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Author Topic:   Cosmos with Neil DeGrass Tyson
Omnivorous
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Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


(2)
Message 56 of 206 (722073)
03-15-2014 8:59 AM
Reply to: Message 54 by hooah212002
03-14-2014 7:04 PM


Re: Great Job
hooah writes:
Add some LSD and see if you get the same effect that Wizard of Oz supposedly has. I am sure some Feynman lectures work this way.
Everything works that way.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 110 of 206 (723792)
04-08-2014 5:07 PM


"Your Inner Fish"--3-part series on evolution hosted by Tiktaalik co-discoverer
Just a reminder...
quote:
To Neil H. Shubin’s long rsum paleontologist, molecular biologist, dean and professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, best-selling author can now be added television host. Dr. Shubin, 53, who helped discover the 375-million-year-old fish called Tiktaalik, hailed as a missing link between sea and land animals, will preside over Your Inner Fish, a three-part series on evolution (based on his book of the same title) that makes its debut Wednesday (4/9) on PBS.
...and how odd to be reminded (in the 4/7 NYT interview with Shubin) that Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


(1)
Message 120 of 206 (724039)
04-11-2014 6:31 PM
Reply to: Message 119 by RAZD
04-11-2014 7:58 AM


Re: "Your Inner Fish"--3-part series on evolution hosted by Tiktaalik co-discoverer
Thanks for the link--I just finished watching.
I thought it was excellent. The combo of intellectual adventure and field work in a challenging environment was great--using digital effects to turn the tilted strata back into a flood plain was esp. nice.
Wow, two good shows on science ... must be the end of times
Eh, end times, beginning times...same-same.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


(4)
Message 126 of 206 (724217)
04-14-2014 6:43 PM
Reply to: Message 121 by RAZD
04-14-2014 6:51 AM


Re: the crazies are out, and fumbling at the mouth
RAZD writes:
wizardry/haroldry
Harold, are you messin' with those witches again? You get your young ass home right now!
--Maude

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
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Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 128 of 206 (724449)
04-17-2014 9:23 AM
Reply to: Message 127 by Dogmafood
04-17-2014 8:29 AM


Re: Inner Fish
I haven't seen the second installment yet...
But even very good scientists slip into teleological shorthand explanations; for example, making it sound as though a need for a bigger brain caused it to evolve, rather than more carefully explaining that an environment which conferred survival advantages on a larger, more efficient information-processing brain created selection pressures which favored mammals with that trait.
ProtoTypical writes:
Is that right? If I do lots of calculus will my children have bigger brains?
Bigger than what?

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 134 of 206 (724632)
04-18-2014 7:06 PM
Reply to: Message 130 by Dogmafood
04-18-2014 6:29 AM


Re: Inner Fish
Prototypical writes:
It seems likely that there would be some driver that was causing the sustained incremental increases.
Other people.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
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Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


(3)
Message 143 of 206 (725352)
04-26-2014 7:53 AM
Reply to: Message 138 by RAZD
04-25-2014 5:58 PM


Re: Inner Fish / Inner Monkey
RAZD writes:
Not just in size but in convolutions. Primates and squirrels apparently have more developed sense of 3-D world due to leaping from branch to branch.
Proto could grow his kids' brains by teaching them another language after the age of first language acquisition but before puberty; that'll convolute them, too
Safer than trees, though I'd personally prefer the trees. Learning another language is like taking another lover: Who's got the time?
I like Shubin's enthusiastic but matter-of-fact affect: he's just laying out his portrait of our evolutionary past, sketching some of the best evidence. I especially like his inclusion of regular people with relevance to the topic: he explains polydactyly to parents and how our embryonic testes drop and fishes' don't to a fishmonger.
Tyson is a bit more...incisive, albeit coolly and urbanely. Throughout the series he's noted suppression of the best science of the day for political and religious reasons. The Patterson story added the hydra of corporate money. The scope of Cosmos gives Tyson a bigger canvas, and I think he's using it well. Of course, he's an intellectually and culturally confident black man, and that will strike many Americans as arrogance. Shubin is cozier.
It's great to have them both doing this work. We need more, much more: funny to think that CGI and advances in scientific and popular imaging on all scales might reignite public enthusiasm for science, as they offer visually stunning explanations that let people see what they cannot imagine. Incredulity arguments lose their punch when you've seen it on tv. (More mundanely, I think many people don't know the persuasive power of the fossil record because they simply haven't seen enough of it. My prescription for both better tv and better intellectual times is show and tell more fossils.)
Thanks for the reminder. I haven't watched the Inner Monkey yet, although I feel perfectly comfortable with mine.
Perfect for a rainy Saturday.
Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 149 of 206 (725393)
04-26-2014 8:20 PM
Reply to: Message 148 by RAZD
04-26-2014 8:09 PM


Re: NCSE comments
RAZD writes:
Then there is astronomy with their fantasy about light years and development of stars with the original stars blowing up to make new stars like the sun and the planets like the earth
You know, I was just wondering about that. If you believe that the earth is 6000 years old, what do you make of the stars and the apparent age of the universe? Do you insist that nothing in the universe is farther away than 6000 light years? How do you explain stars whose life cycle status shows them to be clearly older than ours? When God created the earth, were we joining a show already in progress? Or did God create the magnificent evidence of the universe's size and age just to keep us guessing?
I think: head, sand; sand, head.
When you write young earth claims broadly across the night sky, they look even more absurd. After all, we're seeing that light now--no historical conjuring or speculation involved.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


(1)
Message 164 of 206 (725460)
04-27-2014 1:00 PM
Reply to: Message 163 by onifre
04-27-2014 11:24 AM


Re: NCSE comments
onifre writes:
It's even a wonder how murders get solved with all those theories and fantasies and guesswork about the unobserved death of a person, eh?
And an awful lot of false convictions are based on eyewitness testimony, which is infamously unreliable. So much for the sharp science of right here and now.
Still, killers have good odds if they think location:
quote:
Scripps Howard has built a searchable database that allows you to find the murder clearance rate in your state or county over time. You can also see the trends in your county for weapons used, gender, race and ethnicity.
...
Police solved only 35 percent of the murders in Chicago in 2008, 22 percent in New Orleans and just 21 percent in Detroit. Yet authorities solved 75 percent of the killings that same year in Philadelphia, 92 percent in Denver and 94 percent in San Diego.
Well, sure, Denver and San Diego--buncha amateurs. I thought better of Philly.
Story here
The story links to the Scripps Howard database, in case you want to sort your paranoia or odds of apprehension by race or ethnicity.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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Omnivorous
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Adirondackia
Joined: 07-21-2005
Member Rating: 7.3


(1)
Message 178 of 206 (725629)
04-29-2014 5:52 PM
Reply to: Message 177 by RAZD
04-29-2014 5:35 PM


Re: Inner Fish Monkeyshines: NCSE Science League of America
RAZD writes:
Again very well done and I am sad that this will be ending.
I did watch Inner Monkey and thought it was the best yet. I especially enjoyed "meeting" Johanson and White, whose work I've long admired.
I suspect we'll see more of Shubin.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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