Archive for August, 2007
The representation of science in film has never been a balanced affair. Right from the outset, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis cast Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the wild-haired scientist Rotwang, setting the archetype for the next 80 years. Since then, scientists in film have fallen into two broad categories - the eccentric yet brilliant old man, and the sexy nymph whose credentials are little more than window dressing on 98lbs of eye candy.
Now, I know the movies aren’t the place to go if you want reality. But the following culprits are guilty of stretching credibility thinner than than Paris Hilton’s resumé. These are the characters who don’t demand suspension of disbelief so much as a permanent revocation of it, a total regression to infant naïveté, waiting to be spoonfed a purée of techno-jargon and labcoats. To the following: I salute you, for having the gall to call this characterisation.
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C. A. Rotwang, Metropolis (Rudolf Klein-Rogge)
This was the man who started it all. The hair, the attitude, the lab filled with unnecessary electrical equipment. Up to this day, actors pay tribute to Klein-Rogge by indulging in all the same stereotypes he did. |
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Sue Storm, Fantastic Four (Jessica Alba)
Stunning, yes, but when it comes to acting skills, Alba is barely convincing as a human being, let alone a chief geneticist. Are we to supposed believe that the Early Learning Centre is selling PhDs now? |
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Jeff Goldblum, Various (Jeff Goldblum)
Shot to fame in 1984 playing brilliant yet enigmatic scientist Seth Brundle who ends up turning himself into a fly. Reprised the role of brilliant yet enigmatic scientist in Powder. And again Jurassic Park. And again Independence Day. And again in Cats & Dogs. Responsible for a generation of children growing up believing all scientists were all lanky giants with the dress sense of Johnny Cash. And anyway, what the hell is a chaotician doing at Jurassic Park? |
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Bruce Banner, Hulk (Eric Bana)
Somewhat impossibly, Eric Bana created a movie scientist who is even more tedious to watch than actual lab work. Kids, science isn’t as fun as the movies - but it’s nowhere near this boring. |
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Dr Brackish Okun, Independence Day (Brent Spiner)
Lab coat? Check. Big glassess? Check. Unkempt hair? Check. Ugly? Check. Poor social skills? Check. Brent Spiner doesn’t stumble into common pitfalls so much as leap into them with enthusiasm. Perhaps it was all those years playing a deadpan android that left him with a huge reservoir of emotion to overact with. Thankfully dealt a swift death. |
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Rockhound, Armageddon (Steve Buscemi)
Technically, he plays a driller. But he’s also shown to be a super-genius during the film. Which means he’s naturally also the one to go mad with “space dementia”. Genius = Lunacy. Hooked up with underage girls and strippers, so breaks the mould somewhat. |
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Dr Christmas Jones, GoldenEye (Denise Richards)
She’s a scientist. But she’s actually really hot! Wow, are we breaking down paradigms here or what? Notably performs absolutely no science whatsoever during the film. Besides, no-one who could even spell “venereal disease” would sleep with James Bond. |
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Dr Emmett Brown, Back to the Future (Christopher Lloyd)
Another graduate from the Klein-Rogge school of acting, Brown has the hair, the labcoat, the distracted demeanour. Reinforces the “lone genius” stereotype by inventing time travel in his garage. Names his dog Einstein, which shows you where he thinks of himself in the pecking order of science greats. |
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Professor Charles Xavier, X-Men (Patrick Stewart)
Fabulously wealthy psychic (those premium rate call lines are doing great business) who builds a school and appoints himself as the only professor on the board. Trains child soldiers in preparation for induction into a paramilitary organisation. And he’s supposed to be the hero? |
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Dr Alex Hesse, Junior (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
So you have a new fertility drug, which bizarrely already has a commercial name, Expectane. Your research grant is denied, so you decide to contravene safe procedure, ethical behaviour and common sense by implanting an embryo into yourself. Then, despite the very likely chance that the child will be some kind of malformed freak (after all, Arnie is the dad) you carry it to full term.
Umm, no. |
Just to show I’m not a miserable pedant, Hollywood’s Ten Awesomest Scientists is on its way.
August 31st, 2007
I’ve just discovered the delightfully low-fi Pinky Show, a “super lo-tech hand-drawn educational TV show”. Covering topics as diverse as cats with guns to the legality of the Iraq War, it is the complete calming inverse to the hyper-connected link-festooned information cavalcade that most of the web is built to be (and I include myself in that). The electronic equivalent to a mug of warm cocoa (although I’m not ruling out the possibility that the milk has been adulterated by some liberal astroturf think-tank). Here’s Pinky on Edison and his DC electricity distribution.
August 30th, 2007
Today the Times announced dedicated its front page to claims of a “gentlemen’s agreement” amongst examiners to make GCSE science exams easier. The JCQ director gave this wonderful logic:
Dr Sinclair added that the changes would help to stop children being “turned off” by science.
“Part of the desire is that the student can come out of the exam with a feeling of success that they have actually tackled a significant proportion of the questions, and achieved the best grade expected,” he said. “The vast majority of candidates taking this exam are going to achieve grades D to G, and they deserve a positive experience of science.
Clearly, in answer to my previous article, the purpose of exams is actually to give kids a warm fuzzy feeling, and to teach that smoking pot all day instead of studying doesn’t preclude you from deserving an academic qualification. Speaking of drug abuse, here’s an example question from the GSCE paper posted on the Times website. Can anyone even begin to understand what’s going on here?
August 29th, 2007
The New York Observer has a wonderful column entitled “Ask a Theoretical Physicist“. It’s like Ask a Ninja, but for geeks (well, even geekier geeks).
Dear Theoretical Physicist:
I met a terrific girl a few months ago, and things are starting to become serious. I like her very much, but she wants children quickly and I still don’t feel ready. What should I do?
—Alexander F., East Village
Dear Alexander:
It might help to think of your girlfriend less as the potential mother of your child, and more as a swarming agglomeration of infinitesimal strings vibrating in 10, 11 or 26 dimensions. These strings would have length but not width or height, and they could either be closed, in which case they would look like squiggly ovals, or open, in which case they would look like shoelaces. The shoelaces would spin out “world sheets” through time, while ovals would make “world tubes”; and two world tubes could combine to form a single world tube, which would look like a pair of trousers!
Let me know what you decide.
—TP
August 28th, 2007
It’s that time of year again, when examination results for the nations 16-18 year old come out, only photogenic girls seem to turn up for their results, and everyone bemoans the fact that either children are getting more stupid (as evidenced by falling grades) or children are getting more stupid (as evidenced by rising grades, which really mask falling standards).
So which is it? When the grades rise, are the exams getting easier or children getting smarter? It’s time for some hardcore statistical fun!
At the face of it, the answer is no-one really knows. Both the rising intelligence and falling standards are reasonable hypotheses that can be deduced from the results, and aren’t even mutually exclusive. Perhaps one is happening, maybe both. Maybe standards are falling in London whilst intelligence is rising in Glasgow.
The key here is this: are these exams supposed to test children against themselves, against eachother, or against a national standard? We tend to think it’s all of these, but there’s a problem in that.
The only way we’d know for sure whether this year’s children were as smart as last year’s is if the children sat exactly the same exam as last year’s kids. But those sneaky boys and girls, they’d find out last year’s answers from their older mates. The rouges.
So what we have is an uncontrolled test. Sort of. Because even though the exam has changed, we trust in those writing it to make it more or less as difficult as the previous one. Don’t we? Well, not really. We wait until the results come back to discern whether the last test was as hard as the previous one. Can anyone see a problem here? We’re controlling the test with the same group of people we’re conducting it on. Wherein lies the problem. The answer is really: this year’s results can’t be accurately compared to last year’s.
So is the point to test the children against eachother? Employers certainly seem to think so. After all, they’ve all received the same education, so each has an equal chance of getting a top grade right? Well, no, because each student has a different background, lifestyle, level of support, and a million other factors that confound equal comparison. Another reason children aren’t truly tested against eachother is because every boy and girl who answers a question right is awarded a point. So the grade boundaries are artificially imposed as “those with >90% right answers: A, those with >85% right answers: B”, etc. This implies that everyone who answers more than 90% of answers correctly must be in the top bracket, but is confounded when half the students end up in this bracket. How can half the kids be in the top bracket? The solution is one of three options: make the exam harder, raise the bracket for the top grade (say, to >95%), or “mark on a curve”. This is a phrase unfamiliar to most Brits, but widely used in the US, where the top 20% of the class is awarded an A, the next 20% a B, and so forth. The problem with this is that the difference between an A and a B student is decided not by his or her ability, but the competition’s. This might seem unfair, but remember: we’re testing these kids against eachother, right?
Maybe not.
Third and finally, are we testing these kids against themselves? Isn’t that the true mark of success to improve upon yourself? I certainly think so. But this is also fiendishly difficult to measure. Every single student would need an individualised series of tests, marking their improvement over the course of their education. Not going to happen.
So what are exams for? Until we can decide, we’ll be confused and concerned about the results every year.
August 24th, 2007
The Metro reports on a fantastic new product from Bullet Proof Baby, a firm offering, amongst other things, a buggy that can withstand automatic weapons fire from just a few meters away. The Metro gushes:
Proving that a new invention worked was a matter of life and death for Stella Stevenson. Or at least it was for her 18-month-old son when she placed him in a newly designed bullet-proof buggy and opened fire at him with an automatic rifle. After a ten-second burst, the American picked up the unharmed infant and smiled for the camera.
Err, except there’s no such company as Bullet Proof Baby - it’s just some mildly entertaining viral marketing for an upcoming action film. I’m sure if I confronted the Metro about this they’d claim they knew all along (ho ho, those scallywags!). But the truth nobody bothered to do even a cursory check before printing this fluff. You’d think if your story was going to be printed in over a million papers, a 30-second fact check wouldn’t be too much to ask.
August 23rd, 2007
OK, so some of these are a bit fanciful when it comes to correctness, but there’s no doubting the plain awesomeness of have biologically themed tattoos adorning your body, celebrating the beauty of what lies beneath the skin. I really want a UV tattoo of my bones after seeing this.
Via Street Anatomy
August 22nd, 2007
The Mail, along with most other publications, is reporting on a survey by consumer magazine Which? that showed, quel surprise, most people interviewed think it’s irresponsible for companies to put cartoon characters on “unhealthy foods”. This was followed for a call for a ban on junk food advertised to children.
As far as I can see, there are several problems with this:
1) Children don’t buy food, parents do. So the decision is down to the parent.
2) There’s no such thing as junk food. Eating a little salt, fat and sugar isn’t just harmless, it’s healthy.
3) Advertising agencies need to put their client’s image where it is exposed to the target market. Disney don’t brand apples because nobody brands apples - they’re a staple, not a luxury. Sticking Disney characters on bags of apples won’t help sell them, so if you force companies to lend their characters to “healthy” products the result is a loss for both apple sellers and Disney.
4) If you’re going to force advertisers to only brand “healthy” options, please submit a list of every foodstuff on earth divided cleanly into “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Trail mix is high in sugar and fat. So where is it going to be?
We’re in dire need of a little self-responsibility here. Otherwise we can sum these protests up, as the Onion famously quipped, “Why won’t someone do something about how fat I am?”
August 21st, 2007
Clarins have been sitting on my radar since a reader forwarded me their “anti-EMF” spray - a magical solution that claimed to be able to protect the wearer against the damaging effects of “artificial” electromagnetic waves. To my delight, the ASA has criticised the skincare firm and told them to withdraw their advertising:
The firm sent the ASA research which it said showed how electromagnetic waves from mobile phones affected skin cells.
Some of studies looked at radiation from a mobile phone over a six-hour period and others monitored exposure over 24 hours.
But the watchdog told Clarins the research was “not robust enough” to prove the phones generated electromagnetic waves which damaged or aged the skin.
It was also told not to repeat claims about the waves’ effect on the skin without having “robust scientific evidence” to support it.
Link
August 15th, 2007
What happens if you seal bacon and an egg in a Perspex tomb for a year? See the effects of time ravage two once-proud constituents of an English breakfast.
Link
August 15th, 2007
I love Australian pop act The Grates more than the BBC loves made-up formulae. And I love them even more for singing this, the best science-themed song since Leonard Nimoy hung up his mic (only kidding, this is way better than that).
You can also watch their riotous video for the insanely catchy “19-20-20“, which is pretty much the best party you never had as a kid. Enjoy the weekend, folks!
August 10th, 2007
Carl Zimmer’s blog entry on science-themed tattoos is getting a lot of attention from the interweb. No wonder, science and punkery are a great combination!
August 9th, 2007
Do not adjust your monitors. What you are seeing is correct. The picture above shows Stan Jones, a Libertarian US Senate candidate, taken in 2002. Contrary to what you might expect, this isn’t about a genetic condition - I wouldn’t be so cruel. In fact, Jones’ unusual skin colour is entirely down to his diet - namely his ill-advised consumption of home-made nutritional supplement, colloidal silver. Properly made, colloidal silver is a power antibiotic, used in antiquity for disinfecting wounds. Jones, believing the the turn of the century would herald untold civil unrest (and therein a stark lack of antibiotics), started brewing his own medications in preparation for the Y2K meltdown. Unfortunately he didn’t follow proper protocol, as Wikipedia states:
[Stan Jones] later revealed that he had used many techniques which are generally considered unwise by colloidal-silver producers, some of which were: (1) The use of mineral-rich well water, which likely caused the production of various, unpredictable silver compounds; (2) the addition of salt as an accelerant, which likely caused the production of the compound, silver chloride; (3) unusually long production times, which likely produced unusually high concentrations; and (4) the lack of filtering, which likely caused him to ingest a lot of non-soluble silver compounds.
These conditions, twinned with Jones’ predilection for drinking his mixture rather than using it to treat external wounds, led to the condition known as argyria, a permanent blue-grey colouring of the skin. Jones insists that he is otherwise healthy, and even had to defend himself during campaigning from accusations that he was using his unusual skin colour as a gimmick. Which would be almost as stupid as drinking toxic amounts of silver instead of stockpiling Novamox.
August 8th, 2007
These are troubling times, but it’s nice to know someone is looking out for us. In the worrying gulf that lurks over our heads while the government fails to put the finishing touches to a workable anti-terrorist spray, one company is bold enough to offer us protection from at least one of the threats we face on a daily basis: ankle-biting midget werewolves. Yes, have no fear from Lilliputian lycanthropes, as Carnation Footcare gives us… the SilverSock!
Inexplicably, the SilverSock “contains no chemicals” and “is made with pure silver”. Even more amazingly, those two claims appear in the same sentence. If that wasn’t enough, the SilverSocks also boast anti-microbial activity, anti-odour technology, high thermal conductivity and anti-static properties to protect against those little zaps from car doors that can be almost as annoying as midget werewolves. Sounds to me like these would be exactly what Troy Hubertise wants for Christmas.
August 7th, 2007
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