There is a good reason Americans stink at chess - our unfailing optimism. No matter how bad things get with the economy or the environment or (insert your pet cause here) Americans will always believe that, because we have Jessica Alba, we beat the pants off of everyone else. Russians, for example, don’t think that way. Half of Moscow is populated by women hotter than Jessica Alba and they’re all on a Russian dating site hoping to meet an American mechanic who will get them a green card and raise their kid.

Scientists, American or otherwise, are not afflicted by that kind of sunny disposition. People have a perception that science is a happy wonderland where you come up with an idea and everyone rallies around you and supports you while you try to prove it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Science is done by falsification.
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In case you’ve been canoodling with your supermodel and not reading this blog, you may not know that the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is due to go online.(1) Or is it? No one can really be certain. After 14 years and billions of dollars, it’s had a number of delays but they have intended to make up for lost time by just eliminating minor steps, like a low energy run.(2)

“We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go,” said LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans.

Oh my.

But before you get concerned, let’s keep in mind that science is often done without being absolutely certain about every little detail. As train engines were being developed, they tested them using dogs because they were not certain how humans would respond to high speeds, 30 plus miles per hour. In hindsight that seems quaint but it was scientifically prudent. You can think of the LHC experiments like the early days of trains, except if something goes wrong you, your loved ones and the entire galaxy could be sucked into some alternate universe and be ruled by our new Strangelet Overlords.

Dynamic face recognition may be one of the last frontiers for quantifying why some of our simplest brain functions have difficulty being matched by computers.

As a kid, when computers were more basic, it was easy to see the differences between my brain and the power of a computer. When I played baseball I knew the instant the ball was hit whether I had to run back or forward. This was a spectacular amount of mathematics done in an instant with the only programming being my amount of practice. A computer has to be able to define a parabola before it can tell me which way to run - by the time it could tell me where to run, the ball will have landed. The only reason I bothered to show up for trigonometry was to figure out a methodology that could help me write a computer program to catch a baseball without having the computer know where the ball was going to be hit in advance.

Facial recognition today faces similar obstacles. If you look at your favorite scientist’s irritated face while his supermodel storms out because he did not tell her she was beautiful for the requisite hundredth time that day, it looks a certain way. If he then looks happy because he finally got some peace and quiet, it looks another way. To you, it is easily the same person but a computer has a very difficult time with that operation.

A three-year old child can look at a real chicken and then a cartoon chicken and say, “That’s a chicken.” A computer has a very difficult time with that also. And good luck getting a computer to tell you who is more attractive, that girl from “Veronica Mars” or the live action model of Lara Craft, Tomb Raider:
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I was puttering around the attic of the Cashominium, trying to sort through some old boxes, and I came across something you all might find interesting. Before any of this makes sense, I need to give you a little family background.

Like many, the Cash family has been here a long time (a long time for America, anyway - here a hundred years is a long time and in Europe a hundred miles is a long distance, so it’s all perspective) but we are not blueblooded fancy-pants Mayflower descendants or anything like that. We arrived just over 160 years ago. The mid-1800s were a popular time to leave Europe, what with land and opportunity here and there being the place where guys like Napoleon were still fashionable and ‘reform’ meant killing a lot of people, but we weren’t the working poor that left because of lousy potato crops or anything so dire.

More predictably, legend has it that old Jebediah left Britain under some questionable circumstances - namely a scandal involving a woman.

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It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists - a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

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