The Futile Cycle

I just went and saw the new Indiana Jones movie. I guess I got what I expected, but still. Despite the signs in the earlier films of George Lucas’ insistent, steady drive to transform Indiana Jones from an engaging, hapless archaeologist and treasure hunter to a flat, boring superhero, a small part of me still had harbored a tiny flame of hope. What a bucket of cold water.

The movie is best seen while shouting at the screen, making fun of the camp dialogue, and generally taking it as a very good parody of the Indiana Jones series. Like any good parody, it comes complete with extraordinarily campy dialogue, over-the-top in-jokes, trite characters, mindless plot, and a John Williams score. It has to be on purpose. There’s no way that the movie would have been this much of a parody by accident.

Either that or it will be a movie that years down the line will be shown as a shining example of what happens when mediocre movie-makers get to make exactly the kinds of films they want, without the good taste that editorial oversight and budget constraints provide.

Well, at least I’ve seen it now. And I got popcorn.

At the risk of alienating part of my family and a bunch of my friends from college, hell yes, the Giants win a huge upset victory! And Eli’s absolutely amazing pass under pressure to Tyree was too appropriate a way to set up the final, last minute touchdown. Congrats to the Giants! Eli no longer needs to live under his brother’s shadow.

This morning I came across a short blog post that talks about pollution and environmentalism; the first sentence just irritated me:

The theory of evolution describes life forming and emerging billions of years ago from the slimy shores of a chemical soup.

This is not the theory of evolution. The origins of life are a completely different topic! Basically, evolution assumes that life already exists, somewhere, somehow, and describes how one species change over time. Evolution explains why bacteria and humans fundamentally share some similar biology, it explains why mitochondria look like bacteria, and it explains the diversity of traits within and between species. It does not talk at all about where life came from.

Origins of life studies are much harder and more controversial than evolution, basically because we have to speculate about things like the composition of the Earth billions of years ago, how likely life is under those conditions, and so on. For evolution, we have solid evidence, experiments, and well-thought-out quantitative predictions, regardless of what the “intelligent design” folks like to claim. For origins of life studies, mostly these are missing, save for a few prominent experiments (prominent because, well, there really aren’t that many, and so the couple that we do have get a lot of notice).

The theory of evolution is not controversial to those who know what they’re talking about. Theories of life origins are quite controversial. Very different.

Nobel Intent has a wonderful post at Ars Technica that shows the difference between real science and pseudoscience by going through an issue of the journal Homeopathy and systematically destroying every article in it. It’s a six page post, and after a while, it gets repetitive (oh goody, yet another crank who doesn’t understand basic concepts in science), but there it is, a systematic deconstruction and refutation of almost every single article in that special issue. I’m amazed that the Nobel Intent authors had the patience to do something like this, but someone had to, to finally blow some reason into the minds of these strange “scientists” and the easily duped consumers.

All good things must come to an end, and Battlestar Galctica (BSG) is one of them. I’m always very happy when serials, like TV shows, movies, books, comic books, and so on have a very definitive beginning, middle, and end. I rarely enjoy (for very long) serials that hang on forever. Eventually, the dialogue and characterization becomes poor and annoying as writers run out of ideas, and the plots usually become really boring. X-Files, the Simpsons, Lost, almost all comic books, and so on that just drag on and on as the producers milk the products for all their monetary brand value makes me really irritated, and I usually abandon ship as soon as I sense that this sort of thing is happening, unless I happen to really, really like the series and have hopes that they would recover, eventually. (None of the above examples were of that hallowed category.)

BSG is getting there. The third season was quite weak in the middle, and the beginning wasn’t all that great either. The ending wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t quite as great as the second or first seasons’. Thus, I’m actually quite glad to hear that BSG will be heading into its final season next year. Almost makes the almost one year wait worth it…