Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
We liked #SciWars so much in 2014 that we did it again in 2015. This time, we actually did it on May 4* (aka, May the Fourth Be With You). Check out the Storify of the tweeted goodness/nerdiness.
*This was not really our fault.
Posted by in Items of Interest, may the fourth be with you, science, SCInema, star wars, storify
Monday was Groundhog Day, which inspired one of the great films, Groundhog Day from the late, great Harold Ramis. It, consequently, inspired #GradhogDay, the revision of classic lines to have a science-y spin (and vent a little graduate school blues).
You can read all the tweets in the #GradhogDay Storify or contribute your own. So far, my favorite has been this offering:
Posted by in Andie MacDowell, Bill Murray, film, GradhogDay, Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, Items of Interest, movies, SCInema
The sciencing of A League of Their Own (#ALabofTheirOwn) reminded me a bit of the sciencing of Conan the Barbarian (#ConanthePostDoc). Both films have great scripts, with great lines; but most people only remember one or two. People other than me do not have the scripts burnt into their souls.
That is ok. In fact, it is better than ok. As Jimmy Dugan says to Dottie Hinson:
It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.
It was not easy, but I think we found a few gems that speak honestly to the practice of science now.
Some of the lines were so relevant that observers mistook them for actually commentary.
One would hope that a movie about women playing baseball in the 1940s would not be relevant to science today.
The #ALabofTheirOwn storify makes up for its lack of quantity with some real quality, but I’m biased.
Posted by in #ALabofTheirOwn, A League of Their Own, Items of Interest, SCInema
That thing where you indavertantly facilitate a polite-ish discussion between Michael Eisen and Ewan Birney about ENCODE’s claims regarding “biochemical function” in the genome using modified Monty Python and the Holy Grail* quotes:
With a “wafer thin” side of Open Access:
You can check out the Storify of the #MontyPythonidae edition of #SCInema here.
*An apropos and overused scientific metaphor itself.
Posted by in #MontyPythonidae, ENCODE, Ewan Birney, Genome, Genomics, Items of Interest, michael eisen, Monty Python, SCInema
Starting with #SciWars, we’ve been in the semi-regular habit of dedication Fridays to sciencing quotes from a particular movie, with one brief (or not so brief) foray into Shakespeare (#ShakesPeerReview). Often, the biggest challenge is not picking a great movie to do, but figuring out a good, science-y hashtag* (see #GhostBusterSci for an example of such difficulties). So, I thought we could crowdsource some ideas. We got more than a few (as of this writing, there had been about 1000 #ScienceaMovieTitle tweets).
Today, we kicked off #ScienceaMovieTitle with:
Haven’t run the numbers on it, but I can be pretty sure using a tortilla chip and guacomole to simulate the Philae landings is now the second best thing I’ve done on the Internet.
Click the image below for a progressively more complete Storify collection of the #ScienceaMovieTitle tweets. UPDATE: Your #ScienceaMovieTitle tweets required not one, not two, but three Storifys to contain them. We have a trilogy. Just as your favorite deity or deity replacement intended.
*I also have a backlog of scienced movie titles that amuse me, but aren’t associated with enough great lines to be good fodder for script rewrites (see #ConanthePostDoc for an example where folks only know one line – though there are SO many really).
Posted by in film, Items of Interest, movie, ScienceaMovieTitle, SCInema
We typically do our #SCInema sciencing of movie quotes on Friday. This past friday happened to be Halloween. So, we took a whack at the classic film Ghostbusters, which turned 30 this year*. If you have not watched Ghostbusters recently, you are cheating yourself. It holds up.
Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd. Harold Ramis. Sigourney Weaver. Rick Moranis. Directed by Ivan Reitman. You owe it to yourself.
Frankly, I had been looking forward to sciencing Ghostbusters all October (yes, I once went as a Ghostbuster for Halloween). It was not, however, until a few tweets into the sciencing that we settled on a hashtag. We tried #GibbsBusters, #IdealGasBusters, even #FadeevPopovGhostBusters, before settling on the relatively pedestrian, but descriptive #GhostBusterSci.
The first act of the film centers on a trio of disgraced, academic parapsychologists losing their faculty positions and starting a company to catch ghosts. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many lines need no alteration to be applicable to today’s scientific world.
This also suggests that a plausible backstory for an all-female Ghostbusters 3 team would be composed of graduate students/post-doctoral fellows who are unable to find faculty positions due to the oversupply of PhDs, undersupply of faculty spots, and disparity between the gender equality in some graduate school fields with the gender inequality among faculty.
Like usual, I have Storified our results.
*File under things that make me feel old.
Posted by in Ghostbusters, GhostBusterSci, halloween, Items of Interest, SCInema
It has oft been our wont on a Friday to indulge in a bit of sciencing of movie quotes – a practice we have saddled with the Twitter sobriquet #SCInema. This Friday, however, was not like most Fridays. For, on this Friday, my friends at the Science for the People podcast released a show featuring interviews with author Dan Falk and scholar Stanley Wells entitled “Science and Shakespeare“.
So, instead of putting the science in movie quotes, we brought the science to the works of The Bard with the hashtag #ShakesPeerReview. It was met with great enthusiasm by science-y folk who were eager to show-off that their knowledge of Shakespeare and their senses of humor (these things do not always go together).
My favorite effort, among many potential favorites, may be this one from Shane Caldwell.
You can find a storify of #ShakesPeerReview tweets here.
To help get us in the mood for Halloween, our most recent SCInema target was the psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs.
Some participants may have found the ease with which they could put their thesis advisor’s words into the mouth of a psychopathic killer a bit disturbing, that should not take away from your enjoyment of the sciencified quotes one bit.
Posted by in #ScienceoftheLambs, #SCIotL, Items of Interest, SCInema, Silence of the Lambs
#PrincessSci was not the first effort to “science up” The Princess Bride. It will probably not be the last. After all, The Princess Bride is one of the most quotable movies of all time; and, in my humble opinion, one of the best movies ever made (no, I don’t care what the American Film Institute says).
I must say that the contributors to the #PrincessSci hashtag really brought their “A Game” to the effort, with a stand-out performance by Johnna Roose:
You can read all the contributions Storified here:
We took some time off from corrupting classic(ish) films with science, but we came back strong this past Friday with #casLABlanca – a noble effort to science-fy the 1942 classic Casablanca. Despite the risk this posed, I was pleased with the results (measured by my lack of productivity on Friday), but I amuse easily.
You can read the Storify of #casLABlanca, or even add your own “scinematic” efforts to the hashtag.
The Scinema Veritas ouevre includes:
#ConanthePostDoc (Conan the Barbarian)
#TheGrantfather (The Godfather Trilogy)
