Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Ice Age Movie

OK, this is just a kid's movie: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Of course, the dinosaurs lived about 64 million years before the really famous ice ages, and ice ages and dinosaurs don't necessarily have a lot of overlap.

Anyway, films like this are bound to screw up kid's notions of what happened when. I mean, my 4-yr old nephew sucks down information like a Hummer consumes gas, and (and this is a bit scary) he doesn't miss much. So this movie is bound to confuse him, until his obsessed uncle comes along and tries to set him straight, which no doubt probably confuses him even more.

Although I did teach him to add small integers.

Heck, I was confused until about 12th grade because some idiot teacher in the 7th grade said that pi was equal to 22/7. I'm sure he or she, the first time they mentioned it, said it was an approximation, but you can only do so many substitutions for it on the blackboard before you ruin even semi-smart people.

This movie will not help with American's scientific literary, which is already killing us.


PS: And now that I think about it, why were there so few ice ages before about a million years ago? Orbital factors?

3 comments:

Steve Bloom said...

The short version is that the orbital cycles can't drive glacial cycles unless CO2 drops low enough for ice sheets to form.

Jason Delso said...

What Steve said.

The Wikipedia article has links to most of the important papers in the References section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#References

dan said...

steve,

you are an idiot. unless co2 levels get low enough.

hahahaha you think co2 is the climate driver

get a fucking clue