iBiome

Happy Life Day!

this didn't seem so campy when I was eleven.

 

what a wonderful world

a la David Attenborough let's not screw it all up, ok?

"the best actor in the world today"

Pete Postlethwaite was captivating in every role I've seen him.  I'll salute his exit with a clip of my favorite - Obadiah  Hakeswill.

one breath

Freediving is the ultimate sport. Pushing physical limits into an acutely dangerous environment. This video of a freediving "base jumper" into a blue hole is....breathtaking.

Fallen

I found this at Unreasonable Faith and, as he says: "Life — enjoy it while you have it"

Fallen
by mikropikol

Mongol

A story of a boy, his girl, his horse, and his yurt. Two thumbs way up.

the good shepherd

I was disappointed to see the crap rating from rotten tomatoes.  I loved this movie.  Chronicling the genesis of the CIA, at nearly 3 hours, it was plodding enough to feel authentic and perhaps that's what I enjoyed.  It rang true from start to finish. And this exchange between Damon and Pesci illuminated, in my view anyway, the organizing psychology of the American ruling class, for better or worse.

Nice work if you can get it

I've often been curious about the business of contributing scientific expertise to movies and television - how one gets the work, do they listen, that sort of thing.  In "My life as an advisor to TV and film", Wayne Grody describes his work for the Nutty Professor and CSI, among others.

For both Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor movies, the studio's Art Department asked me for assistance in designing the set for Professor Klump's laboratory. They came to my research lab at UCLA and took lots of pictures, then we sat down with the Fisher products catalog and started on page one as I pointed out what they needed to order as "props" (with a budget of $50 million, money was no object)
....Sometimes my advice goes unheeded. Klump was supposed to be a biology professor at a small liberal arts college, but his laboratory occupied an entire soundstage on the Universal Studios lot -- about ten times larger than the best-funded faculty member at a major research university. And while we tried to make it look as much like a real-world molecular biology lab as possible (I brought my graduate students along with me to help "dress the set"), when the director arrived for the first scene to be shot there, he ordered some of the visually boring thermal cyclers and centrifuges replaced by flasks and tubes of bubbling green and purple liquids -- more reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory than a modern facility....
...Even on the dramas, however, a cherished scientific truth will sometimes have to be discarded in order to enable an essential story development, such as a normally three-week-long forensic DNA analysis that's fictionally done in one hour for the sake of plot pacing. In truth, few will ever notice these gaffs. As one TV producer told me, the number of Ph.D. scientists watching his show accounts for no more than 0.00001% of the Nielsen rating audience.

The bit about thumbing through a Fisher catalogue and budgets reminded me of a colleague ranting over beers about how the resources devoted to CGI on Finding Nemo dwarfed but at least one order of magnitude most large scale bioinfomatics efforts.  I think of a big project as something north of $5 million. But that's just walking around money for the film industry.  

cheaper to sequence his genome