Catastrophe

[camouflage]

I've been watching this, and although that Baldric/Time Team guy presents it it's managed to hold my interest. It's abit dumbed down but I guess it's good to keep things accesable, for school-kids for instance. The only thing that's annoying about it is the way Tony Robinson insists on describing everything as a catastrophe, a disaster etc. Well I suppose they need to live up to the title of the series, why the makers of the series chose to come at geological history as a series of disasters and catastrophe's is abit puzzling. Senseless really, and repeatedly making the point that "if this didn't happen we wouldn't be here", what's that about

Still, nice graphics like, pretty. And if you ignore half of what Mr Time Team* says, quite interesting too. Recently came back from a trip to the Sahara so finding geology really interesting at the moment. I'm hoping they'll get to talking about the age of the trilobytes! :- ))

*Why do they call that other show Time Team anyway, they only ever talk about cultures in Britain, there's no wider investigation in like... Time, they should call it the British Archeology Show instead, it's not like they ever show the slightest interest in archeology in other parts of the world. Tossers. Not that ancient Britain isn't interesting but there's a whole world out there, I never watch that show anyway because it's so parochial and anyway if the people's whose lives they dig up were alive today they'd have no interest in the kind of nerds that spend their time digging up the past so they can get all excited that people built houses and had markets and had like... lives and stuff back in Roman times. It would be like a thousand years from now people like Tony Robinson and that Farmer Giles character digging up the sites of ancient squat parties and imagining they share common interests with those long dead ravers.

 

[Groucho]

I think it is a very good accessible introduction to 'catastrophe' theory hence the title and the reference to catastrophes/disasters etc. The basic proposition is that significant evolutionary change did not come about as a gradual process but (relatively speaking) sudden dramatic shifts caused by cataclysmic events.

In the eighties this theory was somewhat on the fringes of evolutionary thought, but has relatively quickly become central as more and more evidence has been gathered.

The idea of feedbacks and tipping points as used in climate change science has also been introduced in an accessible way. There is growing evidence that too little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes a freeze, the impact of which causes feedbacks causing more freeze until we hit a point of no return and we get sudden dramatic catastrophic freeze. Similarly too much carbon dioxide causes warming which at a certain tipping point causes feedbacks causing greater warming at a dramatic and catastrophic pace - the point of no return.

The CGI also makes it fun viewing.

 

[Groucho]

.....

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*Why do they call that other show Time Team anyway, they only ever talk about cultures in Britain, there's no wider investigation in like... Time, they should call it the British Archeology Show instead, it's not like they ever show the slightest interest in archeology in other parts of the world. Tossers. Not that ancient Britain isn't interesting but there's a whole world out there, I never watch that show anyway because it's so parochial .....

Sorry but this is not strictly true as you would know if you watched the prog. TT is mainly UK based but has the occassional trip elsewhere in the globe.

The accessible popularisation of archeology and of the developing science behind it is one of the few successes in recent TV imo. One positive abvout archeology is that, unlike the written records, it is not so skewed towards the lives of the 'great and the good'. Archeology uncovers the day to day lives of ordinary folk - and yes I do think we had much in common if you can look beyond the human excrement fertiliser and game boys.

 

[camouflage]

I think it is a very good accessible introduction to 'catastrophe' theory hence the title and the reference to catastrophes/disasters etc. The basic proposition is that significant evolutionary change did not come about as a gradual process but (relatively speaking) sudden dramatic shifts caused by cataclysmic events.

In the eighties this theory was somewhat on the fringes of evolutionary thought, but has relatively quickly become central as more and more evidence has been gathered.

The idea of feedbacks and tipping points as used in climate change science has also been introduced in an accessible way. There is growing evidence that too little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes a freeze, the impact of which causes feedbacks causing more freeze until we hit a point of no return and we get sudden dramatic catastrophic freeze. Similarly too much carbon dioxide causes warming which at a certain tipping point causes feedbacks causing greater warming at a dramatic and catastrophic pace - the point of no return.

The CGI also makes it fun viewing.

I understand the principal of tipping points but why reffer to these as catastrophes? for instance in the first program we were dealing with Earth as a firey rock, collided with another firey rock. How was that a catastophe, there wasn't anything alive to feel inconvenienced by it all. Is the program trying to scare us into recycling more? If so, well... abit ham fisted but I'd understand.

I just feel all the emotive terminology is un-called for.

 

[Groucho]

I understand the principal of tipping points but why reffer to these as catastrophes? for instance in the first program we were dealing with Earth as a firey rock, collided with another firey rock. How was that a catastophe, there wasn't anything alive to feel inconvenienced by it all. Is the program trying to scare us into recycling more? If so, well... abit ham fisted but I'd understand.

I just feel all the emotive terminology is un-called for.

except that it chimes with 'catastrophe theory'

 

[camouflage]

yes I do think we had much in common if you can look beyond the human excrement fertiliser and game boys.

Yes, we folk who don't go around digging up peoples lawns only to exclaim "Look! They built houses that had walls back in Roman times too!" have much in common with previous generations, I agree.

Tony Robinson and his friends though are freaks in time, their different from the rest of us that inhabit history as they don't seem to have anything better to do.

Nothing wrong with popularizing archeology, but it should consist of more than just noting that the Iceni or someone lived in houses again and again and again. All I'm saying is that Time Team is boring as fuck, and so is Tony Robinson, and I'm pretty sure Woad Warriors for instance lived far more interesting lives than the thankless drudgery that is watching Time Team on a sunday afternoon. Which is why I don't.

 

[Groucho]

Catastrophe theory, which originated with the work of the French mathematician René Thom in the 1960s, and became very popular due to the efforts of Christopher Zeeman in the 1970s, considers the special case where the long-run stable equilibrium can be identified with the minimum of a smooth, well-defined potential function (Lyapunov function).

Small changes in certain parameters of a nonlinear system can cause equilibria to appear or disappear, or to change from attracting to repelling and vice versa, leading to large and sudden changes of the behaviour of the system. However, examined in a larger parameter space, catastrophe theory reveals that such bifurcation points tend to occur as part of well-defined qualitative geometrical structures.

wiki

 

[camouflage]

except that it chimes with 'catastrophe theory'

I shan't bother to ask why the scientists involved decided to call it Catastrophe Theory then. Critical Change Theory or something would have been far more... scientific in my opinion. Probably they were looking for funding or something.

 

[Groucho]

Or read Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory in which he examines traditional gradualist evolutionary theory and then alternatives including catastrophe theory (and punctuated equilibrium).

 

[stavros]

I really enjoyed it, although it did cover a lot of what Iain Stewart did in his BBC Earth: The Power Of The Planet series which was superb.

 

[david dissadent]

Its reasonably ok. Its a decent enough vehicle for getting people to watch a bit about geology that does not have dinosaurs in it. But it presented alot as hard fact where there is still some debate imo. For example snowball earth itself is quite widely questioned as slushball earth.

Still I kinda reckon I know what next weeks show will be about

Spoiler: the great dying

Itll be the siberian traps and the permian triassic extinction event. Basicaly the biggest volanic epside in over 500 million years goes off in the Ural ocean near a huge deposit of coal. This massive amount of CO2 is enough to trigger the methane clatherate gun to go off and truly cook the earth. This super hothouse earth causes the seas to stagnate and turn anoxic, which then only sulpher loving biology thrived and thirved in such numbers that the atmosphere became poisoned with hydrogen sulphide which poisened the air and created acid rain.

95% of all spieces of life became extinct.

 

[Gingerman]

The timespan involved is mindboggling,billions of years

 

[Epona]

I think it's great, the whole thing is done really well. It's good to see catastrophe theory presented in an OTT CGItastic way on telly and I'm absolutely hooked