"Drill, baby, drill!", now on Discovery Networks

I really try to keep religion, politics, and anything of the like off of Superoceras. But I'd be naive to think that I'd be able to do so all the time. I feel like this issue is relevant in some way to my normal musings here, so I'm going to bring it up. But I won't go into to much detail, because as much as I wish what I'm writing about wasn't happening in the first place, and as much as I want to change it, I'm not willing to waste a lot of "breath" on this issue. I've blogged about it before, but have come to the conclusion that some people just don't deserve that much of my attention.

Here's the short version. Sarah Palin is being paid millions of dollars to do a show on The Learning Channel (TLC). It's going to be called "Sarah Palin's Alaska". Discovery Networks doesn't seem to see a conflict of interest between it's mission statement, and Sarah Palin's reputation as an enemy of wildlife and the environment. In fact, they are so into selling themselves out now, that the first episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" is going to feature another "reality celebrity", Kate Gosselin, in an effort to cross promote her new TLC show.

The Discovery Hostage Situation

As much as I don't want to write about this, I feel I have to say something.

Silver Spring, Maryland, right down the road from where I work and live, and home to the Discovery Communications headquarters building, made national news yesterday as a hostage situation unfolded. "Environmental fundamentalist" James J. Lee entered the lobby of the Discovery building around 1:00PM, 01 September, 2010 firing shots and taking hostages. A little before 5:00PM, police had shot and killed Lee after hours of surveillance and attempted negotiation, fearing for the lives of the hostages as he brandished a firearm and told police he had explosives in the building. Watching the situation unfold via live web streams, Twitter updates, and Google Buzz posts took up a large portion of my afternoon.

DON'T PANIC: Triceratops is here to stay!

I got an e-mail from a friend this weekend with a link in it to a Gizmodo article titled "The Triceratops Never Existed, It Was Actually a Younger Version Of Another Dinosaur.

I have an exam tomorrow, so I don't have a whole lot of time to blog today, but I had to write something given the content of Friday's post. I check Gizmodo most days of the week, and really enjoy their articles and reviews, but maybe they should stick to technology and gadgets. When it comes to paleontology, they are way off the mark. (Above, Torosaurus (top) and Triceratops (bottom) the subjects of the study, as reconstructed by Nobu Tamura, from Wikimedia Commons.)

"Wrong, wrong, triple wrong."

I started talking about this subject a long time ago, touched on it a few more times in between other posts here at Superoceras, and I have no doubt that I'll write more in the future. But I want to finally finish up a post series that is long overdue, and answer a question that inspired me to start blogging in the first place: what do I think of the discovery or Ardipithecus ramidus, and the scientist that claimed that "apes descended from humans"?

Why do you do these things?

I have to start out by saying that I thought long and hard about actually publishing this post. It is, for the most part, an opinion piece, and distracts from the primary focus of my blog. It communicates little science, and is for all intents and purposes, more of a rant than anything. But it does tie into other issues covered here at Superoceras in the past, like the role of the media in communicating scientific knowledge, and protection/conservation of wildlife. For that reason I'll get on with it.

Vanessa over at NatureBreak recently posted a new video titled "Is Wildlife Filming Cruel to Animals?" that has started quite the discussion. I didn't want to distract from the conversation there by getting off topic, or distract here by starting my own on the subject (please follow the link, join NatureBreak, and comment on the video there yourself). But I did want to quickly speak my mind about something that really gets under my skin: Bear Grylls.

Snowpocalypse 2010 and Global Warming.

The snowfall in my backyard the evening after the first storm.

The Washington DC area where I live is slowly beginning to recover from a record setting amount of snow that fell in two major storms between February 5th and 10th, 2010. I personally measured ~0.76 meters (30") of accumulation in my backyard, and in areas that were untouched by shovels there is still ~0.38 meters (15") left after five days of melting. Some of the mountains and piles formed from the drifts we experienced on Wednesday were over 1.5 meters tall.

Jurassic REBOOT!

The rumor mill about future/upcoming films is always working overtime, and sometimes people wait years, even decades, before a film they heard about actually comes to fruition on the big screen. But THIS is something that Universal Studios needs to jump on IMMEDIATELY.

I know that for most professional paleontologists, the original "Jurassic Park" film (not to mention the second and third) was somewhat torturous to get through. Even in my youth, I had a lot of problems with the science depicted in the film. But I'm sorry, the concept was still great, and I knew exactly how Dr. Alan Grant felt the minute we saw that first Brachiosaurus - or is it officially Giraffatitan brancai now (Taylor 2009)? It was a blockbuster film, and still remains a classic.

Ardipithecus ramifications. (Science in the media part II)

Back in October, I wrote the first post in a series on science, education, and the media. Needless to say, I never got around to finishing that series, or answering the initial question of my friend regarding my thoughts on the (then) recent publication of papers and news articles on Ardipithecus ramidus, and the interpretation of the fossils by the scientist who claims that "apes descended from humans".

Clash of the Dinosaur Special and Professional Paleontologist

Man, I really wish that I had actually finished my series on science, education, and the media before now. I keep getting interrupted from writing it, and then something like this happens, which perfectly illustrates why I need to talk about it in the first place. This will be another quick, link heavy post, but bear with me until I can flesh out the bones of my larger post over break.

Matt Wedel over at SV-POW was a featured "talking head" in the recent Discovery Channel documentary Clash of the Dinosaurs, and did not have a very good experience. Essentially, the individuals over at Dangerous Ltd., the production company working on the program edited an interview with Dr. Wedel so that it appeared, on television, as if he agreed with an outdated and falsified notion regarding the "second brain" of sauropod dinosaurs. Dr. Wedel was obsiously very upset at this, as his reputation among his peers and collegues could be seriousy tarnished.