Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Monday, January 12, 2009
Skeptical movie, a rare breed.
I watched City of Ember, and for all the foibles and issues it still falls into a rare and very nice category: pro-skepticism. After utterly evil movies like Polar Express, it's good to see a movie exalt a little questioning of authority, exploration, and trying to understand the world around us.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Watching Expelled: Underwhelmed beyond expectations. Part 2.
43 minutes in. This douche is in a chair.
Berlin wall of non-academic freedom. Good Comrade. Scientists are bullies. Pull back the clothe, it's like the wizard of oz.
They can't say it's complicated? I've read enough biology papers and reviewed enough to see they say that a lot. The nitty-gritty is a pain in the ass and more complex than you previously thought at pretty much every turn. If not for evolution we'd be completely swamped.
Liberal Christians hate fundamentalists and so they side with the atheists. Those evil colluders!
Evolution says there's no God.
Dawkins turned toward atheism by evolution. Overly frank. He constantly comes off really well.
We don't get even level debate. Those bastards think that ID isn't worthy to be considered on the same level. -- DUH!
Some ID supporting journalist wrote some favorable ID stories and ended up getting laughed at. -- How oppressive!
In Poland the courts don't need to decide. Court cases don't decide anything! Poland doesn't have crappy creationists wanting to teach religion in public schools or the first amendment which says that they can't. Did that polish guy support ID? Seriously? I don't know.
It must be very important! It must be something more sinister!
They move to attack religion in order to stamp out ID! Awe, it's that dumbass who tries to ride Dawkin's coattails. He's totally douche and lame. Another clip of douchey guy in chair.
Why is this clipping out Murrow and making it seem like he supported ID or something? That seems pretty stupid.
Early scientists were believers! Science is biased towards atheism.
But were their other consequences? ...
You're here today and you're gone tomorrow! -- Okay duh.
Guy deconverted by understanding evolution. That's pretty reasonable. No free will? No meaning? That's a bit cold but eh.
I'm going to shoot myself in the head. I don't feel bad about it. That's absolutely seems reasonable.
More deconversion with evolution. Evolution and atheism do have strong correlations.
PZ called it fairy tales! ZOUNDS!
Dawkins says goblins.
Attenborough says it's stupid.
Maher says regulate religion if you're regulating dangerous things
PZ says it's like knitting. Fun, gathering, no importance, and we should let it die a slow death. -- Clearly he wants to eradicate it by force.
HITLER!
Here's somewhere where the Germans killed some handicapped people.
Breeding programs are a human invention which long predate Darwinian evolution. It isn't that they are taken from evolution but rather Darwin's great insight was to see that the same factors which allowed for the breeding of livestock would equally apply to the breeding of animals themselves via slower natural means and that a Malthusian argument could be made for all organisms and, as such, this would cause a gradual improvement in complexity and explain many vast arrays of lingering questions in biology. -- So yeah, pretty much all of it is pretty much nonsense.
Ben Stein keeps asking the tour guide some retarded questions.
Eugenics!
This is why medicine is largely not very sciency.
Planned Parenthood!
Stein is overacting, and doing a crappy job at it. Hitler was very logical. Clearly. Evil but logical. Science is evil! Muahahahahaha! -- This is epic fail.
I know Darwinism isn't responsible for Nazism but Darwinism is responsible for Nazism and it will happen again!!!!
Journalist women is talking about abortion and euthenasia like it's a holocaust. I get the distinct impression that all of these people are very right-wing... why is that?
The Elites control all the research money. No religion!
Ew. You sick bastard. Ben Stein is now in Down House. Isn't there some rule?
Some more sinister walking around.
Hey, there's a statue of Darwin somewhere? That looked pretty cool. I want one.
Jefferson wrote "creator" so values come from God. Scientists aren't alone. Darwinians hate America! It's a massive conspiracy.
Baylor refused to say their issues had to do with ID. Even though it was tainting their good name.
We didn't want ID tainting our names. Avalos is great.
It's just like the Berlin wall!
Dawkins is donning his armor for the coming battle. Armor being make-up and battle being sucked into a fairly nonsensically cut up interview.
Why do you use the word who? -- Dawkins wins. Panspermia is possible, but certainly didn't happen. He supports ID! What? You're a dumbass Mr. Stein.
Stein is obsessed with some gods.
What would you do if you ran into God? "Sir, why did you take such pains to hide yourself." My favorite reply to that kind of question is, "what I would say would depend on how good his apology was."
Back to the lecture.
YOU MAY HAVE YOUR SCIENCE BUT YOU CAN NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM*!!!!
* freedom to take your science out of context and push religion.
I knew I would. I want my hour and a half back!
Berlin wall of non-academic freedom. Good Comrade. Scientists are bullies. Pull back the clothe, it's like the wizard of oz.
They can't say it's complicated? I've read enough biology papers and reviewed enough to see they say that a lot. The nitty-gritty is a pain in the ass and more complex than you previously thought at pretty much every turn. If not for evolution we'd be completely swamped.
Liberal Christians hate fundamentalists and so they side with the atheists. Those evil colluders!
Evolution says there's no God.
Dawkins turned toward atheism by evolution. Overly frank. He constantly comes off really well.
We don't get even level debate. Those bastards think that ID isn't worthy to be considered on the same level. -- DUH!
Some ID supporting journalist wrote some favorable ID stories and ended up getting laughed at. -- How oppressive!
In Poland the courts don't need to decide. Court cases don't decide anything! Poland doesn't have crappy creationists wanting to teach religion in public schools or the first amendment which says that they can't. Did that polish guy support ID? Seriously? I don't know.
It must be very important! It must be something more sinister!
They move to attack religion in order to stamp out ID! Awe, it's that dumbass who tries to ride Dawkin's coattails. He's totally douche and lame. Another clip of douchey guy in chair.
Why is this clipping out Murrow and making it seem like he supported ID or something? That seems pretty stupid.
Early scientists were believers! Science is biased towards atheism.
But were their other consequences? ...
You're here today and you're gone tomorrow! -- Okay duh.
Guy deconverted by understanding evolution. That's pretty reasonable. No free will? No meaning? That's a bit cold but eh.
I'm going to shoot myself in the head. I don't feel bad about it. That's absolutely seems reasonable.
More deconversion with evolution. Evolution and atheism do have strong correlations.
PZ called it fairy tales! ZOUNDS!
Dawkins says goblins.
Attenborough says it's stupid.
Maher says regulate religion if you're regulating dangerous things
PZ says it's like knitting. Fun, gathering, no importance, and we should let it die a slow death. -- Clearly he wants to eradicate it by force.
HITLER!
Here's somewhere where the Germans killed some handicapped people.
Breeding programs are a human invention which long predate Darwinian evolution. It isn't that they are taken from evolution but rather Darwin's great insight was to see that the same factors which allowed for the breeding of livestock would equally apply to the breeding of animals themselves via slower natural means and that a Malthusian argument could be made for all organisms and, as such, this would cause a gradual improvement in complexity and explain many vast arrays of lingering questions in biology. -- So yeah, pretty much all of it is pretty much nonsense.
Ben Stein keeps asking the tour guide some retarded questions.
Eugenics!
This is why medicine is largely not very sciency.
Planned Parenthood!
Stein is overacting, and doing a crappy job at it. Hitler was very logical. Clearly. Evil but logical. Science is evil! Muahahahahaha! -- This is epic fail.
I know Darwinism isn't responsible for Nazism but Darwinism is responsible for Nazism and it will happen again!!!!
Journalist women is talking about abortion and euthenasia like it's a holocaust. I get the distinct impression that all of these people are very right-wing... why is that?
The Elites control all the research money. No religion!
Ew. You sick bastard. Ben Stein is now in Down House. Isn't there some rule?
Some more sinister walking around.
Hey, there's a statue of Darwin somewhere? That looked pretty cool. I want one.
Jefferson wrote "creator" so values come from God. Scientists aren't alone. Darwinians hate America! It's a massive conspiracy.
Baylor refused to say their issues had to do with ID. Even though it was tainting their good name.
We didn't want ID tainting our names. Avalos is great.
It's just like the Berlin wall!
Dawkins is donning his armor for the coming battle. Armor being make-up and battle being sucked into a fairly nonsensically cut up interview.
Why do you use the word who? -- Dawkins wins. Panspermia is possible, but certainly didn't happen. He supports ID! What? You're a dumbass Mr. Stein.
Stein is obsessed with some gods.
What would you do if you ran into God? "Sir, why did you take such pains to hide yourself." My favorite reply to that kind of question is, "what I would say would depend on how good his apology was."
Back to the lecture.
YOU MAY HAVE YOUR SCIENCE BUT YOU CAN NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM*!!!!
* freedom to take your science out of context and push religion.
I knew I would. I want my hour and a half back!
Watching Expelled, prepairing for underwhelmity.
Expelled Exposed.
Intro with spiced up prison camps.
Freedom is great, freedom makes us great, but what if we didn't have freedom?
We are losing our freedoms in science!
Creationists does something stupid, gets canned. (I expect this shall be a theme)
Shermer things "something else going on". -- Yup. Apparently he published the paper faking the peer review himself and was lambasted for not going through proper channels and for completely abusing his authority.
Another creationist starts teaching creationism and is not invited back to work more for the university. -- Zounds.
Doctor says evolution is false. -- Internet is mean to him.
Mark sets ups a fake lab at Baylor and it gets shut down. Baylor, though a Baptist university, is actually pretty good. Although, they recently fired the president and decided to go way more stupid. So any diplomas pre-2008 are probably legit.
Astronomer doesn't get tenure. Um. Nobody guarantees you tenure and I think ID would be a pretty good reason to deny you. Look how screwed over Behe tenure at Lehigh worked out. He doesn't publish papers anymore and he's a complete embarrassment. Lehigh is a good school but in my mind I associate it with stupidity.
"We don't want people to be taught that the earth is flat or that the holocaust never happened." -- Um, irony of irony, this movie got condemned by the Anti-Defamation league for holocaust denial. I haven't yet been confronted with this part of the film, so I suspect it is going to get much worse.
Ben Stein is lost... still lost.
He found it.
He talks with the Discovery Institute then a Bible college and then a bunch of religious points. They are suppose to keep up this front.
Evolution:Intelligent Design::Newtonian Physics:Einsteinian Physics... ? Really? Somebody needs to read Isaac Asimov's Relativity of Wrong to get the basic idea of how science works. Sure you can evolve but how does evolution do design? Wow that's pretty dumb.
It isn't going to be settled by the numbers but by the evidence and the arguments. If ID had any of those, they'd be set!
Now Ben's in France. Nothing's clear, you don't have very much math. We don't have a good idea of what a species is! -- That's true but has no bearing on evolution. I'm considerably underwhelmed here.
Dawkins is back. These clips are the only oasis in the whole thing. Though Dawkins atheism is fairly different than his evolution belief. There's certainly a relationship there, but it's pretty unrelated.
First cell? -- What long before that it works fine even in the RNA world.
No explanation for abiogenesis. Claims Miller's experiments were wrong. Popular theory is crystals! He's not joking because that's actually a really good theory. What the hell?
Ben Stein's Money joke...
250 proteins so it's math wise inconceivable. That's not possible! The problem with every last thing that says anything remotely close to this is that we don't actually know what the very minimal would be and we get evolution kicking in pretty early making all the future odds non-existent (once evolution kicks in the odds are ~1 that you get something, moreso considering it already happened).
Directed panspermia? That's mostly in jest and simply outsources the problem. Though if 4 billion years isn't enough we can use most of the 13.7 billion years to do whatever we need. Though, 2 billion seems more than enough.
A gigabyte. Zounds. I could put my genetic code on my thumbdrive. Oh the humanity!
I'm lost. I'm not even sure what I'm suppose to be impressed with.
Hey, it's that stolen Harvard animation that ERV talked so much about. Making for one of the few good bits in this entire production. Ouch, they changed it a lot. This is actually way worse in places. The Harvard animation was better.
Where do you get information from? Isn't that a question for computer scientists. Hey, I'm one of those and have an okay understanding of information theory. Let me explain. SDFKDSfioasdfoijsdfjasd2-289023d8923di2klj2kl;3dmkmndalksdfds -- That's more information than pretty much anything else I've typed here. Any mutation would produce information just as there is more information in the TV static than their is in the TV show. Evolution largely works to parse this information and isolate via natural selection any little bit that lucks into creating an organism marginally better than it's cousins. What? They are still harping on this crap?
OH SWEET SPAGHETTI MONSTER! I'm ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH!!! ARG!!! -- I'm burnt out about now. I'll try some more a bit later.
Intro with spiced up prison camps.
Freedom is great, freedom makes us great, but what if we didn't have freedom?
We are losing our freedoms in science!
Creationists does something stupid, gets canned. (I expect this shall be a theme)
Shermer things "something else going on". -- Yup. Apparently he published the paper faking the peer review himself and was lambasted for not going through proper channels and for completely abusing his authority.
Another creationist starts teaching creationism and is not invited back to work more for the university. -- Zounds.
Doctor says evolution is false. -- Internet is mean to him.
Mark sets ups a fake lab at Baylor and it gets shut down. Baylor, though a Baptist university, is actually pretty good. Although, they recently fired the president and decided to go way more stupid. So any diplomas pre-2008 are probably legit.
Astronomer doesn't get tenure. Um. Nobody guarantees you tenure and I think ID would be a pretty good reason to deny you. Look how screwed over Behe tenure at Lehigh worked out. He doesn't publish papers anymore and he's a complete embarrassment. Lehigh is a good school but in my mind I associate it with stupidity.
"We don't want people to be taught that the earth is flat or that the holocaust never happened." -- Um, irony of irony, this movie got condemned by the Anti-Defamation league for holocaust denial. I haven't yet been confronted with this part of the film, so I suspect it is going to get much worse.
Ben Stein is lost... still lost.
He found it.
He talks with the Discovery Institute then a Bible college and then a bunch of religious points. They are suppose to keep up this front.
Evolution:Intelligent Design::Newtonian Physics:Einsteinian Physics... ? Really? Somebody needs to read Isaac Asimov's Relativity of Wrong to get the basic idea of how science works. Sure you can evolve but how does evolution do design? Wow that's pretty dumb.
It isn't going to be settled by the numbers but by the evidence and the arguments. If ID had any of those, they'd be set!
Now Ben's in France. Nothing's clear, you don't have very much math. We don't have a good idea of what a species is! -- That's true but has no bearing on evolution. I'm considerably underwhelmed here.
Dawkins is back. These clips are the only oasis in the whole thing. Though Dawkins atheism is fairly different than his evolution belief. There's certainly a relationship there, but it's pretty unrelated.
First cell? -- What long before that it works fine even in the RNA world.
No explanation for abiogenesis. Claims Miller's experiments were wrong. Popular theory is crystals! He's not joking because that's actually a really good theory. What the hell?
Ben Stein's Money joke...
250 proteins so it's math wise inconceivable. That's not possible! The problem with every last thing that says anything remotely close to this is that we don't actually know what the very minimal would be and we get evolution kicking in pretty early making all the future odds non-existent (once evolution kicks in the odds are ~1 that you get something, moreso considering it already happened).
Directed panspermia? That's mostly in jest and simply outsources the problem. Though if 4 billion years isn't enough we can use most of the 13.7 billion years to do whatever we need. Though, 2 billion seems more than enough.
A gigabyte. Zounds. I could put my genetic code on my thumbdrive. Oh the humanity!
I'm lost. I'm not even sure what I'm suppose to be impressed with.
Hey, it's that stolen Harvard animation that ERV talked so much about. Making for one of the few good bits in this entire production. Ouch, they changed it a lot. This is actually way worse in places. The Harvard animation was better.
Where do you get information from? Isn't that a question for computer scientists. Hey, I'm one of those and have an okay understanding of information theory. Let me explain. SDFKDSfioasdfoijsdfjasd2-289023d8923di2klj2kl;3dmkmndalksdfds -- That's more information than pretty much anything else I've typed here. Any mutation would produce information just as there is more information in the TV static than their is in the TV show. Evolution largely works to parse this information and isolate via natural selection any little bit that lucks into creating an organism marginally better than it's cousins. What? They are still harping on this crap?
OH SWEET SPAGHETTI MONSTER! I'm ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH!!! ARG!!! -- I'm burnt out about now. I'll try some more a bit later.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Amazon preorders for Expelled.
So Expelled is going to DVD soon which means Amazon is preordering (if you don't order right away they might not have them in the bargain bin by next month). P.Z. Myers Pharyngulaed the reviews with other people who have seen the film... it's pretty much all 5 or all 1. This includes some of the worst votes I've ever seen. 5 positive out of several 300 and the like.
Any mention of that crappy movie must also mention Expelled Exposed on the off chance one of you is ignorant but not stupid (believed the movie because you didn't have good information but know real data when you see it).
Any mention of that crappy movie must also mention Expelled Exposed on the off chance one of you is ignorant but not stupid (believed the movie because you didn't have good information but know real data when you see it).
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Sunday, December 23, 2007
I Am Legend-arily bad.
{{Spoiler Warning}}
I hate to say it but there's so much potential there. You even see the original ending there, ready made for the movie. However, pow, God did it. Really, had the reasoning for the survivalist colony been "I heard on the radio from somewhere else" or "I have actual information from the mainland and you've been cut off from everything for years" sure. It was attributed to God. And I daresay 90% of the world population dropping dead, 9% going zombie, and 1% surviving to be eaten by the zombies is a good argument for the non-existence of an all-powerful benevolent god. Certainly, atheism is called for, but a mountain town... not really.
Also, if you have three years and know exactly what you're fighting. You might want to have a better defended base of operations.
The original ending to the film was that he was the monster. The people were still alive and kind of messed up, but he was the monster going about and killing them. He kidnapped a woman. The same man who tried to save her by running a bit out in the sun was the same who set the trap with the manikin, and who lead the attack on his house at the end. Really, he was trying to save the woman the doctor took. He was just going around murdering people willy-nilly... and it was really he who was the monster. Zing. That would have been the right ending, and a good one at that... but no... atheist doctor can't even believe in a mountain town. If you can't believe in God you can't believe in anything. Also, a number of his defenses were actually good enough. You're telling me a vault in the basement isn't enough? And what the hell good were those lights? He used them a lot for being completely ineffective.
It was 98% of a great movie. I hope they offer alternate endings on the DVD.
I hate to say it but there's so much potential there. You even see the original ending there, ready made for the movie. However, pow, God did it. Really, had the reasoning for the survivalist colony been "I heard on the radio from somewhere else" or "I have actual information from the mainland and you've been cut off from everything for years" sure. It was attributed to God. And I daresay 90% of the world population dropping dead, 9% going zombie, and 1% surviving to be eaten by the zombies is a good argument for the non-existence of an all-powerful benevolent god. Certainly, atheism is called for, but a mountain town... not really.
Also, if you have three years and know exactly what you're fighting. You might want to have a better defended base of operations.
The original ending to the film was that he was the monster. The people were still alive and kind of messed up, but he was the monster going about and killing them. He kidnapped a woman. The same man who tried to save her by running a bit out in the sun was the same who set the trap with the manikin, and who lead the attack on his house at the end. Really, he was trying to save the woman the doctor took. He was just going around murdering people willy-nilly... and it was really he who was the monster. Zing. That would have been the right ending, and a good one at that... but no... atheist doctor can't even believe in a mountain town. If you can't believe in God you can't believe in anything. Also, a number of his defenses were actually good enough. You're telling me a vault in the basement isn't enough? And what the hell good were those lights? He used them a lot for being completely ineffective.
It was 98% of a great movie. I hope they offer alternate endings on the DVD.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)