Janeane Garofalo, I salute you – primarily for playing Heather Mooney in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion ["This dress exacerbates the genetic betrayal that is my legacy"], but I salute you nonetheless. As well as reminding me of Lisa Loeb, appearing in this and being generally awesome, you have now given me an analogy that I will steal and use forever. While describing Elisabeth Hasselbeck on the Rosie O’Donnell radio show [add one more awesome point], Garofalo used the term, “dead reckoning”, to describe Hasselbeck’s politics… I shall now shamelessly steal this analogy and apply it to science.
Dead reckoning is a navigational term, and a way to estimate your position when you don’t have access to navigational tools – you take a previously determined position, guesstimate the direction and distance you’ve travelled, and use that information to determine your current location. The problem is that, because you use this estimation to plot your course, any errors are cumulative. It’s like surfing YouTube clips using only the suggestions panel to choose your next clip [and if you accidentally click "Twilight Fan Video" along the way].
As societies and cultures, many of our ideas and opinions have survived by dead reckoning – generations of people doing things a certain way because that’s how it’s always been – and I think that process has facilitated things like sexism, racism, and homophobia. One of the best navigational tools available to us is science. I don’t just mean the Petri dishes, boffins, and iPhone 4s; but the idea that we can understand the world on its own terms. Science connects us to reality in a unique way that allows us to determine our position based on fact [science is the YouTube search bar that saves you from the next Bella and Edward montage video set to an album track from Katie Melua]. I’ve decided that my next post will be about the ways that science can filter through popular culture and get us out of that feedback loop… mostly because I have an incredible shoulder pad-era picture of Dana Scully that I really want to use.
