Day Three Hundred and Forty-seven - Mythbusters: Season 10, Episode 2, "Kari is skydiving for why now?"

Mythbusters is always a fun watch, even if they're not exactly the most rigorous in the repeatability of their experiments. This particular episode, they're split into their regular groupings of Adam and Jamie on one experiment (Bourne Magazine Bomb) and Kari, Grant, and Tory on another (Blue Ice).

I'm kinda meh when it comes to the Bourne Magazine Bomb. It's a nifty enough to see Adam and Jamie progress from a small plastic cube (to gauge fuel-air mixture for methane to oxygen) to a scale-sized apartment that they fill with gas to attempt to recreate the movie explosion from The Bourne Supremacy. Still, while it's not exactly the same, it's pretty similar to several experiments they've done in the past.

I do like the safety precautions they've implemented, including the rather kludgerific saftey cutoff (a pipe on a rope!) and the box fans to draw the gas out of the test apartment for resets, but really the only fun part of the whole thing are the EXPLOSIONS... which are pretty much the main draw of the series, I think.

Grant, Tory, and Kari's experiment is much more interesting to me. Tasked with trying to recreate the infamous Blue Ice myth, where mysterious blocks of icky waste are supposedly falling from the sky, dropping from poop chutes evacuated by pilots on cross-continental flights. It doesn't take long for the trio to dispel the myth of pilots actually having control of waste expulsion in mid-air. There is still some plausibility to the myth, though, as mechanical failure could cause the noxious fluid to be dropped at altitude, causing instant frozen balls of doom.

In order to get data, they put together a mock-up fuselage and enlist the help of NASA, which has an icing wind tunnel, in order test two scenarios: a catastrophic release all at once or a slow drip. It turns out that the slow drip is the real deal and has potential to create the icy balls of death. What I don't get is why Kari needed to go skydiving to watch a real ice ball drop from altitude. I can see why they would have trained skydivers tracking it with GoPro cameras, but Kari could've been on the ground with the boys tracking with binoculars, too.

Ah, well... any excuse for a little daredevilry, I suppose.

Overall, while the episode isn't exactly the most scientific or elucidating, Mythbusters is always a fun watch... most especially for their enthusiasm for SCIENCE, which is often lacking in our society. I'll almost always recommend the show for its entertainment value, if not totally for its educational merits. I say "almost" because I don't think I could ever recommend the Seth Rogen epi. Heh.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Twenty-eight - Fringe: Season 4, Episode 15, "Squeeze-tube Love"

One of the main arcs of this season deals with the fact that Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) was erased from both universes, but through sheer force of will was able to break his way back in to a world where the love of his life, Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), doesn't remember him at all. That is, until her memories from the old timeline begin to overwrite the present ones... something that she is conflicted about to say the least.

Meanwhile, season arcs aside, the MotW (Monster of the Week) is a serial killer who is stealing the juices from men in loving relationships, dumping their bodies, and using their concentrated pheromones to seduce their wives before he murders them as well. As far as mysteries go, it's not all that compelling, but that's not the real meat of the episode.

No, the real meat is Olivia's gradual realization that, despite the fact that it means the loss of her old self, she actually does want to give into the memory rewrite and love Peter. Normally, that would be a bad thing... in fact, Walter (John Noble), goes so far as to laud Peter for his restraint in trying to stay away from Olivia in the hopes that absence will stop or at least slow the overwrite.

There's also the continuation of the Observer subplot where Peter goes on a search for the one seemingly good Observer who is trying, however obscurely, to help humanity. I like the Observer storyline, and know it's going to come to a head in season 5, but after a while it just becomes so much noise such that I never understand why the other Observers don't just kill the Fringe teams in both worlds. It really makes no sense to keep the one group of people who can stop you alive.

From a storytelling standpoint, the episode is one of the weaker ones when you consider the actual mystery. The arcing bits are great, but those are the only things to care about. The cinematography is your standard Abrams greatness, as he and his crew really know how to put a show together that is beautiful, moody, and compelling. I don't think I could ever be disappointed by Fringe, no matter how freaky or weird it gets. It has all of the strengths and none of the weaknesses of its more famous cousin, Lost.

Will I continue to recommend Fringe? Yes, of course... and that's probably why I should stop watching it for the blog. I'm pretty sure that all of my fawning is getting repetitive and puerile at this point. Maybe I'll come back to it for Couchbound for the finale, maybe there will be something that I just can't wait to tell you about in the interim which forces me to go back on my word, but if there's one thing I really want for the blog, it's authenticity, not pandering... so we'll see.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Twenty-six - MST3K: The Beginning of the End, "Yay! More Riffs on Netflix!"

It's hard to imagine that Peter Graves was in a giant grasshopper movie back in the 50's.

Well, wait. Actually, it isn't that hard to imagine Peter Graves in a giant grasshopper movie in the 50's. After all, his Airplane co-star Leslie Nielsen was similarly in another 50's era B-movie scifi classic: Forbidden Planet.

Still, I think Leslie got the better end of the deal... and Graves more than made up for this drek during his tenure as Mr.Phelps on the Mission:Impossible series. Cheese, to be sure, but classy cheese.

Anyways, The Beginning of the End has Graves staring as a bug scientist who is assisting a deaf-mute plant scientist in growing overly large strawberries and tomatoes in the hopes of ending world hunger. Sure, you can't eat their efforts yet, what with the fact that they're fertilized with radioactive manure (no, seriously), but they have high hopes for the future... if it wasn't for the fact that some of the locusts that fed off of the giant plants are themselves muting and turning into giant, town-destroying people eaters!

RUN! It's the INVASION OF THE GIANT GRASSHOPPERS! Somebody find those industrious ants to hurry along the coming of winter and freeze the evil, lazy grasshoppers out! No pity food for you this year, slacker!

It's sad... I had such high hopes for the intrepid female reporter lead, but she takes a side-seat to Peter Graves' scientist role almost the moment he shows up twenty minutes into the film. What's the point of setting up an independent, smart, adventurous woman if you're just going to foist her off in favor of a stereotyped dominant male? It's depressing how easily they fall for each other, embracing tenderly whenever things look grim in the last half hour in between moments of bravado and SCIENCE on behalf of Graves.

Harrumph.

This is an early Mike episode and you can tell that he's still trying to find his way around his main host duties. Still, even his weak start is better than most of Joel's best, but that's a matter of opinion and taste. I'm sure there are plenty of Joel fans who think I have none of those, so there you go.

There's not much to say about the inbetweeners as they're pretty lame (also, my opinion), The Mads try to combat the impression that they're sissy boys who are worried about their figures and waiting for women-oriented talk shows to come on by throwing on "the game" and boxing each other. Not all that funny, really. And then there's Tom Servo's stand up comedy routine that doesn't even make me crack a smile, and Crow's fifteen act play about Peter Graves which is just Peter Graves narrating his life while letting you know every other line that he's Peter Graves. Peter Graves? Peter Graves. Yes, there IS such a thing as too on the nose and that skit managed it.

While it's not the best episode of MST3k, it's not terrible. I'd certainly watch it over Doctor Who (and DID). By the by, happy early 50th anniversary, Doc. Maybe I'll watch you again tomorrow and finish up that Cybermen two-parter from yesterday.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Twenty-four - Fringe: Season 4, Episode 12, "Timecop Physics, Minimal Effects Necessary"

The last episode of Fringe that I did for the blog was the pilot. Here, we skip a bit, settling in on the middle of the fourth season and a LOT of stuff has gone down between the two. Suffice it to say, you'd be doing yourself a great disservice not watching the series from beginning to end.

That said, the reason I'm doing it is because this episode is where I left off before completely shunning broadcast/satellite television in favor of internet streaming and DVDs. And boy is it a doozy of one, despite the fact that there's not a lot of progress concerning the major season and series arcs that Fringe has become known for.

That's not to say there aren't connections to said arcs, though, as the majority of the episode happens in a small town that has been cut off from the rest of the universe. Attempting to leave only results in a mobius strip-like occurrence where you wind up back at the other side of town, a la Pleasantville. Instead of quaint, 50's era Americana, though, this town is populated with residents gone insane and precious few survivors who are constantly in fear for their lives.

Enter Olivia, Peter, and Walter, who show up to town quite accidentally to investigate a suspicious fringe event just up the highway only to become trapped themselves. Of course, being who they are, they manage to survive the rampaging psychopaths and deduce the nature of the cross-dimensional event that is plaguing the town, finding a safe zone before the entire area is destroyed.

While not quite a bottle episode, I do like how close it comes, with the Fringe team caught and unable to escape, doing their best to help the trapped townsfolk while dealing with their own issues, particularly THIS universe's Olivia starting to manifest the memories of Peter's Olivia (say, Olivia-Prime?)... which causes a bit of confusion for Peter at the end of the episode when Newlivia fully slides into the persona and memories of Olivia-Prime.

It's all very sad and can be a little confusing (especially if you're skipping straight to this from the pilot some 90 episodes ago)... a lot of water under the bridge that the writers are trying to rectify, but they're doing a very interesting job of it, especially considering how brave and bold the concepts are that they're trying to explore as the series wears on. The Observers, multiple versions of the same person from different realities with startlingly different motivations, fantastic science fiction that is just too preposterous to believe outside of television, but also vaguely fun and convincing.

Definitely the spiritual successor of the X-Files, but much more liberal with the lengths it is willing to go to stretch the bounds of reality. People tend to give it a lot of crap because of how weird and obfuscating the previous JJ Abrams show, LOST, became downright silly, but I think Fringe is much more grounded... and yes, I realize that I'm typing this concerning a show about alternate universes and surviving huge cross-dimensional events.

I highly recommend Fringe, as mentioned above, from start to finish. It's compelling, dramatic, fantastic, romantic, and just plain fun. Check it. NOW!

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Eight - Fringe: Pilot, "X-Files with no limits other than the imagination."

After a month of Lynch's crazy prime-time soap opera, it was nice to get back to quality television that had weird for a reason instead of just being for weird's sake.

Definitely owing to the ground paved by The X-Files, Fringe started its journey through the realms of pseudo-science and alternate realities in 2008, combining the tremendously vulnerable (and occasionally menacing) acting of John Noble with relative newcomer Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson, who was probably previously best known for his work as Pacey on Dawson's Creek.

Set in the present (and occasional in the future and past), Fringe tells stories very reminiscent of Mulder and Scully's encounters with the strange and unexplainable, but throws off all pretense of mundane explanations and active government coverups. Instead, week to week, Fringe fights monsters, sociopaths, and doppelgangers all augmented with superscience that seems impossible (and probably is), but works in the context of, you guessed it, "Fringe Science" where just about anything can happen, provided Walter Bishop (John Noble) can handwave it away with some experiment he and William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) did in the 60's, 70's, and 80's.

This pilot episode jumps you right into the thick of things (minus Nimoy, who doesn't show until the first season finale) with a plane full of people literally melting in their seats thanks to some unknown biohazard. Among many other investigators is Agent Olivia Dunham, who trips onto a connection between the biohazard and similar experiments done by Bishop long ago, before he was locked up in an insane asylum. In order to get access to him, Agent Dunham has to enlist Bishop's genius, but rebellious, son... Peter (Jackson). Together they managed to glean enough clues from experimental dream work to track down the bioterrorist and save the day.

It is safe to say that I really love Fringe. I mean, really love it. It's smart, excellently produced by JJ Abrams and company, and the casting is divine, particular when it comes to John Noble's ability to ramble and the personal chemistry between Torv and Jackson. It also has just the right balance of the everyday and the fantastic, combining in such a way as to be utterly believable, no matter how ridiculous the solutions and cures can be. The writers and technical consultants take just enough care to make the technobabble honest and difficult to discount if you're not an expert in any of the fields required to call them on their bullshit (which I am definitely not).

Since the entire series is now available on Netflix, I can definitely recommend a binge watch to anyone who hasn't already seen the greatness that is Fringe... or, even if you have, now is a great time to revisit the series from start to finish... starting with this episode here! Enjoy it! If you don't I'll have lost faith in your humanity. :)

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Two Hundred and Sixty-seven - Prophets of Science Fiction: Robert Heinlein, "Fascism, Communism, Revolution... but barely a mention of Free Love!"

As promised, I came back to The Science Channel's Prophets of Science Fiction in order to hear what they had to say about my favorite Sci-Fi author, Robert Heinlein. After the silly docudramas intercut with scientist and author interviews that they did on Phillip K. Dick that I watched a while ago, I wasn't sure that I really wanted to see how they treated him... but a promise is a promise.

I think that it is safe to say that they definitely toned down the community theater inbetweeners, focusing more on the works themselves, along with small animations of their book covers and the predicted technologies found within their pages. Honestly, the episode was so much better for it... but still not great.

While it does jump back and forth a little in his personal history in covering the inventions and emerging technologies that he dreamt up, for the most part the episode is a chronological look at both his work and his life, going from a jobless veteran just before the second world war to one of the most celebrated science fiction writers of the century.

I find it interesting that the origin story the episode weaves fails to mention that the story he wrote for his first contest was actually sold to a different magazine, but it's a half hour show and they were more worried, I think, about the future tech in his full-sized novels than a short story.

Also, while I understand the point of the series is to show how prescient authors and creators can be when it comes to their fictions becoming future's reality, I still wish there was more time spent on the meaning of the works themselves as opposed to the dream science that happened to come true years later. They barely covered the interpersonal and societal issues that Heinlein put forth in his books even while acknowledging that he was at the forefront of Social Sci-Fi.

Heck, they didn't even touch his later novels like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond The Sunset.

But, it is their show, after all... and, while it's sort of entertaining to see the tech made real, watching the prototype moon habitats be credited to Heinlein is a bit of a conceptual betrayal of his work. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress didn't feature inflatable shelters... everyone lived underground in tunnels. They would've been better off to talk about the computer work and the sentient AI, Mike, or the rail gun mass driver catapult.

Oh well.

The show is bare bones and disappointing, though not as much as the previous episode I've watched for the blog. I'd say, at best, it's something for middle and high school literature teachers to throw on when there's a substitute. As for true fans of either the author or the genre, I wouldn't recommend it.

One good thing, though... it gave me the name of one of Heinlein's novels that I'd never heard of. I'll have to head on down to the library and check it out (if they have it).

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Two Hundred and Forty-three - TEDTalks: Crime & Punishment, Episodes 1 and 2, "Cheating... and the New Mafia. Well, I'm depressed."

Owing to the fact that I've pretty much slept the entire day away, I've found myself in the precarious position of not really having the time to watch Greenberg like I wanted to for today's Couchbound entry.

Also, I just did an episode of Anime... and wasn't in the mood for any other thirty minute to an hour long shows that I typically watch (like Numb3rs or Call the Midwife). It seems as though my lethargy has infected not only my sleep patterns but my viewing habits as well, today.

So, facing a quickly diminishing window of time to get the blog done before the day was out, I decided to go the educational route and watch something from the ever intriguing TEDTalks, these particular episodes being from the Crime & Punishment series of egghead lectures. The two speeches that I viewed were by Dan Ariely and Misha Glenny... and, while they both talk about the darker natures of humanity, they're also concerning subjects that are only very thinly related... the capacity for people to commit crime and the growing surge of organized criminal activity, respectively.

Dan Ariely takes a very scholarly look at pain and cheating. Through his studies, he has managed to produce data that shows not only which situations humans find that it's okay to cheat, lie, and steal, but also those possible triggers that minimize the urge to cross that line and take from the candy jar.

I found it fascinating to hear about these sociological studies which set up various ways to help people in situations where they could take advantage, only to find that certain things made it easier or harder for folks to live with themselves after stealing. I was especially intrigued by the implications that he made concerning the stock market, Enron, and the convergence of triggers that might have allowed such massive fraud to be seen as acceptable to the perpetrators.

Misha Glenny's lecture, on the other hand, while still interesting, was much more depressing. It feels so because his entire talk is about the massive surge of organized crime that is thriving in the recession thanks to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the defeat of communism not only putting former KGB and other security experts out of jobs, but thrusting them into emerging globalized markets with ample incentives to play fast and loose with property... and lives.

Not so much as scholar as an expert whose journalistic experience over the past thirty years has allowed him deep analytical insight and personal connections with victims and the criminals themselves, Glenny paints a portrait from the destruction of the Berlin Wall all the way to the warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Coltan is the resource du jour for organized crime.


His logical leaps can be a bit fuzzy at times, as he early on draws a line between Soviet Olympic athletes and the Russian Mob which doesn't exactly compute... but it's not hard to assume where he's going as he reveals the former to be the affluent class of their era, suddenly without the support and resources that they had previously been accustomed to. The problem is that said assumption is on shaky ground a best as the only evidence he presents to support this claim is a photograph with some of these supposed athletes in bathing suits with heavy gold chains.

It just seems like so much stereotyping. I would've preferred it if he'd actually shown some hard evidence instead of just saying, "look at how 'naughty, naughty,' these half-naked guys are!"

Still, he brings up quite a few salient points about the wide reach of organized crime in the modern era and how pretty much everything we touch, eat, buy, and consume has their fingers in it to some degree. He, too, takes a jab or three (not undeserved) at Wall Street and its robber-barons, pointing a huge, accusing finger at Bernie Madoff and outright saying that there are more like him in the hallowed halls of America's corporations (again, with no evidence... just his word)... and, while it's easy to want to believe, I find it hard to take seriously.

Of the two lectures, I much preferred Dan Ariely's. At least he had the science to back it up. Misha Glenny just spins a story... and while I do not doubt the veracity of his work, it's difficult to digest his comments as he's just so obsessed with the big picture and doesn't make it easy to relate with on a personal level.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Two Hundred and Fourteen - Mythbusters: Collection 8, Fireball Stun Gun, "I am the God of Hellfire... and I bring you-"

...FIRE!

No matter what certain skeptical friends say about Mythbusters' devil may care attitude when it comes to repeatability and the scientific method, I love this show... in spite of the fact they had a Green Hornet episode (ugh, Seth Rogen).

This particular entry follows the now standard rubric of Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman working on one project (the eponymous "Fireball Stun Gun") while Kari, Tori, and Grant do another (a fireworks propelled Rocketman!).

Of particular note with this edition of Mythbusters is that the leads, Adam and Jamie, both cameoed on CSI during an episode where the myth got it's big television break. While I fell out of love with CSI many, many moons ago, it's still pretty cool to see them both on a primetime show, essentially playing themselves.

Overall, the pepper spray-to-tazer fire hazard bit is pretty entertaining. I like the way they go about their experiments and account both for minimum and maximum effects. Sure, they go way overboard at the end of the episode, but that's kind of why you're there... to see them take out a dummy with a gas-fueled flamethrower!

Kari, Grant, and Tori have the lesser of the two experiments, sure, but I don't think it's all that less entertaining. Perhaps their final launch at the flooded quarry isn't quite as viscerally pleasing as Jamie letting loose with a flamethrower, but their systematic leadup, if a bit kludgerific, is still fun and taps the "blow crap up" portion of my lizard brain.

I also love how this show always gets my mad science juices going. Just looking at all the model rocket engines that Kari, et al, had taped together got me itching to run out and buy a rocketry kit and try and recreate my teenage years both in Atlanta with kits and New Mexico with our six-footers learning physics with Mrs.Prell (RIP).

Man, that takes me back.

Okay, sure, the science isn't perfect and, yes, they don't repeat or account for everything like you'd want to for thoroughness, but you can't argue with the fact that Adam, Jamie, and company really know how to entertain and teach basic science/engineering lessons.

Kudos to them and may they keep on rocking!

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day One Hundred and Ninety-four - The Manhattan Project, "Remember the Cold War of the 80's... it remembers you."

If you remember the 80's like I do, you remember the yuppie paranoia of the end of the Cold War. It wasn't the biting fear the Bay of Pigs, but there was still plenty of scapegoating features that painted us as one minute from the brink... a picture not all that dissimilar to the one that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons painted for us in Watchmen.

I remember WarGames and Miracle Mile and Red Dawn... I remember The Manhattan Project.

While having very little to do with the Soviet Union, nevertheless The Manhattan project had quite a bit to do with Cold War paranoia and pretty much everything to do with Nuclear Deterrence and Brinksmanship.

Set it upstate New York where an affable scientist, John Mathewson (John Lithgow), relocates his team of nuclear engineers to create a plutonium production facility, TMP mostly follows the teenager he comes to know while courting his mother.

The boy, Paul (Christopher Collet), is quite intelligent, assertive, and a nefarious prankster. While trying to win him over, Mathewson gives Paul a tour of the facility, passing off all the nuclear material as merely medical production. This, of course, doesn't fool Paul who hatches a plan with his would be girlfriend, Jenny (Cynthia Nixon), to swipe some as proof that the government plopped a nuclear facility in the middle of New York State with no oversight or warning.

The theft goes off without a hitch, switching shampoo for the plutonium slurry, and the rest of the film is Paul and Jenny making a bomb (I know, what a quick jump from exposing the government to actual Mad Science!) and taking it to be entered in the National Science Fair, then escaping when the feds close in and try to take the bomb away, leading to a climax defusing and a schmaltzy happy ending.

There's a lot that's completely weak about this film... for one thing that a nuclear facility in the heart of the cold war isn't being guarded by at least a platoon of soldiers checking and double checking everything... every hour on the hour.

For another, all the exposure Paul, et al, go through during the course of the film should've had them all flat on their backs, losing hair, and coughing up blood. It's one thing to occasionally hint at the contamination with Geiger counters and glib remarks, it's quite another to contradict it by shoving one in the face of two people in constant, unshielded contact with plutonium and get nary a trace just because it's plot convenient.

I mean, really... "just background radiation?" You've got to be kidding me.

Science aside, there's also very little in the way of chemistry... emotional chemistry between any of the leads. While I actually believed Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy and their mostly tame courtship in WarGames, I can't say the same here whether it's Lithgow and Jill Eikenberry or Collet and Nixon.

I also cannot believe the reactions of anyone in the staff or armed forces. As much as I like John Mahoney, his angry face had nothing on Barry Corbin.

It should be noted that there's a very small part for Robert Sean Leonard here as one of Paul and Jenny's school friends, but it's nothing all that special.

While it's not the most sterling example of a message movie, at the very least it tries to lead you to a few good ones by showing clips from tremendous films concerning the subject like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Dr.Strangelove. It feels a little like cheating, but it's still a nice nod.

I think it's decent enough for starting a discussion with your kids about the feeling of that era, but there are much better examples out there... like WarGames, actually... or, if you want to go back a generation, Dr.Strangelove.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day One Hundred and Eighty-six - October Sky, "I'm just shocked that it was Jake instead of Tobey."

Alright, let's make an "Inspirational Coming of Age Movie" checklist for October Sky:

• Misfit Blue Collar Teen? Check.
• Stern and Stoic Father Figure? Check.
• Supportive Female Mentor? Check.
• Superfluous Love Interest Who is Totally Wrong For Male Lead? Check.
• Superfluous Love Interest Who is Totally Right, But Not His First Choice? Check.
• Climax Father/Son Bonding Gestures? Double Check.

Seems like everything is in order here... carry on, movie.

Set during the Space Race with Russia in the middle of the Cold War, October Sky follows Jake Gyllenhaal as young Homer Hickam who is the son of the local coal mine foreman and dreams of something better than a life underground. To that end, and inspired by Sputnik high overhead, he and his friends elect to start building rockets.

At first just a fun hobby, their teacher Ms. Riley (Laura Dern) encourages them to enter their rockets in the state science fair with the aim of going to nationals and perhaps getting scholarships so they can leave their tiny coal town behind them.

This whole process doesn't sit well with Homer's father, who is played by gruff character actor Chris Cooper. He discourages and forbids Homer's lofty dreams often and only rarely helps out through discarded materials and the like. Of course this leads to a third act olive branch where the two bond over Union appeasement and de Laval nozzles, but hey... that's Hollywood for you.

Based on a true story, October Sky is your typical Coming of Age schmaltz... but it's still somewhat decent. While it stumbles horribly with it's weak subplots, like Homer's fruitless crush and Ms. Riley's cancer (which comes out of nowhere), the core of the story plays out pretty decently. Sure, it's full of your basic amounts of "Aw shucks" cheese and plucky sticktoitiveness, but they're at acceptably muted levels.

I would say that October Sky is a decent enough movie to show to kids on substitute days in Science Class, much like Clueless or 10 Things I Hate About You could be a good way to get English Class kids into Jane Austen or Shakespeare, but it doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to great cinema. It's good, but not superb in any way.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day One Hundred and Five - Cosmos: The Persistence of Memory, "Yeah, where's a Bird of Prey when you need one?"

To be honest, I've watched this episode twice in the last twenty-four hours. 

The first time was last night while I was arranging perler beads for a crafting project with friends. There was much in the way of half-listening and little in the way of actual watching. 

The second time, however, hours later, I was able to give Carl the full-attention that he deserves and felt almost the same amount of awe that I've recalled from previous episodes.

I say "almost" because, well, I wasn't too impressed with his "Dandelions" monologue on the complexity of life. 

He does have a nice bit on whales, their songs, and the effect that man has had both on isolating our mammalian cousins from each other thanks to muddying the oceans with noise pollution and hunting them so close to extinction. So much so that I think one of the writers of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home started writing the treatment for their script the moment they finished watching the segment.

Also, I was particularly enthralled with his comparisons between the sheer amount of information it takes to begin to understand life, our brains, and our need as a species to compile additional information in large memory banks outside our brains... in libraries.

He also goes into a little bit about the Voyager space program and the golden discs that are aboard both soon to be extra-solar vehicles. I find this additionally amusing due to the fact that a Voyager spacecraft was the main villain of the original Star Trek movie.

I think it's pretty fair to say that this wasn't the most thrilling of the Cosmos episodes, but it's still a certainty that I always learn something (or am reminded of a fact that I've long since forgotten since the first time I saw Cosmos is Debbie Prell's Physics classes). I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with delight when he spent a good ten minutes equating the knowledge of the human race in its various forms with stacks of books, but it was interesting how quickly he introduced the viewer to the concept of the bit... a simple yes or no that matters immensely to computer programers and logicians, but very little to the laymen.

Heck I still don't know the specific reason video game system generations operated using the bit as a measure of processing power. It was just something I always accepted with more meaning better, but hearing Carl talk about the bit as a logic gate, it makes me want to research it on my own.

And that's something I dearly love about Cosmos... even in its weaker episodes, it manages to pique my curiosity in some manner and goad me into learning something new outside the show. Sure, it's a silly little thing like what 8-bit versus 16-bit really means, but still.

As ever, I think Cosmos should be on everyone's queue and I look forward to hearing its soothing new age soundtrack and the sonorous lilt of Carl's voice again in the near future.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Seventy-eight - Cosmos: Episode 10, or "Prepare for brain drain... in a good way."

Cosmos has done a pretty good job of explaining both the fundamental and the cutting edge of science while maintaining senses of wonder, entertainment, and connection to the length and breadth of human history. Thanks to Carl and his series, I've visited Japan, Brooklyn, Greece (sadly, only through my monitor... I really need to start traveling), and so very many other places where human civilization has thought and hypothesized about the world.

This episode, though, "The Edge of Forever" is a serious strain on one's conceptualization ability.

I say this because we take a brief trip to Flatland.

Now, Flatland has always confused me. The idea of having no depth but still being able to perceive length and width is just so far beyond me, but Sagan takes it a bit further, using it as a means to broach the idea of a fourth physical dimension, one that is beyond our current perceptual realm and the Tesseract (what is this, Marvel 2.0?), or Hypercube, whose shadow can be represented to us.

Pretty heavy stuff, no?

Luckily, the rest of the episode isn't as difficult as Carl takes us on a trip to India and talks about the Hindu legends of the universe and its cycles of creation and destruction that may be similar to what actually happens. He uses this bit of culture to springboard into discussion about whether our universe is expanding eternally or will eventually contract in on itself.

Some of the dangerous concepts are only mentioned here... the reversal of cause and effect observation, the possible reordering of cosmic laws, but he also tries to dampen any fears due to the supreme scale of chronology that any eventuality, be it expansion or contraction, will have in relation to the lifespan of the human race.

Perhaps a bit depressing, but what else is there to do but live and be happy?

It was also good to see the Very Large Array (or VLA), what with being a New Mexican, myself, for the past twenty years or so. It's a point of pride for us, after all, and even garnered our state a bit of press as a location for Jodie Foster's movie based on Sagan's novel, Contact.

A tiny point of pride, but still.

As always, I love Cosmos... and miss Carl (and Debbie) terribly. While this episode had it's moments of "wha-huh?" I still enjoyed it quite a bit... especially the Cosmos Update which was a nice five minute segment at the end of the episode where an elder Sagan reported on developments made in the years after he first recorded the episode (and, sadly, before his death in 1996).

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Fifty-seven - Cosmos: Episode 7, or "Beyond Pythagoras and the Backbone of Night"

I really love Cosmos.

If I had children, when I have children (should I be so lucky), I would/will show it to them the moment they start to reason and understand. There's just something about the way Carl breaks down such complex topics as our place in the stars and relates it to the history of man, civilization, and science that makes it so interesting and awe-inspiring.

This particular episode of the series talks about not only the early concepts of the Earth, the Sun, and the stars, but also deals with a lot of the pushback that has occurred in history concerning science.

Now, you'd immediately think from that sentence that he went after the Dark Ages and the Inquisition and the like, but no. Instead, he explores and explains a source of suppression that I really wasn't expecting... especially since it comes from a name that I've been taught to revere for decades thanks to its intimate connection with how we learn mathematics.

Pythagoras.

Yes, the man whose name reminds us of one of the most fundamental formulas in algebra, was party to the suppression and persecution of observational scientists whose ideas and experiments may have contradicted his belief in the five perfect solids.

I'd never known... or, at least, never absorbed the information before that one of the hallowed forefathers of math and science was himself a sort of mystic who considered the fifth form, the dodecahedron, to be too dangerous for the public to consume and thusly had to be hidden from their hearts and minds. That sort of behavior seems antithetical to me.

Yet, here we are... and there I was, learning about it from Carl as he traced the line of thought from Aristarchus to Kepler to today.

I was especially fond of this episode's classroom sequences, where Carl speaks to a room full of elementary students about images taken by Voyager of the other planets in our solar system. To see the wonder in their eyes and hear their excitement as he passed out the photos, then see the gears turning in their minds as he gave a quick demonstration on detecting planets by their star's wobble.

Fun stuff!

As I said before, I love Cosmos. Every episode fills me with a sense of wonder and understanding, even as I know that I am thoroughly ignorant, a babe in the woods. This episode is no different from the others in giving me that feeling.

One thing that does stand out, though, is one of my favorite Sagan lines... that "the sky calls to us... if we do not destroy ourselves we will, one day, venture to the stars."

My main fear in life and living is that his couched warning will come to pass... that our current and continuing willful disregard for ourselves, our neighbors, our future generations, and the nature, fauna, and planet we call home will lead us to destroy any possibility of spreading out to other stars and worlds... that we will be a footnote in the cosmic history, doomed by our own hubris and petty jealousies and bickerings to die out, having poisoned our world beyond sustainability before we step out into the stars.

I think that and despair... yet, somehow, I still have some small measure of hope.

I wish he were still here with us, but I'm also glad he's gone so he wouldn't have to live in this current anti-science climate.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~