Chronic Geekery

[gemfyre]

That Science at the Movies thing I went to last night was okay.

They had loads of trouble with it, first the laptop wouldn't talk to the projector, and lots of other things went wrong. Lucky the presenters were also kinda stand-up comedians so they saved it a bit.
I won 2 Starburst lollipops for knowing Stegosaurus was spelled wrong in a scene from Jurassic Park. They paused it there and everything, too easy. It's spelled "Stegasaurus" in the scene.
Too many kids. "Lollipop if you can tell us which movie this is!" etc. Lots of yelling over bits, pretty annoying.

The science wasn't as in depth as I would have liked either. I didn't really learn much new. I did however discover a few things to look up.

- A National Geographic mockumentary on what kind of aliens could theoretically be out there. Forget all this movie-driven humanoid crap. This thing takes into account conditions on the planet (or moon) and then figures how creatures may have evolved in this. Looks fascinating.
- The alligator in Lake Placid is not an alligator. A quick look at its teeth gives it away - this is a crocodile. I haven't seen Lake Placid - it looks a bit too stupid for me.
- They didn't cover Dante's Peak. *sulk*

Immediate obliteration zone of the KT meteorite was around 2000km. Okay, few questions – have these been researched?
- Did ANYTHING in that area survive? Did all families evolved in that particular area get obliterated?
- Has research been done to see if the species that occur there after the KT boundary arrived many years after that event – suggesting life slowly migrated back into that area.

Made my brain tick anyway, which is why I went. I like how they said that the only exactly true thing in one of those movies is that politicions know jack shit about science/the environment and that to me is truly terrifying. These people have the lives of millions (human and otherwise) in their hands and they're just destroying our home.

Comments

KT questions

[mmcjawa.livejournal.com]

Well...we can't really answer alot of those questions, as Central America has a crappy fossil record, especially in regards to anything before the Cenozoic. It's also an area which has off and on again been under water (can't remember for certain if it was underwater when the Meteor hit or not). As far as animals which are believed to have evolved there, most of them are post KT as far as I know...Some of the lizards and frogs have been argued to have a Cretaceous origin in the Caribean area, but then lizards and frogs generally went through the KT pretty well (though not as well as some people claim of course)

Film Faux Pas

[meanbot.livejournal.com]

*The mosquito (encased in amber) from which they extracted the dino DNA in Jurassic Park belongs to one of the few mosquito species that is strictly vegetarian-- it only ate nectar! They probably chose it because it is one of the largest mosquitoes, so I guess I can forgive them.

*The ebola monkey from Outbreak was a species found only in South America.

*A geneticist in the movie Red Planet, sick of coding DNA sequences, complains, "I'm so sick of staring at all these As, Ts, Gs, and Ps!"

Re: Film Faux Pas

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

Shocker! They did go over the reason that some stuff in Jurassic Park was impossible but they didn't mention the mozzie!

I'm still seething that despite all the research into beautiful Great Barrier Reef fish for Finding Nemo - they still had bloody American species of birds in it!