I don’t go to the theater very often, but in the past 2 weeks, i’ve gone twice. (also - before i get into this… im on a broken laptop, the regular shift key that i used doesn’t work, so im not going to put anything in caps. also, the last letter of the alphabet doesn’t work, so i couldn’t spell capitali_e just now…sigh… i love my best friend, but he’s sort of a space case sometimes.)

Last weekend i saw the ever famous Expelled. i’m sure everyone’s read 1.4 million reviews of it online already. so i’ll just say this. …it was the worst thing i’ve ever seen in my entire life. i’m sorry, but sitting there watching hours of stein compare evolutionary biology to hitler and the holocaust?? yeah, definitely not something i’d ever want to do again or recommend to anyone else to do. it was so horrible. i thought that there would at least be a few good points in it or something… but no, it was just bad. i hadn’t read any online reviews of it, so i didn’t know what i was in for… sigh.

On the other hand…Wall-E??? cutest movie EVER… i totally loved it. it was great to see something environmentally AND sciencey being done for kids. not only that but there were 2 other previews for science-ish kid films. one about monkey’s in space and another about a science fair that an igor tries to win. science is awesome, and there should be more science films for kids made. so this is good. yes, wall-e was great, and the perfect date movie, btw… if you haven’t heard about the plot line - the robots fall in love. and its the cutest thing since kittens.

a lot of other stuff happens too, but that was the part i was focused on. yeah, i couldn’t get enough of it. wall-e good. expelled bad.

im back in toronto this weekend, sans hemant. we’re having a whole crew of people go to the rom tomorrow, so that should be a lot of fun. science science and dinosaurs. awesome. im sorry about my lack of content, but… i’ve been busy trying to figure out plans for september. as it looks now i’ll be moving to toronto at the end of august to go to york university. … where i plan to live… i dont know yet. where i plan to work… i dont know what either. what classes i plan to take at school…. haven’t quite got that under control. but hey, it’s only the first week of july, i still have some time here. and yes. im aware that this is like my 80th university. shut up.

If you hadn’t heard recently a story broke on numerous websites that some researchers had found ” building blocks of life” in a meteorite. Numerous headlines stated that we were aliens and other such things to grab the attention of readers. I’ve never found science journalism to be particularly great at explaining things so I thought I might clarify things a little. Several researchers from around the world ( Imperial College London, Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre, Radboud University Nijmegen etc.) extracted and analyzed a 15 g sample from the interior of the Murchison meteorite.

They crushed it and going through an extensive purification process eluted out any organic compounds they could find. Then using mass spectroscopy ( a way of determining what a compound is by ionizing it and firing it against a detector and determining it’s time of flight) they determined samples of both uracil and xanthine were present in the meteorite. This actually fairly cool since uracil is a component of RNA and xanthine is an intermediate in the biosynthetic pathway to guanine, another nucleobase found in both DNA and RNA.

It was determined through isotope analysis of these samples that significant proportions of the carbon atoms found in them were of carbon 13 indicating that the molecules likely formed extraterrestrially since carbon 13 is rarely found on earth.

A damn cool story but it’s not like they’ve found incontrovertible evidence that earth was seeded from the heavens by aliens. It just means that life on this planet may have been partially jump started by these biological precursors from the stars, which is still fairly cool I think.

Incidentally, xanthine is one of the intermediates in the pathway that leads to caffeine. Looks like it’s always had a role in getting things going

Reference:

Martins, Z. et al. 2008. Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 270: 130-136

I won’t write about how much I fucking loved the dinosaur exhibit, because you all probably know that I think it was PHENOMENAL… except that they said they had “expanded” their dinosaur collection - however… they just made fake dinosaurs out of plaster. There were a TON of dinosaurs that had no real bone on them. … So that wasn’t very cool. But they were still neat to look at.

I spent last weekend in Toronto with my gay boyfriend, his brother, the lovely pres of the UTSA and met up with some Guelph friends one night. We did the usual… bar… thing. We went to 4, which was actually really nice, I wish we could have stayed there. But we had to go meet people at Crews … we went too late, and it was full of hot sweaty gay men. And ran into like 4 people I haven’t seen in a long time and had awkward conversations.

Anyway… after all that craziness I decided it was probably in my best interest to spend Sunday doing some downtime sort of things. So I went to the ROM, since I missed out on it when all the campus people went. When I walked in, this was the first thing I saw:

Seriously. There is NOTHING more adorable than kids loving dinosaurs. I’d of hated to be the person inside that costume, but they kids loved it so much.

I think the most interesting stops of my day were - Canadian History, Darwin and the top floor Japanese art exhibit.

Canada through the history didn’t actually sound that good, because I already know all about Canada’s history - but after seeing a painting of some aboriginals, and the art’s description of being humbled in front of his own painting - I decided to press on. On of the things they had set up was decor. They showed what people’s houses would have looked like during the first settlements, then with French influence… etc. when it got to the “modern” section it was weird. I was staring at what was supposed to represent my era.

It was a read couch, with a curvy top sitting low to the floor, and a couple super modern looking chairs and like funky looking lamps. The only thing I could think was “Uh, my house totally doesn’t look like that” really.. rich people’s houses were the ones that looked like that. It made me sort of second guess everything I had just looked at. Who actually had the french influenced furniture? Just the rich people? Was anything the correct depiction of how everyday people lived?

The only downside of that exhibit was that it didn’t once mention Sir Isaac Brock, and I love him. <3

The Darwin exhibit was pretty good. I felt bad for the animals they had caged up for entertainment, people knocking on their glass, taking pictures and pointing. They just looked sad. The history of Darwin’s life was good to read, and all the information on evolution was no news - but again, glad to see it was there and being read by so many people.

There was a “tourist” group going through…. so I attached myself for a little bit. Turns out they were a Christian group, and that was interesting. The tour guide would bring them to a section of the exhibit that said on the display “evolution is the only explanation for life science has thus far” and would read it as “obviously evolution isn’t the only explanation” and would make up their own science.

Shanghai Kaleidoscope was the japanese art exhibit on the top floor - I recommend EVERYONE go see this. It wasn’t very big, but it was SO good. The large scale video art was just amazing. I’ll likely go back to the ROM just to see that exhibit again.

It seems as though anyone with any sort of science background is scurrying around trying to solve the problem of global warming. Recently some (almost) geoengineers proposed a “solution” that would just make matters worse. It’s an idea that really makes me think that real and professional scientists should be left to coming up with ideas for solving global warming. Their idea? Clouding the atmosphere up with man made aerosol particles. Now, they do admit that it would deplete the ozone in “some” regions, mostly the North and South pole thus turning those regions into irradiated dead zones. But to them it seems like a pretty fair trade off to them.

These aerosol particles that would be added to our atmosphere would in theory reflect sunlight away from the earth thus cooling the planet. But when you consider that for a second… instead of investing money into long term life changing solutions we’re going to (or are proposed to) add more chemicals to our atmosphere that would shift weather patters, deplete our ozone to the point where areas of our Earth would be considered “dead zones” and it seems like such a scheme would cost a gigantic amount of money. And logically - when they STOP shoving all of it into the environment or something faults in the process we’d all be screwed.

Playing with the Earth like this is just crazy. We’ve seen time and time again the playing around with nature is rarely, if ever, a good thing. When it comes to the ozone there is so much that we don’t understand and so much that we’re still discovering. Where would geoengineers even get an idea like this? In 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo erupted and released sulfur into the atmosphere there was a direct correlation with the temperature decreasing.

All of these new fangled attempts at cooling the planet are getting out of control.

There’s the man-made volcano that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space “sun shade” made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet’s temperature. The forest of ugly artificial “trees” that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the “Geritol solution,” named after a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement with extra iron — in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

All of this time, energy and money is being poured into these ridiculous attempts at using science to cool the planet, when really humanity would be better of pursing changes within their industrial, economic and home lifestyles. All of these crazy ideas could lead to disastrous weather patterns, cloudy skies through which we’d never see the sun again, droughts and famine. Changes on Earth take millions of years for a reason, we can’t just start dumping tonnes of sulfur on the planet and expect everything to be okay… we certainly can’t expect things to be better after such an act.

So, instead I’ll write a story containing the links, mostly environmental. And I warn you - I’m a horrible story writer unless given some direction…

This story takes place in a phallic tower, one that slightly resembles a haunted tower at the University of Toronto. Inside this tower there was a group of people who had come together to try and make an extremely important decision. They met inside a relatively normal conference room with eggshell white walls and a fake oak door. The room was three times longer than it was wide and had a mirrored ceiling. At one end of the room there was a table with food placed out, all of it was organic because the people there simply hated the environment.

One member of the party was running even more late than usual so then people sat around discussing their families and other “important” aspects of their lives. One of the women had recently joined a self help group and started giving a mini lecture on ways that people could improve their lives.

It’s easy.

She said…

Perhaps the most important. Fall in love, if you aren’t already. If you have, fall in love with your partner all over again. Abandon caution and let your heart be broken. Or love family members, friends, anyone — it doesn’t have to be romantic love. Love all of humanity, one person at a time.

This upset some of the men, one man in particular who immediately changed the subject to what he had eaten for breakfast that morning.

Eggs, bacon, orange juice and french toast!

Someone in the conference room asked if the chicken he obtained the eggs from was blind… Before being able to answer in confusion the late member of the group showed up. The group ended up staying in the room for weeks upon weeks before finally coming to the decision that they were going to dump garbage into space. Little did they know, an annoying fly that had been buzzing around was actually a spy that had lost it’s way to a nuclear power plant that was about to explode.