Bond movies, etc. (any suggestions? Pass ’em on)—which show us off as evil villains, and I’m going to show short clips from them to illustrate our poor image. Then I’m going to follow up with more but less exciting clips of people like Sagan and Wilson and Dawkins and, if I can track it down, Bronowski to illustrate the real humanism of good scientists. Suggestions for the latter part are also welcome, and that will be the heart of the talk, but face it: I don’t want to overdo the moralizing, and all the fun is going to be in the monster-makers.

I’ve also finalized our schedule. I’ve opened it up to a few people on the other side of campus, so we’re also going to hear about the legal standards for the admission of scientific evidence, and the economics of alternative power generation and transmission, in addition to a discussion of the chemistry we all use in our homes, a bit of astronomy, and a session of insect identification.

  • 31 October 2006 :: PZ Myers, Biology
  • 28 November 2006 :: Theodora Economou, Law
  • 30 January 2007 :: Panel discussion, Chemistry
  • 27 February 2007 :: Arne Kildegaard, Economics
  • 27 March 2007 :: Kristin Kearns, Physics
  • 24 April 2007 :: Tracey Anderson, Biology

It’s looking like a good year for this seminar series. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop on by!

DeLong explains Easterbrook

How can Gregg Easterbrook be publishing a science column in Slate? Brad DeLong explains it all.

The fact that Easterbook’s writing is “lively” and “provocative” and that he is a member of the appropriate social networks is sufficient reason to publish him as a “science writer.”

I can see where “lively” and “provocative” are necessary pre-conditions for getting a column in a popular magazine, but are they sufficient? No. Would they hire someone for a gossip column who had never heard of Scarlet Johansson or Brad Pitt? There is this phenomenon called “expertise” that ought to be part of the equation.

That being in the right clique is part of the prerequisite is unfortunate, but is a common part of human reality. The interesting thing, though, is that picking Easterbrook tells us something about the social circles in which Slate management seems to circulate—and that is that they are disjunct from the social circles that include competent scientists and science writers.

The fact that this has an effect not just on how good their operations are at delivering accurate information but also on how the scientifically-literate regard their operations as a whole–I don’t think that’s something that enters Weisberg’s (or Foer’s) mind at all.

Exactly. Although it could be that that’s a smart (in a short-sighted, counter-intuitive way) decision: the scientifically literate are clearly a minority in this country, so maybe one way to market ‘science’ to that profitable majority of boobs is to hire a boob to write it. That is, if you think your job is not to tell people what they ought to know, but rather to repeat to them what they think they already know.

House jumps the shark

True confession: I try to watch the medical drama House when I can. It’s lead character is an acerbic and brilliant atheist M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie, a comedic actor—which was a smart casting decision), and the humor is snarky and dark. That’s just the kind of thing I enjoy. It’s been going downhill, I think, because the episodes have gotten far too predictable—there’s always a weird illness which is handled via increasingly wild semi-random diagnoses that always, and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient. The infallibility is wearing a little thin.

Last season’s finale almost made me give up. They turned the gross-out factor up to 11 (exploding testicles and eyeballs popping out), and resolved everything with the lamest, laziest television cliche: it was just a dream. I hoped it was just an aberration.

Last night’s episode, though, blew it. I have lost faith in House. <spoilers below>

[Read more…]

Nerd music

The Scienceblogs Nerd–off contest should have this for a new theme song: Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy”.

First in my class here at MIT
Drop skills, I’m a champion at D&D
M.C. Escher, that’s my favorite MC
Keep your 40, I’ll just have an Earl Grey tea
My rims never spin, to the contrary
You’ll find that they’re quite stationary
All of my action figures are cherry
Stephen Hawking’s in my library
My MySpace page is all totally pimped out
Got people bangin’ for my top eight spaces
Yo, I know pi to a thousand places
Ain’t got grills but I still wear braces
I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise
I’m a whiz at Minesweeper, I could play for days
Once you see my sweet moves you’re gonna stay amazed
My fingers movin’ so fast they’ll set the place ablaze
There’s no killer app I haven’t run
At Pasqual, well, I’m number one
Do vector calculus just for fun
I ain’t got a gat but I got a soldering gun
“Happy Days” is my favorite theme song
I could sure kick your butt in a game of ping-pong
I’ll ace any trivia quiz you bring on
I’m fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon

(Here are the complete lyrics—it’ll make you weep, dawg.)

Getting ready for Halloween (already?)

Since I saw this meme at Dr Crazy’s place, I thought I’d toss it up here for the commenters to make suggestions.

” If I were designing a Pharyngula Halloween costume, it would consist of…”

It’s actually relevant. I just put out a call at my university for volunteers for Cafe Scientifique, which we will be holding on the last Tuesday of each month…and the October calendar puts that on Halloween. I’m going to be trying to organize a panel session on “Mad Scientists and Monsters” as the topic that day, and ask the panelists to show up in costume. So let’s see what suggestions you might come up with!

Wait—I’m in the same building with a bunch of chemists

I’m having second thoughts about the virtues of proximity to my colleagues of that other discipline after watching this video of people plunking alkali metals into water. Cesium looks…interesting.

Fortunately, my chemistry pals aren’t British, or I might have trouble understanding their comments. What the heck does “the dog’s nuts of the periodic table” mean, anyway?

Needs more arrows

But I like it anyway. It’s a series of charts illustrating channels of communication of science.

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I appreciate the distinction made between “Average Citizen” and “Informed Citizen.” Maybe there ought to be another box interposed between “Mainstream Media” and “The Average Citizen” labeled “Fox News/Talk Radio/Other Organs of Propaganda,” though. And shouldn’t there be another arrow from “Mainstream Media” to “Informed Citizen”?