COSMOS series

To both of your comments

Species at the top of the food chain are always vulnerable as the result of an ELE. One of the rules of survival--don't become too dependant on anything.

Fortunately after an ELE, if anything survives there's another 'Nature hates an empty niche' period. I consider this a consequence to natural selection.

In 1980 when we gathered in our living room on Sunday night to watch the original commercial free Cosmos it was an event-guests were invited, pizzas made, chairs arranged around the big 21 incher. Today if I miss a commercial rich Cosmos on Fox, I can always watch it later on the National Geographic channel while sitting alone in front of a 4 foot HD flatscreen waiting for a pre made pizza in the oven.

It ain't quite the same---but paraphrasing Cowboy from Full Metal Jacket---Sagan's better than Tyson, but Tyson ain't bad.

Rap

This group seems to be a hard one to please. I watched it and was quite entertained .
Remember 25 years ago much of this stuff wasn't even available. Genomics was almost non-existent and "survival of the cutest" was a Soviet Lab study with foxes that were raisd for fur.

Also, I taped it so that I could watch the show, commercial free and at my time of convenience.

I like Tysons calm style and matter of fact delivery. Sagan was good but a bit too Walt Whitmanish . He was always searching for the best turn of phrase. I think this eries will celebrate the Cosmos with the level of CGI that weve developed since Sagan was here.
Even that "Hall of Extinction" is a CGI that would have taken really skilled matte painters to do back then and it would have been limited because of the costs.
Now, almost every acene was CGI and so, (unlike everyones disappointment at the "cartoons"), I was amazed at how they've made the cartoons of the ancients and the arctic bears actually look like cartoons(even with black outlines) so they weren't confused with the amazing CGI (course thats only my take, I could be all wet but I think the producers had lots of ideas in mind as to how to suck us in and how to break the "real, almost real, and the cartoon" apart)
I loved the DNA sequences, filamentous, gossamer and all tangled up.

I watched the first episode yesterday. I too was entertained. I'll watch the second one sometime today.

DVRs free us from tv schedules and incessant commercials on the cable networks.

Ive gotten really good at spooling through commercials at top speed an usually hitting the resumed program without more than a second or two lost.

Its a gift

I just watched the first two in the series and liked them. Neil doesn't have that "endless pregnant pause" delivery that Sagan had, but then, who does.

I like the little homages to the original and to Carl that they slip in. Not enough to retread old ground, but enough to remind me of the original.

The graphics are good and some of the new data is presented well. It's a little bit too rudimentary for me so far, but I'm not a novice to this information, so I don't expect it to cover much ground that I haven't seen before.

It was also interesting hearing him talk about microwave background radiation and the Big Bang given the other big (and growing) news story related to the twist pattern of the CMB confirming Inflation.

I think Neil was a tad nervous, I have seen Neil in debates n he comes off far better. He just needs to let be himself n this version of Cosmos will be epic.

Hes imparting new information on the genetics and cosmology. Hes not up for "best role by an actor in a science series"

You might be right. His presentation might get better as the series goes on and he gets more comfortable. I thought it was pretty cool that he met Carl Sagan when he was 17 years old. He must be feeling very honored to be hosting this series. I wonder what the book was that Carl signed for him (I couldn't catch the title when he showed it).

Duck dynasty

DVR ?

Right. I'm more interested in the content than Tyson's performance.

a DVR is a Digital Video Recorder. Its the basis of the Teevo service. In my case our cable service has provided a recorder that can "tape" up to 200 hours of programs. We tape and watch later then erase and tape again. It frees you to watch when you want.
Of course our cable also has an "On Demand" service that saves programs in the "cloud" for up to a year. that must be one huge disc drive.

They were very nicely rendered dead dimetrodons. And I will give them credit for not lumping dimetrodons in with the dinosaurs. You should have seen me ranting in guild chat, back in the day, whenever I quested in Un'Goro Crater.

But I still wonder what dead dimetrodons were doing representing the Permian extinction, when dimetrodons went extinct tens of millions of years before the Permian extinction.

First, the P/Tr extinction didn't just happen overnight, by some estimates based on volcanic complexes, it could have started five or so million years earlier than when it became the "boundary event"

Second, There were so many families like Sphenacodonts which contained at least 6 sub families of these synapsids that one or two genera ( at least to me), like caseids or sphenacodonts. lived up to the end and some of these looked all the world like dimetrodonts except for their stupid faces.
Remember, and Im not fully convinced, That all fossil genera are based upon a couple of skeletal remains and any differences are assigned new species names. Its often time that some paleontologist wants to be memorialized for findng a "newbie" when it may just be a deformed form.
When Cope found his first dimetrodonts in the Red CliffFormation, the chronometry of that formation does reach into the middle upper PWrmian , so the dimetrodon story is still full of ignorance on all our prts.
I cant help you much because I don't use many vertebrate fossils in my ork because usually mineral deposits aren't associated with most vertebrates (eceptions being cichlid fishes and sygnathid fishes (pipefishes and seahorses).

I know of 6 different genera of synapsids that hd those big sails and one or two lived into the Induan of the lower Triassic.

Third,I think the artist on the program couldn't have chosen a more representative fossil for the late Carboniferous than the synapsids or therapsids, so why not a little artistic license on his part.?
Personally, I would have plopped a couple of big-ass Permian Opistoparian trilobites (which classically defined the GREAT DYING). But, it wasn't a geology lesson, it was entertainment with a little science thrown in.

Whats guild chat and is it still round?

i m watching it but i m thinking that wat is the source of their series bcoz may it is just a theory

For some of your posts I need English subtitles. I'm not talking about the typos either.

that's what I mean, so what whether a certain fossil was off the timeline?

All of your parts of what?

lizards