Schooled Like a Fish (Bite Us)

We got the start date for Shark Week dead wrong.

From our friendly neighborhood Discovery Channel press being, possibly in an attempt to smother Lunar Weight with kindness and turn us into corporate shills (hey buddy, it'll work, trust us; the secret is schwag. We'd like a Les Stroud action figure with kung-fu grip and Real Dehydration-Induced Hallucinations™):

"I noticed you accidentally put June 27th as the start [for Shark Week] date though... it's actually July 27th (at 9PM with a Mythbusters special) which is what I'm sure you meant. Unfortunately there is no Shark Month & One Week celebration yet."

Whoops. We blame all the drugs we're not doing.

{from the minds behind Shark Week to the shitforbrains at Lunar Weight}

The Week in Sharks: ...and Other Things that Like the Taste of Seal

"In fashion, you're either in or you're oh god oh god my leg." Heidi Klum—supermodel, erstwhile fashion svengali, and all-around German person—considers scuba-diving in shark infested waters to be her bravest moment ever.

Even braver, the New York Daily News gushes, than "showing off her pregnant belly in tight outfits on Bravo's 'Project Runway,'" because fat people suck and are from space.

In her Parade Magazine interview, Klum explains how the shark schmooze helped her conquer her fears. "I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks," she says, "but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life." Such as, say... optics?

Klum made the dive as part of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week in 2003, which further goes to prove Lunar Weight's point.

Bollywood icon Zayed Khan also got fabulous with the cartilaginous. On a recent underwater shoot, he basically bro'd out with his toothy would-be antagonists. "They came and flapped their bodies next to us and slapped our shoulders like buddies," Khan told the Times of India. Little did he know they then turned around and put most of the contents of his trailer on eBay, since no one likes to work for scale. Or for denticle.

{from Parade and the Times of India, respectively; Lunar Weight hereby humbly threatens to bite Zooey Deschanel if it'll get her to consider hanging out with us an honor}




Or maybe Zooey'd dig us if we "sharked ourselves". As part of the Shark Week promotional run up, Discovery.com offers you the chance to morph yourself into that manic, sodden, Dunst-mouthed freak on their billboards.

Discovery's own flacks describe the e-mutilator as "totally viral." By which they presumably mean "akin to having smallpox." Since what those earnest nerdlings who haven't grown to embrace their own inherent attractiveness really need is a way to obliterate said attractiveness entirely.

Oh well. It beats blatant, unrepentant racism.

{from Discovery.com, who, to be fair, probably hate themselves as much as they hate their audience}




LW appreciates a good chomping in the name of class warfare, but it ain't gonna happen this time. A Great White sighting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard was reported, but an airborne search by what Bloomberg referred as "a fish spotter" failed to find confirmation.

The search failure may, in part, be due to the fact that people were making that shit up.

Because everyone's kinda bored right now.

Fortunately, some good came out of the silliness. The press managed to cite Jaws at every fucking opportunity, because, epistemologically speaking, nothing can be considered to possess material or temporal form unless Steven Spielberg has made an ass-ton of dough off of it.

{from the Boston Globe, and every bored hack stuck at a science desk bitterly driving staples into a Malcolm Gladwell voodoo doll}




Biologist-poet describes a whale shark on the move as "a bird as large as a bus". Though humans only ever encounter whale sharks placid and (prosaically) tail-propelled near the surface, when at depth, these largest-of-all-fish use gravity, fins, and the always-good-for-party-conversation laws of fluid dynamics to glide through the water column.

This unique method of swimming could be a means to conserve energy, or it could be an attempt to get Gerard Manley Hopkins to take that stupid windhover and shove it.

{courtesy FOX News, which claims to also have a whale shark video, but when LW clicks on the imbed, it plays lots of footage of Heath Ledger gallivanting about looking like a cross between Steven Tyler and a White Stripes groupie, then freezes}

June 27th: Shark Week to Begin, All Chance of Sex to End

The Discovery Channel just released the lineup for this year's Shark Week. Shark Week runs June 27th through August 2nd, putting the "yes!" in "chondrichthyes!"

We'll quickly editorialize here regarding a persistent flaw in the week-long celebration of all things aquabitey: documentaries about shark attacks are not shark documentaries. They are documentaries about people stupid enough/delicious enough to get bitten by sharks. If we wanted to watch Eating Stupid/Delicious Person Week, we'd release barracudas into Heidi Montag's swimming pool.

Still, we're anticipating a week of denticles and Dewar's. We may even try to liveblog it, though the majority of our speech will consist of "Dude! See that? Awesome!"

Though to be fair, it's never not fun to watch Les Stroud find new and innovative ways of getting himself killed.

{from TV Squad; show descriptions in the lede link, if you have no faith in sharks to be unconditionally awesome (though that makes you a dirty dirty sea lion lover, ork ork)}

It Starts in Inimitable Style

Welcome to Lunar Weight.

This is a science blog, written by a cohort of science fans. Not scientists—though some of us may be scientists—and not science writers—though some of us are paid to write about science, by people who apparently know even less than we do—and for the love of God or Dawkins or JAMA not science journalists.

Just fans. Of chemistry, biology, psychology, physics, biomedicine, materials science, robotics, NOVA, hungover posting, and attention. Probably in that order, actually. So our style isn't quite as inimitable as promised, but so far there doesn't seem much imiting it.

Because this shit is awesome (the science stuff, not Lunar Weight. Well, maybe we are, but we're trying not to be smug). This shit is also occasionally profoundly silly. Even better, it's both. I mean, we're dealing with either a constant search for things that already exist, have existed, and exist quite well without our actually being aware of them (sort of like Columbus or even Leif Ericsson "discovering" the New World, much to the bemusement of various and sundry indigenous civilizations who just referred to it as, er, the World), or else an employment of the basic "hit it with a stick and see what happens," instinct extrapolated over 10,000 years of increasingly better sticks (hit it with a laser and see what happens!).

So here's what we promise. Coverage of science that interests us, with humor and insight, frequent but not guaranteed factual accuracy (please e-mail us if we get something butt wrong), occasional foul language, a sense of excitement, and the impending live-blogging of Shark Week on Discovery.