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.

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.

(more…)

When President George Bush announced in 2004 that he wanted to reinvigorate space exploration, he presented a number of arguments for increasing funding but they were all rather tepid. Space exploration technology, for example, led to CAT scans and MRIs. Oh, and we got better weather forecasting.

Honestly, those are pretty weak arguments to justify an organization that gets almost $15 billion per year. Why not mention Tang and a pen that writes upside down? At least Tang is something most of us have had. I have never had an MRI.

Since then we have had some interesting projects take off; the Dawn misson to Ceres, for example, but nothing that really captured the attention of the common man. The space shuttle is, let’s face it, boring.

I remember one episode of Farscape where our lead character, who piloted a ship through a wormhole and discovered all kinds of interesting things, speaks with reverence about his astronaut father who was … a space shuttle pilot. I started laughing even though it wasn’t supposed to be funny. That’s how far the space program had fallen - the only recent thing that young people could idolize was the equivalent of a high-altitude delivery truck.

(more…)

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

(more…)

I guess the NY Times is just discovering that Halloween is the perfect time for women to let out their inner tramp.

Men knew this. Hell, we invented Halloween many years ago for no other reason than to get Celtic women out of those ill-fitting robes and into some cool outfits.

Even seeing that picture makes me feel all piratey. If she were here I’d totally make her surrender her booty.

“It’s a night when even a nice girl can dress like a dominatrix and still hold her head up the next morning,” said Linda M. Scott, the author of Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism and a professor of marketing at the University of Oxford in England.

(more…)

It confuses some people that I can be an environmentalist and a Republican. It’s confusing because Democrats are handed a checklist of “coalition of the oppressed” platforms they have to believe in, so they don’t understand picking and choosing positions based on logic and common sense. Republicans don’t much care if you are for ice-picking fetus skulls or paying high taxes, as long as you have an oil well in your backyard and all of your TV channels parent-blocked except Fox News. Republicans have a pretty big umbrella that way, mostly because rich white guys can only buy so many votes and thus they have to broaden their appeal.

So people are confused that I can think Al Gore is an opportunistic shill mobilizing the left with deceit and still care about good old Mama Earth. Well, I do, but instead of asking someone to nationalize Exxon or fly airplanes all over the world telling people they should ride bicycles, I do practical things. Small differences add up to big effects. And I can show you how to make a difference too.

Everyone likes to talk about making a difference but no one is really sure what works. Carbon credits? Scam. Carbon offsets? Scam, only liable to make you rich, so worthy of consideration. But while you get rich selling carbon offsets to suckers on Craigs List, how can you legitimately lower your carbon footprint yet maintain the decadent western lifestyle you’ve come to enjoy?

The answer is simple, my fellow environmentalists: fruit power.

(more…)