I’ve been seriously considering working on a deck of playing cards that has the court cards as the faces of some of the great people of the science revolution. As playing cards have become a wonderful medium for art I think a series of decks for all the main people in each field of science would be a great momento for us science lovers. I might include philosophy but I want opinions first. I was also thinking of making a website catering to compiling information and source materials from each scientist. I know I’ve been a bit difficult and in all honesty this is more of the stuff I’m interested in sharing with such a cool community. I’m backing off from debating things for a bit because I should have entered this forum with the intentions of sharing creative and fun ideas. So who wants to nerd out?!
In regular playing cards, there is an inherent value ranking where the rank is king > queen > jack. If we go by linguistic gender here, it would imply that male scientists are ranked higher than female scientists, and below there we have another layer of values that (at least in my mind) associates with males. So if you’re serious about this, I would suggest you find a way around the inherent gender ranking, as the world has seen some truly amazing female scientists that unfortunately have been overshadowed by (oftentimes) lesser male colleagues. Examples: Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Chien-Shiung Wu.
I think thats more then possible like a king and jack don’t have to be male…in fact i just thought of a fun image of say one of the female scientists shooting a laser at the knig of spades or something. We can get very creative here and aren’t limited to exactly what a card looks like. Now do we want all decks to have only female scientists? Or do we leave room for some men?
Well, there are are an even number of kings (professors?), queens (engineers?), and jacks (educators?), so you can easily make a fair gender balance.
Ok so lets say we start with the first deck. For this I had in mind the name of the deck can be called simply The Evolution Deck it would include people dedicated to biology and have interesting imagery for the number cards i was thinking either collections of atoms to molecules or strands of dna but I would want to have each number card to represent precisely what happens when say five molecules are together in water or something.
Your talk about playing cards and interesting female scientists makes me think of Dr. Emilie Ringe, from Canada.
I am a science fiction author, and I try to stay informed about certain advances in science in the way that an artist might study human anatomy, and I have an interest in nanotechnology because I’ve used it as a plot device (my story “Pale Horse” in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in an example).
Dr. Ringe is a chemist who was the first to discover that magnesium can be used in nanoplasmonics, and her work demonstrated that magnesium (instead of toxic heavy metals) can be used in photothermal therapy for cancer, which interests me as a nurse who works with oncology patients.
She also made several refinements of the scanning electron microscope, and invented both educational and lab equipment for scientists who are blind, and is heavily involved in educational outreach to high school students who want to pursue careers in science and technology.
She is also a champion distance runner who guides blind athletes during competitions
She graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University, and is a professor of natural and synthetic nanomaterials in Cambridge.
What is her relationship with playing cards?
Well . . . she was also a very famous extremely hardcore porn star for about seven years, and performed under a variety of stage names like Emily Davinci and Emily Vanili, and she seems to have starred in about 70 movies (and probably more, if the porn industry recycles archival material).
I don’t indulge in porn because it goes against some of my values, and I only found out about her porn work because of some snide and nasty comments that assholes made regarding her TED talk about perceiving the Universe in different ways.
And there have been “adult” playing cards that feature her from when she was a hardcore porn star.
As I mentioned earlier, her work with magnesium nanoparticles greatly expands the utility of photothermal therapy in treating cancer, and I lost both my parents, a cousin, an uncle, and several close friends (firefighters and EMS workers are exposed to a lot of nasty chemicals) to this disease . . . so the online assholes that make nasty comments about her success as a porn star can go fuck themselves.
Hi! I love the idea I really do.