Smoke, mirrors and mazes

Let’s start with eye candy.

This is an image looking over the balcony from the top floor of the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing. The seemingly perfect positioning of the security guard caught my eye.

But enough with the photo frivolity, friends, there’s important things afoot! Today, a story broke about leaked internal documents from notorious denial institute Heartland. It’s one of those ‘oh, OK’ stories, in that it shows the direct link between funding from large organisations with vested interests, and the opinion columnists, ‘skeptical scientists’ and bloggers who champion anti-science perspectives.

There’s a couple of things that strike me, most of which are detailed in the post I’ve linked above. One is that they are keen to stifle opposing voices in outlets they feel they control, like Forbes – unsurprisingly, a hypocritical viewpoint, considering how much they whinge about their viewpoint being sidelined and stifled.

The second is that it’s a relatively small amount of money, overall, but it shows the strength of the strategy of sowing doubt, which plays into media norms and also the hands of politicians, who can make a living by doing not much because public apathy continues on the issue of climate change.

Anyway, it remains to be seen how much this goes through the media, because it’s kind of like many of the normal climate change stories – bad things are happening, which we already kind of knew about, but now we know more details!

EDIT: This is funny, from a prepared response by the Institute:

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

They’re bonkers. Their response to their error (one of their staff sent these in an email) is to ask people to delete all reference to it, and threaten legal action? Then there’s this:

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Yes. Because when YOUR documents get leaked, we should all sit back and think about the badness of the act. When the CRU emails were stolen and leaked, you told everyone to stop and think about the content, without ever mentioning the ethics of how they were obtained. And strangely, all of their news content from the dates surrounding that hack are now… gone? It’s almost like Heartland don’t want a record of their Climategate claims being dredged up again!

Hypocritical bastards.

Today’s Youtube Empires, Tomorrow’s Hollywood Ashes

Charlie’s a star.

Here’s Charlie, talking about stars.

A million people, roughly, have seen Charlie talking about stars. He’s got two-thirds as many followers on Twitter as Brian Cox, the physicist star of BBC doc Wonders of the Solar System, which topped out ratings around 3 million viewers. That’s impressive. And Charlie’s video cost a tiny fraction as much to make.

3 million is, incidentally, about a billion billion times less than the number of stars in the universe. Hmm, let’s stop using the word ‘star’ now. It’s starting (AH! There it is again!) to throw into stark (no!) relief how… I’m going to cut that sentence off before it becomes any more silly.

Throw into the mix the frank insight of a Hollywood hack, courtesy of The Benshi:

Its like, there are so many stories out there that could go a thousand different ways, mostly they turn into a boring bio pics. that lose money. So to invest the money studios do, they want someone who they know can deliver (aaron Sorkin and David Fincher) and even then they tend to want it to be about Steve Jobs, which is the hot assignment right now or in the prior case Facebook.

If you have a lights out script that blows people’s mind, that isn’t about a subject with a failing track record(IE the middle east wars.) you may have a shot there too, but people better totally flip.

127 hours btw only grossed $60mil world wide. Not a lot for a global release
Hurtlocker grossed $50 mil world wide. Even less.

Its fine and well people in LA and NY like to talk about these movies over cocktails but in a world where it costs a mint just to market these pictures, they financially are damn tough.

If they are getting into something like that, they want it to be Social network that did $225M WW.

I shit you not, baring guys like [James] Cameron of which there are about 5-10 people with anywhere near that juice, almost every project is freaking existing IP driven stuff. Meaning Robocop remake, Fast and the furious 6, Transformers 4, Ouiji (based on the board game), Battleship (also based on the board game), Highlander remake, 2 snow white movies, Cinderella, a 300 sequel about Xerses, The Man from Uncle remake, Cannon ball run remake, The secret life of walter mitty remake. You would fucking laugh and then never try again in Hollywood if you saw the grid list of stuff out there, sometimes we just laugh.

We are along way from the 70′s and Chinatown. A long long way.

He may sound like a cynical bastard (stop it!), but it’s clear: Hollywood’s a non starter (that wasn’t even intentional!) for all us budding science communicators. Contagion‘s probably the closest we’ll get for a while.

So rather than staring (I give up) at the glass ceiling of commercial backing, I plan to have a crack at the Youtube market. It will probably end up floating in the void, languishing with a lazy triple digit hit count and dwindling into obscurity after being shared by friends and a few friends of friends… but who knows, maybe I’ll find the right formula (that would be startling) and win the hearts, minds and subscribe buttons of the fickle Youtube populace.

Of course, this isn’t just something I am going to whip up in a week. I just thought that announcing it would make me more likely to start.

I give up, it's me, under the stars.

What I need, though, are topics. I want to be answering the burning little questions we rarely bother to ask. What’s something that bugs you, in your everyday life, that you might want to know more about? What’s a thing you see that puzzles you, or a bodily function that confuses you, or a trick of the mind that catches you out? What do you want me to find out for you?

I get Tentacled

The infamous Ed and Jake invited me on to their tremendous, terrific Tomorrow’s Tentacles radio show yesterday. After hearing about death, space and yet more of Jake’s worms, I had a chat about gamification. Check it out at their posterous account!

The Hot Seats.

Tooth Fairy Palaces and Ivory Towers

OK, so I didn’t get my choice of title on the article. But here’s a taste:

Sara and Gina are collecting baby teeth, to build a palace.

Gina: “The experiment has gone so far, without even being made, that it’s become an interesting journey. What we saw as the end was actually the start.”

Sara: “And the end doesn’t matter so much.”

Gina: “There is no end. But I don’t want to be sticking teeth to a sculpture for the next ten years.”

Anna Perman and I wrote a final major article for the Inside Knowledge blog collaboration with the Imperial College Blast research group. It’s about science outreach: why do scientists do it, what is it for and can it be a bad thing? They’re big questions to tackle, and we can’t offer anything more than informed thoughts. If you’re into science, either on the doing, communicating or hearing about side of things, I’d love it if you could read the article and leave your thoughts either here or over on PLoS.

My new job, starting mid September, will be helping to co-ordinate science outreach with Lottolab Studio. And it means I get to play with giant colourful dice.

Climate skeptics: whoa. Just whoa.

Let’s start with some racism:

Bangladeshis suffer because they have failed to understand the basic things that make an economy work to better their lives.

General hate:

People like McKibben are pathetic. They think of themselves as martyrs to some glorious cause, yet are far too vain and cowardly to strap on a vest full of C4. Or to even to publicly set themselves on fire, as some did during the Vietnam era, to make their point. They are beneath contempt.

Lies and Nazi comparisons:

Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” and the subsequent blanket ban on DDT has so far resulted in the death of > 30 Million. I believe that Hitler and Stalin killed less people, on an individual basis at least.

Hyperbolic lies:

These people are pure enemies of human freedom.

Academic purging:

Ah, another example of the “intelligentsia” at work. We need to scrub our colleges and universities of these idiots out to save the world.

WTF statistics:

If we convert 50% of our food to bio-fuels, and then go to organic farming as well, something like 70% of the world’s population will need to be culled, in order to balance the food supply.

Hysteria:

Al Gore and the global warming alarmists such as left wing politicians, pseudo scientists, journalists, the Hollywood idiots, have been inflicting psychological terrorism upon a whole generation of children all over the world for the last 20 years.
These charlatans should be brought to justice as the perpetrators of the biggest scam in the history of this planet.

And yet still come comments are too graphic to be allowed by moderators:

[snip - too graphic]

That’s all from one comment thread at Watt’s Up With That. The thing that scares me the most is that none of these people were criticised or pulled up for being too extreme, or, well, wrong.

I’m studying the community at the site for my MSc dissertation, looking at how climate skeptics react to evidence that the globe is warming (like, uh, this). I want to understand what makes these people take the position they do, but I’m regularly seeing comments – like the C4 one – that make my eyes bleed and my head hurt. I will be happy when this study is finished.

So here’s a nice picture to cheer you up.

Fitzroy Falls in New South Wales, Australia. A stunning gorge and view.