We were supposed to have a new edition of the Tangled Bank this week, at the Blue Collar Scientist — but has more serious real-life issues with which to contend, so unsurprisingly it has not made it up yet, and I haven’t heard back from my email query. If I don’t hear anything by this afternoon, I’ll put something together myself — no blame to the BCS, of course, and please do give him your support.
Most of you haven’t seen Sizzle, but there is one global warming denier in the movie who is a wonderfully strange character, Dr Chilingar. He is interestingly idiosyncratic, but the movie didn’t really pursue his views very far…but Tim Lambert has. Chilingar is guilty of comparing CO2 over billions of years to human CO2 over centuries and using formulas that assume greenhouse effects don’t change to argue that greenhouse gases will have no effect.
<hack> <hack> Excuse me, I had a little cough.
How sad. I no longer have the lead headline at Spirit Daily: I’ve been bumped by WORRIES ON POTTER BEAR OUT IN AN EXPLOSION OF TEEN WITCHCRAFT. How fickle these Catholics are, and how easily they are frightened by imaginary concerns.
(By the way, Spirit Daily is one of the best places to go if you want to see spiritual wackaloonery — they glean the web for the craziest stuff.)
Regular commenter Patricia sent me a present — isn’t this pretty?
The octopus pendant is also very nice. You can get your own at the Emerson Glass Art Studio, if you’re envious.
Thanks, Patricia! I will get it away from my cervical model someday, I’m sure.
P.S. All you happy Minnesotans should be pleased to hear that Roy will be in Minneapolis on 1-4 September. I’ll be sure to put up details as they become available.
On his last visit to the US, Richard Dawkins was having little conversations with various people — people like Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, and David Buss — and recording them. Now you can get them on DVD. It’s a clever and understated idea; instead of having these guys lecture at a crowd, capture them in some quiet one-on-one conversation.
Yeah, I’m in there, too. Unfortunately, I just can’t watch myself. The others are very good, though!
This is just to handle the overflow from this closed thread.
You crackerbaters are insane.
You know nothing is sacred around here. Well, I saw The Dark Knight last night and … didn’t care for it. It was OK as an action movie, but the story was a mess. The plot wandered all over, and the movie seemed less interested in telling a story well than in throwing up moral ambiguity and ethical dilemmas which, instead of actually pursuing with any depth, it would resolve with a punch from Batman’s fist or an explosion. As a plot mover, the Joker was less an agent of chaos and more like the TA for a freshman philosophy course, leading everyone through twisty little exercises in artificial circumstances that present the poor student with difficult choices. The answers in the movie were about the level of superficiality I’d expect from naive freshmen: he’s not a hero, he’s more than a hero, he’s a guardian, or something. Unbelievably, the dialog actually spelled out such empty nonsense.
Although, it might make such courses much more interesting if, instead of writing papers, the students had to make their arguments in fistfights and pyrotechnics.
On the good side, though, the portrayal of the Joker by Heath Ledger has to be one of the best movie villains ever. That guy was scary — you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley, and Ledger made you believe that you just might find someone like him in a dark alley somewhere. He set the screen on fire, and made the guy in the batman suit recede into irrelevance. If only he’d been given a screenplay that was less stagey pinball machine, and more focused.
