Original Blog Entry from 2013
During LAST weekend's entirely seasonal "freak" snowstorm, I did a panel on Science and Journalism, which this episode follows up on. Hopefully THIS weekend's entirely seasonal freak snowstorm will be over and done with so that we can go to Herp Day on Sunday in Efland, which I somehow always read as "Elfland" when I'm flying past that exit on I-40 (curse you, Lord Dunsany!).
Teaching in an auditorium to a group of 75 students is as much stand-up comedy as anything else. I'm dying to show my students this brilliant Daily Show segment on the Russian meteor, which turns out to have been an airburst (scroll down) that didn't kill anybody, unlike what I implied in the episode. That clip is not only hilarious, but surprisingly relevant to our ongoing discussion about gun violence as a cultural evolutionary adaptation (both a cause and an effect of living in dangerous and unpredictable neighborhoods).
The Russians have adapted somewhat differently. Apparently Russian roadways are so full of fisticuffs, hatchets (!?!), and other non-gun violence that people have started videotaping their commutes with dashboard cameras as a form of self-defense. Most of my students are too young to remember Rodney King and the 1992 riots that followed, which maybe could have but didn't trigger a similar cultural trend here. That's my job as resident old guy.
Updates from 2023
Ten years later, I am now even older. My hair is still blonde at this point, but my beard is pretty much white. I usually keep it very short so it’s harder to tell.
The Herp Project apparently doesn’t do Herp Day any more? The website keeps using past tense to describe itself, but it’s not entirely clear to me what its current status is.
Not only is Jon Stewart gone from The Daily Show, his replacement Trevor Noah has also left, after seven years behind the desk. I watched a few of his early ones, but never really got over Jon the way the rest of our culture seems to have done.
I have yet to experience Russian traffic, but I did go to India in 2018, where traffic signs and signals are at best regarded as suggestions. City streets are so crowded there that nobody can drive over 35mph — like, ever — so accidents are less common and less severe than you might think.
NOVA (which is on season FIFTY now!) did a documentary on the Chelyabinsk meteor, but it “is no longer available for streaming,” so I link instead to this one, which has a more sensationalist flavor.
I have absolutely nothing useful to say about the whole Prighozhin mutiny / ongoing horror show in Ukraine, so will leave that to Kurt Vonnegut
"The destruction of Dresden was my first experience with really fantastic waste," he recalled. "To burn down a habitable city — and a beautiful one at that. And so I was simply impressed by the wastefulness, the terrible wastefulness, the meaninglessness of war."
and to fellow Substacker Chris Hedges, who is not nearly as funny as Vonnegut (aside from the phrase “pimps of war”), but has the benefit of not being dead.
Instead, I will point out another NOVA episode, “Star Chasers of Senegal,” in which local scientists and students collaborate with NASA to track the path of a distant asteroid across the night sky in preparation for a satellite flyby of the object in 2028. There is also a focus on Senegal’s Sufi form of Islam, which relies on precise local measurements of the hours of the day to drive its ritual prayers more than any other religion. There’s also some stuff about megalithic sites in Senegal that, like the ones in Europe, were probably used as astronomical calendars during ancient times, long before the arrival of Islam.
International cooperation. What an idea!
One of the Extras for that episode shows how to use a manual computer called an astrolabe. One of my favorite books on astronomical history is by Alexander Boxer, a data scientist whose website has a virtual version of an astrolabe and other cool interactive historical curiosities.
Among those is an interactive translation of a 16th century treatise on cryptography disguised as an occult manual for summoning spirits.
An equally playful treatment of the supernatural is Something in the Dirt, directed by a pair of guys I had not realized were involved with the Moon Knight series, and are now working on season 2 of Loki.
Synchronicities are a theme in the film. The comic book thing only mildly tripped my personal coincidence detector because my kid and I took a day trip to HeroesCon in Charlotte on the 16th. I was on a mission to find lesser-known artists who might be amenable to working with me on various projects. We did manage to catch one Q&A with BONE creator Jeff Smith, which I posted about briefly on Notes.
FURTHER REFERENCES
Their website says “We’ll be back soon!”
These were throwaway jokes, even then. Now? It’s just sad.
This, on the other hand, is still hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film)
And this is still my favorite sports movie.
VSI Episode 57