A Physicist Examines the Scientific Accuracy of Physics Shown in Major Movies: Batman, Gravity, Contact, Interstellar, Star Trek & More

in Film, Science | August 6th, 2020

Ever had a friend who can­not bring them­selves sus­pend dis­be­lief? It’s not a moral fail­ing, but it can be a tedious qual­i­ty in sit­u­a­tions like, say, the movies, or the cin­e­ma, or what­ev­er you call it when you’ve paid your day’s wages for a giant tub of car­cino­genic pop­corn and a three-hour dis­trac­tion. (These days, maybe, an over­priced stream­ing new release and Grub­hub.) Who doesn’t love a big-screen sci­ence fic­tion epic—science be damned? Who wants to lis­ten to the seat­mate who mut­ters “oh, come on!,” “no way!,” “well, actu­al­ly, that’s sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble”? You know they nev­er passed intro to physics….

Dominic Wal­li­man, on the oth­er hand, is a physi­cist. And he is not the kind of per­son to ruin a movie by going on about how goofy its sci­en­tif­ic ideas sound, though he’s like­ly to express appre­ci­a­tion for films that get it right. He doesn’t get bent out of shape by artis­tic license and can appre­ci­ate, for exam­ple, the cre­ative use of visu­al effects in Inter­stel­lar to rep­re­sent a black hole, which would oth­er­wise appear onscreen as, well, a black hole. “I’m okay with bad physics in movies,” he says, “because the job of a movie isn’t to be a sci­ence doc­u­men­tary, the goal of a movie is to tell an inter­est­ing sto­ry.”

Even so, if you sit him down and ask him to talk specif­i­cal­ly about sci­ence in movies, as a friend does in the video above, he’ll tell you what he thinks, and you’ll want to lis­ten to him (after the movie’s over) because he actu­al­ly knows what he’s talk­ing about. Over the years, Wal­li­man has mapped var­i­ous domains of sci­ence, like chem­istry, com­put­er sci­ence, biol­o­gy, math­e­mat­ics, physics, and his own field, quan­tum physics. His visu­al expla­na­tions make the rela­tion­ships between dif­fi­cult con­cepts clear and easy to fol­low. In this video, he com­ments on some of your favorite sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy films (stand­outs include the first Bat­man and Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons) in ways that are equal­ly illu­mi­nat­ing.

Big win­ners for rel­a­tive accu­ra­cy, in Walliman’s opin­ion, are no sur­prise. They include Grav­i­ty, Con­tact (writ­ten by Carl Sagan), even a clip from the incred­i­bly smart Futu­ra­ma. It is soon appar­ent that the use of a fold­ed piece of paper to rep­re­sent space­time through a worm­hole has “become a bit of a cliché,” although a help­ful-enough visu­al aid. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “bor­ing” (with apolo­gies), a judg­ment that might dis­qual­i­fy Wal­li­man as a film crit­ic, in many people’s opin­ion, but does not tar­nish his sci­en­tif­ic rep­u­ta­tion.

One of the biggest sci­ence-in-film fails: 2009’s Star Trek, whose vil­lains have dis­cov­ered a sub­stance called “red mat­ter.” A sin­gle drop can destroy an entire plan­et, and the idiots seem to have enough onboard their ship to take out the uni­verse with one care­less oop­sie. Wal­li­man is maybe not qual­i­fied to weigh in on the pale­o­bi­ol­o­gy of Juras­sic Park, but Jeff Goldblum’s expla­na­tion of chaos the­o­ry fits with­in his purview. “So, this is not a good descrip­tion of chaos the­o­ry,” he says, “at all.” It is, how­ev­er, a fab­u­lous plot device.

If you’re inter­est­ed in more engag­ing­ly acces­si­ble, non-cin­e­ma-relat­ed, sur­veys of sci­en­tif­ic ideas, vis­it any one of Walliman’s many Domain of Sci­ence videos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math­e­mat­ics in Movies: Har­vard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes

Arthur C. Clarke Cre­ates a List of His 12 Favorite Sci­ence-Fic­tion Movies (1984)

Info­graph­ics Show How the Dif­fer­ent Fields of Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics & Com­put­er Sci­ence Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Quan­tum Physics: A Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Explains the Often Mis­un­der­stood Branch of Sci­ence

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Map of Quantum Physics: A Colorful Animation Explains the Often Misunderstood Branch of Science

in Physics, Science | August 3rd, 2020

In our time, few branch­es of sci­ence have tak­en as much pub­lic abuse as quan­tum physics, the study of how things behave at the atom­ic scale. It’s not so much that peo­ple dis­like the sub­ject as they see fit to draft it in sup­port of any giv­en notion: quan­tum physics, one hears, proves that we have free will, or that Bud­dhist wis­dom is true, or that there is an after­life, or that noth­ing real­ly exists. Those claims may or may not be true, but they do not help us at all to under­stand what quan­tum physics actu­al­ly is. For that we’ll want to turn to Dominic Wal­li­man, a Youtu­ber whose chan­nel Domain of Sci­ence fea­tures clear visu­al expla­na­tions of sci­en­tif­ic fields includ­ing physics, chem­istry, math­e­mat­ics, as well as the whole domain of sci­ence itself — and who also, as luck would have it, is a quan­tum physics PhD.

With his knowl­edge of the field, and his mod­esty as far as what can be defin­i­tive­ly said about it, Wall­man has designed a map of quan­tum physics, avail­able for pur­chase at his web site. In the video above he takes us on a guid­ed tour through the realms into which he has divid­ed up and arranged his sub­ject, begin­ning with the “pre-quan­tum mys­ter­ies,” inquiries into which led to its foun­da­tion.

From there he con­tin­ues on to the foun­da­tions of quan­tum physics, a ter­ri­to­ry that includes such poten­tial­ly famil­iar land­marks as par­ti­cle-wave dual­i­ty, Heisen­berg’s uncer­tain­ty prin­ci­ple, and the Schrödinger equa­tion — though not yet his cat, anoth­er favorite quan­tum-physics ref­er­ence among those who don’t know much about quan­tum physics.

Alas, as c explains in the sub­se­quent “quan­tum phe­nom­e­na” sec­tion, Schrödinger’s cat is “not very help­ful, because it was orig­i­nal­ly designed to show how absurd quan­tum mechan­ics seems, as cats can’t be alive and dead at the same time.” But then, this is a field that pro­ceeds from absur­di­ty, or at least from the fact that its obser­va­tions at first made no sense by the tra­di­tion­al laws of physics. There fol­low for­ays into quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy (lasers, solar pan­els, MRI machines), quan­tum infor­ma­tion (com­put­ing, cryp­tog­ra­phy, the prospect tele­por­ta­tion), and a vari­ety of sub­fields includ­ing con­densed mat­ter physics, quan­tum biol­o­gy, and quan­tum chem­istry. Though detailed enough to require more than one view­ing, Wal­li­man’s map also makes clear how much of quan­tum physics remains unex­plored — and most encour­ag­ing­ly of all, leaves off its sup­posed philo­soph­i­cal, or exis­ten­tial impli­ca­tions. You can watch Wal­li­man’s oth­er intro­duc­tion to Quan­tum Physics below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Quan­tum Mechan­ics: From Schrödinger’s Cat to Heisenberg’s Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Info­graph­ics Show How the Dif­fer­ent Fields of Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics & Com­put­er Sci­ence Fit Togeth­er

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

in Astronomy, Literature, Religion, Sci Fi, Science | July 21st, 2020

The point at which we date the birth of any genre is apt to shift depend­ing on how we define it. When did sci­ence fic­tion begin? Many cite ear­ly mas­ters of the form like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its prog­en­i­tors. Oth­ers reach back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Franken­stein as the gen­e­sis of the form. Some few know The Blaz­ing World, a 1666 work of fic­tion by Mar­garet Cavendish, Duchess of New­cas­tle, who called her book a “her­maph­ro­dit­ic text.” Accord­ing to the judg­ment of such experts as Isaac Asi­mov and Carl Sagan, sci-fi began even ear­li­er, with a nov­el called Som­ni­um (“The Dream”), writ­ten by none oth­er than Ger­man astronomer and math­e­mati­cian Johannes Kepler. Maria Popo­va explains at Brain Pick­ings:

In 1609, Johannes Kepler fin­ished the first work of gen­uine sci­ence fic­tion — that is, imag­i­na­tive sto­ry­telling in which sen­si­cal sci­ence is a major plot device. Som­ni­um, or The Dream, is the fic­tion­al account of a young astronomer who voy­ages to the Moon. Rich in both sci­en­tif­ic inge­nu­ity and sym­bol­ic play, it is at once a mas­ter­work of the lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion and an invalu­able sci­en­tif­ic doc­u­ment, all the more impres­sive for the fact that it was writ­ten before Galileo point­ed the first spy­glass at the sky and before Kepler him­self had ever looked through a tele­scope.

The work was not pub­lished until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death, by his son Lud­wig, though “it had been Kepler’s intent to per­son­al­ly super­vise the pub­li­ca­tion of his man­u­script,” writes Gale E. Chris­tian­son. His final, posthu­mous work began as a dis­ser­ta­tion in 1593 that addressed the ques­tion Coper­ni­cus asked years ear­li­er: “How would the phe­nom­e­na occur­ring in the heav­ens appear to an observ­er sta­tioned on the moon?” Kepler had first come “under the thrall of the helio­cen­tric mod­el,” Popo­va writes, “as a stu­dent at the Luther­an Uni­ver­si­ty of Tübin­gen half a cen­tu­ry after Coper­ni­cus pub­lished his the­o­ry.”

Kepler’s the­sis was “prompt­ly vetoed” by his pro­fes­sors, but he con­tin­ued to work on the ideas, and cor­re­spond­ed with Galileo 30 years before the Ital­ian astronomer defend­ed his own helio­cen­tric the­o­ry. “Six­teen years lat­er and far from Tübin­gen, he com­plet­ed an expand­ed ver­sion,” says Andrew Boyd in the intro­duc­tion to a radio pro­gram about the book. “Recast in a dream­like frame­work, Kepler felt free to probe ideas about the moon that he oth­er­wise couldn’t.” Not con­tent with cold abstrac­tion, Kepler imag­ined space trav­el, of a kind, and peo­pled his moon with aliens.

And what an imag­i­na­tion! Inhab­i­tants weren’t mere recre­ations of ter­res­tri­al life, but entire­ly new forms of life adapt­ed to lunar extremes. Large. Tough-skinned. They evoked visions of dinosaurs. Some used boats, imply­ing not just life but intel­li­gent, non-human life. Imag­ine how shock­ing that must have been at the time.

Even more shock­ing to author­i­ties were the means Kepler used in his text to reveal knowl­edge about the heav­ens and trav­el to the moon: beings he called “dae­mons” (a Latin word for benign nature spir­its before Chris­tian­i­ty hijacked the term), who com­mu­ni­cat­ed first with the hero’s moth­er, a witch prac­ticed in cast­ing spells.

The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Kepler’s pro­tag­o­nist, Dura­co­tus, and Kepler him­self (such as a peri­od of study under Dan­ish astronomer Tycho Bra­he) led the church to sus­pect the book was thin­ly veiled auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal occultism. Rumors cir­cu­lat­ed, and Kepler’s moth­er was arrest­ed for witch­craft and sub­ject­ed to ter­ri­tio ver­balis (detailed descrip­tions of the tor­tures that await­ed her, along with pre­sen­ta­tions of the var­i­ous devices).  It took Kepler five years to free her and pre­vent her exe­cu­tion.

Kepler’s sto­ry is trag­ic in many ways, for the loss­es he suf­fered through­out his life, includ­ing his son and his first wife to small­pox. But his per­se­ver­ance left behind one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing works of ear­ly sci­ence fiction—published hun­dreds of years before the genre is sup­posed to have begun. Despite the fan­tas­ti­cal nature of his work, “he real­ly believed,” says Sagan in the short clip from Cos­mos above, “that one day human beings would launch celes­tial ships with sails adapt­ed to the breezes of heav­en, filled with explor­ers who, he said, would not fear the vast­ness of space.”

Astron­o­my had lit­tle con­nec­tion with the mate­r­i­al world in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. “With Kepler came the idea that a phys­i­cal force moves the plan­ets in their orbits,” as well as an imag­i­na­tive way to explore sci­en­tif­ic ideas no one would be able to ver­i­fy for decades, or even cen­turies. Hear Som­ni­um read at the top of the post and learn more about Kepler’s fas­ci­nat­ing life and achieve­ments at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script of Franken­stein: This Is “Ground Zero of Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Says William Gib­son

Stream 47 Hours of Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­els & Sto­ries: Asi­mov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Love­craft & More

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics Avail­able on the Web (Updat­ed)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Dr. Fauci Reads an Undergrad’s Entire Thesis, Then Follows Up with an Encouraging Letter

in Current Affairs, Graduation Speech, Letters, Politics, Science | July 20th, 2020

Pho­to via the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases 

What are some qual­i­ties to look for in a leader?

  • A thirst for knowl­edge
  • A sense of duty
  • The scru­ples to give cred­it where cred­it is due
  • A calm, clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion style
  • Humil­i­ty

Dr. Antho­ny Fau­ci brings these qual­i­ties to bear as Direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases at the Nation­al Insti­tute of Health.

They’re also on dis­play in his mes­sage to then-under­grad Luke Mes­sac, now an emer­gency med­i­cine res­i­dent at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, whose research focus­es on the his­to­ries of health pol­i­cy in south­ern Africa and the US, and who recent­ly tweet­ed:

13 years ago, I emailed Dr. Fau­ci out of the blue to ask if I might inter­view him for my under­grad the­sis. He invit­ed me to his office, where he answered all my ques­tions. When I sent him the the­sis, HE READ THE WHOLE THING (see his over­ly effu­sive review below). Who does that?!

Here’s what Fau­ci had to say to the young sci­en­tist:

It cer­tain­ly reads like the work of a class act.

In addi­tion to serv­ing as one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most rec­og­niz­able faces, Dr. Fau­ci has acquired anoth­er duty—that of scape­goat for Don­ald Trump, the 6th pres­i­dent he has answered to in his long career.

He seems to be tak­ing the administration’s pot­shots with a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cool head, though com­pared to the furi­ous crit­i­cisms AIDS activists direct­ed his way in the 80s and 90s, he’s unlike­ly to find much of edu­ca­tion­al val­ue in them.

Last March, The Body Pro, a newslet­ter for work­ers on the front lines of HIV edu­ca­tion, pre­ven­tion, care, and ser­vices quot­ed ACT UP NY’s Jim Eigo on the doctor’s response to a let­ter demand­ing par­al­lel track­ing, a pol­i­cy revi­sion that would put poten­tial­ly life-sav­ing drugs in the hands of those who test­ed pos­i­tive far ear­li­er than the exist­ing clin­i­cal tri­al require­ments’ sched­ule would have allowed:

Lo and behold, he read the let­ter and liked it, and the fol­low­ing year he start­ed pro­mot­ing the idea of a par­al­lel track for AIDS drugs to the FDA. Had he not helped us push that through, we couldn’t have got­ten a lot of the cousin drugs to AZT, such as ddC and ddI, approved so fast. They were prob­lem­at­ic drugs, but with­out them, we couldn’t have kept so many peo­ple alive. 

Fau­ci, despite being straight and Catholic, was not only not homo­pho­bic, which much of med­ical prac­tice still was in the late 1980s, he also wouldn’t tol­er­ate homo­pho­bia among his col­leagues. He knew there was no place for that in a pub­lic-health cri­sis.

Speak­ing of cor­re­spon­dence, Dr Mes­sac seems to have tak­en the “per­pet­u­al stu­dent” con­cept Dr. Fau­ci impressed upon him back in 2007 to heart, as evi­denced by a recent tweet, regard­ing a les­son gleaned from Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger in Pump­ing Iron, a 1977 doc­u­men­tary about body­builders:

Schwarzeneg­ger explained how he would fig­ure out what to work out every day by look­ing in a mir­ror and find­ing his weak­est mus­cles. It’s pret­ty good advice for study­ing dur­ing res­i­den­cy. Every shift reveals a weak­ness, and greats nev­er stop look­ing for their own.

In writ­ing to Mes­sac, Dr. Fau­ci allud­ed to his com­mence­ment speech­es, so we thought it appro­pri­ate to leave you with one of his most recent ones, a vir­tu­al address to the grad­u­at­ing class of his alma mater, Col­lege of the Holy Cross:

“Now is the time, if ever there was one” he tells the Class of 2020, “to care self­less­ly about one anoth­er… Stay safe, and I look for­ward to the good work you will con­tribute in the years ahead.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Sci­ence

Richard Feynman’s Tech­nique for Learn­ing Some­thing New: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy Gives Writ­ing Advice to Sci­en­tists … and Any­one Who Wants to Write Clear, Com­pelling Prose

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Everything You Need To Know About Viruses: A Quick Visual Explanation of Viruses in 9 Images

in Biology, Current Affairs, Science | July 17th, 2020

It’s a great time to tune in to what sci­en­tists are try­ing to tell us.

It’s true that we’ve received a lot of con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion over the last four months with regard to how to best pro­tect our­selves and oth­ers from COVID-19.

Sci­en­tists and health care pro­fes­sion­als have a learn­ing curve, too.

Their bul­letins evolve as their under­stand­ing of the nov­el coro­n­avirus grows, through research and hands-on expe­ri­ence.

There are still a lot of unknowns.

Some peo­ple take any evi­dence-based mes­sag­ing updates regard­ing masks and re-open­ing as proof that sci­en­tists don’t know their ass­es from their elbows.

To which we might counter, “If that’s the case, please take a minute from berat­ing the poor gro­cery store employ­ee who asked you to fol­low clear­ly post­ed state man­dat­ed pub­lic health prac­tices to edu­cate us. For­get the econ­o­my. For­get the elec­tion. Blind us with some sci­ence. Pre­tend we don’t know any­thing and hit us with some hard­core facts about virus­es. We’re lis­ten­ing.”

(Crick­ets…)

Sci­ence writer Dominic Wal­li­man, founder of the Domain of Sci­ence Youtube  chan­nel, may have a PhD in quan­tum device physics, but he also had the humil­i­ty to real­ize, ear­li­er in the pan­dem­ic, that he didn’t know much about virus­es:

So I did a load of research and have sum­ma­rized what I learned in… nine images. This video (above) explains the key aspects of virus­es: how big they are, how they infect and enter and exit cells, how virus­es are clas­si­fied, how they repli­cate, and sub­jects involv­ing viral infec­tions like how they spread from per­son to per­son, how our immune sys­tem detects and destroys them and how vac­cines and anti-viral drugs work.

Wal­li­man ani­mates his 10-minute overview with the same bright info­graph­ics he uses to help stu­dents and laypeo­ple wrap their heads around com­put­er sci­ence, biol­o­gy, chem­istry, physics, and math.

The virus video has been fact-checked by immu­nol­o­gist Michael Bramhall and biol­o­gist Christoph von Arx.

And how refresh­ing to see trans­paren­cy with regard to human error, pub­lished as a cor­rec­tive:

In slide 9 tox­in vac­cines are for bac­te­r­i­al infec­tions like tetanus, not virus­es. 

For those who’d like to learn more, Wal­li­man has tacked a whop­ping 15 links onto the episode’s descrip­tion, from sources such as Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, Nature, Stan­ford Medicine’s Scope blog, and the Nation­al Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­o­gy Infor­ma­tion.

Down­load a free poster of Domain of Science’s Virus­es Explained in 9 Images here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Spring Break vs. COVID-19: Map­ping the Real Impact of Ignor­ing Social Dis­tanc­ing

A Chill­ing Time-Lapse Video Doc­u­ments Every COVID-19 Death on a Glob­al Map: From Jan­u­ary to June 2020

The Case for a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income in the Time of COVID-19

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est project is an ani­ma­tion and a series of free down­load­able posters relat­ed to COVID-19 pub­lic health Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Michel Gondry Creates a Burger King Ad That Touts New Research on Reducing Cow Flatulence & Climate Change

in Film, Science | July 16th, 2020

As every grade school­er knows (and delights in work­ing into con­ver­sa­tion), cows have a ten­den­cy towards flat­u­lence. At first this just deterred kids from going into ani­mal hus­bandry, but now those kids have come to asso­ciate the phe­nom­e­non of fart­ing live­stock with a larg­er issue of inter­est to them: cli­mate change. From cows’ rear ends comes methane, “one of the most harm­ful green­house gas­es and a major con­trib­u­tor to cli­mate change,” as Adam Satar­i­ano puts it in a recent New York Times arti­cle on sci­en­tif­ic research into the prob­lem. “If they were a coun­try, cows would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emit­ter, ahead of Brazil, Japan and Ger­many, accord­ing to data com­piled by Rhodi­um Group, a research firm.”

For some, such bovine dam­age to the cli­mate has pro­vid­ed a rea­son to stop eat­ing beef. But that’s hard­ly the solu­tion one wants to endorse if one runs a com­pa­ny like, say, Burg­er King. And so we have the Reduced Methane Emis­sions Beef Whop­per, the prod­uct of a part­ner­ship “with top sci­en­tists to devel­op and test a new diet for cows, which accord­ing to ini­tial study results, on aver­age reduces up to 33% of cows’ dai­ly methane emis­sions per day dur­ing the last 3 to 4 months of their lives.” The main effec­tive ingre­di­ent is lemon­grass, as any­one can find out by look­ing up the pro­jec­t’s for­mu­la online, where Burg­er King has made it pub­lic — or as the mar­ket­ing cam­paign stress­es, “open source.”

That cam­paign also has a music video, direct­ed by no less an auteur of the form than Michel Gondry. In it the Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind and Be Kind Rewind film­mak­er has eleven-year-old coun­try musi­cian Mason Ram­sey and eight oth­er West­ern-attired young­sters sing about the role of cow flat­u­lence in cli­mate change and Burg­er King’s role in address­ing it. All of this presents a nat­ur­al oppor­tu­ni­ty for Gondry to indulge his sig­na­ture hand­made aes­thet­ic, at once clum­sy and slick, child­like and refined. You may rec­og­nize Ram­sey as the boy yodel­ing “Lovesick Blues” at Wal­mart in a video that, orig­i­nal­ly post­ed two years ago, has now racked up near­ly 75 mil­lion views. Burg­er King sure­ly hopes to cap­ture some of that viral­i­ty to pro­mote its cli­mate-mind­ed­ness — and, of course, to encour­age view­ers to have a Reduced Methane Emis­sions Beef Whop­per “while sup­plies last.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radio­head & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

Film­mak­er Michel Gondry Presents an Ani­mat­ed Con­ver­sa­tion with Noam Chom­sky

Direc­tor Michel Gondry Makes a Charm­ing Film on His iPhone, Prov­ing That We Could Be Mak­ing Movies, Not Tak­ing Self­ies

The Coen Broth­ers Make a TV Com­mer­cial — Ridi­cul­ing “Clean Coal”

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

McDonald’s Opens a Tiny Restau­rant — and It’s Only for Bees

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Bill Nye Shows How Face Masks Actually Protect You–and Why You Should Wear Them

in Health, Science | July 10th, 2020

Like many Amer­i­cans of my gen­er­a­tion, I grew up hav­ing things explained to me by Bill Nye. Flight, mag­nets, sim­ple machines, vol­ca­noes: there seemed to be noth­ing he and his team of young lieu­tenants could­n’t break down in a clear, humor­ous, and whol­ly non-bor­ing man­ner. He did­n’t ask us to come to him, but met us where we already were: watch­ing tele­vi­sion. The zenith of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of his PBS series Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy passed a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago, and the world has changed a bit since then. But even in the 2020s, when the spread­ing of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge is no less impor­tant than it was in the 90s, Nye knows where to air his mes­sage if he wants the kids to hear it: Tik­Tok.

Huge­ly pop­u­lar among peo­ple not yet born dur­ing Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy’s orig­i­nal run, Tik­Tok is a video-based social media plat­form that accom­mo­dates videos of up to 60 sec­onds — rough­ly half the length of the “Con­sid­er the Fol­low­ing” seg­ments embed­ded with­in the episodes of Nye’s orig­i­nal show.

This week Nye has revived the for­mat on Tik­tok in order to lay out the sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples behind some­thing that had recent­ly become a part of all of our lives: face masks. True to form, he explains not just with words but with objects, in this case a series of res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem-pro­tect­ing anti-par­ti­cle devices from a hum­ble scarf to a home­made cloth face mask (employ­ing that stal­wart sci­ence-project com­po­nent, a pipe clean­er) to the med­ical indus­try-stan­dard N95.

“The rea­son we want you to wear a mask is to pro­tect you,” says Nye. “But the main rea­son we want you to wear a mask is to pro­tect me from you, and the par­ti­cles from your res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem from get­ting into my res­pi­ra­to­ry sys­tem!” As sim­ple a point as this may sound, it has tend­ed to get lost amid the fear and con­fu­sion of the ongo­ing coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic: the con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion ini­tial­ly pub­lished about the advis­abil­i­ty of face masks for the gen­er­al pub­lic, but also the ensu­ing con­tro­ver­sy over the imple­men­ta­tion and enforce­ment of mask-relat­ed rules. But as Nye reminds us, this is “a mat­ter lit­er­al­ly of life and death — and when I use the word lit­er­al­ly, I mean lit­er­al­ly.” As we shore up our knowl­edge of masks, we Mil­len­ni­als, who through­out our lives have learned so much from Nye, would do well to inter­nal­ize that point of usage while we’re at it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Sci­ence Face Masks: Con­quer the Pan­dem­ic with Sci­ence, Cour­tesy of Maria Popova’s Brain­Pick­ings

Japan­ese Design­er Cre­ates Free Tem­plate for an Anti-Virus Face Shield: Down­load, and Then Use a Print­er, Paper & Scis­sors

Bill Nye, The Sci­ence Guy, Says Cre­ation­ism is Bad for Kids and America’s Future

Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy Takes the Air Out of Deflate­gate

Free M.I.T. Course Teach­es You How to Become Bill Nye & Make Great Sci­ence Videos for YouTube

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Vintage Science Face Masks: Conquer the Pandemic with Science, Courtesy of Maria Popova’s BrainPickings

in Current Affairs, Health, Science | July 7th, 2020

If you don’t floss or brush your teeth, they will rot and fall out. If you don’t eat fruits and veg­eta­bles, you will get scurvy or some oth­er hor­ri­ble dis­ease. If you don’t use pro­tec­tion… well, you know the rest. These are facts of life we most­ly accept if we care about our­selves and oth­ers because they are beyond dis­put­ing. But the idea of wear­ing a cloth mask when in pub­lic dur­ing a viral pan­dem­ic spread through droplets from the nose and mouth—a prac­tice endorsed by the CDC, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, sci­en­tists at Stan­ford, Johns Hop­kins, and pret­ty much every oth­er research uni­ver­si­ty—has become some kind of bizarre cul­ture war.

Maybe some walk around mask-less because they’ve inter­nal­ized the idea that the coro­n­avirus is “over,” despite the fact it’s spread­ing at around 50,000 new cas­es per day in the US, and poten­tial­ly head­ing toward dou­ble that num­ber. Maybe some feel it won’t affect them because they aren’t elder­ly or immuno­com­pro­mised, nev­er mind that virus­es mutate, and that the nov­el (mean­ing “new”) coro­n­avirus has already demon­strat­ed that it is far less dis­crim­i­nat­ing (in pure­ly bio­log­i­cal terms) than pre­vi­ous­ly thought. (In Flori­da, the medi­an age for COVID-19 has dropped from 65 to 37 years old.) Nev­er mind that spread­ing the virus, even if one is not per­son­al­ly at high risk, com­pro­mis­es every­body else.

Are masks uncom­fort­able, espe­cial­ly in hot, humid weath­er? Do they muf­fle speech and make it hard to have sat­is­fy­ing face-to-face inter­ac­tions? Well, yes. But con­sid­er your hour­long masked trip to the gro­cery store against the 12 or 24 or 48 or what­ev­er hour-long shifts med­ical per­son­nel are pulling in emer­gency depart­ments across the coun­try.

It real­ly is the least we can do. And we can do it in style—masks went from scarce, with armies of home­bound neigh­bors sewing home­ly stacks of them, to tru­ly over­abun­dant and fash­ion­able, on the rack of every gro­cery, phar­ma­cy, and con­ve­nience store. It couldn’t be eas­i­er.

If you’re con­cerned about look­ing like every oth­er masked weirdo out there, con­sid­er these masks cre­at­ed by Maria Popo­va of Brain Pick­ings, which she intro­duces with ref­er­ences to Rebec­ca Elson’s poem, “Anti­dotes to Fear of Death.” The sci­ence of pub­lic health may demand that we are grim­ly prac­ti­cal at the moment, but Popo­va wants to remind us that sci­en­tif­ic think­ing is equal­ly invest­ed in the expe­ri­ence of awe and the love of life. By wear­ing these masks, we can com­mu­ni­cate to oth­ers, those who may be feel­ing despon­dent over the sea of masked faces in pub­lic places, that there is beau­ty in the world and we can ful­ly expe­ri­ence if we get through this. Popova’s masks, print­ed and sold by Society6, illus­trate the won­ders of sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty with “won­drous cen­turies-old astro­nom­i­cal art and nat­ur­al his­to­ry illus­tra­tions.”

These include “trea­sures like the Solar Sys­tem quilt Ella Hard­ing Bak­er spent sev­en years craft­ing… gor­geous 18th-cen­tu­ry illus­tra­tions from the world’s first ency­clo­pe­dia of med­i­c­i­nal plants… aston­ish­ing draw­ings of celes­tial objects and phe­nom­e­na…trail­blaz­ing 18th-cen­tu­ry artist Sarah Stone’s stun­ning illus­tra­tions of exot­ic, endan­gered, and now-extinct ani­mals; some graph­i­cal­ly spec­tac­u­lar depic­tions of how nature works from a 19th-cen­tu­ry French physics text­book; Ernst Haeckel’s heart­break-foment­ed draw­ings of the oth­er­world­ly beau­ty of jel­ly­fish…William Sav­ille Kent’s pio­neer­ing artis­tic-sci­en­tif­ic effort to bring the world’s aware­ness and awe to the crea­tures of the Great Bar­ri­er Reef; and art from the Ger­man marine biol­o­gist Carl Chun’s epoch-mak­ing Cephalo­pod Atlas — the world’s first ency­clo­pe­dia of crea­tures of the deep.”

Society6 is donat­ing a por­tion of its pro­ceeds to World Cen­ter Kitchen, and Popo­va is donat­ing to The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. You can pur­chase your own vin­tage sci­ence illus­tra­tion mask here and see some of these illus­tra­tions in their orig­i­nal con­text at the links fur­ther down.

Anti­dotes to Fear of Death

Some­times as an anti­dote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quench­ing dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pep­per hot and sharp.

Some­times, instead, I stir myself
Into a uni­verse still young,
Still warm as blood:

No out­er space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drift­ing like a bright mist,
And all of us, and every­thing
Already there
But uncon­strained by form.

And some­time it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ances­tral bones:

To walk across the cob­ble fields
Of our dis­card­ed skulls,
Each like a trea­sure, like a chrysalis,
Think­ing: what­ev­er left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

The Phe­nom­e­na of Physics Illus­trat­ed with Psy­che­del­ic Art in an Influ­en­tial 19th-Cen­tu­ry Text­book

The Bril­liant Col­ors of the Great Bar­ri­er Revealed in a His­toric Illus­trat­ed Book from 1893

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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