Evolution! Beautiful! Engrossing! ... and gross.

Nothing makes science more fun than a catchy song.

You might recognize this tune.

Horrible Histories - Natural Selection

I got my first "Horrible Histories" book when I was in London for a conference.  I loved the authors' instincts about how to make corny - but not too corny - jokes about history and provide a lot of facts of daily life that aren't captured in traditional history materials.  They use alliterative titles like "Rotten Romans" or "The Terrible Tudors" (the latter is the book I bought).

Well, they have a TV show that is based on snippets taken from the various books.  The TV show bounces through the time periods more than I'd like, but they caught the irreverence and wit of the books.

Here's Charles Darwin.  Singing.

Pythagasaurus rex

I know, I know.  You want more math.  The Lehrer bit wasn't enough.

Okay, here you go!

Arachnogiggles

When I was growing up, I loved the "Hinterland Who's Who" spots that came on during commercial breaks.  It's got a very distinctive flute solo that announced when it was to begin, then the announcer would go into some detail about the habitat of the featured creature.  We'd get some interesting facts and after about a minute of education, back to animated mind-candy.

It was so Canadian.  It was just like a film loop - sometimes the sound wouldn't quite synch, there were lines scratched into the celluloid, and the picture jumped a bit.  I can imagine some grant of $50 being handed to a graduate student in ecology to put these together with the available equipment of the time.

This is a great sendup of the old HWW set.  In the originals, there was no experimentation being done on the creatures, but you'll see why that's important here:

Feedback from YouTube

 I wasn't sure where to put this, but I thought the "Humour" page would be the best fit!  I love creating artifacts (teaching objects) and posting them on YouTube.  A few years ago I put up one for my Introductory Biology students to show how to use Excel on the Mac so they could hand in better Lab Manuscripts.  It turns out that the pages really took off and I sometimes get comments about them.  The one I posted below reminded me of something in my life that was rather funny, so I responded as you can see:

• thank you for uploading this :) it is the perfect savior for a senior on the last minute trying to get done with internal assessments
  ur voice has a calming effect by the way =)

  a2310kj 8 minutes ago
• @a2310kj Thanks for the feedback and the nice comment about my voice. I want to share something: my low voice calms lots of students. I'm a professor at Mount Royal University and during my job interview here, I put the Dean to sleep during my teaching demonstration (a part of the hiring process). It didn't stop me from getting the job, though. And just to prove it's not a fluke, I also put an external evaluator to sleep two years later!

 Another response was succinct:

• YOU SIR ARE A GOD!!

I like that because I picture a student who's been struggling to get something right  - much as I was doing as an undergraduate - and finally the catharsis and relief when it all comes together.  And I'm warmed that I had a little contribution to that.  I hope that person did well in whatever they were up to.

And my son just about crapped his pants when he read this one: (There's colourful language, so I put this after the jump.  Don't go there if you are offended by the f-bomb...)

• Dude, this was fucking amazing. Thank you so much! Because of you, I can now finish my lab. You are a fucking genius. I asked my lab T.A AND the school's tech place and they couldn't help me. Thank you so much. i fucking love your geniusness.

  xxDoraemonx 1 month ago

 I suspect the popularity of the videos is easily explained.  Some of the things you have to do to get Office products to do what you want are ridiculous.  This idea is summarized by this entry:

• Fuck you Excel. It's passed midnight and I've got a lab report due tomorrow morning at 8AM. Why are you so DAMN complicated?! I just want to make a simple LINE GRAPH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Thanks for the tutorial, by the way.

  MsKTMvalley 2 months ago

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New note:


OMG, this is so funny - to me, at least.  I clicked on MsKTMvalley and the F-you Excel might be considered a tad... disrespectful.  The wallpaper on MSKTMvalley is this: