viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot, Our Friend the Atom, via YouTube

Megan's and Cate's recent posts have highlighted multiple visual representations of the current crisis in Japan.  Concurrently, there's a lot of talk these days about the future of nuclear power in the U.S.--what we should do about our existing nuclear power plants, whether nuclear energy is the way to go, what we might do in the face of a nuclear catastrophe. These issues have been rather dormant in recent years. However, as we look ahead in considering our options, it's also worth looking back at the rhetoric that made us somewhat comfortable with nuclear power.

If you are a graduate student in the humanities, chances are someone has already forwarded this video to you to remind you what a stupid, stupid life choice you've made. In case you've been spared, the gist is that a naive undergraduate is asking her cynical professor for a recommendation for grad school and gets an earful of everything that is currently wrong with academic apprenticeship in the humanities, including exploitive labor conditions and terrible job prospects. It's one of those "funny because it's true/sad" sorts of things where you don't know whether to laugh hysterically or burst into tears. On second thought, it's probably not the kindest thing to post on a Monday morning. Oh well, too late.

Anticipating 2009 as the Year of Darwin,* Olivia Judson offered this suggestion last year: let’s get rid of Darwinism. She criticizes the Darwin-centric focus of both specialist and popular discourse as “grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology.” Judson’s complaint, of course, is nothing new: as a peeved St. John Mivart notes in Man and Apes (1873), “Again, the doctrine of evolution as applied to organic life…is widely spoken of by the term ‘Darwinism.’ Yet this doctrine is far older than Mr. Darwin…”

Image Credit: Cartooning Darwin

H/T: Seed Daily Zeitgeist

While preparing to teach this week, I came across a couple of intriguing resources that help to explain how the figure of Charles Darwin entered circulation as a scientific celebrity, an icon of sorts, beginning in the late 19th century. They suggest the active role of popular visual culture in the intertwining of Darwin with evolution, even as the meanings of that term remained multiple, fragmentary, diffuse.

Check out Madam and Eve, a great cartoon set in South Africa:

Cartoons—your everyday, old-fashioned ones—are one of my true loves. I haven’t studied graphic art theory, I don’t get into manga, I have no idea who the radical artists are out there. I think it’s a great medium, full of possibilities for telling stories, presenting viewpoints, making people laugh and think. Heck, I learned most of my Vietnam-era US political history from reading old Doonesbury books. Graphic novels? I’ve read two (V for Vendetta and Fun Home) and loved them. But let’s just say I’m a casual but enthusiastic lover of the comics.

The Guardian is reporting that a study by Charlie Frowd, Vicki Bruce, David Ross, Alex McIntyre, and Peter J. B. Hancock at the University of Central Lancashire published in Visual Cognition found that subjects were able to identify a caricature of a person’s face 40% of the time, but could only identify the same face in a police sketch 20% of the time.

via Boing Boing