John Doucet

Despite relative paucity of vertical dimensionality, Louisiana land has its share of geologic peculiarities, many due to prehistoric actions of the great mid-continent river as it swept deltas to-and-fro across the coast.  In recent centuries, those alluvial lands have served as habitation for both Indigenous and early European settlers. When early geographers were employed to draw Louisiana coastlands for nautical exploration, they adopted map words from colloquial speakers--like “chenier,” a southwestern Louisiana word now used by geologists worldwide.  This presentation will survey a selection of such Louisiana French loanwords, their folk origins and linguistic usage, and their remarkable geophysical applications.

Robert Alexander

Why is there something instead of nothing? Leibniz articulated this simple question centuries ago, yet it still resonates as perhaps the most fundamental of questions. This question seems relevant for an introductory philosophy course, but what value could it have for basic courses in other disciplines, in particular general education courses in the humanities and sciences? Perhaps the value lies in a consideration of that which is often ignored or simply considered absent but that is also an essential element, such as the apparent emptiness that actually makes something what it is. As Wallace Stevens suggests in his poem “The Snow Man,” there is “the nothing that is.” Through our consideration of nothing as something we can not only inspire student inquiry but also help our students sharpen their skills of perception and observation through demonstrating how our everyday sense of reality may not represent all that there is.

John Doucet

Characters of science fiction written with intelligence or wisdom greater than that exhibited by humans are often depicted as humanoid but with a large head.  Characters from popular media with elevated wisdom and intelligence, such as the Talosians, MODOK, Oz, Pinky, Face of Boe, and E.T., are invariably depicted with head volumes proportionately larger than that of humans.  Further, some characters are gifted with special perceptions and powers and even weaponizations that derive cephalically.  From early comparative observations of Homo sapiens and its anthropoid antecedents, through 19th-century phrenological pseudoscience and the misapplication of Mortonism, through 20th century pediatric metrics of childhood development, society has been impassioned by the external appearance of the head and related internal consequences.  In this study, 21st century scientific correlates of cranial volume and brain size are surveyed and applied to the origin stories of fictive megacephalic characters to analyze the scientific bases of their creations.

John Doucet

Despite the long literary relationship between poetry and science, little of what Aristotle recognized as “the language of all higher learning and thought” survives either as functional or even memorable writing.  What we recognized as separate cultures in the 21st century is well bridged by relatively recent examples of poets using scientific diction (Chaucer, Donne, Poe, Hardy, Auden, Wilbur) and, less frequently, scientists writing in poetic forms (Maxwell, Oppenheimer, Huxley), not to mention the casual use of terms like “DNA” and “electrons” in modern poetry.  In revival of the tradition, this presentation is the eighth annual reading of original poetry on scientific topics. The poems are written in formalist structures with concise, epigrammatic narrative emulating the nature of scientific writing. Topics of this reading will feature words, terms, and nomenclature from the chemical and molecular world that, somewhat remarkably, integrate seamlessly into traditional meter and scansion of English-language poetry.