[FRIAM] MUsk + trUMP's = MUMPS

Mon Mar 17 21:15:01 EDT 2025

I liked it, Nick! And your new ability a political cartoonist.

I think the cartoon is 80% there. I gave it to Dan and asked him to provide
an extended critique:

Nick Thompson’s cartoon effectively uses exaggerated caricature to
illustrate Uncle Sam’s illness, likely symbolizing America’s political
state. His swollen face suggests mumps, which, given the caption,
metaphorically ties to "Musk + Trump," implying their political influence
as an unchecked infection. The Democratic donkey’s concerned presence hints
at a party aware of the problem but possibly unable to act decisively.

The double meaning in "mumps" is clever but might not be immediately
apparent to all viewers. The visual metaphor could be stronger if there
were additional elements hinting at an epidemic—perhaps multiple figures
sick in bed or a spreading rash-like effect on the flag.

For an image emphasizing the epidemic's spread due to lack of vaccination,
consider:

   - Multiple Uncle Sams, each with mumps, symbolizing different
      institutions.
      - include  a Mumps vaccine shot potentially available
      - The donkey looking sick too hinting at the spread of the mumps
      - Include an elephant  to show bipartisan consequences. Put more
      mumps on the elephant than the donkey.  The elephant emotion is more
      complex. It is both loyal, propping up a weak Uncle Sam, and also filled
      with doubt considering the mumps vaccine shot offered to Uncle Sam.
      - A wider hospital setting with more infected patients, emphasizing
      scale.maybe just two beds with curtains as flags of Canada and Mexico

_________________________________________________________________
Stephen Guerin
CEO, Founder
https://simtable.com
stephen.guerin at simtable.com

stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu
Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
<https://hwpi.harvard.edu/eps-visualization-research-laboratory/home>

mobile: (505)577-5828

On Mon, Mar 17, 2025 at 12:45 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Steve, and others,
>
> Thanks for taking the meme idea seriously for a moment.   I have these
> moments of giddiness in which an idea just seems so good that the world
> must have it.   I actually imagined that my inbox would be full of copies
> of my own cartoon sent to me by people  who did not know its source. Crazy
> as a loon, I know it, but they are wonderful moments, and I could not write
> [live?] without them.  Narcissism Unbounded.   Thanks for playing along.
>
> Nick
>
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> It seems to me they haven’t this through so good.  Thousands of NIH, NSF,
>> and DOE funded scientists out on the international market.  Add to that
>> reduced regulation on advanced scientific equipment and services.  Augment
>> with a general sense of doom and self-interest and alienation from their
>> country of origin.   Sounds like a recipe for foreign-based companies to
>> scoop them up, if not other governments.   I won’t suggest particulars, but
>> I think it is obvious how this could result in bad outcomes.
>>
>> My molecular biologist daughter is in the breach/sights of this
>> nonsense.   She dedicated her career to 3rd-world focused virology (flavi
>> like West Nile, Dingue, Zika) and is now faced with the triple-whammy of
>> reduced funding/interest in third-world problems, reduced *health* funding,
>> and the spirit that suggests as a woman in science she might somehow have
>> gotten her funding through DEI biases.    She is not a candidate for
>> "defecting" to China or Russia in this context but has been made crazy by
>> watching her mid-career colleagues defect from academic research to
>> profit-focused big pharma.   She got pulled off Flavi's to chase Coronas
>> for a year or more because her institution had more  funding than they
>> could spend and her funding was a little more fungible...    I think she
>> can (probably) hang in there through the current storm (years) but not
>> clear and it might actually be better for her (career) to move to a
>> European Institution (though I don't know if that is even possible given
>> what EricS suggested about demand/supply.
>>
>> After the fall of the Soviet Union, I participated in a brief project
>> reviewing US State Dept proposals by (former) Soviet scientists seeking an
>> alternative to becomeing rogue nuclear scientists for who knows?    Seems
>> like we are about to have our own problem of that nature?
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>
>
> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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