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Re: A first practical step on the documentary problem
Last night, I watched a documentary on the History Channel called
'Apocolypse Island', about a 150 foot tall Mayan monument on a remote island
in the South Pacific 400 miles off the coast of South America. I'm not
going to go into details about the 'cult archaeology', but among many other
things, they didn't name the island, they talked about the great difficulty
of having to take 4 days to get there by renting an old fishing boat and the
difficulty and danger involved in landing their boat on the small beach.
The 'unnamed' island was Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile which
has a nice airport with commercial flights -- why didn't they go by air?
Why did they spend 3 days treking and camping to the site when they could
have used the road running from the airstrip? Why did they claim a natural
volcanic formation was an eroded Mayan statue of a sun god and jaguar? It
got worse from there. I used to have a decent opinion of History Channel
quality. I lost that regard last night.
Arrgh,
JimC
----- Original Message -----
From: "david maas" <david@brainpets.com>
To: <wdm1949@hotmail.com>
Cc: <villandra@austin.rr.com>; "DML" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 1:03 PM
Subject: Re: A first practical step on the documentary problem
If a film lays no claim to scientific plausibility that's fine. 2012 was
quite clearly not interested in science beyond as a marketing ploy. That's
not the ssue, I feel. It is an issue when a film project lays claim to
scientific credibility and fails to deliver, for whatever reason.