Via Rebekah Higgitt, a Tumblr on "The Art of Google Books." They're images that break the illusion that the books have been spiritually whooshed whole and entire into the ether.

[Related.]

The Lantern Lecture

Well, I got hold of W. R. Butterfield (thanks, Southern Regional Library Facility!), and was amused by the bit of the succeeding article that made its way into the scan. Museums Journal reports that a Dr. C. H. Townsend has complained of the widespread use of lantern slides at conferences:



People were annoyed by Powerpoint before it was even Powerpoint, it seems.

"The Lantern Lecture." Museums Journal 11 (1912): 346.

Museum of Ideas

In searching around for more on W.R. Butterfield's "museum of ideas" (1912), I ran across this piece of current legislation:

H.R. 202: Museum of Ideas Act

1/6/2009--Introduced.

Museum of Ideas Act of 2009 - Establishes the Museum of Ideas Commission to develop a plan for establishing in Washington, D.C., a museum that presents the history and evolution of human ideas.

Hmm.

By the way, Google Books is a cataloguing nightmare. Who made up their categories, Jorge Luís Borges?

A simian nativity

I go into the Valley Life Sciences Building quite often to use the biology library, which is filled with treasures. Outside the library is an exhibit space, where I once heard a couple of eight-year-olds disdainfully denying the aura of a mere cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull. I quote: "That's fake." (It was excellent.)

Owing to the Darwin bicentennial, I think, there is currently an exhibit on evolution in that space. As the photograph above indicates, it is a rather odd arrangement. Various primate skeletons (one of them human) crowd around a grave-manger where lie casts of Australopithicus afarensis bones, as if to pay tribute to the newborn/long dead missing link. The chimpanzee skeleton crouches like a sheep; a gracile ape (I don't remember the name) hovers overhead like an angel -- or like a crucified, er, ape.

Mechanicity and gendered muppets

Because I live under a rock, I saw this video for the first time only recently.


First of all, gendered muppets. Physically, Mahna Mahna is gendered masculine, with a low, gravelly voice and masculine dress. The Snowths are gendered feminine; they're pink and have exaggerated eyelashes. Let's just pause for a moment to register how odd and not-odd it is to gender muppets. Insofar as they are anthropomorphized and people are preceded by gender, it is not surprising that muppets are gendered. But given how far the producers go out of their way to make them nonhuman, the degree to which they are gendered is surprising.

Even more surprising is how well the muppets' physical gendering harmonizes with the gendering of the actions that they are made to undertake in this video. Supposedly the muppets are just singing a song, but in the process they stage a drama of creativity and regulation that echoes Victorian gender stereotypes.

Muppets are by definition mechanical; they're puppets manipulated by artists from below, and this song is more mechanical than most; syllables, "words," and phrases are repeated over and over. But within the framework of that mechanicity, Mahna Mahna keeps attempting to improvise solos or otherwise depart from the repeated chorus. The Snowths -- two entities acting not as individuals but as a (female) class -- seem to have stepped out of Desire and Domestic Fiction; they survey Mahna Mahna and, with their gaze -- first wondering, then disapproving -- constrain him within the bounds of the repetitive, mechanical chorus. They are not violent; they are not coercive; they simply shake their heads. Influence is all.

Shrinking before them, Mahna Mahna curbs his desire to deviate from the mechanical pattern in which the Snowths, moving synchronously, seem to delight. Like the Widow Douglas trying to "sivilize" Huck Finn, the Snowths set and enforce rules, unable to understand Mahna Mahna's masculine creativity and his capacity for play. The Snowths are didactic Maria Edgeworths to Mahna Mahna's fantasizing George Macdonald; they are petticoat government to a fun-loving Rip van Winkle.

Repressed, Mahna Mahna attempts to escape into the background, turning his back on the Snowths in order to engage in his play. He cannot escape the feminine gaze of social order, however. Even with his back turned, he is aware of the Snowths' disapproval and rushes back to do his manly duty, planting a firm "mahna mahna" between the two bopping Snowths, who continue the chorus in an ecstasy of repetition, as enthusiastic as ever.

Ultimately, Mahna Mahna lights out for the territories -- but he does not forget to call home.

Thus the Snowths' ecstatic repetition of the mechanical chorus, performing the female mechanicity of the "typewriter," the telephone operator, and other modern female cyborgs, returns as technology, only to be shut down thereby. This final utterance of "mahna mahna" puts an end to the repetition that it has so far enabled. Even if Mahna Mahna remains constrained to play house with the Snowths, he can now do it remotely, away from their surveying gaze.

(Far more information than you could possibly want about this song is located here.)

Campanulas

I had my students this past semester read a chapter from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 study Objectivity. My students had a rough time wrapping their heads around the idea that "objectivity" and "science" are not the same thing, or that "subjective" and "bullshit" were not the same thing. When they saw the images that Daston and Galison used to emblematize truth-to-nature and mechanical objectivity, their first impulse was to say that the first image, an engraving of Campanula foliis hastatis dentatis, was "subjective," therefore unscientific and probably bad, while the photograph of a snowflake was "objective," therefore scientific and good.

Here is the true-to-nature image that Daston and Galison use, from Linnaeus's Hortus Cliffortianus (1737). The artist is Georg Dionysius Ehret; the engraver is Jan Wandelaar. As Daston and Galison write, "It is an image of the characteristic, the essential, the universal, the typical: truth-to-nature" (20).



Yesterday I saw some campanula growing outside the Women's Faculty Club and took some pictures with my cell phone camera. They may not be the same species as the one in the Wandelaar engraving -- IANAB (I am not a botanist).








My students greatly approved the snowflake photograph that Daston and Galison used to illustrate mechanical objectivity, "an attempt to capture nature with as little human intervention as possible" (20). A photograph is always more objective than a drawing, but my crappy cell phone pictures, precisely because there was so little human intervention (I couldn't control light or focus, for instance), show the drawbacks of objectivity. The photos are indistinct; it's hard to see what the leaves look like, for instance.


* * *

Semi-relatedly, here is a CBC radio series on How to Think about Science. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison each have an episode! So do a lot of other brilliant science historians.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007. Print.

Nineteenth-century scientist of the week: Elliott Coues

Elliott Coues, 1842-1899

Coues was an ornithologist, naturalist, and (according to Wikipedia) army surgeon. I first ran across him in Frederic A. Lucas's The Story of Museum Groups, a guide leaflet from the American Museum of Natural History.



Museum groups, or "habitat groups," are free-standing groups of stuffed animals, usually dioramas in which specimens are placed in a more or less naturalistic position, with an artificial background that simulates the animal's habitat. Here is one currently on display at the AMNH:


(You can read all about this diorama here.)

Coues is quoted in the leaflet as a representative of the anti-museum group old guard, saying "as late as 1874" that

'Spread eagle' styles of mounting, artificial rocks and flowers, etc., are entirely out of place in a collection of any scientific pretensions, or designed for popular instruction. Besides, they take up too much room. Artistic grouping of an extensive collection is usually out of the question; and when this is unattainable, halfway efforts in that direction should be abandoned in favor of severe simplicity. Birds look best, on the whole, in uniform rows, assorted according to size, as far as natural classification allows. (Lucas 5)

For Coues, there was something anti-scientific about the habitat group; he felt that specimens should be displayed according to their taxonomy rather than their ecological contexts. So, for instance, an ostrich would be displayed next to an emu, not next to warthogs (as they actually were at the AMNH in the 1940s). If I recall correctly, the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes is in large part arranged taxonomically even today, for instance. (But then, they also had a quite goofy exhibit on dragons in the basement when I visited.)

Coues isn't particularly best known for his views on museum groups; they were common enough views in the nineteenth century. He's better known for his commitment to classification and his interest in westward exploration (he edited Lewis and Clark's journals, for example), and of course his extensive studies of birds.

Like many other scientists of the period, Coues was interested in spiritualism, and he was also a member of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was for many years committed to the notion of "biogen," a "substance of mind," or "soul-stuff," in which, according to Coues, the vital principle resided (Coues 14-5). As best I can gloss it, it was vitalism with a spiritualist twist. The idea was not welcomed by the scientific community at large, but in 1885 Coues wrote,

I know that I have made a great discovery which conservative science will properly be slow to acknowledge. I also know that I can demonstrate the thing. Meanwhile, people may call me what they please, and I say proudly, with Galvani, 'they may call me the frog's dancing-master -- but I know that I have discovered one of the great forces of nature.' Galvinism [sic] is an accepted scientific fact: so will Biogen be in due time, and sooner perhaps than even I suppose. (qtd. in Cutright and Brodhead 304)

Famous last words. This is yet another example of the way that science and its protocols fluctuate and are subject to dispute.

Here's his obituary in The Nation.

Coues, Elliott. Biogen: A Speculation on the Origin and Nature of Life. 3rd ed. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1884.

Cutright, Paul Russell, and Michael J. Brodhead. Elliott Coues: Naturalist and Frontier Historian. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Lucas, Frederic A. The Story of Museum Groups. 4th ed. Guide Leaflet Series, No. 53. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1926.

ETA: Apparently students who are given chocolate give more positive teaching evaluations. Oh, for crying out loud.

ETA (again): I appear to have been linked by "Your Unique Portal to the Conservative Blogosphere." It must be very unique, because last I checked, nineteenth-century spiritualist ornithologists were not a conservative issue, or a political issue at all, for that matter. In fact, this blog is in no way a part of the "conservative blogosphere," unless we are talking about conserve in the jam/jelly sense, in which case, well, maybe.

Overly confrontational physics

I spent the afternoon of New Year's Day pleasantly with my friend Katie and her five-year-old, Quinn, at Lawrence Hall of Science. I'd never visited before, though Quinn was an old regular there.

I spotted the shirt below in the gift shop.



I don't recognize the equation, though I can hear C.P. Snow roaring in my ear, Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?.

The humor of the shirt lies in the deformation of a set linguistic phrase, in this case, the faintly aggressive "What part of [X] don't you understand?" In its usual context, X is something very simple, such as "no." Ideally, it's something that doesn't have parts in the first place. This makes the question rhetorical: there's nothing to debate, because X is so very self-evident. If you understand X, as you must, then the conversation is finished.

The phrase is aggressive because it suggests that the reader/listener must be very stupid to have disagreed with the speaker; it suggests that such disagreement can only result from an inability to understand some part of the very simple X.

The phrase on the shirt deforms the template phrase by making X something visually complicated, with many parts. The humor turns precisely on our receiving the equation as complicated, difficult to understand. But it retains the aggressivity of the original template phrase, even as it undercuts itself. You must be very stupid not to understand X, which I am positioning as not at all simple; that is, you must be very stupid relative to me.

Indeed, we are not meant to be able to understand the equation, or even see it: unlike the template into which it is inserted, X is here rendered in small close-set type. It is the aggressive template that is emphasized by the shirt's typography; of the equation, we are only meant to catch enough of a glimpse to see that it is complicated and contains line integrals. It doesn't matter whether the reader can see or read the equation; it's assumed up front that the reader wouldn't understand it anyway.

The wearer of the shirt thereby lays claim to membership in a contemptuous literati, whose aggressivity is both incited and justified by the difference between the wearer's ability to understand X and reader's presumed, typographically enforced, and culpable inability to understand it.

This is one popular understanding of what it means to be a scientist.

All the cultural capital money can buy

Here's another instance of the commodification of the idea of science, here embodied in the "genius" figure of Albert Einstein:





The t-shirt reads "GENIUS OF LOVE." Um. Okay.

Here's another funny item for sale, spotted at one of the many yuppie stores that have invaded Elmwood in recent years (I suppose I should say super-yuppie, since Elmwood wasn't exactly gritty when I moved here).



Seen in the photo below: posh white-painted, fake wooden books to, er, leave lying around on your floor?




Whatever, fools. I have the real deal.

Sociological Images has posted some images of black people being used as "props for white femininity," something I posted on regarding the James/Bündchen Vogue cover a while ago.

Lisa writes, "Dude, we are so not making this stuff up." To which I can only add:

Seriously.

Happy Fourth of July.

Some links

Variously stolen from Zuska:

- The National Women's Law Center's Women's Prerogative gives 2002 data for the percentage of women faculty in science departments. Go, look, and be embarrassed for your school.

- The blog Sociological Images presents image for use in sociology classes and related contexts. Check out their "our favorites" tag.

- Review of Virginia Valian's Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women