The Questioning Librarian

Camarasaurus - very definitely a dinosaur Last time, I wrote about bad science in terrible creature features. One of the things I noted was the tendency of the actors and writers to refer to anything old and extinct as a dinosaur. Of course, this is a problem in that it displays a poor understanding of what a dinosaur actually is, but this misunderstanding isn't limited to bad science fiction films. It instead reflects a larger societal misunderstanding of what constitutes a dinosaur--any big, dead reptile gets lumped into the category of "dinosaur." But in reality, paleontologists have a very specific definition of what a dinosaur is. In the first place, dinosaurs are diapsids, animals that have two openings in their skull behind the eyes (fenestra). Other diapsids include birds, lizards, and crocodiles, but this characteristic alone separates them from the synapsids (one opening behind the eye), a group that includes mammals, and from the anapsids (no openi...

Everyone has their guilty pleasures, whether it is chocolate, Korean television dramas, or even Irish coffee. Among my guilty pleasures I have to include watching cheesy, truly awful science fiction "creature features." These movies are, unlike some major Hollywood films that simply come off as ridiculous, never intended to be high theater, or to be premiered at red carpet events and break box office records. These are made quickly and are generally tongue-in-cheek ridiculous the whole way through. There is just something about their terrible acting, their ridiculous plots and horrible special effects that entertain me to no end. Believe me, I enjoy good films just as much as the next, but there are some times when I just want to sit back and watch a bad movie with ice spiders , giant sharks , and prehistoric beasts . But if there is one thing I hate about bad science fiction movies it is some of the terrible, outlandish science that gets put in--and nothing raises my hackle...

On this blog, I generally spend time railing against the demonstrable idiocies of the young-earth creationists, but this is in no way to say that anti-evolution sentiment is the only form of unreason that is running about. No, there are many other forms that irrationality takes, from those I've touched on in this blog (the anti-vaccine movement) to those I haven't (birthers, UFO enthusiasts). Some of these forms of irrationality are rather harmless, like the old belief that Elvis wasn't actually dead, but some ideas which are quite unreasonable are not harmless at all. The anti-vaccine movement actively endangers the health of the public, and the creationists retard science education. But one other has been bothering me for some time, a topic that was easier left alone while criticism was levied against groups like the Discovery Institute and Answers in Genesis. The topic is, as you may have guessed, gay marriage and the LGBTQ rights movement--or rather the opposition to t...

Last week I finished up a short online course through the University of Edinburgh on astrobiology, the science concerned with the possibility of the existence of life on other planets. It was fascinating, if a bit short at only five weeks with a handful of lectures each week. While it is probably easy for the ignorant to misunderstand and mock this discipline, the question of whether or not life exists on other worlds is a legitimate and interesting field, and it encompasses so many smaller areas of study. Astrobiology seeks to understand how life arose here on Earth in the first place, wondering how it started, what early earth was like--and as far as that goes, what the first life looked like. It also studies life in great extremes, whether extremes of heat or of pressure, to try to grasp the limits to life in order to understand where life might possibly exist (as an aside, were you aware that microbial life survived in space for over a year, in one experiment?). Along with that, i...