Scientists Get Their Groove On On YouTube

merg717 writes "Six weeks ago, the Gonzo Scientist challenged researchers around the world to interpret their Ph.D. research in dance form, film the dance, and share it with the world on YouTube (Science, 10 October, p. 186). By the 11 p.m. deadline this past Sunday, 36 dances — including solo ballet and circus spectacle — had been submitted online." The vitamin D dance is particularly strange.

Comments

My Dance

[DynaSoar]

It would have been simply an inter-tribal pow wow dance, but I would have been laughing and yelling "We told you so! For 500 years we told you it was medicinal! Are you going to listen now?"

Unfortunately I didn't make the deadline. On the other hand, none of those on YouTube had their work on the Big Screen: "Why, they just found that smoking can offset Parkinson's disease." -- 'Thank You For Smoking'

Re:Break down the stereotypes!

[jc42]

I find it interesting that science based Phd students are able to be this creative - they are dealing with very intangible things, and correlating them to a form of communication that they are traditionally not known to be able to identify with.

In my experience, the association of the "hard" sciences and math with music and dance is well known, and qualifies as a stereotype. Since my college years as a math and CS student, I've been involved in music and dance, both classical and various "folk" varieties. In all of the groups, there has been a very obvious preponderance of techies. I've been involved in many discussions of this phenomenon, where people try to explain it.

But the explanation is illusive. I think it's because the discussions tend to break down into "The hell with this; let's dance!"

This association is hardly anything modern. It goes back centuries. Many of the best-known composers have been math geeks. Groups of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers routinely spin off music and dance groups.

My favorite example is an explanation of why the music recording industry has had so much grief from the advent of the Internet. The explanation suggests that you go find the people who built the original ARPAnet, and then find the much larger gang who expanded it into the Internet in the 1980s. Ask them what instrument(s) they play; they invariably tell you. They are all amateur musicians. And if you ask them why they became network programmers rather than musicians, they'll tell you that they realized at an early age that (for nearly a century now), it has been nearly impossible to make a living as a musician. It used to be possible, but the recording industry took control and claims almost all the money. But there was an alternative: These guys were also talented at math, and realized that computers would be a much better career choice. Then they went into network programming, and from at least the 1980s, they all realized that this was a way of killing the recording industry and returning control of music to its makers.

So there's a good chance that, if the recording industry had found a way of paying a good income to these geeks, they would have mostly become professional musicians, and there might never have been any Internet. But a musical career wasn't feasible, a computer career was and paid pretty well, so now all those would-be musicians are getting their revenge on a music industry that locked them out of their first career choice.

It's an interesting explanation, and it depends on the music/dance-math/science connection to be credible. If it's true, I wonder how we might discourage geeks in future decades from becoming musicians and/or dancers. Or will we find that our pool of talented math/science/computer geeks has dried up? (But we'll have a lot more talented musicians and dancers. ;-)