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Scientists Get Their Groove On On YouTube

Posted by kdawson on from the getting-down dept.

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.

15 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Brings About a Smile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    Beautiful.

    Makes me want to go down to the capital with a sign saying:

    Less Invasions, More Equations

  2. Idle by Clay+Pigeon+-TPF-VS- · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why is an idle story filed under science?

    --
    Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
    1. Re:Idle by TheSpoom · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Eh.

      Fun does not necessarily mean "relegated to idle".

      I like my Slashdot to be varied.

      --
      It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
      - E. Debs
    2. Re:Idle by danieltdp · · Score: 3, Funny

      I, for one, welcome our new dancing scientists overlords

      --
      -- dnl
  3. Re:Experiment by H0p313ss · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The full paper will be published in Scientific America once it has completed peer review.

    You've never actually read Scientific American have you?

    --
    XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
  4. Break down the stereotypes! by bossanovalithium · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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. I am not sure sure how I would equate dance to my line of work, so more power to them!

    1. Re:Break down the stereotypes! by earlymon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Not known by whom? You? The popular media?

      I'm a graybeard (literally) sick of this stereotype.

      FYI - Dweebs exist in EVERY discipline - and they are better suited as the outlyers, not the norm, for their disciplines. /. is rife with science and engineering types - but just look at the post counts for any topic dealing with: music, DRM, films and YRO. That is more than merely anecdotal, it speaks clearly to the developed mind being whole, ready to embrace all that life offers.

      I've worked in science and engineering most of my life. Creativity is not the exception - it is the norm. Introspection is a strict requirement for the creative mind - it is denigrated as introversion. Excitement and a need to express excitement over complex work is denigrated as yet another computer-wearing-tennis-shoes running his mouth without social skills. I say that the non-receptive audience is the grown-up from not-paying-attention-in-school crowd. My wife is a well-known and accomplished artist - as are her friends. Her friends and mine never have trouble getting along, relating, or enjoying fun things - be it art, dance, music - or high tech toys and scientific concepts. The creative mind seeks its own kind, not its own narrow expression of specialization.

      The mind of a scientific researcher lives in a fine balance - on one side, beyond the fringe thinking, the only true way NEW ideas are born - on the other side, strict conservatism, the only way crackpotism is avoided.

      Mathematics is the language of science. Everyone here with a hard science degree knows that each semester there were fewer and fewer students in the theoretical math classes - the language is not accessible to everyone. JS Bach was quite a mathist - and purposely expressed his music as such. From what I know, Miles Davis was not so - but his music contains math anyway. The point of that? Math is the language of science - and science is the outcome of the mind of humankind trying to understand the universe.

      The stars dance. Molecules dance. Quarks dance. Dogs dance. DNA dances. Why shouldn't the very people who work the hardest to understand those dances not dance themselves?

      --
      Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
    2. Re:Break down the stereotypes! by jc42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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. ;-)

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  5. Re:Experiment by popmaker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You know you don't automatically lose those qualities by becoming a PHD?

  6. Prior Art! by __aagctu1952 · · Score: 2, Informative

    This reminds me of the old Protein Synthesis Dance.

    "All mimsy was mRNA, and Protein chain outgrabe..."

  7. My Dance by DynaSoar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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'

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
  8. Re:Experiment by NotNormallyNormal · · Score: 3, Funny

    If it is going to be peer reviewed, I doubt they'd publish it in Scientific America... Though a quick review for spelling mistakes could get it published there...

  9. There was only one casualty by popmaker · · Score: 5, Funny

    Luckily for eveyone they didn't mention the poor mathematician who tried to reproduce the Banach-Tarski paradox on stage and disintegrated, while "Just the two of us" was playing in the background.

  10. ARG! by db32 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Look at what those Liberal Arts bastards are doing to Science! Shoo Shoo! Out of the lab, all of you, stop sniffing those chemicals, put that down! If one more of you even suggests that gravity is just the man keeping us down I will kill each and every one of you!

    --
    The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
  11. Re:wtf. by popmaker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Maybe they just wanted to have fun, and didn't think anything more of it. Just a little bit of "hey, let's behave like molecules, it'll be pretty funny".

    I doubt any one of them HAD to do it. And I doubt any one of them was trying to advance their career. Did I miss out on any detail in the article? I honestly think they don't care one way or the other. And I honestly think they got a kick out of it.