petri dish

flotsam and jetsam and historical memories

1953: Midnight Fireball Hits Bay -- UFO Near Miss???? No, the image isn't a real historic boardwalk handbill from Antiques Roadshow but one more bit of McMilleniana (as are the ones below and to the right) -- they're actually banners made in 2004 for the Santa Monica Pier in California for a public art project that took its inspiration from "the facts, folklore, myths, and legends of the Pier's early history," with the images "representing historical events that may -- or may not-- have actually occurred." McMillen's banners, along with those of artist Steve Galloway, were printed on vinyl and hung out on light poles on the boardwalk, flickering in and out of view of visitors as they strolled along the Pier entertaining themselves. (There are more than two dozen, and each one of them is really fun and clever... very much in keeping with a characterization that McMillen used in another context about an art project of his: "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious.")

My third take-away lesson from the world of art for myself as an historian of science (there is a first one -- "trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible". . . and a second one -- "of crocodelephants and category confusions") as seen through the envisionings of Los Angeles artists Sam Rodia and Michael C. McMillen is related to the idea of artistic installations: art in the wild, out in the public square. McMillen's banners for the Pier are an exuberant wave of the hand, inviting those who encounter them to take them in -- maybe do a double-take -- and respond as might be, maybe with amusement or bemusement, or in sparking off a train-of-associations, or drifting in and out of a game of detecting how close to historical reality the "commemorative" homages are. 

The artist initiates a conversation, drawing on the representations and forms and idioms of everyday life, and provides an opportunity for engagement in a way that brings the specialist or expert (the artist) into an inviting -- if brief -- relationship with ordinary folk, casual passers-by. The Pier's visitors didn't have to possess the right connections to enter the home of a wealthy collector who owns an artpiece only seen by invitation, or even to venture into a museum gallery that is the art world's home turf: here, installation art, as public art in its most open form, takes up residence within a commonplace that offers the possibility for an interplay between "experts" and "laity" in a way that neither condescends nor intimidates. The third lesson, then, is of how venturing out beyond professional confines has so much potential: of teaching ourselves as we improvise new forms of communication, in ways that offer different kinds of connections and opportunities for imagination and reflection. And that's why I'm here on the web, diving into the area of science and popular culture, trying to figure out how to be a digital historian of science: putting out a few banners to fly in the public square. Its time to learn how to do history of science in the wild, not simply caretake it within the neatly trimmed hedges and rows of academic propriety.

McMillen's banners are also a wonderful nudge in and of themselves to speculate about the flotsam and jetsam of science and popular culture. UFOS streaking down into the sea, giant squid breaking the surface and upending an unwary boater, late-Victorian submarine steamers illuminating the murky depths: they're all wonderful evocations of the idea of mysteries that lurk so often at the heart of popular culture phenomena, with the ocean being a particularly apt emblematic prompt. In fact these three "historical" posters offer more than just apt symbolic representations of recurring popular symbols -- they intersect with real artifacts as well, in which connecting the dots begins to reveal possible patterns of culture. If not a real-world UFO sighting, well there was the 1953 movie, Phantom from Space ("Million Monkey Theater" provides a sharp narrative and commentary) in which an alien being crashes into the ocean off of Santa Monica. Jules Verne, in the 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, gives us both a Victorian submersible and a giant squid, featured as well in the 1954 film by Disney. Off the coast of Santa Monica you can spy Catalina Island twenty-seven miles away, where (as the locals tell it) the glass-bottom boat was invented in the late-19th century to take advantage of the clear waters and abundant sealife as a novel tourist attraction-- not quite the gothic hulk of McMillen's imagining, but in 1906 you could experience a variant of the Vernian aquatic dreamscape by touring Catalina's "undersea gardens" via glass-bottom boat. Of course, Catalina being a tinsel-town playground, the tourist craft gets its own star treatment in the Doris Day movie from 1966, The Glass Bottom Boat (with Day as a NASA employee and occasional mermaid...there are interesting images of scientists to consider in this comic film). With just this brief tour, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items worthy of study that are historical obscurities for most by now.

It's unlikely that a rampaging squid actually tormented a bay-dweller in 1949 as recorded on the second banner, but Hollywood, just down the road, produced The Lady Takes a Sailor that year with Jane Wyman (directed by Michael Curtiz) where an octopus apparently figures into the narrative, although it's an underwater vehicle that breaks the surface and upends her sailboat -- and, interestingly, just two years post-Roswell, the plot features a government cover-up of secret experiments (extending to messing with civilians' heads and reputations) involving a submarine tractor (bringing together, in a loose but ever more thickly woven web, echoes of ufology, troublesome cephalopods, and novel deepsea machines :-) Of course, nasty squids/octopi received iconic treatment at the movies during the cold war period in Disney's 20,000 Leagues and It Came from Beneath the Sea ("it" being a six-armed octopus that attacked San Francisco, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) from 1955 and in the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, directed by Irwin Allen (I actually saw one of these as a kid -- I think the third one -- at Catalina's movie theater at the Avalon Casino, after having had my first tour in a glass-bottom boat. . . I can still see the vague form of a giant octopus in my mind's-eye today, it scared me that much!). Of course, giant squid are among the most durable popular culture themes and are still a big draw, being that they're so elusive -- they were only recently caught live on video in 2005.

A fascinating late-19th century California seaside connection is a science fiction short story that appeared in a periodical called The Californian in December of 1893. Entitled "A Submarine Christmas" [via Google Books], the fantastic tale by Thomas R. Caldwell shamelessly draws from Verne, but is a surprisingly fresh and up-to-date look for its time at marine zoology. The plot involves an inventor of a submarine research vessel who travels to Avalon Bay at Catalina Island to test it out, and of his intrepid friend from the East Coast who joins him for assorted undersea adventures, including a near-fatal encounter with a "giant cuttle-fish (Architeuthis), a monster at least seventy feet in length. . . Its arms were thrown about the boat: its uncanny black eyes glowing like huge plates in the glare of the search lights" (accompanied by an excellent illustration). Fortunately for the harried explorers, it was all a dream! But the 1906 piscatorial machine of the Santa Monica Pier banner would look remarkably apt as an illustration for the 1893 story; certainly Thomas R. Caldwell would have felt right at home! And, again, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items here that are historical obscurities for most by now, simply by using the 2004 banner imaginings by McMillen as jumping-off points.

Making the (seemingly) ephemeral visible is part of what the art world can teach us humanists, and artists can also inspire ideas about how to visualize a carnival for the curious -- experimenting outside the petri dish -- needed, especially, when humanism becomes tinged with scientism. Not only that, but they can send us off into cultural scavenger hunts that turn flotsam and jetsam into useful things to think with and that point toward historical work that needs doing.

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Images: All from the image gallery at http://arts.santa-monica.org/gallery/paintings/PierBanners/.

half a moon is better than none

As an historian of science, I've spent a lot of time observing the moon -- at least observing the historical traces of where the moon's path has intersected with the human quest to understand nature, the universe, and the meaning of (scientific) life. I've actually never seen the moon through a telescope, as so many scientific investigators have, down through the years since the time of Galileo (that's his work to the left: one of his drawings of his telescopic moon from the Sidereus Nuncius -- The Starry Messenger -- of 1610). Like a lot of moderns, I know the moon from the occasional naked eye glance up to the heavens when I'm out and about and the night is clear, or from the NASA photographs that became part of the collective consciousness for those of us growing up in the sixties.

I'd always liked the idea of star-gazing through a telescope, but growing up in a working-class family, the likelihood of owning a telescope was out of the realm of what was possible. When I became older and on my own, such a thing still seemed like an extravagance, and, really, weren't all those professional pictures in magazines and embedded within television science documentaries going to be vastly better than anything I could manage on my own with a telescope, rendering my own possible efforts redundant? Still, I always had a small, nagging feeling that I was missing out on something important that existed outside of a world of daily routines that kept my focus earth-bound, with little time to just sit back and scan the sky. (I'd heard that binoculars had come down in price and up in power in a way that allowed one to view the moon as Galileo had, but I never got around to investigating that in more detail -- if there had been the kind of web we have today to plug into in the 1970s or early eighties I would have found a lot of advice in seconds and it might have seemed do-able. Take a look here or here or here, for example. Or, if I had encountered the evangelism of sidewalk astronomy, who knows?)

So most of my moon-gazing these days takes place within the pages of books -- the History of Science Collections here at the University of Oklahoma has an astonishing collection of rare books, and I've had the opportunity to pore over the original copy of that Sidereus Nuncius pictured above more than a dozen times in the course of teaching students, and we'll be pulling some other Renaissance rarities this week in another visit for the science and popular culture class, to accompany our reading of Scott Montgomery's The Moon and the Western Imagination. If you want a sense of what we'll be up to, take a look at this wonderful online exhibition from the Linda Hall Library, The Face of the Moon: From Galileo to Apollo.

But before getting strapped into the way-back machine during our Collections visit, I thought I would take a tour around the web and see what might turn up, striking off on a trail that starts from Montgomery's book, but then which rapidly branched off to other strange and fascinating links:

• Montgomery makes the startling claim that the first naturalistic drawings of the moon don't come from the sketchpad of Leonardo da Vinci circa the very early 1500s, or the telescopic observations of Thomas Harriot or Galileo, but are displayed in the artist Jan van Eyck's oil paintings, such as his Crucifixion from the 1420s.
• A discussion of the phenomenon of "strange moonlight", via NASA, explaining, for example, why you can't read by moonlight.
• Moving from the visual to the literary, here's a collection of moon poetry.
• Where did that story about the moon and green cheese come from anyway? Try the Straight Dope.
• The "Earth and Moon Viewer" gives you an incredible number of ways to view the moon.
• And examples of "good moons rising" (and bad ones) from children's picture books -- see how the classic story, Good Night, Moon does a superlative job of portraying the moon through the window as you page through it. This is from a site with an inventive educational twist that is absorbing in itself: Paper Plate Education, whose motto is "Serving the universe on a paper plate." What a concept!

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For more: Here's a collection of paragraphs from an assignment I gave where each member of the class spent some time looking at the night sky and reported back what thoughts occurred to them: funny, lyrical, profound stuff. And here's a previous blog post that touches on the idea of the Apollo landing being a hoax and discusses the myths about the Challenger explosion.

Image: The Galileo drawing of the moon is courtesy of the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries; copyright the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. The thumbnail is from http://hsci.cas.ou.edu/images/jpg-100dpi-5in/17thCentury/Galileo/1610/Galileo-1610-9v.jpg. 

when info tech loses that cute and cuddly vibe

As we were discussing the possible reasons for the wild success of March of the Penguins, one student noted that, whatever else might be true, it was hard to escape the fact that penguins were just pretty darn popular on their own – in fact a number of students mentioned that they never miss the penguin exhibit at the zoo, and some even made sure it was their first stop. This surprised me, because I’d obviously missed out on the fact that penguins are a kind of glamour species, just like dolphins, or orcas, or elephants, or wolves. But once the students pointed it out I’ve begun seeing them everywhere (certainly the Madagascar penguins are a big hit with my pre-schooler who I think secretly wants to be the Skipper). If you want to see some now, you can, thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Live Penguin Cam. But my sharp-eyed students pelted me with one penguin pop icon after another, including, of course for the web savvy, the Linux penguin. Want to see 16 pages of penguins courtesy of lwn.net, a linux news site? Sure you do.

The Linux penguin got me thinking about the vogue for silly, whimsical, cute and cuddly logos for information technology firms. An overfed penguin is an obvious kind of "hey, we’re just a bunch of fun guys having a fun time" kind of image (no intimidating geometric holograms for us!). With Yahoo! you’ve got the name itself and the cereal-box typeface (and the hip counter-hip shtick of the hillbilly yell on their television commercials), that ridiculous pudgy guy in the butterfly suit for Microsoft – Richard Bray, a Microsoft vp called him "fun, friendly, and approachable" – and the oversized primary-colored google logo, with its ever-changing holiday doodles, as another example of charming, child-like un-design.

These zippy little funster symbols are meant to offset the intimidating cast that information technology can conjure up for the digitally indifferent, and probably do a good job at that. The cheerful little google logo on my search toolbar certainly conjures up a pleasant enough response when I look at it . . . until recently, that is, with the news that google has agreed to take over censorship duties from the Chinese government by agreeing in its search results for Chinese users to block content that Beijing deems unacceptable, so that google can tap into the enormous potential that the Chinese market represents. What on a pop culture level can suggest fun, friendly, and approachable can obscure more complex and difficult issues.

A lot of folks say that google’s moves are not a very big deal (although, for a corporation that sold its image on the slogan of "do no evil" it is at least disconcerting) – Chinese users know that their government censors things, and thus what google is doing is par for the course, while still delivering them better service than they’ve had with indigenous search engines. There is also the fact that "everyone" is doing it – that is, all the big US info tech companies are involved one way or another with the Chinese government and "the Great Firewall," and so that’s just the business reality in today’s world . . . and Yahoo! reportedly has turned in two dissidents to the government, so what google is doing is not that bad, comparatively. Like many areas of multi-national trade, the politics and economics rarely reduce to simple dichotomies of good or bad (or, to take google’s own terms, of "evil" and "not evil").

But I can’t shake an historical analogy from my head, from an episode we covered in my "Science, Technology, and Politics: International Perspectives" class, when we looked at an earlier era in information technology management: the rise of the Hollerith sorting machines that enabled massive number-crunching for such complex tasks as the U.S. census. This question becomes enormously significant in regard to Germany in the era of the Third Reich, as detailed for example in Gotz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth's The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich and Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Black, in particular, raises disturbing questions about IBM founder and chairman Thomas Watson’s decision to allow IBM’s data processing machines to service the goals of the Hitler regime in order to maintain IBM’s strategic position in the German market (apparently even after the U.S. entered the war).

The circulation of information is serious business. It may be easy to calculate profits and losses from the point of view of the dollar or the yuan (aka as the renminbi), but it is much harder to calculate profits and losses in terms of the ramifications of restricting the free flow of information. In the end, I guess it makes me uneasy when an American corporation chooses to restrict or monitor information at the behest of a non-democratic regime -- at the very least I figure a repressive government should have to devote its own time and resources to restricting liberty, rather than outsourcing the project to Americans. And crayon box-colored logos with holiday themed cartoon pictures don’t make that feeling go away. . . which means I’m in the market for a new search engine, whether it comes bundled with a cute and cuddly image or not. ( I only hope that it doesn't turn out that the penguin is just a decoy and it is Linux that is really responsible for global warming . . . )

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For more: wikipedia offers a tour of penguins in popular culture and imdb.com has viewer responses and more for March of the Penguins. On "fun" info tech images, some just don't work -- doesn't everyone hate Clippy, the Microsoft Office animated paperclip "helper"? He got the heave-ho in Windows XP. Further perspectives on google and China can be found in a PBS NewsHour interview with Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard, and in an opinion piece entitled "Search Engine Diplomacy" by Adam L. Penenberg, assistant director of the business and economic reporting program at NYU's Department of Journalism.

Image: A Linux penguin made out of LEGOs, by Eric Harshbarger, image located at http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/penguin.html

if you believe there's nothing up my sleeve, then nothing is cool

This is one of those synchronicities between teaching and the information circulating around the web that I love so much. Jump-started by viewing R.E.M.’s video of their song "Man on the Moon" in class, we were talking about how the images of Newton and Darwin in the lyrics might resonate with questions of skepticism, of being kept off balance about judging whether something you are witnessing is real or not, about questions of evidence in coming to know the truth, and how one responds to others who question that truth.

We spent a fair amount of time looking at the question of skepticism about whether the U.S. landed a man on the moon, and what the dynamics might be of belief or unbelief about "what happened." And then when I log onto the web after class there’s this great piece on "7 Myths About the Challenger Shuttle Disaster," by James Oberg, who was a Mission Control operator and orbital designer at NASA and is now a space analyst for NBC. Oberg opens with a paragraph purporting to be an accurate recounting of the Challenger disaster events, and then does a fascinating job in a short amount of space in relating how the seven myths that inform our conventional wisdom about this historical episode emerged. As Oberg explains of this opening paragraph:

At least, that seems to be how many people remember it, in whole or in part. That’s how the story of the Challenger is often retold, in oral tradition and broadcast news, in public speeches and in private conversations and all around the Internet. But spaceflight historians believe that each element of the opening paragraph is factually untrue or at best extremely dubious. They are myths, undeserving of popular belief and unworthy of being repeated at every anniversary of the disaster.

Most poignant to me is the assumption that the astronauts died immediately. Oberg states that "Official NASA commemorations of ‘Challenger’s 73-second flight’ subtly deflect attention from what was happen[ing] in the almost three minutes of flight (and life) remaining AFTER the breakup." I was also intrigued by his explanation of how there was no "explosion," although probably most of us would use that word and feel certain of the evidence of our own eyes.

Reaching into divergent memories of "what happened" with Challenger has the potential to reveal a great deal about ideas about science and culture, as Oberg demonstrates. I’m glad he chose the word "myth," even though he probably means it to be a synonym for lie or falsehood. There are also other understandings of myths – that they are deeply resonant stories that explain our deepest questions about the world around us (even when not deemed to be 'accurate') – and these 7 mythic elaborations of the Challenger event can also be thought of in this way (it's interesting that 7 itself is a mythic number!). Richard Slotkin, in Gunfighter Nation, has an interesting take on the nature of myths: he describes them as "stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society's ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness – with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain." Thinking not only about why these seven points deviate from a more realistic account of the event, but what they themselves signify as symbolic evocations of the complexities and contradictions of our society’s ideology and moral consciousness about science and technology would be very revealing.

For more: The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science at Case Western University has a thought-provoking presentation on "Roger Boisjoly and the Challenger Disaster" (Boisjoly was a Morton Thiokol engineer who argued against launching the Challenger under the prevailing temperature conditions).

If you step into the way-back machine, you’ll discover there was a moon hoax of 1835, when the New York Sun published pictures of what it claimed to be an inhabited moon, as discovered by Sir John Herschel through the telescope.

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Image: The cover image from The First Lunar Landing as Told by the Astronauts: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/FirstLunarLanding/cover.html