Dinosaur Kingdom is a twist on the biblical Creationist view that people and dinosaurs lived together. Here, people live with dinosaurs -- but only until the dinosaurs eat them.
As the tour begins, visitors are asked to imagine themselves in 1863. A family of Virginia paleontologists has accidentally dug a mine shaft into a hidden valley of living dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the Union Army has tagged along, hoping to kidnap the big lizards and use them as "weapons of mass destruction" against the South.
What you see along the path of Dinosaur Kingdom is a series of tableaus depicting the aftermath of this ill-advised military strategy.
Donald Rumsfeld:
Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward. Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?
Kurt Schwenk, via Carl Zimmer:
I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you’d be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.
From the archive:
Pablo Escobar purchased the 8.4 sq mile Napoles Estate, about 200 miles from Bogota, in 1978.
He turned it into a fantasy land with concrete dinosaurs, a bullfighting ring and a private zoo that would have made Michael Jackson jealous, with giraffes, elephants, kangaroos and hippopotamuses.
Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds
Topic: Games
8:20 am EDT, May 20, 2009
Jim Rossignol:
Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.
And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There's surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it's okay to aim for hi-score vengeance.
We are on the cusp of perfection of extreme evil -- an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond weapons of mass destruction.
Robert Draper, for GQ:
Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty.
John Legend recently delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences.
Here's John Jackson on Legend's speech:
He argued for the academic conceptions of “truth” that he learned as an undergraduate, conceptions he considers a lot more rigorous and weighty than what gets passed off as truth in the contemporary public/politic sphere.
He challenged the students to hold fast to the methodological and epistemological lessons they learned in their Penn courses. He dared them to think internationally by putting their own relative luxuries in conversation with the material disadvantages of human beings in other parts of the world. He asked students to redefine “soul” as a framework for operationalizing more holistic engagements with our social world and more empirically verifiable/falsifiable truth-claims based upon such engagements.
Legend proffered soul as an apt scaffolding for the substantive stuff that truth should be made of. He thinks of soul and truth as directly related, even mutually constitutive.
As a soul-singer, people sometimes ask him to define soul. And according to Legend, it isn’t reducible to race or a conventional genre of popular music. Anyone can be soulful, he says in the speech, just as long as the person is “authentic,” “real and pure,” trying to find fleeting but fecund moments “when silence and sound come together” so profoundly and unpredictably that it might bring tears to one’s eyes. And those eyes will always see the world just a little bit differently as a result.
Super Slo-mo Surfer in the South Pacific, on BBC Two
Topic: Arts
8:20 am EDT, May 20, 2009
HD super slow motion video of big wave surfer Dylan Longbottom in a 12 foot monster barrel - the first shots of their kind ever recorded.
Sterling Hayden:
If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
Tim Winton:
The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.
Sanford Schwartz:
If Julian Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.
Jenny Diski:
The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.
Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past.
In the early 19th century, literate families and friends read aloud to each other as a matter of habit.
The way we listen to books today has been de-socialized, stripped of context, which has the solitary virtue of being extremely convenient. But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud.
You can easily make the argument that reading silently is an economic artifact, a sign of a new prosperity beginning in the early 19th century and a new cheapness in books. The same argument applies to listening to books on your iPhone. But what I would suggest is that our idea of reading is incomplete, impoverished, unless we are also taking the time to read aloud.
Steven Johnson:
The book's migration to the digital realm will not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but will likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
David Lazarus:
To be sure, time marches on.
Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.
Mark Bittman:
I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life.
Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy. We can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis.
American officials are in a concealed state of panic.
The Afghan Taliban of the 1990s have morphed into the Pakistani Taliban and the Central Asian Taliban and it may be only a question of time before we see the Indian Taliban.
The Pakistani army seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy.
Since 2004, practically everything that could go wrong in this war has gone wrong. The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot recreate the state's will to resist the Taliban and pursue more effective policies.
Nir Rosen:
"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."
Graeme Wood:
“Is the boy a Talib?” I asked. “Future Talib,” he said.
While we agree with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that “fresh eyes were needed” to review our military strategy in the region, we feel that expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan.
Stewart Brand:
In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.
Kilcullen:
People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.
Kilcullen and Exum:
The use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic — or, more accurately, a piece of technology — substituting for a strategy.
George W. Bush:
We're not sure who the "they" are but we know they're there.
"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists. "Nooooo!" the audience roared.
