Re: A first practical step on the documentary problem

["jrc" <jrccea@bellsouth.net>]

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.