Seriously. You CAN get a PhD in Batman

I suppose anything goes if you put the right spin on it

This improbable topic comes from an article by Jeff Rubin in the Fall 2013 issue of my fave mag mental_floss. The interviewee is doctoral candidate Will Brooker. The academic institution is never revealed.

Why Batman? 1. He’s “rich, multifaceted, so many contradictory things, and very, very complex.” 2. It’s more rigorous than doing a paper on the Iliad. There’s only one volume of the Iliad, but “an infinite amount of Batman out there.” 3. “He’s a good model for someone doing a PhD. I think he’s an amazing figure of what humanity can do.”

Okaaaay. But how does Mr. (Dr.?) Brooker hope to get away with this? Well, first he has to find an expert in this area of study to serve as his supervisor. There are, after all, a number of checks and balances here. Does such a master exist in the world of academia? Oh, stop yelling “Dr. Sheldon Cooper!” at me. Unless Cal Tech recognizes Batman as a legitimate field of research, Sheldon can only sponsor candidates in physics. Even then, said candidate would be better off with MacGyver.

Meanwhile, Brooker is selling the idea of Batman as a concept. “It’s about how the meaning of something changes over time. How something adapts and survives and changes but remains relevant to a new generation.”

Say you’re a Dean of Social Sciences. You buying this?

Where Does Space Begin?

Star Trek sonorously announces before each episode: “Space…the final frontier.” But where exactly does that frontier lie?

Well, according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the world governing body for this sort of thing, outer space begins 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) above sea level. This barrier is called the Kármán Line. Above that, the air is too thin for a vehicle to maintain altitude. So…once you’ve crossed Kármán, you’ve been to space.

Ah, but now the USAF weighs in. By military standards, Space starts 12 miles sooner, or 50 miles above sea level. For Americans, crossing that threshold makes a pilot an astronaut.

All of which gave NASA a bit of a headache. During the 1960s, 8 American test pilots flew the experimental X-15 above the 50-mile mark, but only 5 of them passed Kármán. Astronauts all by American military definition, but to the FAI, 3 hadn’t even been to space.

For nearly 40 years, NASA waffled on whether to recognize these X-15 pilots as astronauts. Then in 2005 the agency relented, finally awarding astronaut wings to the remaining three.

This info, including the illustration, was shamelessly copped from the March/April 2021 issue of Mental_Floss.

Farewell to Arms, Hello Obscenity!

When Scribners published Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms in 1929, the publishing house replaced all potentially offensive words with a series of dashes. This intriguing fact is part of an article, “Up In Arms,” by Ethan Trex in the hilarious magazine Mental_Floss (where knowledge junkies get their fix), the 2011 Golden Lobe Awards issue. No, my IQ is nowhere near Mensa levels, but I still get a huge kick from cleverly written stories about mind-boggling facts.

Back to Hemmingway. Although the author was understandably miffed that even such mild obscenities as “balls” weren’t permitted in a novel about war and sex, he caved in order to get the work published.

And then (get this) he grabbed up a few copies and reinserted the vulgarities by hand. Mr. Trex knows of at least two corrected texts that survive today. One copy went to French literary translator Maurice Coindreau; the other to Irish novelist and poet James Joyce. Joyce’s copy now resides at SUNY-Buffalo’s library in upstate New York.

Wouldn’t Hemingway love writing in this modern atmosphere of obligatory and gratuitous obscenity? Well, maybe not. Where’s the shock value?