And your nose began to twitch

A discussion over at Satellite News, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 site, about the episode The Mole People got to talking naturally about Doctor Ted Baxter, the ``Gesture Professor'', who spends several minutes explaining various historical loopy theories of civilizations hidden in the interior of the Earth before the movie gets to its story of a lost Sumerian civilization deep underground somewhere in Asia with enslaved mutant mole people or something. Baxter's work is important for providing credibility to the backstory and padding the movie out to the minimum legally permitted length. But several commenters pointed out how Dr Baxter was a professor of English, and not any particular science.

It's bugged me that this was mentioned several times as though it underscored the inept things The Mole People did, though. For one, it's as though Baxter were writing his own copy (although the copy was accurate in presenting who believed what loopy ideas); his job was to communicate that information clearly. Appearing as the face of popular science is a very special sort of communication --- even more difficult than simply being a good lecturer, because in a lecture at least you have an audience to feed against and adapt your pacing and tone to. You could get any number of archeologists, or anthropologists, or geologists on camera and have them talk for five minutes about how there used to be other civilizations and there's been a lot of geology happening over the eons, but how many would be suffrable at that length?

Being able to present long blocks of exposition while staying interesting is a rare skill, and it doesn't necessarily correspond to any degrees. Compare Carl Sagan, who was able to hold an audience for pretty much anything, to that guy who's on every Discovery Science channel program and who manages to make every subject --- relativity, the discovery of Neptune, that guy who forged his experimental results so he could publish 800 papers every month --- sound kind of the same. Baxter was able to communicate fairly well, and it's probably no surprise --- or coincidence --- that he had a business appearing in science popularizations like Hemo the Magnificent, asking leading questions of animated representations of the jetstream or the like. For The Mole People he didn't have anything or anyone to play against except his globe and his poster boards, and the context required he present goofy material, but none of that was related to his specific degree.

Trivia: The original Sweet'N Low was a saccharine/cyclamate combination. Source: Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen.

Currently Reading: Notes For A Memoir: On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing, Janet Jeppson Asimov.