Wolmania - Friday, August 12, 2022

Hello and welcome back to Wolmania. It’s been an interesting week for the rule of law. But we’re not here to talk about that! We’re here to talk about how scientists are liars:

Item 1: a link

Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty

The irony of fabricating data for your field study about honesty would be interesting enough if even it hadn’t come to light because someone noticed the difference between the Calibri and Cambria typefaces.

Item 2: a list

Great Apes, ranked:

1. Orang-utans
2. Bonobos
3. Humans
4. Gorillas
5. Chimpanzees

Item 3: a media recommendation

Light & Magic

Disney+ is absolutely unparalleled at creating high quality self-promotional content to justify massive price hikes. This is a six hour commercial for Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company George Lucas created to make the Star Wars movies. The historical footage is great, and it’s very interesting to learn how chaotic and creative things were behind the scenes at ILM. But the thing I found most compelling was the story of how computer graphics seemingly came out of nowhere to decimate the traditional craft of special effects more or less overnight. You can see the pain in these septuagenarian white men’s eyes as they recount the day they realized they no longer mattered (because a bunch of twentysomething white men had come along to make them obsolete). In all seriousness though, the last forty years of innovation in cinema makes for some compelling viewing. There’s also some fun added color on George Lucas’s quixotic efforts to remove all humanity and reality from the Star Wars prequels.

I also recommend The Imagineering Story, a four part documentary about the wonderful dorks who created all of the stuff Disney owned before it bought Lucasfilm, and which clearly served as the prototype for Light & Magic.

Separately, this program also made me really want to see Mad God.

Item 4: a photograph

See ya!

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next week.