petri dish

a big hello to this year's scipop students!

welcome to the spring 2009 edition of hsci 1133, "science and popular culture"! I'm glad you're enrolled, excited about getting started, and looking forward to exploring aspects of the class further here on the blog as we move along through the semester. Although the things I write about on the blog aren't confined to our class alone, the class is the heartbeat behind its existence, and during spring semester a great deal of what appears here will relate to course content.

Sometimes I'll post about a topic or issue that will be coming up soon on the schedule, and providing a sneak preview -- as you'll see below about dinosaurs as scientific icons. Other times I'll supplement our course materials by seeing what I can turn up on the web, just meandering down different avenues that allow you to do some extra exploration if you'd like -- as when we were looking at the history of conceptualizing the moon two years ago. Other times I may reflect on questions you all have raised in class or in your assignments -- this space gives me a place to work on my thinking about these questions at greater length outside of class (see, professors assign themselves homework, too!) Here's an example from a previous year, when we watched a 1950s television program that addressed evolution and religion. And there will be entries related to topics where there is so much interesting extra information to be found online, that I'll use this as a place to bring some of that together as a point of departure for those who might find particular areas interesting beyond what we've had time for in class or in the reading (for example, anyone up for pondering the relationship of medieval bestiaries and phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster in the present day? Then you're in luck!). Or sometimes, stuff that is just fun (like history of science and Halloween.)

This week coming up we'll begin discussing the kinds of symbolic images that appear within popular culture relating to science -- as a kind of quick example, I passed out brochures last class that advertised the "Walking with Dinosaurs" extravaganza that rolled into OKC this weekend at the Ford Center downtown (here's a newspaper review and here's the official site where you can get a sense of the show and here's a review by a scientist, Brian Switek, at his blog Laelaps). Dinosaurs certainly loom large as scientific icons in the public sphere, and the idea of thousands of people gathering together in a darkened sports arena to watch million dollar mechanical/puppet/thingamajigs conjure dinosaurs back to the living world is certainly an interesting example of the intersection of science/education/entertainment/spectacle/commerce.

Trying to understand the ecology of dinosaur images as a social phenomenon even as it is a scientific one is part of our task in analyzing popular culture. For example, if the popular success of paleontology as seen by the arena rock status of "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- or the auction of the T. rex skeleton, Sue, in 1997 for 8.36 million dollars, and the busy schedule the copies of her bones have had in traveling around the US and the world -- are indicative of something powerfully significant, it would follow logically that paleontology would be a richly-endowed area of scientific research, with untold numbers of paleontologists-to-be clamoring to take part, right, with huge paleontological institutes part of the university landscape? Ummmm, not exactly. Discuss.

We'll also work on analyzing images themselves, and trying to discern the patterns of meaning that connect dinosaurian imagery -- as one example -- with other aspects of what's going on in particular cultures at particular historical times and comparing them with the present. We'll look at how it was that a prehistoric creature that seems relatively banal to us today -- the mastodon (how many kids run screaming through natural history museums demanding to see the mastodon fossils?) -- was the first fossil exemplar of the idea of extinction, and on whom we projected our images of a vicious, dangerous past. The newly-founded United States was especially pleased to claim this ferocious carnivore (!) as our own mascot: "huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the Angel of Night." Such attention to big, cruel, meat-eating tyrants is still common two hundred years later. Exhibit one: Oklahoma's own state fossil, the Saurophaganax maximus [note the maximus!], ushered into state law with the following words:

"Because of the extraordinarily rich paleontological heritage of the State of Oklahoma, the Legislature hereby declares Saurophaganax Maximus to be the State Fossil of Oklahoma. This spectacular dinosaur, the 'greatest king of reptile eaters', once roamed this great land. It is only known from Oklahoma and has surpassed the Tyrannosaurus rex, the 'king of the dinosaurs', as the greatest predator of earth’s history."

We don't want no puny critter representing us, ha! Surpassing T. rex! And if you want to check it out, look no further than the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where on the south campus you can see:

"The centerpiece exhibit in the Hall of Ancient Life, the Jones Family 'Clash of the Titans,' [which] shows an encounter between Oklahoma's largest Jurassic animals - the plant-eating sauropod Apatosaurus, which, at more than 93 feet long, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the carnivorous theropod Saurophaganax maximus, the largest of the Jurassic predators."

There's also a mammoth or two, and we'll take a look at how they're presented as well. Feel free to take a field trip of your own and get an early feel for what you think about all this!

If you'd like to explore dinosaurs as modern totems in greater detail, there's no better guide than W.J.T. Mitchell in The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. Here's an interview with him about the book that will give you a sense of what kinds of questions scholars ask about popular phenomena like these and how they go about theorizing the answers. And there's a chapter excerpt as well: the counter-intuitive, "Why Children Hate Dinosaurs." Were you a dinosaur fan, foe, or indifferent to all the hoopla? Still feel the same today as an adult? Stay tuned, and we'll find out more from each of you.
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For more: How do you think the general public view science/paleontology in your country? At paleontologist David Hone's public forum website at DinoBase, he asked the question and you can read the answers given by various scientists. For a quick piece on Oklahoma's dinosaurs, here's a report from News9 by Christian Price, "Oklahoma's First Residents" -- and note that down on the right side of the page in the green sidebar there are some nice video links. And will the whole king of beasts tag become extinct?: see the BBC's report, "T. rex: Warrior or Wimp?" 

Image: Advertising from the producers, at http://www.zrock.com/zforum/about1044.html

the beasts and the birds will teach thee

When you consider the magnitude of the increase in scientific knowledge and technological progress that marks the last century or so it seems logical to claim that "we live in an age of science and technology." At least, that's the conventional wisdom, and a point that Michael Shermer -- founding editor of Skeptic magazine, and the author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time -- argues for. And yet, if this actually is the case, he asks:

"why do so many pseudoscientific and non-scientific traditions abound?. . . One may rationalize that compared with the magical thinking of the Middle Ages things are not so bad. But statistically speaking pseudoscientific beliefs are experiencing a revival in the late 20th century" -- with astrology, ESP, communication with the dead and so forth being held as credible by large numbers of people, along with "other popular beliefs of our time that have little to no veracity in evidence includ[ing]: dowsing, the Bermuda triangle, poltergeists, biorhythms, creationism . . . UFOS, emotions in plants, life after death, monsters, graphology, crypto-zoology. . ."

In short, Shermer concludes that such excursions beyond the bounds of intellectual propriety "are more pervasive than most of us like to think, and this is curious considering how far science has come since the Middle Ages" [my emphasis]. This point is one that comes up frequently when the topic of science and popular culture is on the table, and seems so self-evidently sensible that nothing more need be said. But let's take a few minutes to look at the medieval and the modern together and consider some variations on this theme, using the circulation of bestiaries as our point of departure.

Bestiaries were illustrated books of creatures both common and fantastic that were enormously popular during the 12th and 13th centuries. These illustrations were accompanied by descriptions of the entries that combined natural history, legendary stories, and travelers' anecdotes and that imparted religious lessons in allegorical form. The rationale for treating animals in this way came from passages in the Bible that were read as indicating that God had given them particular characteristics that were to serve as lessons for how humans should conduct their lives; see, for example, Job 7:12: "But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the birds of the air, and they shall tell thee/ Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." These lessons were imparted from animals known to exist in real life such as the peacock and the wolf, and others that were seemingly beyond the reality of everyday experience, such as the phoenix (illustrated above from the Aberdeen Bestiary): 

. . In addition to providing intriguing interpretations of animals, bestiaries offered tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures, many of which appeared in medieval art. The basilisk, for example, which was equated with the devil, could kill by its very smell, by a glance, or even by the sound of its hissing. The manticore, with the face of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion, possessed a seductive voice likened to the sound of a fine flute. It represented the siren song of temptation that surrounded the Christian soul on its perilous journey through an earthly existence. [Melanie Holcomb, "Animals in Medieval Art," Metropolitan Museum of Art's Timeline of Art History.]

As intriguing as the strange creatures are that turn up in medieval bestiaries, it isn't surprising to modern eyes to find elements of the fantastic contained in what seemingly look like works of medieval natural history, since we assume that in an age of alchemy and astrology a belief in something that can't be captured or witnessed -- like unicorns -- is simply part of a pre-scientific, only partially logical mindset in which magical creatures could be imagined as existing somewhere off the known map in terra incognita. [This description is partly caricature -- in both the ancient and the medieval periods there were some who considered descriptions of such strange beasts to be nothing more than lies or tall tales, and viewed them with a skeptical eye.]

However, at the end of the 20th century on into our own time period, it would seem certain that we live in an "age of science," and that our society would have left such child-like fairy-tale imaginings behind us. Or . . . have we? Let's see what the fantastic birds and beasts contained in modern-day bestiaries can teach thee and me. . .

There are two paths to consider in thinking about "modern-day bestiaries." The first fork in the road leads to fantasy literature, films, and games (think Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and such) which are enormously popular. These worlds of high fantasy feature magical and mythical zoologies populated by monsters and fabulous animals that make earlier bestiaries seem rather tame in comparison. While the modern-day bestiaries that accompany the worlds of Middle Earth and Dungeon gaming fill a niche designed for entertainment rather than instruction, it is interesting nonetheless to note how many hours that many moderns have spent with dragons and basilisks and elves -- no doubt more than most folks in the middle ages themselves would have. Another interesting aspect of the popularity of high fantasy in an age of science is the fact that fantasy as a genre outsells the literature of wonder that is supposed to be the companion of the rise of the scientific worldview in the 19th and 20th centuries: science fiction. You can find a number of places on the web where vigorous discussions have been held about the reasons why fantasy outsells science fiction (for example, here and here). A characteristic analysis that argues that many fans of fantasy are science/technology averse can be seen with this comment to a thread at sfsignal.com:

"Technology horrifies too many modern men, and our culture, as a whole no longer prizes the use of reason to solve problems. Fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart, in that it deals with problems solved by emotion, or faith, or magical thinking. Frodo does not outsmart Sauron: he prevails because his heart is pure, and because Supernatural Fate intervenes at the last moment. One might think fantasies like LORD OF THE RINGS would appeal only to the most nostalgic of conservative tastes: people who admired the romance and mystique of monarchy. But the sense that modern civilization has poisoned the Earth, that technology is Mephistopheles, that we all need to return to the Earth and Get Back to the Garden is a widespread idea among in academia and in Hollywood. These ideas have a natural resonance with a fairy-tale version of the middle ages: if only magic actually had worked, then we could all live as hobbits or elves, in union with nature, without the factory-smog of Mordor tainting the air."

David Brin, a science fiction author, agrees, in his article "J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress." Reflecting on the popularity of the high fantasy genre, he remarks:

"Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles -- in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders -- slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals.

Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95?

Didn't we stop going to the moon because it had become boring?"

Brin goes on to cite a similar interpretation, from Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA: "Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there's no magic to it anymore . . . The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn't come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy."

Our second path in thinking about "modern bestiaries" leads not away from science but toward science, in the form of what was christened in the 1950s as "cryptozoology": the study of hidden animals -- most famously, such contested entities as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. (These unverified critters are called "cryptids" by those who search for them.) Such (elusive? imaginary? mythical?) creatures are well-known beyond the crypto community, given their high-profile starring roles in many a cable special, not to mention untold numbers of newspaper and magazine articles. And these shadowy beasts have a whole new stomping ground in which to roam more widely than ever before, thanks to the ecology of the Internet.

Even though cryptozoology has failed to garner academic respectability, its enthusiasts nonetheless believe that the search for evidence of the existence of cryptids should be considered to fall within a generous understanding of what is meant by scientific exploration, or at least should be understood as proto-science. However, in a piece on the nature of cryptozoology and science, Ben Speers-Roesch notes that although "cryptozoology is usually held to be scientific by its practitioners," most professionals "find it difficult to call cryptozoology science, often with good reason -- much of cryptozoology is rife with credulous thinking and illogical conclusions." A particular problem in regard to its scientific status is the fact that much of the basis for cryptozoological investigations rests on eyewitness reports and anecdotal evidence, which are considered to be mushy grounds to stand on, scientifically.

Roesch argues that "the idea that giant unknown primates, living dinosaurs, huge thunderbirds, and lake monsters share the Earth with us are fantasies that are at odds with a great deal of accepted paleontological and zoological evidence" [my emphasis]. This recalls the remark above, that "fantasy is naturally a literature of the heart," and suggests that cryptozoological ventures, if driven by wishful hopes rather than objective reasons, are matters of the heart, not the head: how could they be scientific then, under any definition?

We are left therefore with the knowledge that an interest in creatures of dubious reality -- that nonetheless inspire wonder because of speculations about their fantastic natures -- is one with a long heritage, with dynamics still visible today, despite the fact that the spread of the scientific worldview should have encouraged us to move beyond an enthusiasm for the mysterious and incredible. How to explain this? Peter Dendle, in a literary exploration that compares medieval bestiaries with modern-day cryptozoological encyclopedias -- "Cryptozoology in the medieval and modern worlds" -- points out that indeed "No age has been without its share of hidden creatures, and confirmation of purported species has been a vital and consciously debated issue among the collectors of human knowledge for thousands of years." But a key difference between then and now is that, for the most part, professional science sees matters such as fantastic creatures as falling outside the realm of real knowledge, suitable only for the rubbish heap of pseudoscience:

"Whereas in the Middle Ages the educated scholar was as likely -- or as unlikely -- as an illiterate peasant to believe in a given unconfirmed species, in the post-Enlightenment world there is a conspicuous disconnect between academic science and popular belief on a surprisingly wide range of topics. The ubiquitous popular belief in ghosts, psychic ability, alien encounters, communication with the dead, and astrology, to name but a sampling of the 'paranormal,' documents a resistance to the canons of belief doled out by the orthodox structures of contemporary academic science."

In fact, Dendle argues (and note the similarity to the arguments above about fantasy),that "Cryptozoology thus fulfills an important role: it represents a quest for magic and wonder in a world many perceive as having lost its mystique."

In the Harry Potter books, the magical world exists not in some long-distant past time, but right alongside the non-magical world of modern-day ordinary folk, who are called "muggles." It's just that muggles can't see this world, since the wizarding community conceived of means to conceal it, including "all magical beasts, beings, and spirits," as described in Newt Scamander's (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (p. xvi). Magic is presumed not to exist, even though it surrounds the mundane world, the two intersecting only at odd times, as when the "world's largest kelpie continues to evade capture in Loch Ness [since it] appears to have developed a positive thirst for publicity" (p. xvii). Perhaps it's an apt metaphor for where we are today, presumably so long past the middle ages on into the "higher" ages: magic has seemingly disappeared from the cultural map, at least when a scientific overlay is placed on top of it -- and yet it exists even still, for those who have the inclination to spy out its traces on the palimpsest, making it part of their speculative lives, whether in terms of entertainment or their intellectual passions.

The question of what to make of the persistence of the fantastic, the magical, and the wondrous isn't going to be solved by consigning these facts of human life to the realm of pseudoscience. After a hundred years of working the problem that way, it doesn't seem to have borne much fruit. Like the medieval readers of the bestiaries, I think we will have to listen to the beasts and the birds, and try to discern what they have to teach us. To be continued, then . . .

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For more: Note: A recent report indicates that only 72% of Americans are scientifically illiterate today --  that is, unable "to understand approximately 20 of 31 scientific concepts and terms similar to those that would be found in articles that appear in the New York Times weekly science section and in an episode of the PBS program NOVA" -- as compared to 90% in 1988. At the same time, however, the survey reveals that there has been an "unsettling growth in the belief in pseudoscience." See also the chapter in the 2006 NSF Science and Engineering Indicators report on "Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding." For historical background on, and examples of, bestiaries, in addition to the beautifully reproduced Aberdeen Bestiary noted above, see David Badke's The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages; the Getty Center's bestiary pages; the University of Wisconsin's reproduction of T.H. White's The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts (1960) -- which for a long while was the only English translation available of a medieval bestiary; and a recent exhibition on Bestiaries by the Bibliotheque nationale de France. It turns out that the phrase we all think appeared on early maps -- "here be dragons" -- is one of those historical myths that is hard to shake: see Erin C. Blake's essay, "Where Be 'Here Be Dragons'?" at maphist.nl (a discussion group on the history of cartography), and for more, see Michael Livingston's "Modern Medieval Map Myths: the Flat World, Ancient Sea-Kings, and Dragons" at strangehorizons.com. Don't know much about Dungeons and Dragons? Then catch up with Peter Bebergal's "How 'Dungeons' Changed the World" from the Boston Globe in 2004 (the 30th anniversary of D&D's introduction). For introductions to cryptozoology see here and here.)

Images: The phoenix picture from the Aberdeen Bestiary is located at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/comment/56rbirdf.hti; for the 1987 D&D pamphlet cover, see the Dungeons and Dragons online archive at http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd/dd-ac10.htm; the Tolkien picture is the cover of The Tolkien Bestiary by David Day; and the Harry Potter book cover is from the UK -- a BBC Children's book: Harry Potter: Magical Creatures Hanging Pop-Up from amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harry-Potter-Magical-Creatures-Childrens/dp/1405902051. The "photo" of the Loch Ness monster, now largely held to be a hoax, is reproduced on the PBS companion website for the video "The Beast of Loch Ness," at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lochness/legend3.html.

go fish

Having finished watching the dolphins pirouette and sweep around their tank from the underwater viewing windows at the Vancouver Aquarium, our group began traveling up the ramp back to the main floor. As we did, everyone walked by a nondescript case off to the back containing an odd-looking rhinoceros-type fish, without anyone taking notice of it at all . . . well, that is, everyone but me. I noticed it because even though I only caught it out of the corner of my eye, my heart did a little jump, just like it does when you unexpectedly see someone you love. And this was one of my first loves: a coelacanth.

( Not sure what to do with the Latin? It sounds like this: see-la-kanth :-) 

In the late 1960s, there were only a handful of places in the United States that someone who was nine or ten years old could have seen a coelacanth, but I happened to live in the harbor town of San Pedro, not terribly far from the Natural History Museum at Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles -- that's where I came across my first coelacanth in person. Sure, the dinosaur exhibits were memorable as well, but not anywhere near as captivating as the coelacanth, with its lavishly fringed tail fin, its primitive looking eyes and teeth, its armor-like scaliness, and the fleshy lobe fins that seemed for all the world like they could be dwarf legs. As Samantha Weinberg remarks in A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth:

"In appearance, at least, the coelacanth is less a fish than a bizarre confection of mismatched parts -- modern, ancient, and unique. As one of the deckhands . . . said after hauling it up off the southern African coast in 1938, 'It looks like a giant sea lizard'" (p.196).

Coelies aren't cute and cuddly like waddling penguins or grinning dolphins or furry baby seals; it certainly wasn't looks that led to them becoming pop culture icons in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the fact that, in 1938, a creature that scientists assumed had died out 65 million years ago in the great Cretaceous extinction, like the dinosaurs -- known only through its fossilized remains, dating back 400 million years -- had suddenly emerged from the ancient sea and onto the front pages of 20th century newspapers. It would not be until 1952 that a second coelacanth was captured and preserved in a way that it could be properly studied, adding to the anticipation that the first arrival had caused. (No one has been able to keep a coelacanth alive outside of the ocean to study it; a few films of live coelacanths in the water have been made. Over the years, about 200 coelacanths have been caught and studied. A new initiative in South Africa has created a major program of coelacanth research, which may result in much more information about the life cycle of coelacanths.)

Dubbed "old four-legs" in the popular press, it was more than the fact that the coelacanth was a "living fossil" that caused such a stir. The possibility that coelacanths might well be the "missing" evolutionary link between the first sea creatures and the first tetrapods that had crawled out of the ocean and on to land, giving rise eventually to human beings, made them the source of widespread fascination. And perhaps the coelacanth's renown was given an extra boost in that the Leakeys were unearthing "early man" in Africa, and the idea of being able to at last fill in significant gaps in the great evolutionary story of life (the ones relating to us :-) seemed to be at hand.

When I became a scholar and began thinking about the nature of science in popular culture, my enduring interest in coelacanths has never been far from my mind. For one thing, the existence of coelacanths represents one of the scientific experiences that spurred my interest in studying nature -- and most of these experiences had nothing to do with the science I learned in the classroom up through high school, via textbooks or laboratory demonstrations. The science I most loved rarely showed up in class; the science I was exposed to in class rarely enthused me (don't ever get me started on the tedium of rolling steel balls down inclined planes or of titrations of potassium permanganate).

It was as if my ideas about nature existed on two tracks that rarely crossed: scavenged from museum visits and National Geographic's School Bulletin (and later the grown-up magazine itself) and television specials and visits to the ocean and books from the library and camping trips in the Mojave desert with the Girl Scouts or hiking the high Sierras with the YMCA . . . or instead properly trained into me (more or less) through bench-pressing facts from big fat textbooks and successfully executing one multiple choice test after another.

So what happens when the two paths rarely cross -- or two species of thought fail to cross-fertilize? Welcome to my world! I'm still working on it. In many respects, that early love of coelacanths put me on the path to wanting to understand science in the vernacular.

I think that one important idea that the coelacanth conveyed to me, in the midst of the self-congratulatory high that the space race brought to the US in the 1960s, was of how little we knew about our own planet, particularly the three-fourths of the globe covered by oceans and seas. My own sense of nature was overwhelmingly shaped by my proximity to the ocean as a growing organism, and I was beginning to suspect that a vernacular-derived metaphysics and epistemology that was aqueous-based differs from those that are terra-formed or aether-filled. This has got me thinking, so look for a blog entry sometime this spring on "Thinking Like an Ocean," which will be part of the analysis for the next book I'm writing.

Interestingly, South Africa's Minister of Science and Technology, Mosibudi Mangena, sees study of the coelacanth as a way to promote science in society (I was just born too early, and near the wrong ocean):

The South African Minister however deplored the low standards of science in his country and Africa at large, given the lack of resources. "Public scientific output remains low, and in critical areas, such as securing patents, and new fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, there is a limited institutional capacity to respond adequately," he complained.

The African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme however stood out as an important and well-functioning "high-profile flagship programme" for science in South Africa and the region, Mr Mangena pointed out. Through ACEP, science authorities had caused popular excitement by "ships, sea exploration, sophisticated instrumentation, and new discoveries that extend the frontiers of science to capture the imagination of the youth, and inspire them to take an interest in science."

Coelacanths continue to surprise us, popping up in 1997 10,000 kilometres away from the African coast in Indonesia, where UC Berkeley researcher Mark Erdmann spotted a coelacanth carcass being hauled off to market. The existence of the Indonesian coelacanths surprised the scientific world, although it turns out that Sulawesian fishermen were quite familiar with the fish they called raja laut, or "king of the sea" -- the Comoran fishermen also had a name for the oily, inedible fish they sometimes accidently caught: gombessa.  Makes you think about what it means when we say that a species has been "unknown" -- unknown, that is, until it is discovered by outsiders.

An aside: "My" childhood coelie appears to have been the result of a UCLA researcher in 1964 initiating the first major international expedition to the Comoros Islands off of Madagascar, the coelacanth habitat that had been previously open only to French scientists (see Malcolm S. Gordon, "The international program of research on Latimeria in the 1960s," Environmental Biology of Fishes, 1993, 36:407-14). After their analysis was complete, their coelacanth was sent to LA County's Natural History Museum, and no doubt would have been something of a local celebrity when I visited it.

Ten years later, as a UCLA student, I walked through the doors of the campus Life Sciences building, and came face-to-face with another coelacanth, much to my surprise (it was probably a cast taken of that first one). It still had the power to give me a small electrifying jolt, unlike the dozens of other students who passed it by without a second look. Every now and then, I'd visit it, just to take a small step back in time amidst the stress of the present; it always pleased me to see it there. I wonder if it's still on display?

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Further info: NOVA produced an episode on coelacanths, "Ancient Creature of the Deep," and there is a companion website. Want to make your own paper coelacanth? Courtesy of the Yamaha Motor Company, you can -- see the example to the right. I know what I'm going to be working on over Christmas vacation :-)  Other odd moments in coelie pop culture include the Pokemon Relicanth and a slew of musical tracks which feature coelacanths!

Images: The top left image is from the front page of dinofish.com, a great place to start in your exploration of all coelacanthish news. The second one is from the wikipedia site on coelacanths, and is a coelie that is on display at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The paper coelie can be found at the papercraft "rare animals of the world" Fun From Yamaha site at http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/global/entertainment/papercraft/animal-global/index.html.

halloween treats

Here are some history of science treats for fun, inspired by Halloween sneaking up around the corner. To get in the proper spirit, visit the skeleton carnival over at Dream Anatomy, the graphically elegant, evocative, erudite, and sometimes disturbing, sometimes droll display of what's beneath the skin. This is put together by the National Library of Medicine from their collections, particularly rich in the Renaissance and early modern period. The introduction begins by noting that:

The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century -- and the cascade of print technologies that followed -- helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.

You can start with the introduction in the link above, or go straight to Cadavers at Play or Show-off Cadavers if you don't need to ease into touring dissected bodies. (The image here is from a 1690 book with Govard Bidloo as the anatomist and Gerard de Lairesse as the illustrator.)

Since Halloween conjures up a medieval vibe (although the great witch-hunts and such belong to the early modern era, not the middle ages, despite popular belief), it gives me an excuse here to point out the wonderful digital version of the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary, which provides the wonderful illuminated bat picture at the start of this entry. Magic and wizardry also calls to mind Harry Potter -- and "real science", history of science and mythology mixes together with the popular series in The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works by Roger Highfield. And, for the serious history of science student with a research library at hand and a yen to study the intersection of history of science and the occult, a good place to start is with U of Florida Professor Robert Hatch's bibliography on magic, mysticism, and the occult, from his Scientific Revolution website. (This isn't to say that Harry Potter hasn't been to college; Professor of Physics George Plitnik at Frostburg State has taught Harry Potter science, in wizard robes, no less, as CBS reported.)

History of science does have a few ghosts, witches, and monsters in the attic. The ur-monster of all, of course, is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the Bakken Libary and Museum (which focuses on the history of electricity and magnetism in the life sciences) has an online companion to their Frankenstein exhibit. Science writer Deborah Blum takes on "real" ghost stories in her latest book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Proof for Life after Death. Johannes Kepler, astronomer extraordinaire, had to take time out to defend his mother in a witchcraft trial; the story is nicely retold in Kitty Ferguson's book, Tycho and Kepler. Kepler also has a character that resembles his herbal-knowledgeable mother in his Somnium (The Dream), which was published after his death in 1634. Kepler's tale concerns a young man who journeys to the moon in a dream, assisted by his mother, a witch (some consider this to be one of the first works of science fiction. For an analysis, see this piece by Gale E. Christianson in Science Fiction Studies, Kepler's Somnium: Science Fiction and the Renaissance Scientist).

Happy haunting!

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student anthropologists: through the looking-glass

I always look forward to the final project papers for my Science and Popular class -- watching the students take the wheel and report on their topics always turns up different angles and additional dimensions of the class for me. The projects take in a wide swath of territory, including (as just a few examples) high-spirited analyses of mathematics in Hollywood movies (Stand and Deliver, Good Will Hunting, Mean Girls, Proof and more), to nuanced explications of science fiction stories new to me (this time, of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Newton's Sleep") and to explanations of the popular culture moebius (s)trip that is Futurama -- an animated series that depends on its audience's sophisticated grasp of pop science even as it contributes in its own ways to science and popular culture.

I found a subset of papers that were especially intriguing, though, for their format: future professional scientists (in primatology, paleontology, and neuroscience) reflecting on their observations/interactions with members of the public in settings related to their professional scientific interests (a zoo, a natural history museum, and a science center).

The future primatologist set out to observe visitors at the Oklahoma City Zoo, and found himself reflecting on the differences between his own responses to the zoo as a child and as an adult, and then noting when the responses of the visiting children and adults diverged in certain situations. Outside the snake house, one of the snake handlers brought out a boa constrictor, and within three minutes 25 kids had touched the snake, but only 5 adults. This wasn't due simply to kids being more "hands on" than their elders: when he visited the aquatics area, an equal number of adults and kids had physical contact with the seals. Later, over at the gorilla display, "the [Gorilla] babies brought up an interesting topic that caught my eye. . . the adults were more fascinated with the baby Gorillas than the children were. The reason this caught my attention was due to the fact that most of the time children are more fascinated with babies, not adults." He wasn't sure what to make of all of this, but I bet he'll think about it from time to time. I like students leaving the class with answers; I like it even better when they leave with questions (especially self-generated ones!) as well. It gives me hope that a little piece of the class will travel along with them once we've all said good-bye.

Now, his visit to the zoo's "Great EscAPE" was more than just one stop on his itinerary -- as he finally revealed at the end of the paper: "I want to tell you why the Gorilla exhibit is my favorite part of the zoo. This is the whole reason why I am attending college and studying to become a Zoologist. I want to become a Primatologist and study Gorillas." It was here that he found himself out of sympathy with the zoo's visitors, much to his surprise, for it seemed like the public had trouble knowing the proper term for the Gorillas. He decided to sit at the entrance and record what happened: "I observed twenty-five people total, and out of the twenty-five only five people (three kids and two adults) called them Gorillas," instead speaking of them as "monkeys." A small point, you might think, but he was stunned, as he reported back: "Those numbers were a shock to me." This kind of loose talk grated on his burgeoning professional sensibilities; a few years earlier and a few years closer to the public side of the public/professional divide, and he might not have been bothered by it, let alone have noticed it.

The future paleontologist set off to interview visitors to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and he had his own unsettling moment, in some of the responses to his request for them to "Describe what you think of when you hear the word paleontologist" . . .  for when "some people answer that they do not even know what a paleontologist does it is a shock to me." Taking a more activist approach than the silently observing primatologist, he reported that "You can believe that I took that opportunity to educate them on the basics of what a paleontologist does." The ones who answered "Sam Neill" or "the guy in Jurassic Park" got to slide by :-)

Some of his respondents were fanciful, as with "one kid [who] said that he saw a T. Rex eating a paleontologist because the T. Rex did not want to be found," or "the little old lady" who was visiting the museum because "her grandkids call her an old fossil so she figured she'd come in and see the family." Speaking of dinosaurs and how they viewed them when they were children, one adult woman "said that she was always fascinated by them and actually wanted to study them, but got a little boy crazy and that quickly changed. Another woman said that due to religious beliefs she was not allowed to like dinosaurs." Interesting little bits at the intersection of science and popular culture that you don't know about if you don't ask! In his discussion of his interviews, the future paleontologist frequently switched back and forth from describing his interviewees' ideas to recalling his own early encounters with paleontology (it was seeing Jurassic Park when he was 11 years old that inspired his interest in his future profession). It was interesting to see him grapple with the idea of whether he could still be both a member of the public and a non-member of the public at the same time.

The future neuroscientist was staffing an exhibition table at the Oklahoma City Omniplex Science Museum as part of "Brain Awareness Week" (organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and locally coordinated by the Oklahoma Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience, "to advance public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research"). His table featured the "human brain station," which presented:

three human brains that have been donated for scientific use: a whole human brain complete with the outer meninges, a brain with a cutaway exposing internal anatomy, and finally a brain from which the brainstem and cerebellum have been removed from the cortex. . . [I discovered that] the brain as an icon for science elicits a wide range of responses. My favorite of all of these, however, happened when two couples approached the table. As the women recoiled, the men went through the 'who is more macho' routine, looking and sounding just like the younger boys who try to persuade their buddies with 'double-dog dares'.

He noted that this was a repeated theme:

when asked 'Do you want to touch a real human brain!?' . . . Most children respond[ed] with a resounding 'Wow!' or 'Cool!' and fight over the box of gloves in an attempt to get the first finger on the wrinkly pink mass. Other children simply disappear behind their parents' legs, silently answering me in the negative. More often than not, these children are girls.

Our exhibits are gender neutral; we don't tie pink bows around some brains or strategically place male or female volunteers. Our explanations do not vary from child to child. However, it seems that the idea of science being a male pursuit still seems to influence scientific interest. Sometimes, the parents seem to foster these values. 'You don't want to touch a yucky brain do you?' says one mother to her daughter. Conversely, boys who are afraid to touch the brain may be admonished by their fathers,'What's a matter? Don't be a sissy. Go touch the brain.' And this is where boys and girls begin to learn about how they should -- or should not -- interact with science.

In a fascinating turn of events, even as he was an observer of how attitudes were being formed about what is and is not appropriate in approaching science, he found himself in the uncomfortable position (uncomfortable because of his heightened awareness of himself as both an observer and as a participant) of administering lessons as an expert on the proper relationships between scientists and the lay public. Two incidents in particular caught him off guard:

After they began to touch the brain, one of the men asked me a question. I had practiced my demonstration several times, and as a future neuroscientist, I felt confident that I could field any question the 'uninformed' public could throw at me. This man, though, threw me a curve ball. 'So, uh, d'you believe in that whole evolution thing?' the man asked. I froze. Of all the questions I had been asked about where the brain came from or which part of the brain controlled what, I was completely taken aback by the seeming randomness of the question. I knew how I answered could have an effect on how these people perceived science. What's more, I felt torn between the desire to defend biology's most powerful theory and sidestepping the social landmine that this man had planted. His question and my reaction are indicative of the larger cultural battle between evolutionary theory and recent fundamentalist Creationism alternatives. That the image of the brain can serve as the catalyst for the dialogue, however, still continues to amaze me.

The second incident related to his observation that personal values often surface when "parents may redirect any of my mini-lectures over an exhibit." Who knew it would happen at the pig-eye dissection table? There:

an older man interrupted my explanation of the inner anatomy of the eye to offer, 'You know, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul.' I again got a little defensive, hoping that I could somehow steer the conversation back into the realm of the scientific, replying 'Well, uh, yes. If you look here at the back of the eye, you'll notice the optic nerve, which transmits all the information from your eyes and sends it to the brain to be sorted out.'

"Granted," our brain expert remarked, his response "was not as poetic as the old man's account, but I felt like the romantic aphorism needed to get" -- in his memorable phrase -- "a swat of science." In the end, he suggested, "the man and I played the roles of dry empiricist and artistic poet battling it out for the right to explain nature."

I'm always quite grateful that the students are willing to take a leap of faith with me that studying this science and popular culture thing will prove to be worth their time and effort, given that we're exploring an area that still exists off the map in any kind of meaningful way for most historians of science. To see students willing to begin reflecting on their own scientific images and go through the looking-glass -- well, it was a real privilege to share some of their glimpses. And who knows where next semester's students will go? I can't wait to find out.

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Image: A John Tenniel illustration from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

amen and evolution

Okay, we're regrouping after spring break, and finishing up with some of our thinking about images of scientists, with a focus on the 1950s. One juxtaposition I thought I would try out this semester was science television for kids -- Watch Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert's classic series that ran from 1951 to 1964 in its initial incarnation -- and science television for grown-ups -- Frank Capra's Hemo, the Magnificent (1957), the second of three documentaries on current scientific knowledge that he wrote and directed (he also produced a fourth), underwritten by Bell Telephone Laboratories.

I still think it is an interesting pair to use as a point of comparison but we never got to that discussion because I ended up giving over more time to an aspect of Hemo that turned out to be really puzzling for those who watched it: the fact that a documentary on a scientific topic -- blood and human physiology -- contained a key subtheme about the compatibility of science and religion, and made a number of deliberate religious references that assumed both the correctness of evolutionary theory and its compatibility with a sense of the divine, and, indeed, with Christianity.

There's a lot going on in Hemo, but when I've shown it a time or two before what audiences usually find most startling are the religious references woven throughout the presentation, so I was prepared for that. But I haven't watched it with students since the recent ratcheting-up of the hostility toward the teaching of evolution that has re-emerged with such power due to the shift of framing opposition to evolution as promoting "intelligent design" (the period, for many of the students, of their junior high school and/or high school years). In discussing with my students how such a view as Capra's could seem commonsensical in the 1950s but so odd to our sensibilities today, it turned out that it was kind of hard for the students to find a way to begin to unravel the question because the existence of the film itself, with its easy self-assurance about the the mutual embrace of two realms most of the students have been continually told are at war with each other, seemed so improbable.

It was almost like we had come upon some strange creature out of a medieval bestiary that had a lion's head and a eagle's body and horse's legs or whatever -- a hybrid entity that shouldn't exist because it was full of category mistakes. But there it was, a memento of 1950s popular culture that reached a large and approving American television audience in its 9 p.m. broadcast slot on CBS (beating out the other shows on NBC and ABC) and that also had a vigorous afterlife on the a-v circuit in public schools throughout the U.S. (I first saw it myself in a high school physiology class in tenth grade, I think, circa 1974). But then Capra himself was a hybrid figure -- he earned an undergraduate degree from Cal Tech in chemical engineering in 1918, went on to a celebrated career in the arts as a film director, and was a deeply committed Catholic. (See the excellent chapter discussing Capra and the Bell Science films, "'Almost a Message From God Himself,'" in Jame's Gilbert's fascinating book, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science / U of Chicago Press, 1997).

The plot structure of the film is that a writer has created a set of cartoon figures -- forest creatures and a Greek God, Hemo, who is the personification of blood -- who come to life on a "magic screen". These representatives of the "soul" (art, and poetry, and nature itself) interact with Mr. Fiction Writer (a cigarette-smoking shirtsleeves wise-guy type who stands in for the general public) and with Dr. Research (yes, that's his name . . . he is actually an English professor from USC named Frank Baxter, balding, bespectacled, dressed in a gray flannel suit), as we are guided through the technicalities of how our heart works and the ins and outs of the circulatory system. The topic wouldn't seem to lend itself to much more than a discussion of body mechanics (which it does, by creating a fascinatingly baroque world of anthropomorphized mechanical animations to display human physiology in all of its cyborg glory -- but that's another story for another day).

Christianity pervades Hemo in ways both large and small. The film is framed at the beginning and at the end by biblical quotations, opening with an epigraph from Leviticus: "For the Life of the Flesh is in the blood." It ends with Hemo making a grand declaration:

"One of your greatest physicists, Max Planck, said that over the temple of science should be written the words: 'Ye must have faith.' Your great Apostle Paul wrote to his new church in Thessalonica: 'Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.' A scientist says, 'have faith.' A saint says, 'prove all things.' Together they spell 'hope.'"

And there are side-by-side images of (St.?) Planck and (Dr.?) Paul (with a cross), emerging from a dark background as a radiant luminosity spills forth and a musical hallelujah chorus jubilates. Can I hear an amen? Amen. Thanks.

Even more interesting to me is how the core mythos of the film merges the scientific and the divine through the vehicle of the concept of humanity's ancient ocean ancestry. The pivotal moment in the film occurs when Hemo challenges Dr. Research to describe him correctly in two words or else reveal science's profound ignorance of the truth despite knowing many facts. Dr. Research's confident response is that "the two words that best describe you and connect you with the mystical origins and traditions of life are: sea water." He offers a theory that our bodily fluid possesses the same attributes "of sea water as it was nearly 400 million years ago when life emerged from the sea and began to crawl on land." He explains that:

'A billion and a half or two billion years ago life is presumed to have originated in the warmth of tropical waters as a minute single-celled aquatic organism . . . [this] primeval cell absorbed its food and oxygen directly from the sea and passed out its carbon dioxide and other wastes to the warm ocean. . . Then something wonderful happened, obeying a great plan not given to us to know, groups of these cells came together to live as colonies and new animals were born.'

As life evolved, so too did our internal bodily fluids, which allowed us to carry the sea that had birthed us at creation's beginning inside of ourselves, as we became kind of like living aquariums containing the Paleozoic sea for all time. As Dr. Research proclaims, "In the beginning, Hemo was the sea."

The idea of the oceanic origins of blood (and of life itself) is an extended sequence in the film, portraying a vision of how evolution proceeded, picturing as well the emergence of sea creatures onto land ("Obeying," Dr. Research relates, "some reason known only to God") as the progenitors (eventually) of human complexity. In response to this grand explanatory theme, Mr. Fiction Writer begins to glower and visibly tense up, you can just feel him itching for a cigarette :-) Greatly disturbed, he gets into Dr. Research's face, protesting: "Now wait a minute, Doc, wait a minute . . . are you trying to say that I'm descended from some kind of sea gnat?" He looks like he's ready to punch out the mild-mannered grandfatherly scientist then and there. Dr. Research reassures him that "you have a human spirit that separates you entirely from the animal world" (with a special dramatic emphasis on the word "human".) And here Mr. Fiction Writer relaxes, pleased, even as Hemo did when Dr. Research correctly identified his essential nature.

The scientist returns to the integrating oceanic rhetoric, summing up the intellectual journey he has taken us on by stating that "there is great mystery and great wonder in the fact that our body -- this temple of the spirit -- is built of billions of highly specialized individual cells like minute tropical sea animals." This extended sequence in itself secures the concept that the search for scientific knowledge is not a threat to religious sensibility as a foundational grounding, even if you had ignored the opening and closing scenes.          

As the students pointed out, it would certainly be unusual today for a science documentary to weave religious points throughout the presentation, as it is customary to say that the spiritual and the scientific belong in separate spheres -- an indication, perhaps, of how the early years of television had not settled into the status quo formats that would typify the science documentary genre we are more familiar with today through programs such as NOVA. One student suggested that perhaps the views presented of evolution and faith being compatible were mainstream views back a generation or so ago and might even be the same today -- perhaps it's not the people who changed, but the way the discussion is conducted. Another student, a zoology major, kept shaking his head and he gave a little laugh, explaining how odd it was to see the religious and the scientific brought side by side so graphically at the end with the figures of Planck and Paul . . . but that it also struck home deeply because it came close to describing his own perspective, one that he had never seen articulated so assertively in a public forum before.

When we think that there is only one story to tell -- that of a long endless war between evolutionary thinking and religious understanding -- we mischaracterize the complexity and the diversity of evolutionary ideas in popular culture from the 19th century on out. It almost felt to me this time that if I had described the film to my students, but didn't have it to show them as proof, they wouldn't have believed me that the "amen and evolution" presented in Hemo could have plausibly existed. "In the end," Gilbert notes, "Capra did not have to build bridges between science and religion; they were already there, and he had only to walk his films across them" (p. 223). Recognizing that this bridge in fact has existed in the not-so-distant past and then asking what happened to it is one of the historical questions bequeathed to us, and an example of why thinking about the issue of science and popular culture matters.

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For more: For a contemporary take on the Bell Science films, see David Templeton's "Weird Science? Are Dr. Frank Baxter and Those Wacky Bell Science Films Ready for a Comeback?" and for an historical analysis see Gilbert's book Redeeming Science, noted above. The films themselves are available on DVD from Image Entertainment (see also "Our Mr. Sun", Capra's first Bell science film, for similar themes to Hemo). For an excellent introduction to the scientific question of life arising from the oceans, see Carl Zimmer's At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore and Then Went Back to Sea (Free Press, 1999). For a juxtaposition of what exists on both sides of the great divide in current views on evolution and religion, see a discussion of how evolutionary theory (the "e-word") is avoided in science teaching in Arkansas: Jason R. Wiles' thought-provoking exploration, "The missing link: Scientist discovers that evolution is missing from Arkansas classrooms", Arkansas Times, 3/23/2006) . . . and last year's opening of the Museum of Earth History in the Arkansan Ozarks, which contains exhibits that explain how dinosaurs lived in co-existence with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (and how some of the reptilian descendants later found room on Noah's Ark). The funding, design concept, and installation for the museum were provided by the Creation Truth Foundation of Noble, Oklahoma -- for more, see the press release.

Image: Still from Hemo, the Magnificent (animation by William T. Hurtz), http://www.cinefilevideo.com/images/content/hemo_the_magnificent.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