Archive for the 'archaeology' Category

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Indiana Cash And The Supermodel Of Doom

I am, I confess, among the most boring men in my family. In a family lineage that includes war heroes, riverboat gamblers, inventors, crusaders and even a guy named King Arthur, I instead write science humor on the interwebs.

Not much to brag about.

That’s not to say I don’t do stuff – I have travelled all over Europe, parts of the mid-east, and a decent chunk of Asia. I’ve gone up against the Bulgarian mafia, done falconry in England and faced down Turkish police. There just isn’t a lot to explore these days and real-life adventuring is so obscure as to be a little weird to take on as a career: There are no inner reaches of Africa left unmapped and the Amazon has better cell phone reception than I get in Silicon Valley.

Heck, even being an astronaut means you only get to drive a glorified delivery van to a warehouse orbiting the globe.

But I look like I do stuff and a few months ago I was at a conference and a woman came up to me and started babbling about interviewing me after a near-disaster in the Lincoln Sea part of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission last year. I looked at her quizzically and finally she noticed.

“I have the wrong person, don’t I?” she asked. I nodded my head (1). “Well, they described him and said he looked like a younger Harrison Ford so I assumed it was you.”

She meant the Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, of course, and not that knucklehead Han Solo in “Star Wars” who mumbled something unintelligible about making the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs.” No one in my family would ever make that kind of grade-school physics mistake.

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Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Female Scientists In Movies: The Top 10

It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.


Lauren Fox. Photo by Gino Domenico

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists – a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

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Thursday, October 19th, 2006

Scientists Discover An Underwater UPS Truck from 2300 Years Ago And Other Shipping News

The best stuff happens with Greeks. An undersea robot has discovered a Greek ship from 350 BC containing ceramic jars of olive oil, wine and whatever else Greek ships carried back then. Imagine that advertising slogan: “We deliver in six weeks or it’s free!” We know that buried ship isn’t carrying the head of Medusa because Teri Hatcher is wearing it on her neck:

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And to add to the goodness that is Greece, archeologists have discovered a huge ancient tomb from 400 BC. Except for pictures of Rocio Guario Diaz ( me – Sweety ) I can’t think of a single thing that excites me more than archeological ruins in Greece. Except maybe Cheez-Doodles. We all know how much those excite me.

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