More media stardom for B.

[purplecat]

No idea exactly when this was shown but B. continues to win the "does cool stuff with science" game. So far I've only been able to watch it with the sound off because I'm in a shared office so I've not gleaned much except that he's acquired a new job title "Computational Primatologist" which must have any interested viewers scratching their heads about why he's messing around with T. Rexes.

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I think the commentary said he was a Computational Biologist.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I don't get the Computational Primatologist either, and suspect that the producers must have mustunderstood something, somehow! If you ask B, do let us know!

Edit: I wrote that before listening to it properly. The commentary said out loud that B usually works on primates and had only recently turned to T-Rex. Is that in fact the case?

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

B was great. It's not his fault that the commentary implied that the therapods ran on two legs because they were big - and, of course, the smaller ones evolved first. Then there was the bit where the commentator stated that T-Rex was the largest of land predators when it is only the third largest of the known therapod predators! Plainly, they haven't caught up with the Argentinian research.

Finally, they implied that racehorse breeding was getting lots more speed out of said racehorses, when it probably isn't so. Times are very rarely broken nowadays, and when they are it is often to do with the state of the going, and the fact that nutrition and training methods have improved (which is probably why human track times have also improved.) The thing that is happening is that some lines of breeding have produced horses with horribly fragile legs (I mean, even more so than the normally look-at-it-too-hard-and-it-goes-lame thoroughbred leg.

Huh. Congrats to B on getting his stuff right, though.

Edit: I didn't mean that last sentence the way it sounds! I'm just happy for him that all his technical stuff got through the journalistic mill intact, and he explained it so well that even I understood it.