Get your giant robot dinosaur on

Full disclosure up front: about two months ago, someone associated with Walking With Dinosaurs: The Live Experience got in touch with me to see if I'd be interested in blogging about the show. Tickets were mentioned.

I put him off for a LOOONG time. Mainly because the only two California shows are in late December and early January, and I thought I'd be unavailable for both. But it turns out I will be town the first week of January after all, so I'm accepting the tickets and blogging about the show.

Now that you know I'm a corporate shill, you can believe what follows or not. I'm gonna say it anyway. If you suspect contamination, feel free to compare this post with everything else I've ever said about pop-culture dinosaurs, big machines, and monster movies, and see if I'm writing true to form. To their credit, the folks at Insight Management have been tremendously patient and they haven't given me any pointers or restrictions on what to say, beyond asking that I direct folks to the official site for photos and videos. Fair nuff.

FIRST thing is that I've been meaning to blog about this anyway, because it looks awesome. Jarrod sent a link to one of the videos months ago. The animatronic dinosaurs are very smooth. I love robots. My affection for dinosaurs goes a few orders of magnitude beyond that. So I was already on board.

SECOND thing is that I am continually surprised at how unpopular dinosaur shows and movies are among paleontologists. At least recent ones. The consensus seems to be that Ray Harryhausen's work is beyond reproof (which is true, if a little patronizing given what follows), but bring up Jurassic Park or Walking With Dinosaurs or the new King Kong and it's carp carp carp carp. Some favorites:


"They're just exploiting dinosaurs to make money!"

Goodness gracious! Why, I never! Those horrible capitalists, making a killing by selling people what they'll pay for. I'm equally outraged by the science fiction workers (in any medium) who exploit my yen for creepy aliens, space battleships, and exploding planets. Which is to say, not outraged at all, and in fact quite in favor of it. I'm still a little put out about the general lack of exploding dinosaurs, which I've mentioned here twice before. What do I gotta do, write a paper about it? Oh, speaking of:

"But you're a scientist. You work hard. What if they take your work and use it to make a movie and you never see a penny?"

Yes, yes, I am put upon. But let me see if I can climb down off the Science Cross and take a stab at this one. The possibility that someone else will use my ideas without paying me is a side effect of the maxim that science should be free. Mine is. Don't get me wrong, I love consulting on media projects. Because the gig is basically answering questions about dinosaurs--something I like doing and usually do for free anyway--and the amount of money that media folks have to throw around is pretty sweet compared to what I make lecturing about photosynthesis. But better than the money is the ability to sleep the sleep of the innocent, knowing that I have given the fruits of my labor to all mankind. Sounds melodramatic, I know. But it's true. If someone uses that to make a better monster movie, that's gravy.

The granddaddy of all ex-paleo objections to pop culture dinosaurs, though, is that...

"That's so unrealistic! Why, just look at the external nostril! It must be at least two-thirds of the way back in the bony naris--it's nowhere near Witmer-compliant!"

Yes, it's true, pop culture dinosaurs always fall short of full scientific respectability. Always. If you can show me a counter-example, I can give you at least half a dozen reasons why it actually sucks. I can think of at least three reasons why this is so:

- Media folks are in the making money off dinosaurs business, not the making textbooks business. See above.

- Paleontologists rarely agree about anything. I'm not just talking about stuff like BADD vs BAND, boredothermic vs apathetothermic, etc. I mean everything, from nostril position and pupil shape and size on out to muscle mass, fat deposits, etc. Or rather, we do have broad areas of agreement where the scientific questions are pretty much settled. But those areas are generally not the ones that are of much use if you're trying to reconstruct a living critter that looks and behaves convincingly. Like it or not, the whole life restoration business has a bit of a stigma amongst some Serious Paleontologists. Even if one could generate a static restoration that satisfied everyone, as soon as it moved an inch someone would start bitching.

As a case in point, there are aspects of the WWD sauropods with which I disagree violently. And the advisors who told 'em to do it that way are friends of mine, whom I like personally and whose work I respect. But (#1) respect and agree with are not the same. And (#2) only the paleontologist part of me disagrees violently. The guy-who-likes-dinosaurs side, which has an 18-year head start, thinks CGI sauropods rock and has literally spent hours watching them stomp around.

- I don't even agree with myself. The paleontologist part of me is a bit over a decade old, and I look back at some of the stuff that came out of my word processor back then and just shake my head. There is a line from an SVP abstract that I would erase from all human memory if I could. It's so appallingly dumb I'll probably end up blogging about it. But I've made peace with all that. Scott Aaronson has opined that if you're not occasionally wrong, your science is boring (not in that specific post, I just like that one and can't be bothered to find the real one). My ambition since I started has been to push (my particular tiny corner of) the edge of the envelope. Not for fame or glory. For curiosity. As soon as I get to the top of one hill, I want to see what the view from the next one looks like. And occasionally I've been wrong. That's life. More importantly, that's also science.

This is the tip of whole 'nother rant, about how science actually works and about the entirely overdone phobia among scientists of ever admitting that we've ever been mistaken about anything, which I'll have to expand on later.


But back to task. There is the practical matter, which is that a documentary or book that followed every one of my ideas to the letter would be outdated in a couple of years even to me. And there is the not-being-a-colossal-hypocrite matter, which is that if I can cut myself that amount of slack, I should be equally easy on other scientists (not easier--birds really are dinosaurs, etc.--just equally easy). If we're all ever 100% right, then science is over and we can get back to Resident Metal HaloStrike III with a clear conscience. Or commit suicide because we're bored to tears. And if I can forgive my fellow scientists for occasionally veering away from the Word According to Matt, I should multiply that forgiveness a couple of times to non-scientists who do stuff with dinosaurs. Who, in my admittedly limited experience, usually do want to get it right and are often baffled by the contradictory cacaphony coming out of the Academy--even as those of us on the inside recognize that conflict is vital to the success of the scientific process.

And--importantly--there is the guy-who-likes-dinosaurs matter, because he doesn't really care where the external nostrils are. Hell, he's nearly cried just daydreaming about live dinosaurs (and been man enough to admit it), so he'll probably wet himself when the life-size animatronic T-rex comes out and starts wrecking shop.


I'm still not done.

The ultimate reason why I am blissfully unruffled about the perceived scientific failures of the recent CGI dinofests is that I cut teeth on Saturday afternoon reruns and 50s-vintage dinosaur books. When I was 5 I knew all about Antrodemus and Trachodon, both of which stood bolt upright and dragged their tails, just like God and Neave Parker intended. (How many of you Gen Z weenies know what the hell I'm talking about [without any help from Google or Wikipedia]?) Where I came from, you couldn't get through a dinosaur movie without a fur-clad stud chucking a spear at a carnosaur while a bat-winged pterodactyl made off with the scantily-clad object of his affection. Three-fingered tyrannosaurs duking it out with giant apes, submarines fighting Brobdingnagian cephalopods, pissed-off brontosaurs eating guys out of trees, and cowboys lassoing dinosaurs in a lost valley--we had it all.

And I turned out all right.

So I'm pretty sure that the current generation of up-and-coming paleontologists will survive near-sighted tyrannosaurs and Diplodocus ovipositors. In fact, given that many of the current (and, okay, slightly older) generation freely admit that they became paleontologists because of the efforts of Ray Harryhausen, Neave Parker, et al., I'm willing to bet that CGI dinosaurs are one of the best things that ever happened to this science, even (maybe especially) when said dinosaurs stomped in from off-campus.


That goes for immense non-CG robot dinosaurs that roam around live on stage, too.

Anyway, to reiterate the main points of this essay, WWD Live looks pretty sweet, it's playing in San Jose on Dec. 26-30 and in Sacramento on Jan. 3-6 (other cities and dates are listed on the site), and barring cosmic accidents or someone giving me the axe for overly-genocidey blogging, I'll be there. And then back here to give my honest opinion.

The first and last photos are off the WWD Live tyrannosaur, and were provided by the folks at Insight Management. The rest are screencaps from One Million Years B.C. (#2) and The Valley of Gwangi (3 and 4) borrowed from various places on the interwebs.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Hail Xenoposeidon!

I reckon the readership overlap between this blog and SV-POW! is near-total, but just in case some of you haven't seen it yet, my oft-mentioned homeboys Mike Taylor (right) and Darren Naish (left) have described a new sauropod dinosaur, Xenoposeidon. Xeno, of course, is Greek for "strange" or "alien", and "poseidon" means "based on very few vertebrae".


Here's Mike getting some quality time with the holotype and only known specimen of Xenoposeidon. Emotive hearts added by his junior author, oddly enough.

How strange is this thing (Xenoposeidon, that is, not Mike, Darren, or the hearts)? You'll be finding out all week at SV-POW, but if I had to sum it up in a soundbite I'd say it's officially Damn Weird.

Conceptual artifacts from my inbox

I am now almost incapable of blogging without putting in some pictures. Since this post is a roundup of random sweetness, here's a B-58 Hustler, an airplane that says, "Scuze me, I'll try not to slap you right in the face with my megaton-yield supersonic penis."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After a long dry spell, today the e-mail heavens parted and unleashed a torrent of awesome.

For all of you currently on the job market, here's a dynamite rejection rejection letter you may want to crib from. Thanks to Mike for the tip.

Prepare to bow your naked monkey ass down before the slimy ichthyological overlords. Moray eels have been spotted hunting together with groupers (story here, paper here). Can global takeover be far behind? Can you afford not to FREAK OUT RIGHT NOW?

Is PLoS going to hell in a handbasket? I thought so after reading the msnbc version, which states (ahem):
This is the first example of coordinated hunting seen in fish, and the first known instance of cooperative hunting between species seen outside humans, researchers said.

Which is horseshit, at least the second part, because coyotes and badgers sometimes hunt together and papers on this were published as early as 1884 (short summary and list of refs here).

But then I actually read the paper, which starts with the words:
"Cooperative hunting, i.e., the increase in successful prey capture observed when two or more individuals engage in a hunt, has been demonstrated in a wide variety of species."

The authors then go on to parse out exactly how much cooperation there is in the different systems. The fish score very high, and that's the news. So the "this is the FIRST cooperative hunting we've EVER SEEN!!! OMG! w00t! LOL!" b.s. can be chalked up to some dumbass writer simplifying things to the point that they are, er, completely wrong.

Which is, unfortunately, not all that rare.

Thanks to Mike for that one, too.

Not quite finally, Katie put me on to The Big Switch Off, which calls for all of us that love the Earth to not use any energy this weekend. My immediate thought: why is this scheduled for December? Here in the Northern Hemisphere we'ze freezin' our giblets off, whilst in Australia people are beset by raging wildfires and rampant swamp-ass. Wouldn't the spring equinox have been a better target? People all around the world could get nekkid and go run around in the woods and smoke the flora.

AAAAANYWAY, the funny really starts at this blog, where--I'm just guessing here--non-greenie Tim Blair encouraged his readers to "Please offer in comments your own plans for this weekend’s environmental footprintism." A top pick is comment #75, a veritable turducken of Gaia rape:

I’m going to club a baby seal to death with a spotted owl. Then I’m going to freeze the baby seal corpse and launch it from a harpoon gun at a humpback whale. Then I’ll stuff the dead whale full of burning tires and catapult it at the Rainbow Warrior. [link added]

Really finally, just because I haven't been to this site in about a year but remember really digging it, here is Steve, Don't Eat It! The writing here is freakin' great, so you can be grossed out, amazed, informed, and thoroughly entertained all at once.

Everything in the world should be this cool (see, e.g., the photo above).

Can a Twinkie pass the Turing test?

Probably not.

Humans, the hors d'oeuvre tray of evolution

By and large, people are just meat on the hoof. This has been true for our entire history, and it's still true today, the Enlightenment, iPods, and global warming notwithstanding. Nature looks at us and smacks her slavering lips hungrily, and even in our fortress of industrialization we are not secure. Need proof? Check out the Animal Attack Files.

Here are my current favorites.

Lakeland, FL - 30 Nov 2006: Alligator Attacks Man, Rips Off Arm

"We don't know whether he'll make it or not," said Polk Sheriff Grady Judd. According to wire reports, the man admitted to 'using drugs', which might explain why he waded, naked, into a gator-infested pond in the middle of the night.

So really it's not so much "alligator attacks man" as "dumbass puts his drug-addled carcass in path of alligator, which behaves perfectly naturally".

London, KY - 7 Nov 2006: Woman Fatally Bitten by Snake in Church
A detective with the Laurel County Sheriff's Office said that Linda Long, 48, was attending a service at East London Holiness Church, which reportedly practices serpent handling. Handling reptiles as part of religious services is a misdemeanor in Kentucky, punishable by a small fine.

Yeah, punishable by a small fine or DEATH! Once again, the story is really "dumbass deliberately places self in path of reptilian destruction". That's what you get at the Holy Shrine of St. Bubba the Late Rattlesnake-Smooching Half-Tard.

Delicious.

Image stolen from here.

Hellboy online

At some point I ought to blog about my deep and abiding love of all things Hellboy. Comics, movie, art, mythos, the whole shebang.

In the meantime, here are some e-comics featuring HB.

...and life beyond

Okay, belying what I just wrote, I always have time for highly evolved posthumans (the image above is borrowed from the link target). And while you're at it, go look up one of the greats in this weird, awesome field, Wayne Douglas Barlowe.

Update: Woah. The guy who painted the thing above goes by the handle Nemo Ramjet, and he has a lot more cool, weird stuff on his site. Freak out with your geek out.

Rockets

When I was a kid, I was in 4-H. 4-H was definitely not as cool as Boy Scouts, but there were no Boy Scout troops around and there was a 4-H club. When you hear 4-H, you probably think of farm kids showing their prize pigs at the county fair. I did show a lot of stuff at the county fair, but mostly drawings, photos, and models (I did show some chickens once). 4-H had programs for all of these things and more. But mainly I was in 4-H for one thing: rockets.

I discovered model rockets through 4-H. The appeal is pretty straightforward. You build a rocket and then you fly it. The kits are cardboard and balsa, you get commercially-produced solid fuel motors at hobby stores, and the ignition system is electrical. It's all very safe and sanitary, assuming you follow the safety code, which is full of no-brainers like "don't try to build your own rocket motors" and "make sure everyone is standing at least 10 feet back from the launch pad before you push the ignition button." And this fragile thing that you built yourself roars off the pad and flies up to 1000 feet. It is very, very cool.

I used to build and launch rockets with my brothers and my cousins, and of course we started violating the code left and right. Just the little ones, things like "make sure your rocket has a recovery system" (most come down on parachutes or streamers, or glide down) and "do not launch your rocket at a target." There's really one one rule in the safety code that is best not broken, and that's the one about making your own motors. There aren't many horror stories associated with rocketry (unless you count rockets eaten by trees, or parachutes that failed to open), and those that exist mainly describe how Billy Bob Butthead blew off his thumbs or blinded himself experimenting with homemake rocket fuel.

I have a zillion rocket anecdotes, and maybe someday I'll share some. But the purpose of this post is to provide myself with an annotated list of cool rocketry sites. If you find it useful or entertaining, that's gravy.

The best site I've found for cheap rockets and supplies is HobbyLinc.com. They cover all the major manufacturers, and they usually have some screaming deals.

The granddaddy of the commercial rocket manufacturers: Estes. No one else makes so many rockets, but...it seems like the older Estes kits had a lot more character. Too many of the ones they offer these days are simple 3FNCs (that's "three fins and a nose cone"). One exception is the new F-15-like Screaming Eagle. Fortunately, if you have a yen for old Estes kits, you can get them vintage at suppliers like Modelrockets.co.uk, or get clone kits from Thrustline Aerospace, or build them from scratch using the damn-near-exhaustive blueprints at JimZ Rocket Plans.

Most of those companies offer kits, clones, or blueprints from other rocket manufacturers. Notable ones include:

Quest Aerospace makes some very cool kits reminiscent of old Estes offerings, including the thoroughly badass Space Shuttle Intrepid, a glider that is carried up by a mothership.

Custom Rockets also makes kits with a lot of character, like the old Estes stuff.

Semroc has a lot of cool kits. Their Retro-Repro line consists of clones of old Estes and Centauri kits, including two of the sweetest model rockets ever sold, the Estes Mars Lander and the Centauri SST Shuttle-1, another shuttle/mothership combo.

QModeling has staked out a nice little niche: they only make upscale clones of old Estes kits, including the Starship Vega and Mars Snooper.

Squirrel Works has some rockets with a lot of pad presence, not least their Flash Gordonesque Ajax and especially the Fokker-inspired Mega Baron glider.

FlisKits specializes in wacked-out stuff like a giant rocket made out of coffee cups, and some badass sci-fi models.

Edmonds Aerospace specializes in gliders, from teeny ones with 6-inch wingspans up to monsters 3 or 4 feet long.

Art Applewhite Rockets makes the guys at FlisKits look downright sane, with rockets made from disposable plastic plates and Bic pens and even more unlikely shapes.

Just for completeness, LOC Precision makes high-power rockets...that are mostly 4FNCs (yawn).

Not quite finally, I have a serious jones for the Refit U.S.S. Atlantis from Sirius Rocketry. The old Estes U.S.S. Atlantis was styled after the starship Enterprise from old Star Trek. The Sirius "refit" is a near-clone updated to match the stylings of the movie Enterprise.

Finally (for now), the guy at Excelsior Rocketry sells decals and plans. My favorite among his products are the Goony sets, which use an Estes Baby Bertha to kitbash stubby versions of classic Estes kits. Hmm...I wonder if you could make a Goony Strike Fighter...

UPDATES: Put your local hobby store out of business by picking up cheap kits from Belleville Hobby and their even cheaper outlet, Estes Rockets Wholesale.

Get your DIY on with Jimmy Yawn's awesome pages on rolling your own rockets.

Video rocketry. Self-explanatory. Wicked cool.

Finally (again, for now), Ralph Currell's card models are not designed to fly, but they're not designed not to fly, and some of them do.

MORE UPDATES: Essence Model Rocket Reviews has a simply unbelievable amount of information on the construction and performance of damn near everything.

Attack of the clones: resources for cloning classic kits.

Apogee Components has all kinds of cool stuff, including an article on making rocket components out of paper.

The Rocketry Blog is another good site with lots of resources, including garbage rockets (i.e., scratchbuilt from household items) and probably the largest list of paper rockets anywhere.