Top 10 scientific hoaxes

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From The Guardian: the top 10 scientific hoaxes of all time. A very interesting list, some of which I’d heard of, some of which I hadn’t, and one that I’d never heard was a hoax.

2. The amazing Tasaday tribe

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In 1971 Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister, discovered a small stone age tribe living in utter isolation on the island of Mindanao. These people, the Tasaday, spoke a strange language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion. They made love, not war, and became icons of innocence; reminders of a vanished Eden.

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They also made the television news headlines, the cover of National Geographic, were the subject of a bestselling book, and were visited by Charles A Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. Anthropologists tried to get a more sustained look, but President Marcos declared a 45,000-acre Tasaday reserve and closed it to all visitors.

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After Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists got in and found that the Tasaday lived in houses, traded smoked meat with local farmers, wore Levi’s T-shirts and spoke a recognisable local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had only moved into caves, donned leaves and performed for cameras under pressure from Elizalde – who had fled the country in 1983 along with millions from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday. Elizalde died in 1997.

I remember reading about the Tasaday tribe in National Geographic (though as the issue was printed in 1972, the year before my birth, it must have been much later when I found it) and being absolutely fascinated that they’d been able to survive unchanged for so long. A bit of a bummer that it was a hoax, but not terribly surprising.

(via MeFi)

Gore Vidal interview

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I’ve been something of a low-level fan of Gore Vidal for quite a while now. I say “low-level” simply because every time I’ve seen him in something (such as Bob Roberts, where most of his political ruminations were unscripted and entirely his) or read interviews with him, I’ve liked what he has to say, and yet I’ve not read any of his books (something which I’d really like to correct sometime soon).

The LA Weekly currently has an interview with Gore Vidal which is well worth reading, touching on everything from what our founding fathers might think of Bush and his cronies to electronic voting. Some very good stuff in there.

But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman’s founding of the national-security state, to LBJ’s debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

(via /.)

Trailers: Harry Potter, Peter Pan

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Quick notice of a couple trailers worth checking out (at least, in my world they’re worth checking out):

Sirius Black

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban: On the insanely unlikely chance you don’t know, this is the third film in the Harry Potter series, adapted from the book of the same name. First impressions: Michael Gambon as Dumbledore seems to both look and sound right (a good thing, I was a little worried about the switch in actors). What’s up with Draco’s new hairstyle? I’m not sure if I like it or not. Gary Oldman looks great as Sirius Black. Our first glimpse of the Dementors, and they look nicely creepy. Overall, I’m looking forward to it — each sucessive book has been getting darker, and it appears that they’re not afraid to let the movies do the same.

Mermaid

Peter Pan: I’d not even heard of this one, until I found it linked from the Harry Potter fan site The Leaky Cauldron (Cpt. Hook is played by Jason Isaccs, who played Lucius Malfoy in HPatCoS). This one looks quite interesting — it appears that the people making it are aiming to do their best to capture J.M. Barrie’s book on film as closely as possible. Wendy isn’t “classically” cute, but I think she looks perfect — like a real girl. Isaacs looks like he’s having a blast as Cpt. Hook, and the mermaids look downright creepy! There are two trailers available on the website, I’d suggest grabbing the one listed as “Trailer #1” first — while the “New Trailer!” shows more of the story, the quality is much worse, and the first trailer gives a much better idea of the look of the film.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

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I noticed on my way home tonight that Blockbuster had a huge “In stock or it’s free” sign up in their window for Terminator 3. Since I missed it while it was in the theaters, I picked it up.

I’d avoided seeing T3 on the big screen. Much as I enjoy sci-fi and action movies, and as much as I like The Terminator and T2: Judgement Day, I’d had nothing but bad feelings about T3 ever since I started hearing about it. None of the news I read when it was being made was good — James Cameron, the man behind the first two, wanted nothing to do with it. Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor in the first two) described the script for T3 as “soulless.” I think I remember reading during production that Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese in T1 and the director’s cut of T2) also declined reprising his role, though I can’t find a source for that now and could be mistaken. I didn’t think that there was any way that the series could continue without the key people behind the success of the first two and still be even remotely interesting.

Now that I’ve finally taken the time to watch T3, I’ve got to admit…

…damn, was I right.

I was bored throughout most of the film. Bored. During a Terminator movie. Sci-fi, cyborgs, car crashes, big guns, explosions — and none of it caught my interest. I actually considered turning it off at one point, then looked at my DVD player and realized that I was only about 35 minutes into the film, and I should probably stick it out and give it a chance. What? Half an hour in, and I was ready to turn it off? That’s a sad, sad sign right there, especially when I can pop either of the first two in and get completely sucked in.

First off, there’s too much, too soon, with too little invested in any of the characters. T1 didn’t have a really major action set piece until far into the film, after you’d spent a good amount of time getting to know Sarah and Kyle. While T2 does have a large action sequence fairly early on, with the T-101 and John Connor being chased by the T-1000, by then Cameron’s direction, the solid script, and Ed Furlong’s acting had already built up a level of interest in John, so the initial big set piece was thrilling, especially with the sudden revelation that the T-101 wasn’t what you expected him to be.

In T3, though, we get almost nothing before being tossed into the action. We know who John Connor is only as a character from the first two movies, and Nick Stahl gives us nothing to latch onto or care about in the scenes that introduce the older John to us. Claire Danes fares a little better, but not by much. These are empty people — if it we didn’t know who John was from the first two films, we’d have no reason to care about anything that happened to him.

Additionally, when we are thrown pell-mell into the chase sequence, it is so ridiculously over-the-top that it entirely fails to be captivating, and is instead merely ludicrous. A huge crane truck goes careening all over the place with precious little damage, zooming down city streets with the truck supports extended and slamming into cars without affecting the speed of the truck. The crane boom swinging Arnold all over the place, into cars, trucks, and even buildings, and yet he comes out of it all with only a few scratches on his face? Okay, he’s a robot, but he’s got real skin overlaying his metal endoskeleton, and even the T-101 would have far more than a few scrapes and cuts after getting thrown through multiple buildings at fifty miles per hour. Besides, the entire sequence felt like nothing more than a rehash of the chase sequence from T2 (Arnold on a motorcycle, the bad guy in a big truck, etc.), only turned up to 11 in a sad attempt to out-Cameron Cameron.

Kristanna Loken entirely fails to convey any real sense of danger as the T-X (or “Terminatrix” — ugh). Instead of feeling like she’s a leaner, meaner, more effective model of Terminator, you feel like she’s a former model who lucked into a high-profile gig in a major budget action movie when the power that be decided that a little T&A would help boost the profits (and to make that worse, while we got a brief shot of A, the T part of that equation was sadly missing!). It’s sad, too. While I was (justifiably) concerned when word leaked out that the new Terminator was going to be female, I held out hope that it could work. After all, I’ve seen some women do some seriously good work kicking ass, taking names, and looking good doing it — Angela Bassett in Strange Days, for example. Unfortunately, Kristanna is definitely no Angela Bassett, and I just couldn’t take her seriously.

And what about the Governator himself? While he still looks the part (mostly — he’s still got the build, but it’s hard to hide the fact that it’s been nearly 20 years since the first film), the character of the Terminator came across as little more than a sad caricature of the Terminator from the first two films. Part of what made the T-101 so scary the first time was his inhuman stoicism and invulnerability. Part of what made him a hero in the second one was the masterful work done humanizing the character, using (but not over-using) humor as John taught the machine what it means to be human over the course of the film. In T3, you get the feeling that the director was trying to blend the creepiness of the original Terminator with the humor of the second, and it didn’t work — the humor felt forced at best, and failed to make the T-101 either a worthy hero or a villain we could love to hate. Rather, he’s just a prop — another special effect.

In the end, rather than being a worthy addition to the Terminator world, T3 is nothing more than an overly loud, overblown, sad attempt to capitalize on one of the strongest sci-fi series of all time.

Bad headline award

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One of the many reasons why I love the English language is how sentences can parse in entirely unintentional ways. For instance, from the Washington Post:

Girl Scout Beaver Traps Upset Activists

Those poor activists! Someone really needs to cheer them up — but first, get them away from that Girl Scout!

The copyeditors really should have caught that one before it made it to press…

(via The Usual Suspects)

The other night I…oh, hi mom!

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A wonderful story from The Onion: Mom Finds Out About Blog!

MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as “horrifying,” Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.

“Apparently, Mom typed [Widmar’s employer] Dean Healthcare into Google along with my name and, lo and behold, PlanetKevin popped up,” Widmar said. “I’m so fucked.”

In an e-mail sent to Widmar Monday, Lillian reported in large purple letters that she was “VERY EXCITED :)!!!” to find his “computer diary,” but was perplexed that he hadn’t mentioned it to her.

Upon receipt of the e-mail, Widmar mentally raced through the contents of his blog. He immediately thought of several dozen posts in which he mentioned drinking, drug use, casual sex, and other behavior likely to alarm his mother.

Luckily, something I don’t have to worry about it. I already know that Mom reads (and comments on!) my weblog, and by now, she should be quite aware that I occasionally imbibe alcohol (though not the “beers so dark they’re served with a knife and fork” that she and my brother enjoy), I experimented with drugs for a few years (and stopped quite a few years ago), and that I take every single one of my multitudes of daily sexual encounters with random strangers very seriously, and not casually at all.

(via Lane)

Two out of three ain't bad!

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Singapore sounds like a rather odd place at times. Never having been there, of course, all I can judge by is the occasional news story that makes the rounds over here, when I find out that in Singapore, prostitution is legal, the age of consent is 16 — but oral sex is illegal.

Like the title says…;)

(via Prairie)

Supreme Court looks at Guantánamo

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It’s about damn time.

Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether prisoners at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.

The court said it would resolve only the jurisdictional question of whether the federal courts can hear such a challenge and not, at this stage, whether these detentions are in fact unconstitutional. Even so, the action was an unmistakable rebuff of the Bush administration’s insistence that the detainees’ status was a question “constitutionally committed to the executive branch” and not the business of the federal courts, as Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued in opposition to Supreme Court review.

And in what may be a good sign, it looks like the Supreme Court has decided to play hardball with this case, and make sure that their decision is final:

It was evident on Monday that this, too, was a question on which the justices want to have the final word. That conclusion emerged from a comparison of how the administration phrased the question presented by the two cases with how the justices phrased it in their order granting review. Solicitor General Olson said the question was whether the federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the legality of detaining “aliens captured abroad in connection with ongoing hostilities and held outside the sovereign territory of the United States at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.”

The Supreme Court, by contrast, said it intended to decide the jurisdiction of the courts to hear challenges to “the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.” The court’s question incorporated no assumption about whether the base was or was not “outside the sovereign territory of the United States.”

These people have been locked up for over a year and a half, with no legal counsel, no recourse, no charges. With little more than an accusation, they were tossed into a prison out of the public eye where the US could take advantage of the unusual and unclear legal standing of the base to essentially do whatever they wanted without fear of recourse. It’s long past time for this to stop, and for Guantánamo’s prisoners to be given the basic rights that any other prisoner is guaranteed.

Theodicy survey

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Dad sent me a link to an interesting survey asking how Christians deal with the question of theodicy.

In its simplest form Theodicy asks the question, “If there is a being, God, who is all powerful, everywhere present, all knowing, all good and loving, why is there so much evil, suffering and pain in the world.” The answers range from, “the existence of evil is proof that such a being does not exist,” to “there is no such thing as real evil.” The discussion fills the halls of academia, the corridors of seminaries and is occasionally addressed from the pulpit, particularly in response to tragedy.

Long-time readers of this site (yeah — all ten of you) will know that while I’m not very active in the church, and certainly have my own fair share of doubts and questions, my core beliefs stem from being brought up in the Episcopal church. While I’d not heard the term theodicy before this (or at least didn’t remember hearing it), the question has come up on occasion over the years, often during conversations when people have expressed surprise that a black-wearing, industrial-music-listening, goth-culture-loving, (ex-)drug-using, GLBT-supporting, open-minded person such as myself would still count their base beliefs as Christian.

Admittedly, the question of theodicy is one of the most difficult out there, and often one of the most difficult to counter when someone tosses it out as one reason that they can’t/don’t/won’t believe in God. As for myself, I’m a firm believer in free will (and, thus, no big fan of predestination theories), and have never believed that God (or the Devil, for that matter) intentionally causes tragedies to happen to people as any form of test. There’s a level of sadism to that belief that has never jibed with my notions of what God — should s/he exist (which as I mentioned above, I do sometimes struggle with) — would be like.

Rather, I believe that there’s a lot of things that happen in this world, both good and bad, natural and man-made, and how we deal with them is what’s important. From natural disasters to people doing horrid things, they don’t happen because “God willed it”, but (as trite as it sounds) simply because these things happen at times. And, in a certain sense, the bad things need to happen for us to appreciate the good, just as much as the good needs to happen for us to cope with and get through the bad. No light without dark, yadda yadda…I’m not explaining it well, and I’m afraid I’m veering frighteningly close to new-age mystic claptrap, but I think you get my overall point.

I’m often reminded of three stories I’ve come across over the years.

The first is one my dad tells about a priest and family friend in Alaska, Fr. Mark Boesser, who would be drawn into conversations with someone either expressing doubts in their faith, or lambasting him about his. At some point he would ask them what sort of God they didn’t believe in, and they would go off, describing a God that constantly wreaks havoc on the world, causes earthquakes that kill off thousands of people, kills babies in their cribs, tears families apart in accidents, gives people debilitating illnesses, and so on. After they wound down, Fr. Boesser would almost always in complete honesty be able to look at them and say, “I don’t blame you — I couldn’t believe in that sort of God either.”

The second is from a book I read a long time ago — unfortunately, I can’t remember which. Someone who has just lost someone close to them (a child, I believe) goes to a priest and demands to know why God would allow such a thing to happen. The priest says something along the lines of, “It is my belief that when your child died, the first tears to fall were God’s.”

The third — well, for the third, you’ll just have to bear with my sense of humor. In James Morrow’s book Only Begotten Daughter, Julie Katz (the daughter of God) is being taken on a tour of hell by Satan. They start debating the question of theodicy, and eventually Satan turns to Julie and says, “Well, just think about it this way. All power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”