Original Blog Blurb from January 2013
As I mentioned during the episode, I’ve read more about Stephen Jay Gould than I’ve read of his writing directly, though I have a post on one of his more famous arguments here (it must be famous if I’ve heard of it). Robert Kurzman was pretty tough on him in Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, but he's just the latest critic. I particularly like the line from the obituary that called punctuated equilibrium "evolution by jerks."
This episode’s focus on end-of-the-world scenarios was sort of an accident. Dr. Harmon mentioned earlier that one way to get an adaptive radiation is for all your competitors to get killed off so that there are a lot of open niches. The coincidence of having recently watched Prehistoric Disasters in the context of the misinterpretation of the Mayan Calendar did the rest.
Prehistoric Disasters was almost NOVA-style; it paid a lot of attention to the evidence, and to the story of the scientific community as it wrestled with that evidence. Two others on Netflix this month, covering some of the same stuff, did not do that. Amazing Planet was a straight-up geology lesson on plate tectonics that tried to make things interesting with Patricia Clarkson’s husky voice and a whole lot of MTV-style quick cuts between animations and stock footage of volcanoes and such. The BBC’s Walking with Monsters was shot like a nature documentary, with all the same tricks that Hanna-Barbera and Filmation used to do to with hand drawn animation – flipping the image left-to-right, speeding it up, slowing it down, zooming in or out. CGI is still expensive, and low-budget studios all converge on the same ways to get the most mileage out of that expensive footage. The BBC is not exactly low-budget, so their CGI is always really good, but it’s the same optimization problem. There’s a budget, and it has to be divided. Whatever is saved in one place can be spent in another.
I’m comparing/contrasting these particular series because Chad Rohrbacher and I are testing a trial-and-error writing tutor in some of my classes this semester, and I need things for the students to write about. I’m trying to balance content with process, so I’m looking for good examples that are done in different ways. SUGGESTIONS WELCOME!
References from the show
Wonderful Life, by Stephen J. Gould
Time Travel Movies
It’s a Wonderful Life http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/
Back to the Future http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
The Terminator http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
Contact Conference http://www.contact-conference.org
Avatar (the movie, not the show)
CGI Tharks (with extra arms!)
George Gaylord Simpson (apparently famous for dissing exobiology)
The Singularity movie(bom-pom poooooooooom)
The Dark Ages http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972369/
Updates from 2023
Luke Harmon made full professor sometime during the past ten years. I did not, and left that world. One reason why is made very clear in this post by Columbia business psychologist Adam Mastroianni.
This is one of the reasons I got into micro-credentials once I left the university system. Show what students actually did, and then let the employers make their own decisions.
Today I am starting a permaculture class with the NC School of Science & Math’s Summer Accelerator program. No grades, self-selected students, just learning. The high cost of entry (around $1900) and lack of college credit means that most of the kids there will actually want to be there. Which is nice, from my selfish point of view.
If there’s interest in something similar (but cheaper!) for adults, or in more emphasis on permaculture / nature writing in the newsletter, please do let me know.
VSI Episode 54