Of course, you can already read some fantastic reviews by Rebecca of Skepchick, Ian O’Neill over at Discovery, and at Christian’s The Man Version. To chime in with those: the CGI was pretty effing cool, the movie was LONG and the characters uninteresting, women were reduced to useless whiners, and the bad science was barely justified.  Here’s what sticks out in my head all these weeks later (needless to say, with spoilers):

Super-neutrinos. WHAAA? A solar flare (which has to do with the sun’s surface) is caused by a planetary alignment (must be a new property of gravity) sends off a wave of neutrinos (which come from the sun’s interior) but they aren’t BORING neutrinos that barely interact with matter but SUPER ones that pass unimpeded through the actors but heat up the Earth’s core or mantle or whatever layer was mentioned depending on who was talking.  It would be bad enough to base the movie on the silly pseudo-science surrounding the 2012 nonsense as it is, but they had to make up their own silly pseudo-science to make the plot attempt to stick.  At the very least, it gave those in our row a big laugh.

CGI everything. Okay, watching Yellowstone explode was cool.  But some visceral part of me wants for something to be actually destroyed.  A model, a car, something.  This hit me in one of the very first disaster scenes as the main characters are driving through a series of white picket fences. I noticed that the fence shards were CG.  C’mon, can’t you bust up just ONE fence for me and my $9?!

Roland Emmerich thinks we’re morons.  I guess we are for coming along to see this movie, but nevertheless… the cheesy jokes and over the top symbolism that is cliche for any bad movie simply saturated this flick.  The wholesale destruction of various religious monuments gave a “God says eff you” feel to the flick, but he had to rub it in when the wave of destruction hit the Sistine Chapel and a crack running along the ceiling went OUT OF ITS WAY to split exactly between the fingers of God and Adam.  WOW.  Thanks for being so SUBTLE.

THAT’S what you call a happy ending? All of humanity is pretty much dead with almost a hour left to go in the film which centers around these arks that are to carry a minuscule percentage of the Earth’s population (mostly politicians and rich people) and their art to safety.  I wanted spaceships, I got arks. You just DESTROYED THE PLANET and you want me to care that John Cusack is stuck in a water-filled compartment? Check, please.  But at the end they had these few survivors prancing out of the ark onto new land and we’re supposed to be happy about this? I was totally expecting a rainbow and a dove like in all those cartoon versions of Noah’s Ark that I had to watch as a kid.

For all the complaining, it was worth it for the funny and to say I survived it, but I’d recommend only watching it if you have fast-forward as an option.

And if you are really worried about 2012, check out this cool visualization by Information is Beautiful. I have a small beef with the skeptics side which agrees that precession has a beginning or end point or a length of time for termination… I don’t think there is a particular end point, nor does precession changing by half a degree mean anything significant. Minor point, and if someone knows why they said that, I’d like to be corrected!

Then again, maybe we are in trouble…

Click for the rest…

Ok, so I am not typically the type to write a blog posting, actually I’m not the type to really read or write at all, but it’s always good to attempt something new.  Anyway, Nicole & I were watching this show on SciFi…SyFy…PsyPhi…whatever it’s calling itself now, about 2012.  This dude came on…now right away I knew he was someone I should trust.  I mean his hair, bolo tie and hat, it resembled a Sombrero-Cowboy Hat hybrid, were good indicators that this guy was worthy of my attention.  His name was Richard Hoagland.  Apparently he’s a genius (at least in his own opinion).  He was telling me about this thing called Torsion Field Physics.  Now, I’ve never heard of this before but I’m no scientist so that wouldn’t be surprising.  However, I learned that the Mayans were experts in Torsion Field Physics…Calendars and Torsion Field Physics…and sacrificing things to appease the Gods.  Well, I learned from Hoagland that the Mayans were experts in Torsion Field Physics and he knows Torsion Field Physics and they appeared to be the only ones who know anything about it…so either he’s right or he’s just making this stuff up.  I think I’ll trust him though because he had some awesome scientific type equipment.  Sure, it may only look like some little box with a broken watch on top and a USB cable running to his laptop…but he swears it’s scientific.  It’s called an Accutron after all…need I say more?  Now I’m not sure if Accutron is an Autobot or a Decepticon, so I am a little wary still, but if it can find Energon Cubes, then Torsion Field Physics should be easy…fictional things should be able to deal with other fictional things, right?

Bolo, yo.

Seriously though, or as serious as I am capable of being.  Why don’t Hoagland’s family and friends love him enough to just get him committed somewhere?  I know I am not a full blown skeptic and I don’t really care to research or look into things, but even I think this guy is a crackpot.  Martians left Mars because it was doomed and they came to Earth to hang out with the Egyptians & Mayans to teach them about Torsion Field Physics and warn them about impending disaster.  Then the Martians went and hung out in Atlantis.  Really?   That sounds as plausible as my theory that tiny green gremlins will burst from inside the Earth in 2012 and run around stabbing people in the toes with spears and with all these green gremlins leaving the center of the Earth, there will be nothing at the core anymore and the Earth will collapse in on itself.  That’s right, the core of the Earth isn’t iron or anything like that…it’s tiny Green Gremlins.

I decided my new best friend, Richard Hoagland, deserved a quick Wikipedia search.  I really do think this man would awesome to hang out with…it would be a non-stop riot and his Wikipedia page only further supports that opinion.  For instance, he believes the US Government and other major governments of the world have known 2012 was going to happen for some time and have staged an elaborate ruse to confuse us and keep that truth from us.  The Berlin Wall coming down, the two satellites that collided in space, 9/11, they were all part of this conspiracy to keep us from finding out about the impending disaster in 2012.  Personally, I think he’s giving way too much credit to politicians.  He also believes in an ancient Moon Civilization, life on Mars, the Face of Mars, the Face of Bo…oh that last one is from Doctor Who not Hoagland, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he believed Doctor Who was actually a documentary.  As I said, I am not a scientist.  I probably slept through any science classes I took, in fact, I probably slept through most classes I took, science or not.  But even for me, some of these theories are so completely absurd that they’re funny.  They make no sense and the conspiracies needed to hide some of these “facts” are so elaborate that they leap into absurd.  So I implore you, if you know Richard Hoagland or know anyone who believes everything he says, have an intervention.  Send them to The Bad Astronomer or one of the other great scientifically accurate blogs out in Cyberland (not to be confused with Cybertron).  Do something to help them learn real science.

UPDATE: On further research, by that I mean I actually looked something up, it turns out Hoagland’s Accutron looks just like a watch on a box because it IS a watch on a box.  An Accutron watch is a watch made by Bulova that uses resonating tuning forks as a means of regulating the time keeping function.  But with the name Accutron, I’m not changing my mind, it might still be a Transformer.

–
The writer of this blog posting accepts no liability for any pain, damages or losses suffered as a result of the misinterpretation of or actions taken based on information contained above.

This blog posting may contain sarcasm. If you are offended by sarcasm or do not know how to differentiate between sarcasm and sincerity then do not read, copy or distribute the blog posting. Instead, please navigate to a different posting.  Thank you.

Anyway, I then got distracted by a link on the side about Dan Brown and his views on science and religion. (Scroll down a bit. Yup, there it is.)  To be honest, I’ve never read his books, although I’ve seen some people get their knickers in a knot over his interpretation of religious stories.  But this blurb says that he “is sceptical about both” religion and science.  This quote from Brown follows:

I was raised Episcopalian, and I was very religious as a kid. Then, in eighth or ninth grade, I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a minister, ‘I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and Earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?’ Unfortunately, the response I got was, “Nice boys don’t ask that question.’ A light went off, and I said, ‘The Bible doesn’t make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.’ And I just gravitated away from religion …The irony is that I’ve really come full circle. The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, ‘Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.’

I’m not quite sure what physics Brown was studying, but I’m pretty sure my undergraduate classes did not at some point switch to metaphysics.  Science is more of a process than a body of knowledge.  There is nothing mushy about the rigorous standards of evidence that every study must be held up to before becoming part of our working explanation of the universe.

Rocking my SurlyRamics today!

If you delve too quickly into the cutting edge of theoretical physics, without understanding the scientific method first, science may seem like a whole lot of fantastical and “mushy” claims.  Quantum mechanics tells us that the fundamental nature of reality is probabilistic.  Relativity makes space and time malleable.  Dark energy is supposed to make up most of the energy budget of the universe, but we’re still scratching our heads over what it even is!  Although one can come up with philosophical ruminations on what this all means on a metaphysical, personal, or moral scale, that is stretching beyond science itself.

I don’t understand how one can be skeptical of science.  It is, by definition, one of the most skeptical exercises out there.  That is not to say that all scientists are skeptical, or that our discussions of reality should begin and end with science.  However, to assign to it a sort of mysticism is to talk about something that is not science at all.  Maybe it is just an admittance of where one’s understanding of science ends.

Oh, and here’s another explanation…

<3 TMBG

Holy. Hilarious. Batman. Anyone feel like he and John Stewart had the same hair in the 90s?  There are a bunch of these videos well worth watching, including the lava lamp and Mike singing “My Way.”  Just as entertaining then as he is today.

Okay, off to finally see Star Trek! I’ll be in Philly all next week, including the Penn&Teller show at Harrah’s in Atlantic City on Saturday night. It’s a skeptic meetup, donchaknow? For the Skeptics in CVille, don’t forget there’s a meeting Saturday to plan upcoming events and talk about the future direction for our group.

And… if you are looking to spice up your science life, click here right now! You won’t be disappointed. (*Giggle*)

He does however have some competition in the science world. Bill Nye has quite an impressive list of his own! He did, after all, help save the world in a recent “Stargate: Atlantis” episode.

Much love to Gail for sending around the link!

He does however have some competition in the science world. Bill Nye has quite an impressive list of his own! He did, after all, help save the world in a recent “Stargate: Atlantis” episode.

Much love to Gail for sending around the link!

Man, he is so amazing. After watching that, laughing hysterically, then watching it with my friend, I went to check my Gmail and strangely enough I see this headline in the reader above it: “Human Infidelity Linked to Gene.”

Priceless.

(Seriously, it’s worth it… your irony meter will asplode…)

(Shamelessly stolen from the Bad Astronomer’s twitter post)

And this and this and this and this!