I'll update soon with something about the one I want to read.
ADDED: The article I chose — could you guess? — was "It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct" by Riley Black (subheadline: "The New Yorker’s story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear").
Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.IN THE COMMENTS: William said:
This isn’t a scene from the next Indiana Jones film; it’s the kind of breathless prose novelist Douglas Preston employs in his latest New Yorker feature hyping a controversial fossil site that slammed onto social media last week like the asteroid that closed the Cretaceous. It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay... It’d be one thing if the rogue-heroic-scientist-makes-amazing-discovery storyline was one of many types of tales of how we make progress in this field. But it’s the only one we ever seem to get with paleontology, and in this case, the hype just doesn’t match the published results. The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....
This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works....
I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists.....That's right! The 2 most well-known paleontologists in American popular media are Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and Ross in "Friends." Both are nerdy and inhibited.
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133 comments:
The one about the Liberals living in a Fantasy land because they won't accept the Mueller report??
Looks like four solid exercises in responsible unbiased journalism to me. Read ‘em all!
Was number 1 by a woman in prison?
She's gonna call you out, Meade.
#4 is at least a competitor for the Bulwer-Lytton prize.
Number 3 doesn't make sense. If Trump really did conspire with Russia to steal the election (which appears to be the unstated premise), why would the Mueller people expect "good faith" of him?
Oh, those poor, put-upon, super-patriotic progressives, continually disappointed by the depravity of their evil opposition - for having the temerity to oppose them!
Hmm, juvenile choices and avoidance, misandry in progress, of witches and warlocks, or democracy dies with left-wing/establishment global socialism. Perhaps 5, none of the above.
Brexit?
Albeit without mentioning Trump
Indiana Jones was too masculine.
Not all women like being gone down on. Find one who doesn't. BTW, pussy eating can cause cancer.
It's own?
Jones was reputedly based on hiram Bingham the discoverer of Machu picchu.
The interesting aspect of (3) is the claim the problem with the Mueller report is that Trump didn't accept the findings in good faith. [What findings?] They're trying to create the impression there were findings but Trump somehow blocked them. The goal is to convince acolytes the collusion accusations are true but were illegitimately suppressed and this will become mythology throughout academia where reality was banished for not sufficiently conforming to left wing preferences.
So who is living the fantasy?
Lolo (2015) has the fashion-designer woman telling her friend that she lies her new computer-geek boyfriend because he goes down on her even during her period. French movie. Said to be comedy but I didn't stick with it.
Everyone knows it's anthropologists who rock the science world.
If Trump really did conspire with Russia to steal the election (which appears to be the unstated premise), why would the Mueller people expect "good faith" of him.
If your premise is sound, this headline implies that the left-wing/establishment expected Trump to move to the back of the bus, or commit seppuku as many weaker competitors would have done during a State-sponsored warlock hunt and the stress of journolistic pink noise.
I believe I commented that the New Yorker article showed a paid-by-the-word style that takes no account of the reader's time.
A thicket of brush with no promise of game. Quit early.
The earth used to be one single giant rock, but it's been worn through friction down into smaller rocks and pebbles and eventually sand.
It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....
To be replaced by the stunning lingerie model/paleontologist who digs dinos by day and flaunts gravity-defying breasts by night.
Reading anything published by Slate.com is like downing a 750ml bottle of Vodka before lunch — velly bad for blain.
Reality does not suit the literary tastes of a Salon reviewer.
The world, nature included, should take note, and edit itself.
Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.
A paleontologist's work must be excruciatingly boring much of the time. Maybe Douglas Preston's Adderall was kicking when he wrote that.
Oh, sorry, Slate, not Salon. These things have coagulated into indistinguishable mush.
Poor Salon. They are big fans of women designed bridges in Florida.
All those POC physicists.
The brilliant civilizations in Africa. Oh, wait.
"Riley Black, formerly known as Brian Switek, is the author of the natural history books Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and Written in Stone. They live in Salt Lake City."
Yes chase Manhattan funds them,
Eagerly await your missive on toxic paleontologists.
Riley Black is apparently unaware of Mary Leakey. Or her daughter in law. For that matter Douglas Preston may also be unaware of her — the historical ignorance of modern, progressive, journalists is astounding at times.
rhhardin said...
The earth used to be one single giant rock, but it's been worn through friction down into smaller rocks and pebbles and eventually sand.
yes, BUT! Sand becomes Sandstone, which becomes Quartzite!
Without a macho archeologist; HOW are we going to keep the Nazis from using the Arc?
Without a macho archeologist; the entire movie would end differently ( or, would it?)
the not-o-macho paleontologist is all hat, no relics.
Did I not predict this 2 days ago:
Somewhere, someone is sorely disappointed that DePalma is a white male who looks like Indiana Jones. Why can't we suppress these stories and report on advances in Women's Studies instead?
4/2/19, 6:05 PM
Surprisingly, the author of the paleontology pieces (Riley Black) is a man. Usually I can tell the gender of an author by their verbiage. In this case, I was wrong. I think the "machismo is bad" miasma threw me.
Once again the rational, reality-based community has a tizzy fit because the protagonist of a true tale is a white man. How sick is a society that obsesses over such idiotic things! And oh how far we still have to go, because the "myth" of an Indiana Jones-like character is being played out for real, and the poor paleontologist sweating in th dust for years is the same (assumed) race/sex as the myth. The horror!
But wait, it gets worse. Even the title of the New Yorker article, The Day the Dinosaurs Died, is a play on the Don McClean (white man!) song, The Day the Music Died, which is itself a tribute to three white men (although Richie would likely be amended today to be a white Hispanic) who died while flying from one White State to another in a whiteout snowstorm. This unfortunate accident interrupted the cultural appropriation of Black Music that the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly were engaged in at the time.
And somehow this poor 15-year grad student in the dust of North Dakota, wearing the unfortunately symbolic fedora, represents all that is wrong with current progressive wokeability and their freaky obsessions of race and gender. If he was a Black woman digging up a dinosaur would the story have been different?
Yes. She would be portrayed as being oppressed by her "lonely existence" as the sole Black paleontologist of fair sex struggling against the White People dust of North Dakota and wearing that fedora like its never looked that good before.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay...
Bad comparison. Indy was an archaeologist, not a paleontologist.
I read the story about the paleontologist and thought it - and he - were remarkable. If his discovery holds up, and the article makes clear that's still an open question, it's one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time as well as a great personal story of perseverance and drive. And all Slate can say about it is, "white guy, who cares?" Honestly, I think the author of that Slate piece is deranged, really sick in the head.
I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists......Not so with archeologists. From father to son, they pass the gene or, should I say, pathogen on. Sean Connery to Harrison Ford to Shia Laboef. It's just not a field that welcomes strong independent women.
White man bad. You didn't dig that (dinosaur bone).
FWIW, MSM is WAY over matched when they try to report on any scientific finding. Breathless breakthroughs are the norm.
So you’re saying we need more black trans women in the paleontology field? Because “diversity” will really lead to more scientific breakthroughs?
GMAFB
BTW, this whole "day the dinos died" kerfluffle is really old hat. Tectite glass particles from the Chicxulub impact were discovered in Haiti only months after Glen Penfield published his paper hypothesizing a K-Pg bolide impact in Yucatan.
I can't bring myself to read the opinion piece. But anyone who finds the New Yorker to be insufficiently PC is going to be offended by a lot of things, every day.
Does the paleontologist like to go down on women? Or does the fedora get in the way?
Nonfiction journalism (and video more than print) invariably spices up what might otherwise be a boring story by injecting a narrative containing some dramatic tension. A science journal may be "just the facts," but general audiences expect a narrative arc, and likely will tune you out if you don't provide one.
But the Slate author's latching onto the paleontologist's race and sex is seems bizarre: the New Yorker author worked with what was available. Which in this case is a non-PhD'd paleontologist who is pale and male.
Would the narrative have been more Slate-acceptable had it featured a black female paleontologist while trumpeting a "you go girl" narrative and, if so, is there any reason why this would be so much better, other than an ugly animus against anyone who's white and male?
The lone Male Paleontologist spends his life going down on Mother Earth.
BTW, this whole "day the dinos died" kerfluffle is really old hat. Tectite glass particles from the Chicxulub impact were discovered in Haiti only months after Glen Penfield published his paper hypothesizing a K-Pg bolide impact in Yucatan.
Isn't the new angle that the latest discovery found the particles inside fish/dinosaurs, meaning it portrays the actual extinction of most life on earth?
So you’re saying we need more black trans women in the paleontology field? Because “diversity” will really lead to more scientific breakthroughs?
Of course! Why should anyone need to ask? That wider and flatter male IQ distribution curve is just another disinformation tool created by the Patriarchy to confine Nobel Prize awards to those evil cis-gender penis-possessors.
I love saying the word "Chicxulub"
I think oral sex, particularly cunnlingus, is a recent development in humanity'sdvelopment. The bathing habits of our none too distant ancestors were nothing to brag about. Aristocrats washed their face and hands and that was about it. The poorer people slept with farm animals. Not a world where oral sex could flourish. Our sexual mores and morals are secondary to such conditions. When I was young dixpix were unheard of, and I'm pretty sure your nineteenth century great grand mother never knew the joys of cunnilingus......Perhaps the well off took the baths at Baden Baden and other spas to facilitate oral sex. The historical record is unclear.
rhhardin: I learned in kindergarten that the Earth was formed by many, many, little tiny rocks that fell together in space. Of course, the gravitational potential energy thus released caused them to get quite hot and fuse together. At that point, I suppose you could say it was one big rock.
As Lucretius said, matter is always changing in form, but the atoms comprising it are unchanging. (They didn't know about beta decay or the Big Bang in 55 BCE, so let's be fair to old Lucretius here.)
Personally, I would have chosen #3 or #4 (although #3 is pretty familiar territory to most of us), but heck, it's your morning, not mine.
Ten or twenty years digging holes in the hot sun, dodging scorpions and rattlesnakes, entitles one to wear outrageous hats, in my opinion.
So there.
Not a world where oral sex could flourish.
Not according the Jean Auel. Once the hero, Jondalar arrives in the Valley of Horses, there is a lot of cunnilingus. I think the author was probably into it quite a bit,
Did I not predict this 2 days ago:
So you think prediction is funny, chickelit?
4/2/19, 6:05 PM
4/5/19, 9:06 AM
Pretty good numerology, too.
I got more of a Silence-of-the-Lambs-entymologist rather than Indiana-Jones vibe from the original article. Maybe we’re all projecting.
I'm all for getting rid of the trope. Since trope in this case is a literary cliché let's get rid of the writers who perpetuate it so we can keep the cool rock diggers.
"It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct"
I mean, was that much of a trope though? The only movie and book I can think of with an actual "Heroic Male Paleontologist" is the original Jurassic Park. One instance is not enough to qualify as a trope. And by mentioning Indian Jones, the writer seems to be conflating paleontologists with archealogists, which is just lazy (like "They both study and dig up old stuff, man. Whatever. They're basically the same!"). So the first part of the premise of the article is pretty shakey.
Maybe it's time for the whole trope of articles being written about how a white male trope needs to go extinct needs to go extinct. See? Those are definitely a trope.
I couldn't bring myself to click through. Is the answer yes, yes you do have to?
Low compensated highly detailed work, like paleontology and wikipedia writing, is a male thing. So we must extinguish it, like a wrathful meteor!
Not a world where oral sex could flourish
Or french kissing. How long before Scope would people even breathe near each other's faces?
GODDAMMIT another "white guy hero" story. What an outrage!
I once took a jet boat trip into the Idaho wilderness with other passengers including a paleontologist headed out on an exploratory trip. He was a rather nerdy, boring academic type. He offered his expertise to the other passengers during the trip and also asked if anyone would care to come along as his assistant. Based on his kit it looked like you'd have to share a tent. There were no takers...
Has this idiot never seen the Tomb Raider series of video games and movies?
Isn't the new angle that the latest discovery...
The K-Pg extinction has been known to have affected marine life as well as non-avian dinosaurs (not to mention pterosaurs as well) for about thirty years. In fact, one of the early objections to the impact hypothesis was an apparent sudden decline in the diversity of ammonites just before the extinction of dinosaurs. Ammonoidea are an extinct subclass of cephalopods similar to the chambered nautilus which occupied a position in the Cretaceous marine food web analogous to pelagic schooling fish like herring and capelin today, i.e. the foundation food of the marine megafauna, in this case, ichthyosaurs, pliosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, etc. Before the impact hypothesis, some authorities held that it was a collapse of marine ecosystems which triggered the decline and extinctions among land vertebrates. Research since then has shown the mass extinctions on land were virtually coeval with those in the oceans, pointing to an outside cause affecting marine and land-dwelling animals simultaneously.
The disappearance of the dinosaur megafauna apparently opened land ecosystems to mammalian successors. However, there is an unresolved problem with the K-Pg impactor hypothesis. Not all the dinosaurs that died out were large. There were hundreds of small non-avian theropods which died out but were as small as many of the mammalian species which survived. Why? No one has answered that yet. At sea, the success of the ammonites suppressed the diversification of many types of bony fish throughout the Mesozoic, and it was only after the Ammonoidea went belly up following the K-Pg Impact Event that teleosts became the dominant form of marine life. Why? What made the fish more resistant to the effects of a cometary impact than molluscs, especially since it was the mollusca that weathered the more catatrophic Permian mass extinction better than most other marine genera?
Another fly in the K-Pg Impactor ointment is the frog problem.
Meade just gave a hilarious reading of that first paragraph...
"Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential"
... as if it were the first paragraph of "I Really, Really Hate to Go Down on Women. Do I have to?"
I don't think I've ever seen even one grammatical/usage error in your posts. This headline had two.
...as if it were the first paragraph of "I Really, Really Hate to Go Down on Women. Do I have to?
You were thinking Cooties!, weren't you? You nasty lady.
I read these headlines and think, "Were these articles written by actual humans, or by the WokeBot 3000 (tm)?"
There was indeed a genre of adventurous paleontologist stories. The National Geographic carried tons of them. Louis Leakey was one, the NatGeo published tons of articles about him, but there was a long parade of them, setting up dinosaur bones in dozens of museums as something of a triumphal exercise, having been found somewhere bleak and distant. On a motor expedition in the Gobi desert say.
Note that there was a Mary Leaky only because there was a Louis Leakey. She was brought in as a replacement illustrator, when his first wife was indisposed.
The Indy character is probably a composite, with Hiram Bingham being only most the obvious antecedent. The Great Belzoni also has many parallels. Why, Belzoni's formidable wife once held off bandits with a brace of pistols and was even known to crack a bull whip once in a while!
https://detritusofempire.blogspot.com/2011/12/belzoni-as-indiana-jones.html
Articles that didn't make Slate:
Paleo-pervert Caught Licking Dinosaur Pussy
This reminds me of the complaint that men won’t watch women’s basketball. Why don’t the fucking women watch women’s basketball if they want it watched so bad! Men have a fascination for certain things, things that require extended concentration, which is greatly aided by testosterone, or for seeing excellence in athletic performance. Something sadly lacking from women’s basketball unless you grade it on a curve.
What the article is really saying is that even though women don’t want to be men, men should stop being men, because women just don’t want men getting glory for stuff women don’t want to do that men like to do.
When your readers are drama kings and queens you gotta give ‘em drama.
I read somewhere about a book that claimed Einstein’s wife or some woman in his life helped him with GR. The only way I think that might be true is if she dragged him shopping and he noticed that 15 clock minutes of shopping seemed like four wasted hours to him, and a breezy thirty seconds to her. “I’fe gott itt! Time iss relative!"
Adventurous Euro people in dangerous exotic places was simply real life, the daily existence of hundreds of thousands, until the Euro empires started withrawing and the wild frontiers of the Earth shrank away. To a great degree, because of a lack of familiarity, the romance of the thing has disappeared.
My own grandparents were pioneers, starting up and running a coconut plantation on Palawan island, a truly primitive place then, the very few natives of which were at a hunter-gatherer level, still subject to slave-raids by Moro pirates. And this was in the 1930s.
This was still a time of island traders across SouthEast Asia and the Pacific. And of pioneering anthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists, going places where survival was iffy.
I think it's pretty impressive that Quaestor knows how to spell all those words. Paleontology is not a field for the dyslexic.
"I Really, Really Hate to Go Down on Women. Do I have to?"
Not every man has to, but some men are well advised to do so.
The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....
This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works....
But that's exactly how most contemporary science journalism works. Just noticing now? Most "science writing" these days is really bad - inaccurate and misleading, whether purposely or because the writer is ignorant or incompetent. Not because it tarts up the reporting with some Heroic Science Guy human-interest bait.
It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....
That sort of thing is what sold National Geographic to generations of happy readers. Such popular publications have not been improved by replacing Indiana Jones with Intersectional Wokester-Jones.
This was still a time of island traders across SouthEast Asia and the Pacific. And of pioneering anthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists, going places where survival was iffy.
The Mutiny on the Bounty has some great scenes of aboriginal life on some of those islands.
Btw, I got a good laugh out of that list. Thanks.
What made the fish more resistant to the effects of a cometary impact than molluscs, especially since it was the mollusca that weathered the more catatrophic Permian mass extinction better than most other marine genera?
It's possible that it had something to do with the configuarion of the oceans and continents during each extinction event. There were probably more large shallow seas during the Cretaceous–Paleogene than Permian–Triassic.
At the time of the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago there was the massive Western Interior Seaway that covered the middle of North America.
But 250 million years ago during the Great Dying was when all the continents were merged into Pangea. There were probably fewer shallow sea and you had one deep mega ocean, Panthalassa. This massive deep ocean may have protected the mollusca somewhat.
Note that there was a Mary Leaky only because there was a Louis Leakey. She was brought in as a replacement illustrator, when his first wife was indisposed.
But she became a formidable scientist in her own right. And Maeve was a paleontologist in her own right before she met Richard. And Leakey is spelled with two e’s.
These seem like comments from critics who can't write half as well as the New Yorker writer nor explore more than an hour in the hot sun. It seems all good narratives use some trops we just have to be aware of them and put them in perspective.
I read somewhere about a book that claimed Einstein’s wife or some woman in his life helped him with GR.
That would be Special Relativity. If a chick helped him with GR it would have been from her exotic explanation for the bathroom scale pegging at 200Kg when she stepped on it.
The trope is per aspera ad astra.
Which has the great advantage of being true to life.
@Nobody, Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, was a top notch mathematician who was able to do the heavy duty mathematics his theory needed. He left her for another woman.
I won't read the entire article, but the part quoted suggests the writer doesn't know the difference between an archaeologist and a paleontologist.
@William, someone who knows Latin told me that “cunnlingus” is Latin for “cunt licking.” I infer that the Romans were familiar with the practice. Of course the Romans bathed a lot.
replacing Indiana Jones with Intersectional Wokester-Jones
Ms. Pro-Choice, barefoot, available, and taxed, and, in following United Airlines style guidelines for sex, gender, and not "=" shades of the transgender spectrum, Mx. Wokester-Jones. In a similar vein, The Guardian's Hope Solo recently reported on too many "white girls next door" in the Olympics. The intersection of diversity, sexism, and politics in progress.
Sometimes the heroic male palaeoanthropologist is simply not suited for the task at hand and has to call for help from (gasp...) heroic female palaeoanthropologist! The six women in the 2013 Rising Star Expedition are the real heroes of the story.
Quaestor @9:53 AM:
When I was young and fair-to-middling, this was just the sort of scruffy, macho white-man talk that made me swoon. (Still does, calmer and soberer with age though I am.)
Personally, I was more interested in Brexiteers resigning (from what?) and sabotaging trains... but, to each his or her own.
Re dinosaurs, I note that the fossil T. Rex, Sue, was named for the (female) paleontologist who discovered the fossil, Sue Hendrickson, in 1990.
Sorry that the author of the piece you read is all butt-hurt that some paleontologists are men who wear hats with brims. Actually, I am not sorry at all.
a book that claimed Einstein’s wife or some woman in his life helped him with GR
Today it is a political myth, one of many. Possible, plausible, unverifiable, but true for purposes of social progress and political leverage.
I infer that the Romans were familiar with the practice. Of course the Romans bathed a lot.
“Don’t bathe Josephine! I’ll be there in three days!” - Napoleon
Reading on Riley Black, it apparently used to be a guy.
It seems all good narratives use some trops we just have to be aware of them and put them in perspective.
Except in this case they aren't tropes, they're dirty, sweaty facts. Having been a volunteer surveyor on a dig near Como Bluff, Wyoming, I can say it's hot, boring, work that involves hours of walking in the predawn just to get to the survey site — the BLM does not allow motor vehicles near the fossil-bearing strata. A big dirty hat is absolutely regulation cuz your brains will addle otherwise. You spend most of your time walking looking at the ground until you see something less like a rock and more like a bone. Then you plop on your belly and start picking away with a dental probe and a paintbrush until an expert tells you you're wasting time on a bit of feldspar. We walked over Barnum Brown's Quarry D site and found some Allosaur teeth, which aren't rare at all. I was told the typical Allosaurus fragillis shed five or ten teeth every time it made a kill.
The six women in the 2013 Rising Star Expedition are the real heroes of the story.
Weren't they mostly spelunkers (or is that selunkerettes?) rather than qualified paleoanthropologists?
See Riley Black's pic at bottom of link-
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaurs-from-space-64403301/
Just another white guy with a mission to eliminate his own kind or tribe, which might work better these days.
Reminds me of pajama boy!
Martin: Personally, I was more interested in Brexiteers resigning (from what?) and sabotaging trains.
#MeToo. "Sabotaging trains"? Now that, I thought, looks like the sort of old-fashioned, *quality* yellow journalism that one wouldn't expect from Slate.
Modern journalists' hysteria is just so tedious, never entertaining as it ought to be.
Rae said...Surprisingly, the author of the paleontology pieces (Riley Black) is a man. Usually I can tell the gender of an author by their verbiage. In this case, I was wrong. I think the "machismo is bad" miasma threw me.
It seems a little more complicated than that. "Riley Black, formerly known as Brian Switek, is the author of the natural history books Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and Written in Stone. They live in Salt Lake City."
Should be "its own." Not "it's own."
Quaestor @ 11:01: Never forget that anything women do even moderately well is a BFD!
gilbar: Without a macho archeologist; the entire movie would end differently ( or, would it?)
Yes, it would. People who make that assertion are missing something. From your linked article:
Now imagine if Indy had never gone on this Raiders adventure. The Nazis would have gone to Marion's bar and taken the medallion, though as Gallagher notes, they probably would have killed Indy's defiant ex.
The Nazis followed Indy to Marion's bar. You can argue that they would have found her eventually on their own, but the fact remains they didn't.
Lara Croft -- not a paleontologist but let's not act like there's never been a similar heroine.
Ross on Friends was a paleontologist and the extreme opposite of Indiana Jones.
I don't think this trope exists as the author thinks it does.
> Mileva Marić, was a top notch mathematician who was able to do the heavy duty mathematics his theory needed.
No, that was Marcel Grossman. One should also give some credit to Minkowski for treating space and time as a whole (1909) and introducing spacetime diagrams, and of course, we must also credit cigarettes. Einstein was a heavy smoker at the time.
Note that Hilbert actually beat Einstein to GR by a couple of weeks, deriving it from a variational principle after Einstein had visited Göttingen and explained what he was trying to do. Hilbert declined to publish until Einstein had done so, as he credited Einstein for the fundamental physical ideas. Hilbert was one of the great mathematicians and greatly admired by Einstein.
There is an episode of The Big Bang Theory about Indy's actual effect on the turn of events in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
For what it is worth- the Nazis will find the Ark with or without the medallion- they were digging every around it already. The medallion is the only way for Indiana Jones to find it first.
They might have given up, bellocq was based on a real character as well a vichy archeologist that survived the war and ended up in south america
Answer to #1- only if you don't mind someone else stealing your girl away.
Something I was informed of when any type of sexual activity was still theoretical for me.
> A thicket of brush with no promise of game. Quit early.
Cunnilingus?
@chuck (lower case ‘c’). Please point me to a paper about Grossman and Einstein. I had always heard credit given to Mileva Marić.
Re Nobody and chuck: The first female that I thought of was Emmy Noether, but upon reflection I believe that that is incorrect. Einstein as I recall helped Noether to get a teaching job at a time when they were not available to women, so she maybe she was too young to have assisted him.
Noether is credited with the observation (demonstration? conjecture?) that every physical symmetry is associated with a conservation law.
That level of physics is way above my pay grade.
Separately, I see that Quaestor apparently agrees with my judgement about the critical importance of hats in paleontology.
The Heroic Male Paleontologist/Archeologist/Explore is a bad thing??? How about the Female ones Jane Goodall. Laura Crofts and Amelia Peabody, for the fictional side.????
What's not to like about that trope? It is cool. Interesting, brave, hard working, danger daring, scientific people going to exotic, lush or dry sandy places> Meeting exotic, dangerous, interesting people. Discovering exciting artifacts, mysterious vanished civilizations. Discovering new species. Understanding existing species. The mysteries of the ancient civilized world. The mysteries of the prehistoric life on this planet.
To be honest, this was something I dreamed about doing when I was studying Meso American Archaeology and Anthropology.....until I realized that it was tedious work, hot, sweaty, with too many snakes, spiders and bitey insects and I would hate the realty of field work. Nevermind.
Throw in a bit of exaggerated sexual attraction and some flowery language. People can immerse themselves in a harmless vicarious enjoyment of their exploits.
Perhaps even to be enticed into such a lifestyle themselves.
What a sourpuss the writer is to complain about this topic.
The acknowledged inspiration for Indiana Jones was James Henry Breasted, of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Robert Braidwood, a young colleague of Breasted, as well as famed paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, were also influences. But, mainly, it was Breasted.
After 150 years of scientists telling us this or that happened over hundreds of thousands or millions of years, they now say, "Well, the world changed completely on Tuesday afternoon."
TEST
YES, YOU HAVE TO!
The New Yorker article was written by Douglas Preston, a well known author of "sciency fiction", fiction that is roughly set in current reality with a reliance on some technical conceit to provide a setting as opposed to "science fiction" that are set in an alternate reality or future. I read both the New Yorker and the National Geographic articles. Both said basically the same thing about the facts but Preston was able to bring some of his novelist capability to bear to make the story more immediate and exciting. I've read a bunch of his stuff and like his style (should probably add a jealousy factor to the writer of the article).
I used to work with a guy whose father was an archaeology professor at Harvard. He assured me that it's nothing like the movies. Mostly just a lot of hot, dusty, boring work. I was shocked to find out that real life is different than the movies.
One day - and I say this in a distant, silently respectful way - A part of me hopes to see a trending web article entitled:
"Intrepid researcher discovers that elusive romcom DVD that rhhardin is willing to finish"
@Big Mike
The wikipedia entry for Grossman isn't bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Grossmann
He was even mentioned in a song during a skit put on during the 5'th Solvay Conference, "With tensors by Grossman" or some such. I may have the details wrong, it was in one of the Gamov books, probably Thirty Years That Shook Physics.
The Mileva Marić story was due to Einstein himself, IIRC, about discussions during the development of special relativity. That was back in his "hippie" phase.
Emmy Noether wasn't the only woman mathematician who had trouble getting a mathematics position, Mrs. Robinson (Julia Robinson) was another. George Uhlenbeck's wife was also reputed to very good, he maintained that she was more talented than he was.
narciso said...
Jones was reputedly based on hiram Bingham the discoverer of Machu picchu.
I was going to disagree and say Roy Chapman Andrews (that's the one most often cited) but according to the Wikipedia (I know, I know) article they never said who, if any, real life person was the inspiration.
Actually, archaeology today is chock full o' wimmins. And, unlike in my day, lots of really, really attractive ones.
It seems a little more complicated than that. "Riley Black, formerly known as Brian Switek, is the author of the natural history books Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and Written in Stone. They live in Salt Lake City."
Now I feel validated. And for some reason the name "Brian Switek" seems familiar. Maybe I've read one of his books.
"Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay—I can tell you from my own years doing fieldwork in the Southwest that paleontologists aren’t dusty old fossils."
- Brian Switek writing as Riley Black
"If I could be anything, I’d be a jaguar. And not just any jaguar. One with a dark coat, blue spots, but my general humanoid shape intact along with the feline features. That’s because I’m a furry."
- Brian Switek writing as Brian Switek
I like this quote from James Henry Breasted.
The World War has now demonstrated the appalling possibilities of man's mechanical power of destruction. The only force that can successfully oppose it is the human conscience - something which the younger generation is accustomed to regard as a fixed group of outworn scruples. Everyone knows that man's amazing mechanical power is the product of a long evolution, but it is not commonly realized that this is also true of the social force which we call conscience - although with this important difference: as the oldest known implement-making creature man has been fashioning destructive weapons for possibly a million years, whereas conscience emerged as a social force less than five thousand years ago.
It took a while to get there, but D 2 wins this time.
This was most apt comment at the Slate article:
Depalma should have left this site alone. As a white male he has no idea of the damage he has done to all of the heteroflexible multiracial cisgendered plus sized models turned Paleontologists who could have surely found it and then we could have all celebrated this monumental discovery....as it stands now I'm ashamed.
What the author of the SJW screed failed to point out was that DePalma discovered incontrovertible evidence of the first lesbian dinosaur which he has named lickalotapus.
.....c'mon! We're all basically 14 yrs old.
- Krumhorn
Actually, archaeology today is chock full o' wimmins. And, unlike in my day, lots of really, really attractive ones.
MY daughter who was an Antropology major, visited a friend who was working on a dig in Ecuador at 14, 000 feet above Quito. Because her Spanish was better than any of the Archeo students, the professor running the dig asked her to take over one trench. She spent a month there and he tried to convince her to switch majors.
Well hiram Bingham was in the list, but Andrews and breasted were the lead candidates.
What, seriously? The guy makes a spectacular fossil find working on essentially zero budget, and you begrudge him his choice of hat?
Here's an idea: maybe paleontologists look like Indiana Jones because Indiana Jones was based on a paleontologist named Roy Chapman Andrews.
Also, read between the lines: 37 year old graduate student doing a dig on his own = zero institutional support, something like 15 years after entering a graduate program. He is literally making cuts in his budget in order to afford high quality fossil glue.
Somebody living in poverty for 15 years before making the find of a lifetime isn't cosplaying Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is cosplaying *him.*
No, Indiana Jones was mainly/mostly based on Breasted. Spielberg came to the Oriental Institute and consulted with the OI on Breasted. The set for the lecture hall scene is closely modeled on Breasted Hall in the Oriental Institute.
Six of one, half dozen of the other. Jones is an extremely devoted researcher whose obsessions bring him to remote and exotic places. He's based on a type; the type isn't based on him.
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