April 2018
Does anybody else ever cringe when their discipline is depicted in pop culture?
This happens to me all the time working in forensics. I’m sure my computer science and cybersecurity homies also get a case of the cringe pretty often watching primetime TV (you know, from all those “backdoors” the glasses-clad resident tech savvy team member uses to access encrypted files?).
I get it – the shows are fictional, they’re meant for entertainment, and it doesn’t really matter that the fly larvae they’re using to “calculate time of death” (cringe) that was pulled from a body in the dead of winter in Washington DC is really only found as a summer active seasonal species… in the deep south. I get it. I do. It’s all for fun. I am constantly telling my very literal husband this when he questions the plotlines in Supernatural (babe, they’ve only got 42 minutes to kill the monster, sometimes they’ve got to cut some logic corners to get there, k?). And, at the very least, I’m excited for the general population to be excited about/engaged in my science… even if it’s a little embellished.
And I’m a good sport about it. I definitely don’t go around correcting someone every time they say bug when really they mean insect. I don’t get my intellectual panties in a twist when the same actor seems to do crime scene investigation, fingerprint analysis, ballistics, GCMS, personality profiling (über cringe), and forensic accounting… and receives results from the respective machines with a nice little ding within thirty seconds (again, I get it, 42 minute time limit here).
But every once in a while something will be so blatantly wrong, so grossly misrepresented, that I could literally cringe myself into another dimension. I’m looking at you, CSI: Random City. And you, NCIS. And you Bones (although you get a pass, because you actually at least try – and listening to TJ Thyne pronounce the scientific names of various fungi and insects is really entertaining).
So what about you – is there an aspect of your discipline that ever gets misrepresented in pop culture that makes you cringe?
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Jennifer Rhinesmith-Carranza
Jennifer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Entomology
This happens to me all the time working in forensics. I’m sure my computer science and cybersecurity homies also get a case of the cringe pretty often watching primetime TV (you know, from all those “backdoors” the glasses-clad resident tech savvy team member uses to access encrypted files?).
I get it – the shows are fictional, they’re meant for entertainment, and it doesn’t really matter that the fly larvae they’re using to “calculate time of death” (cringe) that was pulled from a body in the dead of winter in Washington DC is really only found as a summer active seasonal species… in the deep south. I get it. I do. It’s all for fun. I am constantly telling my very literal husband this when he questions the plotlines in Supernatural (babe, they’ve only got 42 minutes to kill the monster, sometimes they’ve got to cut some logic corners to get there, k?). And, at the very least, I’m excited for the general population to be excited about/engaged in my science… even if it’s a little embellished.
And I’m a good sport about it. I definitely don’t go around correcting someone every time they say bug when really they mean insect. I don’t get my intellectual panties in a twist when the same actor seems to do crime scene investigation, fingerprint analysis, ballistics, GCMS, personality profiling (über cringe), and forensic accounting… and receives results from the respective machines with a nice little ding within thirty seconds (again, I get it, 42 minute time limit here).
But every once in a while something will be so blatantly wrong, so grossly misrepresented, that I could literally cringe myself into another dimension. I’m looking at you, CSI: Random City. And you, NCIS. And you Bones (although you get a pass, because you actually at least try – and listening to TJ Thyne pronounce the scientific names of various fungi and insects is really entertaining).
So what about you – is there an aspect of your discipline that ever gets misrepresented in pop culture that makes you cringe?
---
Jennifer Rhinesmith-Carranza
Jennifer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Entomology