You all remember that a program on the giant squid is on the Discovery Channel tonight, right? I’m tuned in right now.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You all remember that a program on the giant squid is on the Discovery Channel tonight, right? I’m tuned in right now.
Right, so how was it? Is it anything new, or just old recycled footage that isnt too interesting. Wanting to know if I should catch the re-run of it @ 11pm.
It’s not bad. It is just the Kubodera work I wrote about before, so it’s nothing new…but it does have some very nice movies of sperm whales and squid.
Ahh, so its just recycled footage then. Sounds like they took the aforementioned video of the giant squid playing ‘hooky’, and some of their old CGI animations (from an older presentation) of a sperm whale and giant squid duking it out.
PharmPreSchooler is jumping around yelling, “giant calamari, giant calamari!” We changed the channel and she begged to put it back on – perhaps you have found a future graduate student?
Up here in the not-currently-frozen north, our version of the Discovery Channel is showing American Chopper until early in the morning. It seems to aim a lot of its ‘science’ programming at some exec’s 14-year-old son. After all, that real science is boring, right? I don’t watch it much any more.
I thought it was great. I had seen a few of the pictures before, but nothing else, so I was paying pretty rapt attention.
Why does everyone keep saying there is a video? I have heard nothing of a video, and I think such a video would have been know way before this show was to ever hit the air…
If there is a video, someone show it to me…
I’ll second the notion that the Canadian Discovery Channel may as well be called the “Motorcycles! Trucks! HotRods! Tits! Channel!”. Oh, sometimes at night they play “Experts say ghosts are real, so that makes it science” shows.
Bleh. Since Nova went all “science of war” on us there is very little real science TV any more (at least in _my_ locale). I read SciAm and try to pretend the pictures are moving.
I haven’t watched it in a long time, but then last night not only did they have the show on the squid, but afterwards there was one called the Triassic Giant, about the excavation of an ichthyosaur fossil in British Columbia. It was actually quite good, and there were no motorcycles or ghosts involved.
I quite liked it. I probably didn’t learn much beyond that the closed captioners are unwilling to take a shot at Japanese names, but it was pretty good anyway.
After Triassic Giant, which is a few years old, they had another called Jurassic Shark, also a few years old. Also pretty good, b maybe not as good as Prehistoric Shark, which features Ray Troll, whom I love in any context.
The squid program did spend a while rehashing their 2003 special “Chasing Giants” with the larval giant squid, but I liked that one, too.
I admit my tastes in science documentaries are unsophisticated at best, but there is a lot of decent stuff out there, and it sure beats the rest of what’s on TV. And since I usually watch while doing a million other things, it’s not that big a deal if it’s not totally absorbing.
I have to say I don’t get the disdain for documentaries. Even if viewers only learn one thing, it’s still leaps and bounds over American Idol. I grant you all the science channels spend a lot of time on stuff like Is Bigfoot Real and Let’s Talk About UFOs, but there’s a lot of decent stuff on at other times.
And Nova this week is about a couple of guys testing pyramid-building theories. I can’t actually recall any recent Science of War stuff, but maybe I just ignored those episodes. A lot of astrophysicist stuff lately.
And of course anything with David Attenborough is worth a watch and a re-watch.
I don’t think they program for scientists, really. Mostly just for people with, as they say, “some college”, and some free time. I don’t see the problem with that.