Quicksand Fans

I don't remember hearing about this (?). From 2 years ago:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... firma.html

One day in late February 1995, a 32-year-old electronics sales associate named Duncan Edwards was sitting at a computer in Dallas running keywords through a Usenet search. A moment later, he found himself staring at a primitive home page with bright yellow wallpaper. At its center was a pixilated graphic—a clip-art collage—showing a stand of cattails and a white pith helmet floating in a pool of sludge. The name of the site appeared just above: The Quicksand! Page.

"My heart pounded … I very nearly fainted," says Edwards, recalling that first visit. "I didn't sleep for the next three days."

He'd stumbled across an online community of quicksand enthusiasts—kindred spirits, it turns out. Some were "sinkers": Those who crave the sensation of being mired in deep mud, the suction that's created when you step into water-logged clay. The stories they post to the group message boards—which have flourished over the past 15 years— suggest a shared spirit of adventure. Last summer, one quicksand fan set up a collaborative Google map for sinking holes, which now has more than 100 sites marked around the world—from the tidal muds near San Diego, Calif., to the loamy bogs of Finland. (Holes are assigned a score from 1 to 10, depending on amenities like privacy, depth, thickness, and available parking.)

This is the same article that was used as the basis of the very recent piece on Radiolab. Note the date on the article in Slate is fairly old.

In my opinion it is fair to say that Mr. Engber's thesis, that quicksand as a movie element is dead, is rather flawed. When I was interviewed by Radioloab for their piece they made no mention of Engber or his article's thesis. They just asked me about how to make quicksand, how it behaved, how to escape, and stuff like that. Had they asked me about Engber's article in Slate I would have described it as scholastically weak.

The Slate article made the claim that quicksand was declining or disappearing from movie based on an apparent observation that either a lower percentage of movies or a lower number of movies had quicksand scenes. I am unsure which. However, such a change could be due to a variety of causes. A principle cause could be simple dilution by an increase in the overall number of movies. It could also be due to a surge in the percentage of movies making use of some other, perhaps new, kind of thing.

Aside from that, I don't think his actual survey methodology was disclosed. I have not read the original article but Slate is not a research journal and an article giving details of research methodology would be understood by a very small proportion of their readers. For example, I would like to know if he looked at movies year by year or decade by decade. Depending on what was done it might actually mask the truth. Perhaps he simply sampled in such a way that year to year variation appears as an actuaal trend.

I rather wonder if anyone has actually looked at the occurrence of other potential elements of a movie. Has, for example, the number of Westerns changed? Has the number of snake scenes changed. How about the number of movies with red-head actresses. And so on.