30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Myth of Pure Evil
The myth of pure evil gives rise to an archetype that is common in religions, horror movies, children’s literature, nationalist mythologies, and sensationalist news coverage. In many religions evil is personified as the Devil—Hades, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Mephistopheles—or as the antithesis to a benevolent God in a bilateral Manichean struggle. In popular fiction evil takes the form of the slasher, the serial killer, the bogeyman, the ogre, the Joker, the James Bond villain, or depe... 1 
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notes29 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Memetic Sex
There are many similarities between genes and memes. Just as genes transmitted during sexual intercourse in the biosphere, so are ideas trans¬ mitted during social intercourse in the mental realm, or ideosphere.
[...]
The memetic realm also hahas some important differences from the genetic realm. Memes combine, recombine, mutate, and reproduce much more flexly and rapidly than genes do. This is one way that genetic sex does not map completely to memetic sex. For example, the memetic count...
1 Many of the concepts in genes apply to ideas, including cross-breeding, safe-sex, inbreeding, and species.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
America is Naturally Anti-Science
In the end, politics is about story. Robert McKee, Hollywood's master of storytelling, views the world from the top of America's other great cultural export—its movies.
"1 think that the American ethos is not science-friendly and never has been," he says. "The American model is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Guys who never went to college and who were geniuses and invented things, and people like them. The inventor versus the scientist. Somebody who can go west, discover gold mines, and cr...Science is hard work, America is about the dream of Hollywood. We are living on the benefits of science, but will those innovations become cultural rituals if we won't do what we need to do to promote science and education?
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
History of the Fairness Doctrine and Rise of Media Relati...
The intellectual erosion of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as science sat silently on the sidelines and anti-science rose to rule on both the left and the right, was greatly worsened in August of 1987 when, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) abolished what was called the "fairness doctrine" in an historic 4-0 vote, severing one of the last ties to a common public foundation of knowledge and its cousin, the carefully researched publi... 1 notes
notesOnce the Doctrine was removed, the media turned to emotive appeals to bring in audiences and public discourse declined.
28 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Scientifically Accurate Movies and Profits
Contact didn't do badly. It earned $171 million worldwide, nearly doubling the ^90-million production budget. But it was also competing with two o considerably more brainless alien-related sci-fi movies, 1997's Men h in Black and 1996's Independence Day, both of which made a great at deal more money ($589 million and $817 million, respectively). And that unfavorable U financial comparison, more than 1 anything else, dramatizes the incredible challenge science faces in Hollywood. If films that...Folksonomies: science fiction film
Folksonomies: science fiction film
1 notes
notesContact didn't do well compared to other, less-scientific films of the summer, but Dante's Peak did better than Volcano.
28 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Hollywood's Anti Science
"REALITY ENDS HERE." IT'S THE UNOFFICIAL MOTTO OF THE UNIVERSITY OF Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, cast in concrete at the entranceway to the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts and, in Latin, at the South entryway of a new complex building. As scientist-turned-filmmaker and use film school graduate s Randy Olson explained to us, the slogan:
is not a joke. It's a bold, challenging statement—r-a basic "screw you" to the outside world who thinks that accuracy and reality ...Folksonomies: science entertainment
Folksonomies: science entertainment
1 A saying found at the entrance to a film school puts down science.
17 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Ronald Reagan's Memory Problems
President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War Two in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr Reagan told an epic story of World War Two courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer - that made quite an impression on me, ... 1 notes
notesReagan recalled things as real that happened only in his movies, what does this mean for humans and major policy decisions?
17 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Notes from the Experiments with the Imagination Conferenc...
Didn't take any direct quotes. 1 notes
notesA summary of points from this conference session about portraying scientists in fiction and getting science facts right:
- Hollywood blockbusters carry so much weight, need to get more science into this medium
- Scientists need to be telling their own stories. There are only about 120 books about scientists.
- What does it mean for a story to accurately portay science? Getting scientific facts right? Or scientists reacting in a way scientists should react? Believes stories are about people, making them more important than the facts.
- Star Trek: Starhip Mine: “terrorists steal MacGuffin juice from the warp core” Barrion sweep on the enterprise, but barrions are in all atoms. LOL Cats as up and down quarks. Maybe the Barrions in ST were exotic sub-space barrions. We can use the episode to teach proper science.
- 2012 had a ridiculous premise, but the scientists were awesome.
- Michael Crighton: Climate Change book was silly, Andromeda Strain was silly
- Jennifer: Percival’s Planet, example of good science story about the discovery of Pluto
- Science presented without scientific process is just magic.
- "Tron Legacy" was awful, but for me Tron, had Unix commands, mentioned genetic algorithms, I got much more enjoyment out of the film than the average viewer. Would including something about the game of life or evolving programs through natural selection make the film more interesting? The screenwriters were obviously familiar with the concepts, why did they shy away from giving the film more depth?
