Good movie for Larry Summers

by philg

Six of us T’d down to the New England Aquarium’s IMAX theater (not the distorted curved Omnimax of the Science Museum) last night and watched Aliens of the Deep (3D), in which James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, goes 3000′ to 10,000′ down into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to film the unusual forms of life living next to thermal vents.  Precious few details are offered about the animals in question.  Much time is spent on computer-generated speculation about a mission to the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has a 16-mile covering of ice and below that, some intelligent big-eyed snails who’ve built themselves an underwater brightly lit Indian casino.


Larry Summers should see this movie because nearly all of the scientists shown are women.  In fact they are nearly all young buff women of color (or with Hispanic surnames anyway).  Maybe this is why we are able to hire scientists for $35,000/year.  Sadly for Science, it seems that in a world where all scientists are women no math is done and you never learn anything about the phenomenon studied except “this is really cool” or “this is really beautiful”.


We were all disappointed that Celine Dion was not featured on the soundtrack.

9 thoughts on “Good movie for Larry Summers”

  1. “Maybe this is why we are able to hire scientists for $35,000/year.”
    Please clarify: are you saying movies like this lure men into science, or that the women shown in the film are not highly qualified?

  2. Unfortunately they don’t make IMAX films about the young women sitting in their offices solving equations.

  3. Young women of color in the buff? Whoa, pretty risque for a family venue like an aquarium isn’t it? Still, like K said it might be effective into getting more young men into science.

  4. Geez phil, guess you didn’t like the movie. Can you guess at the target market? Well, yes, people of color, low income groups, essentially those currently at the socio economic fringe… folks that hopefully, if they get a chance to see something cool… something that they can see perhaps a potential role model for themselves in, then they might actually get excited about.

    (I saw it and spoke w/ James Cameron at the premiere of this film at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Fran last December.)

    It’s odd that on the whole we chastise the rappers and other folks for creative violent images with no positive nature, but that when someone tries to show the opposite role model images that we criticize because we’re ‘cheapening the market’ for scientists… or that maybe that women can only do geoscience and not ‘really hard science’ like math/physics or whatever…
    what a load of crap.

    Why can’t you just say… ‘thank you’… at least it wasn’t another movie about guns and bombs and REAL gender/cultural stereotypes, like we get from hollywood. you know, JC pretty much paid for that movie out of his pocket… and hasn’t even come close to recouping any of the costs for it. So, go drop him an email and share the love.

    Personally, I thought it was awesome… one of my favorite movies this year. Jaw-dropping HiDef 3D … better than i’ve ever seen 3D (make sure you get a seat in the center of the theatre).

    xxooo

    dan

  5. K: My $35,000 comment was related to the fact that when a field is all-female the wages tend to be lower. Wages for scientists are quite low right now (and falling, in real dollars). The movie implies that nearly all scientists are women. If true, that could explain why the salaries are so small… (mostly joking, of course)

    Dan: I like any IMAX movie, including this one. My companions, most of whom were 25-year-old non-technical women, were disappointed, they said, because they wanted to hear more about the animals and the science and less “gee, this is cool” and nothing at all that was fantasy about intelligent aliens.

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