Over the past couple of weeks, I've watched a number of videos that readers of this blog may be interested in. Yesterday, I blogged about A Private Universe and Minds of Our Own. Let me mention a few others today.

The Life of Mammals is a BBC production by the great David Attenborough, who also made Life of Birds, Life in the Freezer, Trials of Life, etc. etc. etc. (Attenborough has been making nature documentaries for the BBC since the late Miocene.) If you're into geology as part of a larger natural system, or if you happen to be a mammal yourself, this is a series well worth watching. Attenborough has a signature style involving showing up in different corners of the Earth, and carrying on a continuous narration the whole time. One moment he's in Tasmania, the next in Brazil, but his thought process is uninterrupted. The discussion is of the highest quality, without being too technical. He's got a real gift for this business. Five stars.

I also watched Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, from the Discovery Channel. It's about past creatures; Cenozoic mammals and birds. Because the animals it describes are extinct, it can't have footage of the narrator (Kenneth Branagh) strolling amongst the entelodonts or Andrewsarchus. Instead, they've used puppets and lots of computer generated animation to depict their subject. They're pretty clever about this, using "film" techniques that give it the flavor or an actual nature documentary: They mimic night-vision footage, for instance, as well as "handheld" camera shakiness, herds fleeing an overhead "helicopter" perspective, and the subjects nosing up to the "camera lens." While the animals they describe are quite interesting, I found the production to be a bit on the bombastic side, with pounding music intended to raise the viewers' adrenaline levels during a hunt scene, and so on. All told, the content wasn't as good as Life of Mammals, but I appreciated the way they handled the production, so I'd give it 3.5 stars.

Labels: critters, fossils, mammals, movies, teaching, tv

I must recommend a couple of videos to any science educators out there. (I just watched the last of them last night.)

A Private Universe was an eye-opening half-hour video that was followed by a short series called Minds of Our Own. (Links go to video on demand from Annenberg Public Media.) Both titles follow a similar format, and pursue similar content. Their subject is the difficulty in getting students to learn science. Both videos make the hypothesis that the major obstacle in science education is not complexity, or abstract reasoning, but pre-existing ideas about the way the world works. Students come into our classrooms with certain notions, and unless we teachers (a) know what those notions are and (b) explicitly confront them, then the students' natural reaction is to stick with their perfectly-reasonable ideas about the way the world works (and reject the scientifically valid ideas about the way the world works).

A Private Universe opens with a scene of Harvard's graduation, and the filmmakers interview the gowned students about the phases of the moon. Full moon, half moon, new moon, half moon again... Why does the moon have phases. Everyone shown indicates they think that it's the shadow of the Earth on the moon that give it its phases. In Minds of Our Own, similarly shocking scenes unfold wherein the graduates of MIT can't use a battery and wire to light a lightbulb, and again where Harvard graduates are tested, this time on the subject of trees. A tiny seed grows into a massive tree: where does all that weight come from? All those interviewed thought the tree's mass came from the soil (as opposed to CO2 in the air). It's really something to see -- some of the brightest students in the country, demonstrating a basic scientific illiteracy.
Subsequent one-on-one interviews with elementary, middle, and high school students probe for deeper understanding of just what these students think is going on. Some of these interviews yield bizarre interpretations of reality so that the student can match their erroneous worldview with their well-developed logic and reasoning. It's quite striking to see the lengths they will stretch their minds to, in order to accomodate their pre-conceived notions. A Harvard education professor (Philip M. Sadler) who is interviewed in the films says "The most important thing we can do as teachers is find out what our students already think when they walk into the classroom" (paraphrase). You can be an extremely skilled intstructor, in other words, but this basic step is essential. If you don't assess your students' understanding before you teach them, you're setting them up for failure. Students must be confronted with their false views and shown why they are false, if they are to open their minds to other possibilities.

One of the most gratifying scenes is when a young man is explaining why pressure increases in a closed piston. At first, he thinks that because the volume is less when the piston is compressed, it must contain less air. But as he's illustrating this notion, and being asked clarifying questions from the interviewer, you can see him realize that the same number of air particles must be in the piston when it is both extended and compressed: they're just closer together when it's compressed!

From the perspective of an educator, the depressing side of this realization is that we have nowhere near the amount of time it would take to have one-on-one conversations with every student to explore their misperceptions and then gently lead them through a line of logical inquiry to correct those ideas. That takes some serious time. Is there a more efficient way to root out these ideas? I'm not sure.

Has anyone else seen these videos? I was very impressed. Now I'm wondering how best to incorporate this new perspective into my own teaching...

Thanks very much to Nicole LaDue (NSF) for sending a DVD of these videos my way.

Labels: astronomy, movies, plants, teaching, tv

When I look back on my four years of undergraduate geology education, the one thing that strikes me as the most important thing I learned is the age of the Earth. It sent my mind reeling to recognize what a huge old planet I was on, and how ephemeral was my own species' time on it. I was a blip, a temporary arrangement of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a handful of other elements that would last a while, and then disassociate. Material and energy passed into me, and out. This kinetic chemical phenomenon known as me would soon pass, and the Earth would keep turning. The human species would reach its zenith, then collapse (or evolve into something else), and the Earth would keep turning. The continents would rift and crash and the map of the Earth would soon be obselete, and the Earth would keep on turning. Climates change, meteors hit, "rivers shift, oceans fall, and mountains drift" (REM, 1985), and still the planet keeps on spinning, keeps on orbiting, keeps on keeping on.

The day I really realized the age of the Earth wasn't the day I heard "4.6 billion" in lecture. It was the day I sat there studying and grasped it internally -- it clicked that it was immensely, unimaginably old. My temporary human mind was a short-time-scale phenomenon, and it was impossible for this small cerebral system to get a grip on the true scale of the planet's age. While I would never really know (comprehend/appreciate) the age of my planet, I tapped into something fundamental that day. Looking back on it now, I'm reminded of John Playfair's words when his pal James Hutton took him to Siccar Point for the first time: "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time" (1805).

When I made that cognitive leap (by essentially realizing it was impossible for me to fully make the cognitive leap), I got stuck on geology. I connected to the study in a way I hadn't done before. Suddenly I was subject to a dizzying temporal vertigo, as if a layer of flooring had crumbled away leaving me gazing into a bottomless pit. The realization gave a whole new perspective on things, and it was exhilarating. It felt like one of the conversations when you're getting to know someone, and realizing that they are both intriguing and yet never completely knowable. It draws you in, connects you. Without getting too gushy, it's kind of like falling in love. I've been a geologist ever since.

As I learned more, both in school and on later peregrinations around the world, I found that geology was a great traveling companion. No matter where I went, geology was there with me, showing me new things, giving me insightful perspective. I was looking at the world through geology-colored glasses, and finding that it had a lot to show me. The world made more sense on an elemental level. Hills made sense; rivers made sense; mountains made sense. While I couldn't claim to fully understand any of these phenomena, I could claim a connection to them now that wasn't there before. They were no longer random in my mind; they had a place in the overall system, and it took geology to make me realize it.

So this perspective has stuck with me, and it's what inspired me to pitch "geology as a connector" as this month's Accretionary Wedge theme. (Newbies: the Wedge is a semi-monthly geoblogosphere carnival wherein different geobloggers contribute posts organized around a central theme.) I was curious about what I would get, and I didn't want to restrict my peers' submissions by specifying what kind of connections should be written about.

Sure enough, different people interpreted connection differently. Tromping around in the mountains doing geologic mapping yields more than insights into local structure and stratigraphy, as BrianR of Clastic Detritus discusses how his field work has connected him to the messy reality that is nature.

Jess at Magma Cum Laude is starting her first semester as a graduate T.A., and is going to employ a teaching technique that connected her to the pervasive nature of geology: everything that the Earth puts out for the purpose of assembling Oreo cookies. Something as simple as an Oreo can be the vehicle through which students realize the manifold ways they depend on the Earth every day.

Where are the boundaries between sciences? Is geology a subset of environmental science, or physics? Or both? How do we define the different parts of Nature that we study? Using a Venn diagram, Hypocentre at Hypo-theses explores the connections between geology and other sciences, particularly in the environmental realm.

Similarly, Mel uses a diagram to explore connections in her post at Ripples in Sand. How does geology connect to paleontology? Join Mel in looking at the taphonomic bridge. (And wish her congratulations on her wedding while you're at it!)

Joining the crowd in her first Accretionary Wedge post, A Life Long Scholar (at The Musings of a Life-Long Scholar) makes a connection between the very small and the very large. In trying to answer questions about massive tectonic plates, sometimes geologists must turn to little bundles of mass a few micrometers across. Check out her post to see how garnets can reveal the secret histories of the continents.

And then there are the personal connections. In Looking for Detachment, Silver Fox was the first one to submit a post on the "connection" theme with her description of how different members of the mining and exploration community connect to one another over time and space (Nevada, of course). How do Charles Manson, Kevin Bacon, and exploration geologists all fit together? Read her post to find out.

MJC Rocks of the Geotripper blog has contributed a real treat: an exploration of the connection of geologists teaching geologists through time. It turns out that his academic lineage goes all the way back to Agassiz and Cuvier! A pretty impressive consideration which will surely inspire the rest of us to investigate our own geologic pedigrees.

Finally, over at Harmonic Tremors, Julian shares a story of how his knowledge of geology led him to make a personal connection with one of his cinematic idols, director Brad Bird. If you've seen the Incredibles, you're familiar with Bird's high quality entertainment. When Julian heard that Bird was working on a movie called 1906 about the great San Francisco Earthquake, he wrote a letter to clear up some inconsistencies in the book upon which the movie is based. The talented director took the time to write back to Julian, thanking him for the "seismic tutorial."

Enjoy the various and sundry posts -- follow these digital connections to other geologists in other parts of the world, and feel connected to the larger community of earth scientists. Thanks to everyone who contributed. If I've missed anyone or if anyone wants to submit a late post, give me a shout or post a link in the comments.
________________________
References:
Playfair, John (1805). Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. V, pt. III.
REM, (1985). "Feeling Gravity's Pull," Fables Of The Reconstruction, IRS records.

Labels: blogs, earthquakes, field trips, geology, metamorphism, minerals, mining, movies, plate tectonics, teaching

I went down to downtown DC's local 'art film' theater this week to catch a showing of Werner Herzog's new movie, Encounters at the End of the World (IMDB, Netflix, trailer).

The movie is a documentary about Herzog's visit to Antarctica in the austral summer of 2006. It is not a scientific movie, but many of the people Herzog talks to are scientists. His thesis is that these people have got to be pretty wacky to go all the way to Antartica and hang out there. This thesis has plenty of supporting evidence, no doubt about it. But the movie is at its strongest when it just shows incredible imagery, set to an odd soundtrack that Herzog has chosen (lots of choirs, but also some Tuvan throat-singing, it sounds like).

There are some hilarious moments in the movie, and some contemplative ones, and some uncomfortable ones. If you've never seen a Herzog movie, maybe you should go familiarize yourself with his style by watching Grizzly Man or Little Dieter Needs To Fly. I'm of the opinion that Herzog is a talented director in the sense of having a vision, and pursuing his filiming to enact that vision. But his technical choices sometimes leave the impression that he's sloppy: lots of too-quick camera pans (which results in lack of optical focus), or too-long unedited sequences that would be more coherent with some selective editing. Regardless of these snipes, I always enjoy watching his movies because he chooses interesting subject matter. Encounters reminded me of his 1971 film Fata Morgana, which was about the Sahara (again, lots of long shots of beautiful austere landscapes, set to an incongruous soundtrack-- in this case Leonard Cohen and a Mayan creation myth), with the exception that he seems to have relaxed in his old age, and lightened up a bit. In Encounters, it's not all doom and gloom; He's equally comfortable speaking about how a penguin's insanity will lead to its "certain death" in the Antarctic interior and (in an exasperated tone) how McMurdo Station includes "such abominations" as a yoga studio.

Thanks to Dean K. for recommending the movie to me.
Have you seen it? What did you think? Chime in below in the comments section.

Labels: antarctica, movies

Yesterday evening, I watched "How the Earth Was Made," a History Channel program available on DVD (Amazon, Netflix, NOVA library). It's an ideal video for introductory students, as it covers 4.5 billion years in 100 minutes of program. I think it's probably worth a viewing even for professional geologists, though there's definitely some stuff in there to take issue with. For instance: (1) they call stromatolites "organisms;" (2) they suggest that Snowball Earth occurred because the continents were clustered over the pole, not the equator, and (3) they show the Pleistocene North American ice cap stretching south into Georgia and the Carolinas. Still, I'm a fan of any video which can animate visually the processes that geologists imagine, and this show achieves that in spades. Have you seen it? Chime in below in the comments section.

Labels: movies, tv

Okay, so we've all heard what a stinker the new movie 10,000 B.C. is, right? I actually went to see it, on Geotimes' nickel, along with a couple of other scientists so we could assess the scientific validity of the film for the magazine. Afterwards, I went to enter my own "review" into Netflix (2 stars out of 5) and I noticed there was another "10,000 B.C." film in the Netflix library: "L.A. 10,000 B.C.," a program from the Discovery Channel that examined the natural history of the Los Angeles area during that same time. I decided to check it out, and last night I watched it.

My brief review: It's not really a traditional natural history program. Instead it takes fossil evidence and uses it as a starting point for a "reality T.V." style stunt program. They take three L.A. stunt actors and "train" them to be Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Then they build pneumatic robots to mimic the teratorn and Columbian mammoth, and the stuntmen and women have to battle them. No joke. This resulted in some cool visuals, though: the mammoth crushing a ten-pound can of tomatoes and having all that red spray everywhere (mimicking the head of a Clovis hunter). And the footage of the stuntman being tossed thirty feet through the air by the "angry" robot mammoth was kind of cool too.

But you can't really call that a nature program. There were some cool facts presented, but the majority of the film was devoted to sensationalism of the encounters between humans and these Pleistocene species. The film was also very repetitive, taking half an hour's worth of material and stringing it out into 1.5 hours. It appeared to have been designed so anyone channel-surfing could get an orientation as to what the program was all about regardless of when they tuned in. That's kind of lame if you're watching the whole thing from start to finish, methinks.

Labels: birdies, cenozoic, mammals, movies, tv

About a year ago, I watched "The Blob" (the original 1958 version) via Netflix. As you're probably aware, it deals with an alien lifeform coming to Earth, a little blob of goo that assimilates human beings into its body and grows, eventually getting large enough to engulf a diner where Steve McQueen is hiding. My favorite moment came at the end of The Blob, when they discover that the blob doesn't like cold. So they spray it with CO2 fire extinguishers & freeze it. Then the Air Force comes in and air-lifts it up to "the Arctic." The police chief character says to Steve McQueen: "At least we've got it stopped." And McQueen replies, I kid you not: "As long as the Arctic stays cold." Oh, Steve, if only you knew! Looks like we've got one more hazard that climate change is going to unleash...

Labels: climate change, global warming, movies

It's almost cherry blossom season, so that means it's also time for the annual DC Environmental Film Festival. For two weeks, lots of interesting films are hosted by dozens of libraries, theaters, embassies, NGOs, and the like. Many of them are free. If you live in the DC area, this is an excellent opportunity to see some movies that you won't otherwise get access to. Even if you're not in the Capitol area, you can check out some of these films: this year, several of the films (like tonight's snow leopard movie) are available for watching free via the Internet. Enjoy!

Labels: dc, environmental, movies

Just got through watching an episode of the PBS program NOVA (which I like to refer to as the "other" NOVA). The episode was titled "Volcano under the city," and it looks at the volcano Nyiragongo in Congo, central Africa. This was the same volcano that had such a spectacular eruption in 2002, when lava flowed through the city of Goma, on the shore of Lake Kivu. The program follows UN vulcanologist Jacques Durieux on a journey through Goma and into Nyiragongo to evaluate the risk for the ~2 million people who live in the mountain's shadow. The program explores volcanic hazards including lava flows, landslides, lake overturn (a la Lake Nyos), and pockets of CO2 in low-lying areas on land. This last one provided what I found to be the most dramatic footage: Durieux tosses a signal flare into one of the ditches, and the smoke rises and flows on top of the invisible layer of CO2 below: it demonstrates dramatically how there's something invisible pooled in that ditch due to its density. There's also plenty of footage of frothing spewing blobby lava, if that's your thing. As is often the case, the narrator overpitches the dangerous aspects of the situation, and the whole hour-long show feels kind of like a hyped-up movie trailer. Certainly the situation there is dangerous, but I feel like some credibility gets lost when every word is uttered with a sense of looming menace.

Labels: africa, CO2, movies, tv, volcano

Check out this great German animation called "Das Rad" about the difference in geologic time and human time. It was nominated for an Academy Award ("Best Animated Short Film") in 2003. I think it's pretty clever.

Labels: geology, movies

Last night, we went to see the final night of the Banff Mountain Film Festival's world tour, held at National Geographic's headquarters in downtown DC. If you're not familiar with it, the BMFF is an annual event showcasing films about nature and extreme sports. Last night we watched films about rock climbers, kayakers, skiers, and snow-kiters. Oh, and a badger (see video online).

This year's festival was advertised using the image at right, of a climber doing a route on what's called the Totem Pole, located in coastal southern Tasmania, Australia. I'd never seen an image of this thing before, but it's pretty impressive. Does anyone know anything else about it? Via Google, I've seen it described as both a "dolerite column" and a sea stack. I'd like to know more. And I'd like to see it. And I don't want to climb it. Yikes.

Labels: australia, movies

Last weekend, I went to see Sea Monsters 3D: a Prehistoric Adventure, an IMAX movie about Mesozoic marine reptiles. It's playing in the IMAX theater down at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum.

I kinda liked it. I must admit, I'm a sucker for a Tylosaurus leaping out of the water with a writhing Squalicorax shark in its mouth. I was disappointed by T-rex: Back to the Cretaceous in the same venue, so it was pleasing to check out this feature's relative quality. Unlike the unabashed fiction of T-rex (the heroine inhales hallucinogenic dust from a dinosaur egg, causing her to see a museum's specimens as they were in life), Sea Monsters is more of a straight shooter. It examines the story of the life of a female Dolichorhynchops in the Cretaceous seas of the Western Interior Seaway. As she grows up, you see nearby predators and relatives, and eventually encounter their fossils. The fossils are discovered in the modern day, sometimes in the early 2000s, sometimes back around the turn of the previous century. The techniques of field paleontology, I noted, don't seem to have changed much during that time.


Anyhow, the various creatures lived and ate each other and died and were fossilized, and the various paleontologists, driving their model Ts or their Suzukis, drive out into Kansas or Montana or the Dakotas and excavate these ancient creatures. These "paleontologists" are patently actors, and not especially good ones at that. Six Feet Under, it's not. But the digitally-recreated scenes of the Mesozoic seas were pretty cool. I liked seeing ammonites squirt ink on the Dolichorhynchops ("Dollys," in the film's parlance), and I liked seeing a lone placodont swim weirdly towards the camera. Because the movie is in 3D, you have to wear dorky glasses (it's dark; no one can see), but that means that the toothy snouts of Styxosaurus and its ilk poke out right into (seemingly) the center of the theater. Pretty dang cool.

Labels: fossils, movies

Labels: art, movies

So this weekend, as part of my ravenous Netflix consumption, I watched Libby, Montana, a documentary which explores the effects of vermiculite mining in the namesake town. The vermiculite in question is augmented with a less desirable mineral: the amphibole known as tremolite. Tremolite grows in a long, fibrous habit, which has been given the name... asbestos. So the deal with Libby is that essentially everyone in town either worked in the vermiculite mine, or was married to someone who worked in the vermiculite mine. A bunch of them inhaled tremolite fibers, both workers and family members. A bunch of them developed lung diseases like asbestosis or mesothelioma. A lot of them died. The movie ends with a moving tribute to the dead. It's some bad stuff. W.R. Grace, the company operating the vermiculite mine, is demonstrably culpable for their employees' deaths.

Tremolite is one of the nastier varieties of asbestos, but not all minerals that happen to grow in that shape are carcinogenic. Some, like chrysotile, (the variety mined at the type locality) have not been found to be as dangerous (by authorities like the USGS). But because many varieties of asbestiform minerals do cause disease, many people (particularly in the litigious U.S.) have opted to ban all minerals of the asbestiform habit. This has resulted in umpteen gazillion public buildings being stripped of their asbestiform minerals, whether or not those particular minerals have been shown to be disease-causing. It's like banning all round candy just because you think that red M&Ms are carcinogenic (which isn't even true). So this brings us to my home institution of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). This week, if you were to come visit me in my office in the CF building, here's what you would see (photo).

We're doing asbestos abatement. Amazingly (from a legal standpoint), I'm still allowed to keep working in my office, ten feet away from a what appears to be a major asbestos removal project. The local source is the floor tiles, which look pretty much like linoleum, but are apparently held together with the strong "asbestos" fibers. Which asbestos mineral exactly? Don't know. Probably never will. Last year, they did the same thing in a separate building, the one where my classes are held.

As a P.S., I'll mention that halfway through the day yesterday, I noticed someone put duct tape over the words "Asbestos" and "Cancer and Lung Disease Hazard." No longer that particular danger, apparently...

Labels: minerals, movies, nova

I watched a cool documentary the other night about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The film is called Manufactured Landscapes. (It's available from Netflix.)

It follows Burtynsky mostly through China (with asides to Bangladesh and North America) as he photographs of places where humankind has indelibly altered nature to produce landscapes that are at once disturbing and utterly beautiful. By trailing Burtynsky, the documentarians film the landscape through his eyes, as well as showing his still photos. Burtynsky maintains a website with some of his best images available in an online gallery. It's a remarkable ensemble. I recommend that you check out this visionary photographer.

Labels: art, environmental, movies