Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationArchive for Announcements
Exploration Roundup
Old Montreal
Notes from Montreal
Montreal: place of cobblestones and canals, of spicy Pho and this year’s History of Science Society (HSS) meeting (and Philosophy of Science Association meeting, PSA).
The conference was my introduction to the Toronto bloggers who are tearing through the HSS/PSA neighborhood. I met Jaipreet Virdi who writes From the Hands of Quacks and Aaron Wright, author of False Vacuum. Justin Curtis and Mike Thicke from The Bubble Chamber were also in attendance but we didn’t cross paths. To all of you: keep up the excellent work!
Of the travel and exploration panels I attended, I was most impressed with a talk by Christopher Parsons (University of Toronto) on 17th century French settlers in North America. He argued that these settlers organized species according to a generalized “folk taxonomy.” While exploration scholars often highlight reports of marvels and wonders, Parsons described the reverse: settlers cataloging new plants and animals according to the most general and conventional of categories.
A Short Rant
One thing I also appreciated about Christopher’s talk was the way he delivered it: framed by issues, guided by images, and given from notes. Some other presenters did not do these things adequately: giving little context, offering no images or outlines, and reading from the text.
I don’t understand this.
Most historians make their living by teaching. Most of the ones I know are attentive, innovative, passionate teachers. They care about communicating ideas. They engage their students and foster their interests in history.
What happens when we go to conferences? What force transmutes vibrant instructors into paper-reading scholastics? Who decided that the best way to present one’s ideas was to sound like a medieval instructor lecturing at the University of Paris?
I’ve heard many arguments for why academics read papers: “It’s the only way to fit my material into 20 minutes.” “I need to be precise.” “I get too nervous to go from notes.””I can write my papers in a conversational style.”
All of this may be true but it doesn’t change the fact that someone speaking from notes is easier to understand than someone reading from a text; the words and cadence are more natural and, I think, better able to carry the weight of a complex argument. I don’t have hard data on this, but consider this: most of us would recoil at the idea of reading a lecture to our students. If we wouldn’t suffer this upon students, why do it to our peers? What’s the point of maximizing time, precision, or peace of mind if, in the process, we lose the attention of our audience?
Ethics of Exploration
In other news, Peter Stanford challenges the heroism of modern day adventurers in his article in the Independent (Thanks to Richard Nelsson for alerting me to this). The article complements longer treatments of this issue by Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild) and Maria Coffey (Where the Mountains Casts Its Shadow).
Spaceflight
Curtis Forbes, writing at The Bubble Chamber, discusses the discovery of the exoplanet Gliese 581g and the hype its generated in the media as the “Goldilocks Planet.” Forbes convincingly argues that the eagerness to imagine this world as an earth-like place tells us more about culture here than environmental conditions there. Meanwhile, Cosmic Variance has raised questions about the concentration of space science funding into the James Webb Space Telescope which is scheduled to replace the Hubble Telescope in 2014.
As NASA enters the post-Constellation era, I think we will be seeing a lot more debates about science and space funding.
Autumn
Autumn in Bavaria, Wassily Kandinsky, 1908
Poets coo about autumn as a gentle season, a time of harvests and golden light. It is Dickinson’s cool orchard where “the berry’s cheeks are plumper” and Keats’ quiet time scattered with grain “drows’d with the fume of poppies.”
But berries and poppies have no place in my autumn, which announces itself to summer like an air-raid siren. Deadlines have arrived for two articles (on Mars and the historiography of exploration). Copy edits for a third are overdue. My book project, drows’d with the fumes of neglect, crawls into a corner to die. Students flutter and spin towards my office like falling leaves. Classes begin in three days.
Wonderful, wonderful posts wait to be written, to be plucked from the golden orchards of science and exploration. They hang unripe, waiting for more fertilizer, or maybe more pesticide.
So no deep thoughts today, just some links that I’ve found:
Apollo 11 Launch, 1969. http://launiusr.wordpress.com/
Roger Launius’s Blog. Launius is a sharp historian who focuses on the history of space exploration. I’m currently reading his book Robots in Space and was excited to see that he has entered the blogosphere. If you want my recommendation of things to read on his site, check out his piece on the popularity of the Apollo Program.
Jaipreet Virdi http://jaivirdi.wordpress.com/
From the Hands of Quacks. Jaipreet Virdi’s history of science blog covers a number of topics, from history of medicine to the challenges of being a grad student. It’s got a nice list of links too.
Jesse Bering http://www.scientificamerican.com
Bering in Mind I can’t think of a way of connecting Bering’s research psychology blog to exploration, so I won’t try. I like his pithy writing style and spin on contemporary issues from a variety of perspectives including evolutionary biology. His latest post on polyamory is also well-done in pointing out the widespread use of the naturalistic fallacy in defending human sex behaviors.
Cosmic Variance. A group blog on physics and astrophysics that is hosted by Discover magazine. The posts often give a lot more depth and perspective on astronomical discoveries than regular media outlets provide.
Ok, done. May your autumn be filled with berries and poppies – or poppy derivatives – as your needs dictate.
100,000
Time to Eat the Dogs logged its 100,000th view yesterday. It’s only a matter of time now before TBS offers me a late-night show on exploration, but I want you to know that I’m not going to let it go to my head.
Let’s face it: the biggest blogs rack up 100,000 views in a few hours. And the 100,000 number doesn’t say anything about the viewers who found their way here through some horrible accident (such as searching for “naked men at sea” or “cooking squirrel”).
Still, I’m happy. I started this blog because I was frustrated with the way people talk about exploration, or more precisely, the way they weren’t talking about it.
While scholars from many fields study exploration, most of their discussions tend to be tightly confined. Debates unfold in the pages of poorly subscribed, peer-reviewed journals. And while academic communities talk past each other, they are also talking past the public: the thousands of people who are fascinated by exploration, who read articles and buy books on the Apollo missions, Christopher Columbus, Ernest Shackleton, and Lewis and Clark.
Blogging here has put me in touch with people from all of these different communities. And their feedback has influenced my work. It has changed scope of my projects and the way that I think about them.
So thanks for stopping by, offering suggestions, leaving comments.
Thanks too to the other bloggers who have given guidance and support: Ting & Tankar, Deep Sea News, Ether Wave Propaganda, World’s Fair, Dispersal of Darwin, The Beagle Project, The Renaissance Mathematicus, and others.
You’ve made me a better scholar in the process.
Why We Need a New History of Exploration
Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806.
Today, just some announcements:
Common-Place, the online history journal, just published my article, “Why We Need a New History of Exploration.” You can read it here.
SciCafe, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is presenting “Darwin on Facebook: How Culture Transforms Human Evolution” a presentation by anthropologist Peter Richerson. “SciCafe features cutting-edge science, cocktails, and conversation and takes place on the first Wednesday of every month. For more information, please visit amnh.org/scicafe”
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) opens its new exhibition Hidden Histories of Exploration today in London. The exhibition website is worth checking out. I hope to be doing a more extensive write-up of the exhibition (and curator Felix Driver) soon.
New Arctic Exhibition
Septentrionalium Terrarum Descriptio, Gerard Mercator, 1611. A polar projection showing islands and open water at the North Pole.
Apologies for the spare postings over the last two weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of out of town projects. Last week I was down in DC where Story House Productions is putting together a documentary on the Cook-Peary North Pole Controversy of 1909. They interviewed me in the historical newspaper room of the Newseum (just off the National Mall). Museums are strange places anyway, but after dark they become positively surreal.
News History Gallery, Newseum, Washington DC.
I was also up in Maine working out the kinks of an exhibition I am curating at the Portland Museum of Art called “The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration in American Culture.” The show examines many of the same themes as my book (no surprise). But where my book was limited to 18 black-and-white prints, the exhibition delivers a much broader range of paintings, photos, and illustrations. The point is to show how the Arctic of these images represents a hybrid-world: a vision of polar regions, colored by the aesthetics and preoccupations of the Americans who traveled there.
Gigantic Iceberg Seen By the Arctic Ships, From a Sketch by an Officer of the Valorous, Illustrated London News, 1875
You can see some of the images of the show here.
I gave an interview about the exhibition on Channel 6 while I was there.
The show opens this Saturday and runs through 21 June.
Time to Eat the Dogs 