This one had to wait until I finished my first online class for Science & Math. The number of students who were unwilling to appear on camera, who wanted to interact wholly through voice and chat, even when video was available, makes me think the opening of Governor’s School tomorrow is going to be extra-awkward.
I’ve used Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in my GS classes for years, in part because it was one of the books that kept my interest in neuroscience alive in the two years between college and graduate school, when I was bussing tables, or sorting photos for those slightly scammy “honorary” directories of the pre-internet era: Who’s Who Among American High School Students, or whatever.
But I’ve never taught his first book, Awakenings, about an epidemic of contagious paralysis that swept Europe and America after the flu pandemic of 1918. To this day, nobody knows what that was, exactly, but it left thousands of patients frozen in hospital beds for decades. People assumed they were catatonic, unconscious.
In the summer of the year before I was born, Sacks experimentally gave these patients L-Dopa, a precursor to the neurotransmitter dopamine, because it showed promise in other movement disorders. Some of these patients woke up, started to move around. They could walk, talk, laugh, and dance for in some cases the first time in their adult lives.
Seemed like a pretty good metaphor for a bunch of COVID-quarantined high school kids, turned loose on a college campus for the first time.
Original Website Blurb from 2011
This episode is going up on Saturday, because I was in Michigan all week for the second annual BEACON Congress, where people from all five of the universities involved in the consortium get together to catch up, hatch new plots, and justify our existence to outside reviewers. My favorite snarky reviewer quote of the meeting came when the presentations ran over time into the coffee break:
“The breaks are the best part!”
presumably because the breaks are where the performance is paused, and people relax a bit and say things that were not rehearsed.
Humans are political creatures. We negotiate and spin and sell, reflexively almost. Scientists less so, but we’re still human, so it’s still there. This was a huge disappointment to me as a naive grad student, finding out that the ivory tower of academia is in many ways just a taller, thinner shopping mall. I thought then that science was sort of magical, that the quality of your work was the only thing that matters. It is the most important thing, but it’s not the only thing. Necessary but not sufficient, the philosophers would say. I have a fuller view now, and I always try to pass that view along to the students and postdocs I talk to at meetings.
Many of the students at this meeting were compu-geek engineers, not biologists, and it is partly in their honor that we included commentary on "Shannon's Law."
http://escapepod.org/2011/05/05/ep291-shannons-law/
In later posts or casts we'll get into a new project for Year 2 of BEACON funding: curriculum guides for SF stories built around evolutionary concepts.
Updates from 2021
That Year 2 project did eventually come to fruition. It is also available for free at the Internet Archive, as the NSF encourages people to do.
The problem with that model is that free distribution is not free to do, from the creator’s side. To get a piece of curriculum or anything else out there in today’s competitive social environment requires people to spend time promoting it, which they tend not to do once the grant is over and they’re spending all their time on the next grant. So this first edition is there, as the “first edition” of the blog is there, but for both to move to the next level, for there to be more content along the same lines produced, there has to be some kind of revenue to drive it.
Crowdfunding for a second, illustrated edition (or with some other kinds of extras) is one possibility. Substack is another possibility.
End of the BEACON Grant
The big NSF Center grant finally ran out after ten years, but the Center still exists with other funding.
https://www3.beacon-center.org/welcome/
Many of the people I referenced in the show have now moved on to bigger and better careers.
Ian Dworkin https://dworkinlab.github.io/
REFERENCES from the show
https://collider.com/avatar-the-exhibition-james-cameron-seattle/
VSI Episode 12