It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

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If you were a young-ish science student in the mid-1980s there are two movies that remain in your collection to this day; Back To The Future and, of course, Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension.

‘Buckaroo Banzai’ was completely inplausible – even I can’t be a rock star, neurosurgeon and world class physicist. Well, maybe I can, but you can’t and even I don’t have my own video game and comic book like he does.

So for actual science discussions, Back To The Future remains the default movie of the period. Like Yahoo Serious in “Young Einstein”, Marty ends up doing some science (in Marty’s case by accident) but also invents rock and roll. Rock and roll shows up a lot in science movies. This is because music is math and math was created to give scientists something to do while sleeping. (more…)

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.

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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.

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There’s a lot of “Can X make you gay?” articles being written these days. This fellow says soy is making you gay and even the New York Times wonders if you have a gay car.

Now a study from the University of Pittsburgh says that fish from Pittsburgh rivers contain substances that act like estrogen.

Estrogen. The female hormone. So you’ll have to forgive me for the topical television reference, but when a show called Queer As Folk is set in Pittsburgh, ‘fish’ is going to jump in there rather naturally.

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I saw a press release about a global warming ‘virtual march’ ( we’ll get back to that ) and a tour being conducted by Laurie David ( married to “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David and thus an expert on climate science, also founder of the website that put out the press release ) and Sheryl Crow called the “Stop Global Warming College Tour” beginning April 9th in Dallas.

I was itching to find more information about it and, other than discovering they were going to show clips from Al Gore’s movie ( yeah, no college student will have seen that ) and Sheryl Crow would sing a few songs at each stop, the only interesting thing I came across was an article in something called the Post Chronicle where the author makes a joking reference to a “girls gone green” tour likely being a better idea. You know, kind of like “Girls Gone Wild” except the beads they get are made of hemp – and they hopefully won’t be chunky sorority sisters on drunken binges.

You mean they haven’t done something like that yet??? No one would ever have heard of PETA if they didn’t go on trial for killing homeless pets and get aging supermodels like Christy Turlington ( perhaps NSFW ) to pose naked in their advertisements.

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Population science is more art than science so you can count on me to be a little skeptical. However, there are times when the numbers are just too alarming and we have to mobilize for action.

What is this looming population catastrophe? It’s Elvis impersonators. Even the Center for Disease Control has sounded the alarm about this issue.  If the CDC is worried about an issue, so am I.

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, there were an estimated 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1993, there were 48,000 Elvis impersonators, an exponential increase. Extrapolating from this, by 2010 there will be 2.5 billion Elvis impersonators. The population of the world will be 7.5 billion by 2010. Every 3rd person will be an Elvis impersonator by 2010. – Source: Caen, H., San Francisco Chronicle; October 27, 1993

That’s right, people. 1 in 3. We don’t have a lot of time to act.

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You can absolutely bet when a marketing department uses the word “ethical” – about its lingerie – someone is out to make a buck at your expense. And they think you will believe anything, my environmental friends.

But French designer Sophie Young’s g=9.8 company is doing it with a straight face. In yet another blatant product placement on treehugger.com they claim the kinds of things only the well-meaning but gullible among us will believe; namely that the company is producing a line of lingerie which will make your hippy chick girlfriend quiver with environmentally friendly delight.

Fabric made from white pine tree clippings!

No water used!

The comfort of silk!

The feel of cashmere!

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Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

As a younger man, I was a big fan of Greenpeace.

As time went on, I thought they lost their focus by branching out from protesting nuclear weapons to whaling and trees and basically hanging out a shingle that said, “If you send us money, we will protest for you.”

I watched them change from instilling their people with scientific literacy to educating their people on political activism. Then I watched them turn on me because I was a scientist who didn’t much like exaggerated evidence in the name of fundraising and because I was a sportsman and because I was a businessman.

I’ve always believed that sportsmen – hunters, hikers, mountain climbers – are natural allies of the environmental movement.

I watched them turn on hunters because of the gun issue. I watched them turn on businesspeople because of the logging issue. I watched them devolve into silliness … hijacking ships, funnelling money to political groups, ramming a French sailboat competing in the 2003 America’s Cup and finally, in the absolute depths of their Klondike Kop level incompetence, running aground on Tubbataha Reef Marine Park off the coast of Manila last year, which they were supposedly visiting because they were worried about global warming. They paid a $7,000 fine and said it was an accident and the millions of dollars in damage done are still not fixed. I imagine the environmental movement wouldn’t have been so lenient if, after the Exxon Valdez accident, Exxon paid a token fine and left the damage.

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Sexy? Ummm, yeah, a little. But only to scientists.

Nah, not sexy at all. This article is by UK writer Henry Nicholls on mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. This technique allows ‘virtual epidemics’ to be run, testing the effects of different assumptions or possible interventions.

Obviously this is important to the British, since their farmers have made careers out of feeding cow brains to their bovine friends, thus driving the big buggers insane and making Brits the butt of jokes even in places like Canada – where they really have no reason to be making fun of other people.

Enjoy the rest of the article on how science is making the world safe from idiot farmers here.