New from Reaper, a mean look Phorusrhacid.

Obviously, I want. But do I need another?

Very True Mood:  content

Via TMP, Magister Militum have launched a new range of dinosaurs in 10mm (1/160 scale).

Meanwhile back in 28mm, I discovered a while back, but forgot to blog it, that Das Schwarze Auge - The Dark Eye range available via Ral Partha Europe, contains a handful of prehistoric creatures.

A dancing T. rex, just don’t paint him purple…

Very True Mood:  chipper

Prehistoric Park on ITV is more than just a bit silly. Remember how Walking with Dinosaurs presented itself as a nature documentary that woulda, coulda, shoulda been made if only we had a time machine? But the only human intrusion into the CGI was Kenneth Branagh’s voice over. Then as the franchise continued Nigel Marven took over from Ken and started appearing alongside the dinosaurs.

Well, Nigel and the CGI team have jumped channels and, quelle surprise, the human and prehistoric worlds have intermingled completely. The mission is the bring prehistoric creatures back to a special safari park. Haven’t these guys watched Jurassic Park? (The audience have, it was on immediately beforehand.) Or for handy tips, read How to Keep Dinosaurs (a very good book).

This week’s opener took them back to the days before the KT boundary meteor impact event. And much was made of the race against time to rescue specimans before the big rock hit. Um, you have a time machine, you can go back months or years before impact, so why pick mere days?

The one up side of this approach is that give a good idea of the scale of the beasts when you see them alongside humans, jeeps, etc. Other than that it’s just pretty CGI dinos and mindless “bring ‘em back alive” boys own adventures.

Very True Mood:  cheerful

As if I didn’t have enough to read, here are a few more blogs that I’ve been looking at lately.

Darren Naish: Tetrapod Zoology - Incredibly fascinating science stuff.

Yours in a White Wine Sauce - Military History that never was.

Too many Ideas - SFSFW stalwart Mark Caldwell’s computer art, writing and other stuff.

ThePickards - some northern bloke who’s related to some other northern bloke that I work with. Web accesssibilty and football rants.

The Flogging Will Continue - Daniel James, aka Captain Cleaver, the head of Three Rings on MMORPGs and the future of entertainment.

Very True Mood:  pleased

Via lonemagpie and Pharyngula come two memes, the results of which seem to fit together fairly well.

( What is Your World View? )( The Atheist Test )

Very True Mood:  cheerful

Spoilers. Yes spoilers. Lots of them. You have been warned.

Right, let’s get the science bit out of the way. No not the moonlight and diamonds stuff, that’s just pure bollocks anyway. Queen Victoria did not, technically speaking, have haemophilia - it’s a recessive trait carried on the X chromosone and hence women only have it if both parents carried the defective gene. She was however a carrier and passed on the gene to her children. For her to have been “infected” in 1879, long after the birth of her children would pose a problem. Unless we want to believe that she went wolf and bit [1] all her children [2]. So it looks like the scratch was just a scratch after all.

The episode opens with probably the best fight sequence in the 43 year history of Doctor Who. Not actually a very hard task. But why were the monks wearing red? Didn’t it occur to the production team that everyone watching would think of those terrible BBC1 channel idents? And a good old fashioned scream at the end of the teaser - that would have been the episode one cliffhanger in old year following a whole load of wandering around on the moors and getting the various characters to bump into each other.

Good stuff - Ian Dury. Maggie Thatcher. Doctor James McCrimmon. Naked Rose (not naked enough for a large part of the audience). Nice Bad Wolf reference. Queen Victoria shooting the monk. Superb work from the supporting cast, especially Pauline Collins. The “books are the best weapons” line (borrowing heavily from the Buffy research scenes?).

So so stuff - The ‘not amused’ running gag. CGI Werewolf worked well in close up but moved a bit odd in long shot. The Torchwood links could have been, oh, about a hundred times, more subtle. Typically dodgy science.

Bad stuff - Not much.

So the Doctor has pissed off Queen Victoria now as well as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. After destryoing his home planet is RTD now making him unwelcome anywhere and anytime in his adopted home?

The implication that the Doctor and Rose are getting too cocky and actively seeking out danger looks like it will be this year’s theme. Should be interesting to see where this goes. The things that niggle me about Tennant’s performance might be sorted out if he has to portray a Doctor who gets shaken up by a big mistake at some point.

I’m giving this one 9/10.

[Updates]
[1] - Ah, there was a line to this effect but I missed it first time around because I was talking about the haemophilia bit being rubbish.

[2] - Not all her children. Just those that had the haemophilia gene (a carrier like Queen Victoria has a 50% chance of passing it on to each child) - Princess Alice, Princess Beatrice, and Prince Leopold. And despite all the inbreeding amongst her descendents the gene has not reached the current royal family. Unless, as the Doctor implies, the werewolf DNA multiplies within the host body over the generations and stops manifesting itself as haemophilia and starts manifesting itslf as lycanthropy, but in that case Victoria wouldn’t have been doing any biting and so we go round and round in circles…

Very True Mood:  cheerful

Amazon Miniatures have joined my favourite bandwagon and started a range of Prehistoric Animals.

Three items are out now with at least five more coming soon.

• ANP01 Raptor (2) 3.25
• ANP02 Diatryma Giganticus (2) £3.00
• ANP03 Raptor and dinosaur eggs £2.50
• ANP04 Yangchanosaurus £7.50
• ANP05 Feathered Raptor (2) £3.25
• ANP06 Leaping Smilodon (Sabre tooth lion) £2.25
• ANP07 Short-faced bear standing £2.25
• ANP21 Neanderthal Warrior with bone club and spear

The plain raptors look like they would fit in well with the Jeff Valent or Ral Partha/Iron Wind Metals versions, and it’s very good to see someone tackling feathered raptors in this scale at last.

Amazon, being the kind of people who “think outside the box” (sorry, really, really sorry) are also stocking bags of plastic toy dinos for wargamers too embarrassed to step foot inside Early Learning Centres.

Anyway, I know where one of my first stops at this year’s Salute will be.

Very True Mood:  cheerful

Four posts in one day and it’s only two o’clock - can you tell that I don’t have a lot to do at work today? Mostly because I don’t really dare touch anything until the java boys (like java man but less hairy) have stopped beating the database with large sticks.

Anyway, want to see one of my favourite web sites? Dino Directory at the NHM is a very neat little site. A database of dinosaurs with a nice web front end that allows users to search and sort the data by a wide range of criteria - the large graphics lead novice users into a simple search by body shape function, whilst more advanced functions such as grouping by geographic and chronological proximity are readily available for more adventurous users. And then the results link through to the NHM’s picture library which is another hidden gem in itself.

It’s a shame that the front end coding isn’t as nice as the information architecture. Looking at the code it seems that the header and footer were created by someone who knows what they’re doing - CSS layout, accessible, etc. Whilst the actual Dino Directory code in the middle is tables based and full of errors. Shame.

There’s also an RSS feed to keep user up to date with the latest dinos to be added. This week saw the addition of the very cute sounding Wannanosaurus. Oddly, this seems to be the only RSS feed on the whole NHM site.

Anyway, here’s a lovely site based on a great idea and well implemented (just needs a little work to make it standards compliant and accessible), but… it’s very Web 1.0 isn’t it? How could one jazz this up to make it Web 2.0? Define a dinosaur microformat and provide an API to allow dino data to be reused on other sites? Allow users to drag and drop dinosaurs into a personal folder and then play top trumps with other users? Or, if it ain’t broken, don’t try to make it buzzword compliant?

Very True Mood:  contemplative

… that creationists couldn’t get their feet any further down their throats, they come up with a real gem. Via Pharyngula, we learn that the according to the big brains at Answers in Genesis, only creatures with red blood are alive. Good one guys.

Very True Mood:  giggly

Oddly enough, the top to items in my newsreader this morning were about celebrity physicists and the media whoredom of a scientist. Not that this has any relevance to any close personal friends…