Today's email brings news of two mentions of this blog within useful blogosphere roundups.
An annotated Top 100 Econ Blogs list--a subjective judgment, not by traffic.
And The Issue, an online daily composed of a wide variety of blog posts. Maybe everybody else already knows about it, but it was new to me and great for browsing.
Meanwhile, in between posting on assorted economic topics, Megan McArdle has been trying to figure out how to keep comments civil.
The post below on DNA glamour was inspired in part by the research I did for my latest Atlantic column, which explores how CSI and Numb3rs have created a new glamorous archetype of the scientist. Here's the opening:
Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science. In August 1957, two months before the Soviets launched their satellite, Science magazine published a survey of high-school students' images of scientists, conducted by Margaret Mead (yes, that one) and Rhoda Métraux. Students, they found, thought scientists were important. "Without science we would still be living in caves," was a common sentiment. But they didn't want to become scientists or (a question asked only of girls) to marry one. Scientists were just too weird.
A common pattern emerged from seemingly inconsistent descriptions:
The number of ways in which the image of the scientist contains extremes which appear to be contradictory—too much contact with money or too little; being bald or bearded; confined to work indoors, or traveling far away; talking all the time in a boring way, or never talking at all—all represent deviations from the accepted way of life, from being a normal friendly human being, who lives like other people and gets along with other people.
A lot has changed in the past 50 years, but the stereotypes remain. Scientists in the movies, noted a 1998 study in The Sciences, tend to "have two personality traits in common: obsessive natures and brilliant minds." Their detached objectivity makes them "dangerously compartmentalized and blind to frailty and emotion." Scientists appear most often in horror movies. Through childlike curiosity or God-defying hubris, they unleash destructive forces they can't control—Forbidden Planet's Monsters of the Id.
In works from Faust to Frankenstein to The Fly, scientific wonder quickly morphs into horror, turning desire into revulsion, as the scientist's beautiful illusion bursts into a nightmarish new reality. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein recalls the transformation:
Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.
Frankenstein did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.
That makes the extraordinary success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which begins its eighth season this month, all the more remarkable. Unlike its direct spin-offs and numerous imitators, which are more-conventional cop melodramas, the original CSI has at its core an eccentric scientist: obsessive, brilliant, objective, and self-contained. "Oh, I have outlets," says Gil Grissom. "I read. I study bugs. I sometimes even ride roller coasters." What a nerd.
Following up on my earlier post, reader (and D Home blogger) Paige Phelps sends a link to this post from science blogger Carl Zimmer taking a pretty comprehensive look (with photos) at science-oriented tattoos. And scientist-blogger-knitter Grace Peng writes, Don't forget you can knit DNA designs on your socks. These are all geek-style, however, not DNA-as-general-icon. A better example of DNA style is this CD rack. We have two of them--functional and beautiful as well.
Megan McArdle (a.k.a. Jane Galt) has joined The Atlantic's blogging roster.
Following the advice in his new book, Discover Your Inner Economist
Drawing on David Hull's classic Science as a Process
Congratulations to Ball of Whacks creator Roger von Oech, who has received a patent on his invention and blogs on the process. As I've written before, Roger markets the ball as a creativity tool but that's just an adult way of saying it's a fun toy. You can order one here, or, better yet, order three and create something like this:
That photo was shot before the move. Our Balls of Whacks are still in a box somewhere.
If I'm in your address book, please change my address to: 2331 Westwood Blvd., #362, Los Angeles, CA 90064. Thanks.
While I've been away, kidney donor Tom Simon has been busy blogging--and defending himself and his donation against an attack in The American Spectator. (The author has apparently never heard of Google, which would have given him plenty of background on Tom.)
A generation ago, DNA was scary or, at best, exotic stuff. Now, thanks to CSI and its progeny, DNA seems familiar to most people. It's the mysterious substance that frees the innocent and determines the father of Anna Nicole's Smith baby. Everybody "knows" what DNA is. It has a warm, fuzzy image in the public mind.
For audiences who know a little more about it, DNA also has glamour. Understanding how it works doesn't cancel the mystery of life encoded, replicated, and wildly varying. Like a spiral staircase, the very shape of the DNA molecule suggests hidden wonders. As the photo above suggests, even Hollywood wants in on the glamour. The double helix image is bound to break out of nerd culture into more general design use. One example: Grant McCracken blogged from Poland about this woman's double-helix tattoo, complete with base pairs.
Commenter Dan Weber on a Freakonomics blog post about Restless Leg Syndrome:
The obscure diseases that I or someone close to me has are totally real.
The obscure diseases that other people have are just bupkis.
(This is meant to be read ironically.)
I'm particularly sympathetic to this point since the article he's taking issue with starts with a swipe implicitly comparing depression to ordinary sadness, which is rather like comparing the flu to sneezing because you inhaled some pepper grains. Personal interests aside, the more fundamental issue is the way we treat the term disease. If something is a "disease," it is worth treating. If it isn't a "disease," you should just live with it. But why? Why not treat a biological condition you just don't like? (I'm assuming that you are directly or indirectly paying for the treatment.) We don't have to call Restless Leg Syndrome a disease to acknowledge that it disturbs some people's sleep and that those people would like relief. Contrary to what you may have heard, the only sort of character suffering builds is the ability to suffer--a useful ability in a world where suffering is the routine nature of life but not a virtue that makes the world a better place.
