Thread by @c0nc0rdance

Let's talk about the Shmoo, and how it's become part of multiple fields of science & medicine as well as being a global cultural phenomenon.

It was a creature invented in 1948 by cartoonist Al Capp for his Li'l Abner comic strip. They lived in the "Valley of the Shmoon".

These little blobby bowling pins were a perfect animal: they reproduced asexually rapidly (like tribbles!), produced eggs and milk, tasted delicious, provided entertainment & companionship.

They were essentially a endlessly renewable, perfect resource animal.

Their escape into the world created immediate economic havoc: scant resources suddenly became free and infinite. The military hunted them down to near extinction.

It was satirical commentary on utopia, which would be bad for business and political stability.

The Shmoo was a cultural hit with children, and became a centerpoint for dolls, toys, games and their own cartoons.

When the US air-dropped food over Soviet blockaded East Berlin, they put candy into inflatable Shmoos to drop with the care packages.

So how does the Shmoo fit into science?

Their distinctive blobby shape was a useful descriptor for:
1. Yeast structures. Here mating strains emit intercellular signals to cause the formation of a mating structure bulge called a shmoo.

2. Shmoo plots are used to graph electrical test results against multiple continuous variables, like temperature, voltage and response speed.

3. In medicine, a "Shmoo sign" seen on an X-ray describes left ventricular enlargement associated with some conditions.

4. In particle physics, Shmoo detectors housed a complex of scintillators and photomultiplier tubes used to capture high energy cosmic rays emitted from the Cygnus Constellation.

5. Lastly, and perhaps more directly, the concept of a Shmoo has been used to provide a thought experiment for resource utilization in economics, and a "shmoo" stands in contrast to a "widget" as a generic term for freely available goods.

It's a strange thing for such an odd little doodle to have lasting power in the collective psyche.

Said it before: what I love about history is that you can pull on any little thread at any point in the tapestry, and it unwinds such a story thread to follow!