Earle Holland, the science p.r. man at Ohio State U., and an old pal, loves to fulminate. He is the king of outrage, and really good at scorn and mock disbelief upon encountering idiocy of various stripes. Or perceived idiocy. He does laugh a lot too. But you want to find somebody spluttering in righteous fury while remaining passably close to rational, that’d be Earle.
Well, a week or so ago he called attention to one of his blogs, but a check of the site found a more recent one which will amuse all science journalists not to mention other readers of this site – people who prefer to see things portrayed as near to reality as human frailty and tricky unintended imagination permit. It seems there is a movie plot going around, and it might reach the big screen. It has to do with heroic college students, nefarious hi-tech thieves, and all the spare and enriched uranium to be found next to a university nuclear engineering department’s research and test reactor.
Considering we’ve in recent years had global warming drench New York City in a gigantic sea wave and then an instant ice age, and a weird beam of neutrinos or something cause continents to become unmoored from the mantle and founder into the sea in 2012, not to mention ex-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger’s next Terminator role should there be one, this show’s premise seems to be small potatoes in the department of rampant techno-nonsense in movies. Earle is worried that the public is susceptible to false information, especially when the information involves science. So am I. But as he also says – “we’re talking about fiction here.”
Earle’s previous post, on nefarious animal rights activists-cum-terrorists, is here.
– Charlie Petit
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