Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is substantially cooler than the don't-get-me-wrong-it's-cool-in-its-own-right Boston Museum of Science. Regarding feces of a more masculo-bovine sort, I wanted a photo of this quote because I thought it was resonant with my complaint about the American Sociological Association having as its most recent conference theme "Is Another World Possible?":
(The complaint being that, as rapid and thoroughgoing as innovation takes place in our society, it takes a remarkably narrow perspective to be able to see the world as mired in the kind of stasis that would lead someone to ask if a different world was possible. Then again, the conference logo suggests that sociology's dream is to encase our existing world in one made of cold, gray stone, which I would agree would require a special conference just to figure out if it is even possible, especially since the logo also appears to advocate tilting our planet 90 degrees upon its axis before placing it in the stone case.)
Other things you can do at the Museum of Science include walking inside a model of the heart, using a computer to try to make your own clone, and playing an alpine ski video game (granted, I didn't follow what the connection to science or industry was for the last game):
If only it had a special laser hair restoration exhibit.
3 comments:
i thought the logo meant we're shedding the cold gray matters that's our current world, and a new world is born within?
I saw the logo as an egg hatching. Wasn't ASA just using the theme of the World Social Forum and the global justice movement more generally? I think the question was not about whether the world is changing or not, but about the nature of those changes (as in, are these innovations producing more of the same patterns of inequality?). I think that's a legitimate sociological question, even if the phrase itself sounds a little hokey.
That sounds reasonable to me.
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