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Ridiculous…

Yeah, so I woke up from my nap to this article in Newsweek that polled Americans about a variety of things, one of which was evolution. 91% of Americans believe in God, which isn’t terribly surprising, however 34% of college graduates believe in the Biblical account of creation. When asked “‘Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?”, 48% of Americans said no.

As I’m sure my views on this are pretty clear, I won’t go into an extended rant. Let me just say, however, that this is very disturbing. It’s disturbing primarily because 48% of people believe in a lie (yes, the vast majority of credible scientists believe in natural selection) and also that 34% of college graduates believe that women were created when a rib was taken from Adam, and that it’s more likely that we came from mud rather than monkeys. I’ll quote a comment off Slashdot, because I think he said it pretty well:

“America continues to worry about losing its edge in the high-tech industry. But that couldn’t possibly be related to poor science education, could it?

“Note: I’m referring specifically to the 48% who believe that evolution is not well-supported by scientific evidence and that it is not widely accepted within the scientific community. Well, and the people who think the universe is less than 10,000 years old, despite all the evidence to the contrary. You can believe in God and have an understanding of science, just like you can have morals without being religious. But thinking that evolution isn’t supported by evidence, or isn’t widely accepted by scientists, is just plain ignorance.”

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A learning experience…

So, last week was a bit busy trying to work with my first poster presentation of my research.  The way conferences work, you typically make a 4′ x 5′ poster that summarizes the background behind what you’re doing, and then presents data that you can then describe to passers-by.  This is a way at conferences to get your data out there without having to have everyone do a 15 min presentation (although, that’s an option, too).  Tends to be very informal and is an excellent way to get started.

Anyway, the Graduate Student Association (GSA) at SLU holds a Graduate Research Symposium once a year where they have everyone submit posters and abstracts to you can present your data to your fellow classmates, and also get them judged by professors at the school.  From my perspective, this is an excellent opportunity to get experience before the Neuroscience meeting in November (in San Diego!), which will be my first real meeting.  The cool thing about that experience, as compared with the GSA symposium, is that those people will be quite familiar with the basics of the research field, while some of the judges at the symposium yesterday were from the social sciences department, requiring you to define “neuron” or “oxidative stress” to them.  60 students presented posters yesterday for a good three hours and most of the people coming by were professors, rather than students, but that’s to be expected, I guess.

Anyway, I think I did a decent job, overall…certainly for a first-timer.  The data I had wasn’t terribly involved compared with other students there, and I’m not even sure I explained it all in the best way either, but regardless, I felt it helped me out in the long-run.

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Review: TMNT

“Giddy as a schoolboy” is what you could say about me after seeing the preview for this one the first time (credit Elsa from “The Last Crusade” for that quote, for the record…), and I can’t say that I was disappointed. TMNT lived up to my expectations and made the jump to a new generation and computer graphics effectively.

The story is generally related to the previous three live action movies, but somewhat loosely… The Shredder is dead (or is he?) and the Turtles are bored without a Foot Clan to thwart on a daily basis. Then, a billionaire (voiced by Patrick Stewart…w00t!) starts rounding up monsters in the New York area that were released over 3000 years ago, and have been running loose ever since (what they’re doing in NYC, and why the Turtles have never seen them before, no one knows…and makes little sense…but whatever…). Anyway, the Turtles have to re-train themselves to work as a team to take care of this new threat.

The real plus to doing it CGI this time around is that they could do fight scenes and action more like they were done in the cartoon, with Michaelangelo skateboarding through the sewers, or Leonardo riding on the wheel of an airplane into New York… These are things that are difficult to carry out in a big turtle suit, like in the previous iterations. The CGI really lent itself to the franchise and I think it strengthened it quite a bit.

Also, there were a few “nods” to the first movie from 1990 with some certain quotes… Lines like “…and I thought Girl Scouts were pushy…” and “…two minutes…for high sticking…” were both included in this new movie, and both of these were also exchanges in the first movie. I guess I’m glad they stuck to the heritage a bit, without over-doing it…

My only real complaint with the movie is that it was a bit short, at 87 minutes, but then again, I don’t think its story needed any more time. As in, while I’d like to pay the big bucks for a full-length film (i.e. closer to 2 hours), at the same time, I’d rather not see an extra 40 min. of superfluous plot.

So yeah, if you were/are a fan of the cartoon series or movies, I’d say this movie is well worth your time, or if you have kids that you’d like to introduce to the franchise. If you’re a general movie-goer, you probably won’t like it, but if you’re familiar with the series, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Oh yeah, and the song playing during the ending credits sounded quite reminiscent of a Vanilla Ice classic… Fond memories, indeed… 😛

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A spring break for the books…

So, spring break was last week…and likely the last one I’ll ever go on (in that this semester is my last one that involves an actual “class” with real “exams”).  With the time off, I flew down to Texas to visit Andy S. and Brett for the week in San Antonio and Houston, respectively.

I flew out on Tuesday at 3:50…but weather in Dallas (where my flight was heading first…) postponed the trip by a few hours.  After we finally got to Dallas, I ran to the terminal, found that there was one flight left to San Antonio (’cause I’d already missed the one I was supposed to be on…) and that it was already boarding…  So I got my ticket transferred and got on at the last minute…and somehow, my baggage followed me, despite switching flights entirely.

So, Andy S. went to work on Wednesday while I played 9+ hrs of “Twilight Princess“…poorly…  I had to get his help on some parts, but I still did most of it myself (although he may argue with this…).  There’s a good 50+ hrs left in the game, so there’s plenty more to do…  Brett came down to San Antonio Wednesday night and we went out to dinner, hung out a bit, etc.  The next day (Thursday), Andy S. worked a half-day so “we” (read: “he”) could watch the NCAA tournament and, honestly, some of those games were pretty good…  Anyway, we had a good time hanging out in San Antonio…

Friday, we all drove to Houston, a few hours away from San Antonio, to stay at Brett’s place.  While there, we played board games, Wii (…I suck at “Smash Bros.,” by the way…), and went out…  Saturday, for St. Patrick’s Day, we went by a brewery for a few hours and then by one of Brett’s friend’s houses to try some home brew that he had made…

The brewery we went to was Saint Arnold’s Brewery, which I’d never heard of…  They’re a regional brewery out of Houston, much like Schlafly is, here.  Saint Arnold’s, however, runs their operation out of a warehouse and doesn’t operate a restaurant.  Apparently, every Saturday, they open the place up from 1:00 – 3:00 pm, you pay $5, get an 8 oz. “tasting glass,” and four tokens for four drinks of anything they’ve got…which included around 5-6 varieties.  If you go often, then it behooves you to buy a larger glass from them that they’ll also fill, making that $5 stretch quite nicely over the two hours…  Regardless, the beer was excellent and a good time was had by all…

But yeah, came back on Sunday and the flight back was rather uneventful…  I had lots of reading to do last night, so I didn’t get a chance to post this sooner…and things are getting busy again already!

Anyway, overall, it was a good trip…  We didn’t do much sight-seeing, but that was fine by me…just wanted to hang out and play video games for a week, and that’s what I got!

Thanks, guys…

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Review: 300

In short: 300 was bad-ass…

The movie is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller (of Sin City fame…), which was based on the Battle of Thermopylae where King Leonidas of Sparta led 300 warriors into a hopeless battle against hordes of Persians led by King Xerxes, eventually paving the way for a more united Greece to defeat Persia in the Battle of Plataea.

Much like Sin City, 300 was styled like a comic book, but to a lesser degree. This story had a coherent plot that flowed through the duration of the film (unlike City). The effects effortlessly transitioned between all-digital and all-real, yet relied heavily on a green screen for the majority of the movie. The acting was rather good, despite having very, very few “big name actors”…actually, there were people you’d recognize, but certainly no one I knew by name… Either way, the fight scenes were very cool, using the obligatory “slow motion” fights frequently, but not that often… It was certainly a violent movie, but that wasn’t unexpected.

The thing that grabbed me the most was the sense of “legend” that the movie evoked. To many Greeks who heard of the battle later, they were inspired to fight for their freedom and democracy as they never had before. Hence, you could imagine that some “details” were exaggerated to a certain degree. For example, Xerxes was noticeably taller than Leonidas. As in…giant-sized… The elephants and rhinos were ten times the size of real ones. You get the idea that, in describing the battle to later generations, the details got a bit more glorious and heroic…and the movie is based more on the exaggerations rather than what actually may or may not have happened. This is how legends are born, after all.

My one complaint was that the Queen seemed like she was used a bit more heavily than she should have been. She was close to Leonidas and stayed behind to try and rally support amongst the Spartan elders, to get more soldiers sent to help Leonidas. I guess her character was being used to try and connect Sparta with the battle, allowing for breaks between the fight scenes…but in the end, her efforts just seemed to be kinda useless… I’m not really sure what her purpose was in the whole deal, besides making some connection between the politics in Sparta and the battle at hand.

So yeah, it was pretty awesome, methinks…well-deserving the $70 million (est.) it took in on opening weekend. If you like action movies, this’ll fit the bill quiite nicely.

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The Extent of Education

I’m not really sure what made me think about it today, but my head was spinning around the idea of education and the process of learning. You start out in primary school learning the absolute basics, and things get a bit more complicated in high school. At the end of high school, you decide what interests you and what you want for a career. Let’s say you want to learn about cancer…

Well, then you go to the Harvard of the Midwest and you get a biology degree, taking classes that will teach you about general science, but also a little bit about cancer. Assuming you still love cancer (well, learning about it…), then you go to graduate school to concentrate only on cancer…

…here’s the dicey part… Eventually, you reach the end of education…as in…all education as you’ve known it for the previous 20 years… Because now, you realize that, hey, this stuff I’m learning isn’t in textbooks. The answers to a given question aren’t so easy to look up and find anymore… You can’t ask your parents or teacher a question and have them reply: “why don’t you go look it up?”

Why is this? Because no one knows… By the time you hit graduate school, you’re really hitting the “nitty gritty” of the extent of all human knowledge in that specific subject that you were interested in back in late-high school. There is no more that you can learn from a person, a textbook, or even a primary research article… That’s it.

I dunno…it’s just kinda weird knowing that you could be asked a question and it isn’t simply a issue of not knowing the answer: it’s not knowing the answer because the answer hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone on Earth. Once in graduate school, you’re really at the “final frontier” (insert Star Trek reference here…) of human knowledge on a given subject. So when you’re called an “expert on cancer,” it’s really true because you’ve learned just about 95-99% of everything that can be learned about it.

These are the thoughts I have when studying for exams… 😛

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People are stupid…

Now, I get confused sometimes. Like. I see a plane and think it’s a boat. Occasionally, I mistake cows for iguanas…

…but rarely do I mistake beagles for dachshunds…

It has happened four times now when walking Edie. Twice to Brooke, twice for me (all of mine this week…). “Look at the wiener dog!” is the usual exclamation… Never “dachshund,” specifically…simply “wiener dog.”

Now, I realize Edie has some brown and black coloring in her. And floppy ears. And, because there’s some bassett hound in her, she’s perhaps slightly longer than your typical beagle. But in no way does she at all resemble a dachshund.

Just wanted to clear that up…

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Review: Ghost Rider

So, I haven’t gotten to see any movies, since Casino Royale…and that was many months ago… Anyway, I’d been looking forward to a good escapist story at the theaters…yet I’m not sure I can say Ghost Rider is what I was looking for…

The story is based on the relatively popular Ghost Rider stories from Marvel Comics where a man, Johnny Blaze (Nicholas Cage), sells his soul to the devil to save his father’s life… The devil betrays him (surprise, surprise…) and Blaze gets rather pissed… Anyway, in selling his soul, he now has to do the devil’s bidding to get his soul back. In the movie, there are some power hungry fallen angels who want souls on Earth, so the Ghost Rider is called upon to take them out.

…predictably…

As in, there are four baddies, each of which has a different elemental power, of sorts. So do all four attack the Rider at once? Nope. He fights one while the others get away. He fights another one, while the others get away. The final two find out that Blaze has a girlfriend, kidnaps her, then lures the Rider to the climactic battle at the end of the movie.

So yeah, the movie wasn’t surprising in the least, which wasn’t really unexpected, but at the same time, I would have liked to see a bit more creativity in the story. The effects were relatively decent, but the CGI flaming skull that replaced Nic Cage’s head just looked fake the whole time. Perhaps lighting his head on fire for real would have been better? 😛

Anyway, the movie wasn’t terrible, and was alright to see in theaters, but I certainly won’t be buying it. It was a formulaic story with halfway decent acting and effects. Nothing to write home about…

…guess I’ll just have to wait for TMNT and Spider-Man 3… w00t!

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Evil more fundamental?

So, an intriguing perspective, as pointed out by “ST: Voyager” in an episode titled “The Darkling“… The episode basically centers around a malfunction in The Doctor such that he goes all Jekyll and Hyde on the crew and attacks people…

…anyway, here’s the important part… The Doctor goes on this rant about evil, essentially describing evil as more “fundamental” than good. The argument went from a physics perspective such that light involves photons, which is made up of particles (yes, light has mass…weird, eh?), yet there is no corresponding particle for dark. So, if there were no particles of light, there would only be dark. There is no corresponding force to go against light, at least as far as particle physics goes.

I guess it’s just an interesting idea, ’cause I’d always heard the argument that you can’t have good without evil, and vice versa, because our notion of “right” and “wrong” requires that opposing force. How can one define “evil” without a “good” to counterbalance it? Our notion of “evil” requires that you know what is bad and what isn’t, and to know what isn’t, you have to have a sense of “good”…confused, much?

Well, using the argument from physics, actually, light (i.e. “good”) is the force encroaching upon what would be there otherwise (i.e. “evil”). If there were no light, there would only be dark. You can’t not have dark (w00t!, double-negative). But you can not have light.

So, thusly I ask: is evil more fundamental than good?

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Wii-tastic

I saw this link at a Wii “fanboy” site and just had to mention it… Apparently, the Wii has sold 5 million units world wide since its release last November (so, approximately 3 months). That calculates out to one console sold every 2 seconds!!! In the other console’s lifetimes, the Xbox 360 has sold 9.3 million (in 1 year and 3 months…) and the PS3 has sold 1.9 million (in 3 months). That also represents a net profit for Nintendo of ~$400m (assuming that it costs ~$158 to make a Wii, then sell it for $250, while the retailer gets $12.50/unit) while Microsoft and Sony are losing money in making their systems.

So yeah, the crazy thing is that the Wii is still so hard to find, as I mentioned in an earlier post…

For the record, I’m getting pretty good at Wii Sports, and I’ve got Super Mario Bros. (NES) and Mario Kart 64 (N64) downloaded to the machine…about ready to buy another Wii game to make use of the controller(s), though… Any suggestions?