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Went to see The Martian yesterday. Man, that is quite a film. Incredibly beautiful, and a really, really well-written script. Matt Damon was fantastic, as usual. Just an all-around excellent film.

But...

( There were a couple things that bothered me... )


So yeah, wonderful movie. Too bad it got tripped up for me by such silly, obvious points. I still enjoyed it, though, and would recommend it to anyone. Just don't think that because it gets so much right, that it gets everything right. It is Hollywood, after all. ;)


P.S. Phil Plait, who writes science articles for Slate, has a great little post on the movie here, where you can see a funny little deleted scene, as well. Enjoy!

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Really interesting little article on a phenomenon nobody was aware of until this month's release of a new study: that young people today, eating the same amount of calories and doing the same amount of exercise as their peers in the 80's, are STILL ten percent heavier than their earlier counterparts.


Why it was easier to be skinny in the 1980's


Personally, I have to say that I've been puzzled for years as to how I could be thinner than some people who eat less and exercise more than I do. I've always chalked it up to a low set-point; mine is around 150 lbs., so I very rarely go above that, no matter what I do. (I spent four months almost not moving at all when my shoulder went bad, but gained only about 12 lbs, which came off when I was able to walk and move around freely again.) But it seems there may be more to it than just lucky genes.

This seems to me important knowledge, so if you find it worthwhile, please feel free to pimp the article. Like it says at the end, if more people understood this finding, perhaps there'd be less nastiness aimed at those with larger body types.

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The spacecraft was a long way from home. I thought it might be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would just be a point of light, a lonely pixel, hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far-off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos. But no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last, for decades to come.



So here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets, and a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world. But it's just an accident of geometry and optics.

There is no sign of humans in this picture. Not our reworking of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization. Every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every supreme leader, every superstar, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of another corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph they can become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in a great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experiment. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceit than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known:

The pale blue dot.

Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan

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Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, "Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it's funny or not?" Gödel replies, "We can't know that because we're inside the joke." Chomsky says, "Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong."

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Erwin Schrödinger walks into his vet's office and asks the doctor, "How's my cat?"

The vet replies "Your cat is dead."

Schrödinger replies, "Sorry I asked."

A policeman pulls over Werner Heisenberg, who was speeding on the new Autobahns. "Do you know how fast you were going? I clocked you at 110 miles per hour!" To which Heisenberg replies, "Damn you, officer! Now I have no idea where I am!"

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Is anyone as troubled by this as I am?


How to Hatch a Dinosaur

Paleontologist Jack Horner reveals his childhood dream - owning a pet dinosaur - and his efforts to make that dream a reality. He says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. “But it’s also possible.”


I've written about my fondness for the film Jurassic Park, so I'm sure you know where my doubts are headed. Horner worked as a consultant with Crichton when he wrote the novel, and later on the production of the movie. And yet it seems he never internalized the main point of the story: that there are things that just plain shouldn't be done, no matter how much we may wish to or how easy we make them. As the wonderful character Ian Malcolm said, "The lack of humility in the face of nature that's being displayed here staggers me."

I wrote a comment talking about my thoughts, not just about the basic premise but also about the animals themselves, which no one seems to be thinking about. (Hardly any surprise there; living creatures treated as tinker toys are par for the course in a great many scientific endeavors.)

So the book and movie's idea of dinosaur cloning turns out not to be possible. And yet, despite Horner's work as a consultant on JP, the central message of the story is completely lost on him. To wit: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Let's say Horner's (Hammond's) dream does come true, and we can create dinosaurs out of the birds we have now. What then? What are we going to do with these animals? Sure, a cute little chickensaurus might be fun (if it doesn't turn out to be really dangerous), but who really thinks it would stop there? The technique may be the same, but we could conceivably end up with the JP scenario: a whole set of revived animals that simply cannot co-exist peacefully with the world we live in now.

Plus, there's another issue to think about (which Crichton also tackled in his second JP book) - what about all those animals that will be brought into painful, deformed, horrifying life during the process of reaching Horner's (Hammond's) "dream"? This isn't going to work the first they try it, or the second or the third or the hundredth or the thousandth. It's going to take an enormous number of tries to reach the weird little critter he's dreaming about. It's bad enough we torture the animals we already have. Are we really going to create an entire population of barely living, horribly suffering critters just so some foolish, selfish people want a pet that nature aced out of the picture millions of years ago?

It's funny that the character that supposedly represents Horner in the film - the paleontologist - turns out to be far wiser than the guy in real life, who turns out to have far more in common with the feckless Hammond. Another quote that always struck me from JP: "I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!" Horner may not be thinking of fortunes to be made, but it's absolutely inevitable that somebody will; the lack of responsibility entailed in opening this can of worms is rather staggering.

It's a cute notion - in a science fiction story. In real life, the whole thing is horrifying, and a perfect illustration of the kind of callousness that can be found sometimes in the scientific community. I shall close with a third quote from Ian Malcolm: "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me."

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Richard Dawkins reads his hate mail aloud


Hilarious.