HT: DF

Anyway, one of the people who tried to get into what appears to have been a private screening of the movie was PZ Myers, a biologist from Morris, MN who is a stern opponent of creationism. His rhetoric knows no bounds, but physically he is every inch the gentleman professor that cliche demands, and immeasurably unlikely to cause a ruckus in public. He wasn’t trying to sneak in, didn’t hide who he was in any way, and was peaceable at all times.

Nonetheless he was removed from the line at the movie theater when waiting to get into the movie, at the request of the producer and, subsequently, the theater manager. I object to banning people in this way because of ideological objections, but it was a private screening so they were entirely within their rights so to do (they got a policeman involved, however, which seems plain wrong). Myers left peaceably, stopping only to tell his family where he would be.

Now for the ironies. The first is that Myers is actually in the movie, and is even thanked at the end for his contribution. That alone would be rich enough, but it pales in comparison to the fact that the rest of Myers’ party was allowed in. Along with his wife and daughter were Richard Dawkins and the entire staff of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. They were not, it appears, too impressed with the film.

It’s the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that’ll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?

I was watching a documentary that mentioned this, and highlighted a factoid that hadn’t occurred to me before. Kittinger was so high up that approximately 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere was below him, and for the first part of his trip what he was falling through wasn’t a great deal thicker than space. On the ground it’s esy to cycle at a speed that sends the wind rushing past your ears, but for the first part of his jump it was basically silent, because there was hardly any wind to rush. I would say that it must have been quite unnerving, except that with the whole plummeting towards the earth at 600 miles per hour with a malfunctioning glove thing going on the lack of noise might not have been a major factor.

(*I’ve heard claims that other military parachutists have since gone higher, but have seen no evidence).

It’s worth recalling Wittgenstein’s remark on the subject. “Tell me,” he asked a friend, “Why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went round the Earth, rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth”. And Wittgenstein replied, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

We are conditioned by who we are, and indeed by what we are, to see things a certain way. That doesn’t mean that we can’t perceive things in a different way (though, as Dawkins argues, that might sometimes be the case), but it does mean that we need to make an effort to avoid falling into the easy default. Often those defaults are handy (well that bottle of bleach might contain champagne, but I’m going to guess it’s just bleach), but many are not. Even more significant, most of our assumptions are unseen; we don’t even know that we’re assuming them. So why don’t you go home today and find something you’ve been taking for granted and challenge it? Unless it’s your wife, of course; I’m trying to challenge you, not get you killed.

The entire video is well worth watching:

Bonus! In a related video David Deutsch points out how untypical our place in the universe is. If we were in a typical place in the universe it would be pitch black; you wouldn’t see anything. If you were then to look at the nearest star at the exact moment it exploded in a supernova, you still wouldn’t see anything

You may be wanting to point out that whales are hardly ever found in space, and you’d be right. But they do exist in a near-zero gravity environment, and hence have similar problems. And their complete lack of elastic webbing means they’ve had to come up with an alternate approach, which is to have another whale swimming around to nudge the couple back into position as needed.

Now I don’t know about you, but I struggle to pee if there’s someone stood behind me, never mind having someone else along for the ride. And given that whales live in pods with other family members… well, no thanks.

The most striking thing, though, was that to study microbes, until very recently, step 1 was to culture large enough quantities that you could work with them. And only around 1% of microbes can be cultured. That means, as one of the interviewees pointed out lest there be any doubt, that we know nothing about 99% of microbes. In the last couple of decades we’ve advanced to the point where we can analyze the DNA of the microbes to learn something about that 99%, but the technology and our understanding are still young.

Still with me? Then here’s the cool bit. There are a number of academics who have made small cameo appearances in movies, mostly in recognition of advice they have given. But there are a small number of ‘proper’ actors/actresses who have also co-authored academic papers. The two most notable are Natalie Portman and Danica McKellar. In case you’re stuck, McKellar was Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years. She was rather attractive then; in fact if you are male and currently aged between 30 and 40 I’d hazard that you either had a crush on her or you didn’t have a TV. And now…well let’s just say that it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, she’s smoking hot. She’s also the McKellar of the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem