Post by Brad Nelson on Jan 1, 2020 9:55:00 GMT -8
CuriosityStream
Special sale going on now (through Jan. 5): Yearly subscription (HD): $11.99. I signed up via Roku and I didn’t see the discount offered.
But when you go to sign up via the Roku, it first starts you out on a 7-day free trial. And if I go to my Roku account to manage my subscriptions online (via a web browser), it shows my free trial but it lists the annual cost as $19.99. There is no mention of a discount.
You can also sign up online but I’m not sure the steps involved for linking to your Roku device or if that restricts to watching via an app on your tablet or via your web browser.
Having signed up from within Roku on my smart TV (using my standard Roku password, etc.), I can’t use this same sign-in for the CuriosityStream site via a web browser. If I try to sign up on the online site, it just take me through as if I was paying for the service from scratch again.
But I don’t want to use the service online. I want to use their online site only to browse through (and link to) their offerings. From the home page (yesterday), I did find a way to browse their titles. But now that has disappeared for some reason. But when I signed up via the Roku device, they sent me an email that links me to their suggested Starter Collection which does offer a few titles I can link to.
Also, the CuriosityStream channel (the app) on my Roku device (you download channels via the Roku in order to use them) has crashed three times. The Roku device will then reboot but it loses my place in the program I was watching.
Oh….via Googling, I found a link to the CuriosityStream categories. This whole channel is obviously held together by bubble gum and bailing wire. But the price is right. One high-quality documentary might cost $4.99 to rent.
But I have happily watched about five documentaries, starting with the excellent David Attenborough’s Light on Earth. That categories pages wouldn’t actually take me to the page (the previous link) that tells more about it. I found that link by Googling. Once again, bailing wire. But you can at least watch the trailer.
I also watched the excellent documentary Samurai Castle. A huge quake (a series of quakes and aftershocks) devastated Kumamoto Castle in Japan. This 2017 documentary concludes saying the restoration is still underway and will take several years. I’m not sure what the state of those repairs are now.
The complex itself is huge and the view above is perhaps 1/12 of the various collapses that had occurred there.
David Attenborough’s Ant Mountain is another excellent documentary. I had never seen anything like this before. In this one, he describes a super-colony of ants. I’d never heard of such a thing.
Note that neither of these documentaries were heavy on the word, “evolved.” And it’s not that things haven’t changed and evolved. It’s just that no one knows how. While watching another documentary (somewhat interesting) in the Ancient Earth series, Who Killed the Giant Insects, you then devolve into wild speculation based on using “evolution” as an all-purpose, all-powerful tool that life uses to create what it needs when it needs it. Besides that, the interpretation of the fossil record seems slipshod. I don’t mind speculation if it’s presented as such. But most of the speculation in this is presented at likely fact.
All in all, it’s fascinating that there were once dragon flies with a 25 inch wingspan. But other than that fact, the rest might as well be Spielberg and Jurassic Park. If you take this entire program and condense it to its actually content you can say: The oxygen content of the earth during the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago) was much higher than it is now. This may have allowed insects to grow larger because insects don’t have lungs and require a different process for distributing oxygen in their systems.
However, complications ensue. These large dragon flies actual post-date high-oxygen levels. So that doesn’t seem to be the only answer. I think the one factoid I got out of this program that I don’t remember hearing before is that the reason (or speculative reason…I’m not sure) that oxygen contents reduced over time was because a type of fungus had “evolved” that would digest the fallen leaf litter and such that otherwise would have trapped carbon in the bottom of ponds and shallow seas.
Makes sense. Whether it really happened this way, I don’t know. The program has points of interest but the overall Zeitgeist is so highly speculative that you might as well throw a dart at a board to find the answer. And it’s not that things that happened 300 million years ago don’t require some creative speculation. But from what I can see, most of this speculation is anointed under the label of “science.” So it’s all sort of a trick. But if you are aware of this, you can watch a program such as this and at least get an idea of some of the problems being faced in understanding this history.
I watched another documentary with similar problem: The Kingdom: How Fungi Made the World. That plants and fungi have (and still do) live in a symbiotic relationship is not in dispute. But, goodness gracious, this show becomes almost unwatchable after a while as it uses a almost magical Darwinian template to explain things. It becomes a series of just-so stories presented as fact (or necessary fact).
Fungi are amazing, beautiful, ugly, and rather important to how life (especially trees) exist on this planet right now. But your average viewer is going to be taking this all in as Gospel while the stories in the actual Gospel make just as much sense, at least from the standpoint of verification. One can see that the point of many of these documentaries isn’t to view the wonders and mysteries of nature but to forward a certain metaphysical point of view. For all we know about this stuff, it would be as useful to say throughout this “God made it this way for this purpose.” And there would be as little evidence for that as well.
But this is the nature of most documentaries today, although as I noted, the two Attenborough documentaries are mostly absent this nonsense.
I did watch a couple more that were quite excellent. One was about a real (and presumably ongoing…they said it would take 25 years to complete) effort to make a castle from scratch using the old techniques and tools. Another was a two-parter on “The Seven Stages of Starlight.” This later series was interesting as well although I’d seen all this before elsewhere. But it was presented in a coherent manner and was well done.
They do seem to have a whole lot of content, at least enough to justify the price. And apparently they are still in the process of making or acquiring more. One documentary I want to watch soon (after the one on supposedly new information on how they built the pyramids) is one on the evolution of the eye. Note: A history or categorization of various forms of eyes will (or would) indeed be fascinating. But I suspect this will be the typical highly speculative Darwinian gradualism explanation where we go from a light-sensitive patch of cells to the human eye, and assuming incrementalism between there and here.
And it’s not that incrementalism is impossible. Whether talking Darwinism or Intelligent Design, the Darwinians have not shown how incrementalism can work any more than Intelligent Designers have brought forth a designer. There’s no question (apparently) that life started out relatively simple (single-celled organisms — that is, the cell itself— is enormously complex, however) and got more diverse and complex as time went on. But other than the genetic aspects of micro evolution, we have no idea how completely new and novel biological structures come to be. None. Zip. Zilch. Notta.
Any honest program would point this out. The problem is, many of these types of documentaries are anything but honest. But I’ll watch this one on the eye and report back.
Special sale going on now (through Jan. 5): Yearly subscription (HD): $11.99. I signed up via Roku and I didn’t see the discount offered.
But when you go to sign up via the Roku, it first starts you out on a 7-day free trial. And if I go to my Roku account to manage my subscriptions online (via a web browser), it shows my free trial but it lists the annual cost as $19.99. There is no mention of a discount.
You can also sign up online but I’m not sure the steps involved for linking to your Roku device or if that restricts to watching via an app on your tablet or via your web browser.
Having signed up from within Roku on my smart TV (using my standard Roku password, etc.), I can’t use this same sign-in for the CuriosityStream site via a web browser. If I try to sign up on the online site, it just take me through as if I was paying for the service from scratch again.
But I don’t want to use the service online. I want to use their online site only to browse through (and link to) their offerings. From the home page (yesterday), I did find a way to browse their titles. But now that has disappeared for some reason. But when I signed up via the Roku device, they sent me an email that links me to their suggested Starter Collection which does offer a few titles I can link to.
Also, the CuriosityStream channel (the app) on my Roku device (you download channels via the Roku in order to use them) has crashed three times. The Roku device will then reboot but it loses my place in the program I was watching.
Oh….via Googling, I found a link to the CuriosityStream categories. This whole channel is obviously held together by bubble gum and bailing wire. But the price is right. One high-quality documentary might cost $4.99 to rent.
But I have happily watched about five documentaries, starting with the excellent David Attenborough’s Light on Earth. That categories pages wouldn’t actually take me to the page (the previous link) that tells more about it. I found that link by Googling. Once again, bailing wire. But you can at least watch the trailer.
I also watched the excellent documentary Samurai Castle. A huge quake (a series of quakes and aftershocks) devastated Kumamoto Castle in Japan. This 2017 documentary concludes saying the restoration is still underway and will take several years. I’m not sure what the state of those repairs are now.
The complex itself is huge and the view above is perhaps 1/12 of the various collapses that had occurred there.
David Attenborough’s Ant Mountain is another excellent documentary. I had never seen anything like this before. In this one, he describes a super-colony of ants. I’d never heard of such a thing.
Note that neither of these documentaries were heavy on the word, “evolved.” And it’s not that things haven’t changed and evolved. It’s just that no one knows how. While watching another documentary (somewhat interesting) in the Ancient Earth series, Who Killed the Giant Insects, you then devolve into wild speculation based on using “evolution” as an all-purpose, all-powerful tool that life uses to create what it needs when it needs it. Besides that, the interpretation of the fossil record seems slipshod. I don’t mind speculation if it’s presented as such. But most of the speculation in this is presented at likely fact.
All in all, it’s fascinating that there were once dragon flies with a 25 inch wingspan. But other than that fact, the rest might as well be Spielberg and Jurassic Park. If you take this entire program and condense it to its actually content you can say: The oxygen content of the earth during the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago) was much higher than it is now. This may have allowed insects to grow larger because insects don’t have lungs and require a different process for distributing oxygen in their systems.
However, complications ensue. These large dragon flies actual post-date high-oxygen levels. So that doesn’t seem to be the only answer. I think the one factoid I got out of this program that I don’t remember hearing before is that the reason (or speculative reason…I’m not sure) that oxygen contents reduced over time was because a type of fungus had “evolved” that would digest the fallen leaf litter and such that otherwise would have trapped carbon in the bottom of ponds and shallow seas.
Makes sense. Whether it really happened this way, I don’t know. The program has points of interest but the overall Zeitgeist is so highly speculative that you might as well throw a dart at a board to find the answer. And it’s not that things that happened 300 million years ago don’t require some creative speculation. But from what I can see, most of this speculation is anointed under the label of “science.” So it’s all sort of a trick. But if you are aware of this, you can watch a program such as this and at least get an idea of some of the problems being faced in understanding this history.
I watched another documentary with similar problem: The Kingdom: How Fungi Made the World. That plants and fungi have (and still do) live in a symbiotic relationship is not in dispute. But, goodness gracious, this show becomes almost unwatchable after a while as it uses a almost magical Darwinian template to explain things. It becomes a series of just-so stories presented as fact (or necessary fact).
Fungi are amazing, beautiful, ugly, and rather important to how life (especially trees) exist on this planet right now. But your average viewer is going to be taking this all in as Gospel while the stories in the actual Gospel make just as much sense, at least from the standpoint of verification. One can see that the point of many of these documentaries isn’t to view the wonders and mysteries of nature but to forward a certain metaphysical point of view. For all we know about this stuff, it would be as useful to say throughout this “God made it this way for this purpose.” And there would be as little evidence for that as well.
But this is the nature of most documentaries today, although as I noted, the two Attenborough documentaries are mostly absent this nonsense.
I did watch a couple more that were quite excellent. One was about a real (and presumably ongoing…they said it would take 25 years to complete) effort to make a castle from scratch using the old techniques and tools. Another was a two-parter on “The Seven Stages of Starlight.” This later series was interesting as well although I’d seen all this before elsewhere. But it was presented in a coherent manner and was well done.
They do seem to have a whole lot of content, at least enough to justify the price. And apparently they are still in the process of making or acquiring more. One documentary I want to watch soon (after the one on supposedly new information on how they built the pyramids) is one on the evolution of the eye. Note: A history or categorization of various forms of eyes will (or would) indeed be fascinating. But I suspect this will be the typical highly speculative Darwinian gradualism explanation where we go from a light-sensitive patch of cells to the human eye, and assuming incrementalism between there and here.
And it’s not that incrementalism is impossible. Whether talking Darwinism or Intelligent Design, the Darwinians have not shown how incrementalism can work any more than Intelligent Designers have brought forth a designer. There’s no question (apparently) that life started out relatively simple (single-celled organisms — that is, the cell itself— is enormously complex, however) and got more diverse and complex as time went on. But other than the genetic aspects of micro evolution, we have no idea how completely new and novel biological structures come to be. None. Zip. Zilch. Notta.
Any honest program would point this out. The problem is, many of these types of documentaries are anything but honest. But I’ll watch this one on the eye and report back.
