CHANGSHA, HUNAN — While I wait for my lunch companions to show up, I will try to dash off a quick movie review.

Of course, it’s not very current. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened in the USA weeks ago, but I saw it for the first time here just last week. In Chinese. With Chinese subtitles.

I didn’t miss a thing.

Some B-movies have redeeming virtues, despite poor acting, bad direction, cheesy scripts, or lousy camera work. Really bad movies (grade Z’s), though, combine all four to make a US Grade A turkey.

And being a science-fictiony kind of film, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, brought really bad to a whole new level with really awful science concepts.

Here’s a few glaring mistakes.

The Bad Guy (TBG) has a huge underwater lair that puts Stargate Atlantis’ digs to shame. Yet, this underwater metropolis is supposedly a secret. How? Its heat signature alone would be as bright as lighthouse beacon to a spy satellite in orbit.

For argument’s sake, let’s suppose the US government knew about The Bad Guy’s secret underwater lair. Wouldn’t the Defense Department be just a teensy bit interested in why TBG has all of that expensive hardware hidden away, especially since TBG is supplying high-tech stuff to the DoD?

(Then again, maybe not. Consider the DoD’s careful monitoring of Blackwater and Halliburton operations in Iraq.)

And he also has a secret weapons facility in the Arctic! Apparently, he hasn’t read up on global warming.

August 22nd, 2009 | Tags: China, movie, Physics, review, Science | Category: China, Commentary, Media, Physics | Leave a comment

(a) United States
(b) United Kingdom
(c) Manchester United
(d) United Arab Emirates

You have 2 minutes.

{Cue Jeopardy thinking jingle}

The answer is B! Author and theoretical physicist Hawking was born in Oxford, England, 67 years ago and is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which at last report was still located where it has been for the last 800 years, in England.

Reading comprehension quiz:
Now read this excerpt from a recent (fubar) editorial from the Investor’s Business Daily, and identify the logical fallacy. You have 5 minutes.

The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the "quality adjusted life year."

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Discuss your answers among yourselves for the remainder of class.

Words fail me.

[ADDENDUM: IBD has since corrected its error, by deleting the graf mentioning Hawking.]

August 11th, 2009 | Tags: Cambridge, health care, Investor's Business Daily, Physics, Stephen Hawking, UK | Category: Commentary, Physics, Random rants | Leave a comment

Four students and their teacher in Cataluña, Spain, sent a Nikon Coolpix digital camera into the upper atmosphere recently, and captured some impressive photos. Here’s one:

More photos and a complete report of their experiments are at their blog and their flickr page. The Big Picture at the Boston Globe also has the photos.

Incidentally, the team’s blog is in Catalan, the language of Cataluña, but they have thoughtfully provided an instant-translation link for the Catalan-challenged.

March 24th, 2009 | Tags: balloon, Catalonia, Nikon, photography | Category: Astronomy, Commentary, General stuff, Physics, Schools, Science, evolution, religion | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — It’s nice to see a movie for kids that for once doesn’t play games with scientific accuracy. While it may be a fantasy (according to Buzz Aldrin), Fly Me to the Moon keeps its physics pretty darn close to the real thing.

Granted, it’s not on a par with Pixar’s or Disney’s animated features, but this cute little kiddie movie about three young adventure-seeking houseflies is not a complete waste of time. It recreates one of the most exciting moments in US history for a new young audience, while giving them a glimpse of what moving in space is really like.

The plot is pretty simple. Three nerdy flies, Scooter (fat kid), IQ (bespectacled brainiac) and Nat (the ringleader), live in a junkyard near Cape Canaveral within sight of the Apollo 11 launchpad. They all want to have an adventure, like Nat’s grandpa did 37 years ago, but all they can do is dream.

Nat’s grandpa tells him once again his story of how he saved a sleepy Amelia Earhart from splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean by flying up her nose. Nat then decides to hitch a ride on Apollo 11, due to launch the next day.

They successfully become stowaways on the moon mission. They correct an electrical short on the outbound leg. They hide inside the Neil Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s spacesuits to become the first flies on the moon.

November 25th, 2008 | Tags: Apollo 11, Fly Me to the Moon, Physics, review | Category: Commentary, Media, Physics | Comments (1)

Not to me, really, but to my site’s visibility. Two years ago I wrote a post debunking the so-called “water gas”/HHO/Brown’s gas technology of running your car on water. Then, starting in January this year I have had several visitors commenting positively and negatively on the post. I suspect it has something to do with gasoline prices rising above $4 and diesel prices inching toward $5 a gallon.

I won’t go over the whole “water gas” scheme here, but the gist of my argument is that it (1) is unsafe and (2) not a cure-all. I won’t even get into the whole “oil company conspiracy” thing, since paranoid people cannot be made un-paranoid no matter how much you try to reason with them.

Rather than do the sensible thing and DRIVE LESS, PEOPLE!!, many US drivers are looking for a magic bullet to maintain their wasteful use of fuel to putter around town. We are so damn spoiled here. Despite our rising fuel costs, we still pay less than Europeans have to years. Detroit (and to some extent Japan) encouraged us to buy big-ass cars and SUVs (fancy trucks, in my book) that get crappy fuel mileage, which suckered US car buyers into these land yachts that now suck their wallets dry at the gas pump.

So now I guess they’re looking up ways to pay less at the pump on the ‘Net, and have stumbled upon the water gas guys, and my post. Good luck, suckers!

June 19th, 2008 | Tags: debunk, energy, HHO gas, scam | Category: Commentary, Physics, Science, Skepticism | Comments (1)

While its lawyers haggle in court about copyright issues, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed continues its inevitable decline into theatrical obscurity. The anti-evolution “blockbuster” pulled in gross box office receipts this weekend of only $102,690, and the number of theaters carrying the flick is now down to 210.

The movie opened April 18 with a great deal of hullabaloo in 1,052 theaters and pulled in an impressive (for a schlockumentary) box office receipts of $2.97 million. Its receipts and theater count have dropped precipitously since then, despite the predictions of its creators that it would be a box-office smash.

Instead it will probably fade into DVD obscurity, once certain legal problems are resolved. Currently, the makers of the film are under a court order not to distribute the flick any further while a copyright infringement suit is settled.

Premise Media, the creator of the movie, licensed several songs, but failed to obtain permission from the copyright holders of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” A short section of the song is used as a foil to suggest that “Darwinism” inevitably leads to atheism.

Lennon’s family and publisher filed suit against Premise Media and its associates April 24 alleging copyright and trademark infringement, asking for at least $75,000 in damages and the immediate withdrawal of the movie in its present form from all theaters. A few days later, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing further distribution of Expelled, including DVD releases.

May 19th, 2008 | Tags: box office, expelled, receipts | Category: Civil liberties, Commentary, Media, Physics, Science, religion | Leave a comment