Science Isn't a Job

I am not suited to have a job.

Notwithstanding my circadian malfeasance, I can't just have a job. A job is something you go to for 8h a day and detach yourself from coming home, something that pays the bills and fits in a big chunk of your daily routine. Something that weekends are an escape from.

Science isn't just a job. Science isn't just a career. Doing science is a mode of being, a way of thinking and a pervasive outlook that permeates all aspects of life. To be sure, there are people doing science to whom science is nothing more than a job, but to the scientists, doing science is a passionate outpouring of their innate internal curiosity and excitement at the sheer wonder and awesomeness of the reality around them.

As I said, I can't just have a job, I need the storm and flow of science's complex funneling of my creativity, cleverness, and joie de vivre. Even as I define the parameters of my experiments, science, in many ways, defines me. My education in science has sharpened my inquisitive and skeptical predispositions to become useful tools and not just the occupation of idle daydreams. This utility of my innate urge to create new stuff, to explore and discover are why science isn't just a job for me, it's awesome.

There are times that I get frustrated with my benchwork. Recently I had a long series of experiments not work properly for a couple months, and tearing through my methodology to try to find where I'd gone wrong, trying to plot out possible sources of error and chafing at the bit as each of these experiments took several days to validate was draining and discouraging. There are times that the poor quality of my data, such as getting a higher event count from bleach than my sample on the flow cytometer, makes me question my scientific aptitude in the first place. How could I ever expect to succeed in this experimental endeavor when I wasn't smart enough to begin with?

But it is this that is also valuable. Science forces us to question ourselves. We wrap up our self-esteem in our experimental results and we take rebukes from reviewers personally. We chase windmills of perfect data and push the capabilities of our minds ever further seeking to integrate our data into a new story the world has never seen before. This is important. By being both scientists and science, by loving what we do and the delightful but exhausting challenges it confronts us with, we are pushed not only to improve the quality, scope and ambition of our experiments themselves, but also to become better, savvier scientists and humans as well.

As a science, biology is weird. It's messy, it's frequently stubborn, it's complex and chaotic and these are what attracted me to studying it. And then into more complexity I realized how awesome immunology is. But it's not so much the complexity itself that draws me back into the lab, it's that with molecular biology I am literally peeling back levels of reality with my mind through the careful design of experiments with cells and reagents that I cannot see, feel, or taste. It could not be cooler, unless I had more lasers, but I digress:

Science ain't a job so much as it is riding an angry horse through a buffet of cookies and ice cream.

The Laws of Mad Science

The Laws of Mad Science
As set forth by the International Mad Science Judiciary Committee, April 17th, 2008 at the Lair of Raw Power in the Deep Southern Pacific (not the other Southern Pacific Lair of Raw Power).

1) Mad Scientists shall build their machines/equipment/experimental apparatus much larger and more badass* than strictly necessary for no apparent reasons other than that they have the ability and capacity to do so.

2) For each time a Mad Scientist asks the question “why?” s/he is hereby also required to ask “why not?"

3) Mad Scientists are encouraged to integrate disparate pieces of machinery into the same chassis and/or wiring schemas whenever doing so adds aesthetic value but not additional functionality [1].

4) Practicality must not be a concern of Mad Scientists at any time.

5) While Mad Scientists are expected to be creative and generate many Mad Ideas at a rapid rate, we note here that we discourage the recording of those ideas on non-Self-Destructable paper as they may be used as evidence in usurpation by assistants or in a civilian court [2].

6) Due to past security failures, Mad Scientists are forbidden from using either word or numeric puns and/or jokes as passwords, machine commands, and/or entry keys [3]. Cultural references are also strongly discouraged [4].

7) Mad Scientists should develop their own or be fluent in another’s cryptography schemas to encrypt inter-Mad Scientist communications and/or sensitive data. Alchemic symbology is now effectively banned.

8) Mad Scientists are hereby reminded to avoid putting chemical or biological samples into the same storage areas as their own food**.

9) Mad Scientists are banned from conducting human research [5]. We emphatically recommend not practicing self-experimentation (the Mad Scientists' Assistants Congress has asked that we implore you to not use them for experimentation). We condemn experiments on civilian subjects [6]. However, if you determine that a human organic system is vital to your research, please contact this body and we will provide you with zombies ad libitum.

10) Mad Scientists may not steal raw materials from cargo transports, be they naval, aerial, or land-based. This is too obvious and endangers yourself, your peers, and the continuance of Mad Science. You may, and are encouraged to, "re-purpose" abandoned or found materials.

11) Collaborations between Mad Scientists are encouraged and are required to follow the rules and procedures laid out in the Collaboration Articles of 1989 [7].

*In memorial to Sir Puj Dramke (1903-2005).
** In memory of Dr. Bartholomew Töppledigöts (1963-1999).
[1] For additional explanation, please refer to the 2005 case of "Oscilloscope inside Flow Cytometer Chassis".
[2] Dr. Ernstrüm Leipäkirja, 1888. "Bayern gegen die Furchtexperimenten Herr Doktor Leipäkirja." The state of Bavaria convicted Dr. Leipäkirja of diabolical intent and ran him out of town with pitchforks and torches. Dr. Leipäkirja was later reported (unsubstantiated) to be living and working in Puxico, Missouri, The United States of America.
[3] In 2007, 10 years of work by Drs. Pram Tiddly and Evox Evox Exox to develop artificial egg environments for embryonic chickens was destroyed when animal rights activists smashed their equipment after gaining access to their lair by guessing the password "toget2theotherside".
[4] In 2003, black hat hackers invaded the pre-sentient computer network of Hermes Plodd and reconfigured it to sell Viagra just as it was learning its first contextual words. He had used "HAL2000" as a password.
[5] The 1800s as a century led to this ban. The actions of Drs. Jekyll and Frankenstein so imperiled the continued existence of Mad Science that this ban was deemed necessary and incontrovertible.
[6] In 1974, Leroy Natty was convicted and jailed for mopping a disco dance floor with androgens solubilized in DSMO to test the effects of increased libido on the power of social mores. He was also permanantly evicted from the Mad Scientists' Association for his actions. Lest you judge him too harshly, it should be noted that reconstituted artificial human biological systems were unavailable at this time.
[7] In 1988 the collaborative laboratory space of Drs. Ruthie Blandry, Sandeep Ravapredavhanamuran and Xing Zhang were found abandoned and charred. An investigation revealed that each had been keeping data from each other, which eventually resulted in a catastrophic firefight between Drs. Blandry and Ravapredavhanamuran. Most of their bodies were recovered, while Dr. Zhang remains unaccounted for and is presumed dead.


The Laws of Mad Science are meant to be a living constitution and are reviewed and amended as needed at the annual Mad Scientist Symposium. If you have any additions, deletions, changes, or retractions that you believe need to be considered for this year's upcoming conference, please append them below and they will be taken into consideration (please also leave your identifying Mad Scientist credentials, as anonymous or unverified suggestions will be rejected wholesale).

Tesla Coils + The First Law of Mad Science

From Biopunk:
And just how small can one get a Tesla coil these days? I will be looking up more for sure, oh great uberlord of the skies...

While appealing to my megalomania is a good way to get my attention, misunderstanding the entire point of having a zeppelin is not a good way to do so. I have a zeppelin, I mean, a motherfucking zeppelin!, and I can guaranfuckingtee you than I am going to have some gianticmothefucking Tesla coils on board.

So you're really going to ask how small can one get a Tesla coil? For real?

Do you not see the title of this blog!?

Why would one even want a small Tesla coil?

This is barely a Tesla coil.

I mean, really? Even when I have explicitly noted below that Tesla is my penultimate scientific role model because he was batshit eccentric (OK, so I'm not really angry about this because I don't expect everything to get read)?

Now this is a motherfucking Tesla coil!

In short, make no mistakes about it: tiny Tesla coils are pointless, and tiny Tesla coils are stupid mad science, even if they are good electrical engineering. Good mad science always makes its machines much bigger and more badass than they strictly need to be, just because it can (this is also the First Law of Mad Science, so learn it well! I will post on the other laws of mad science at some point in the future).

Now, though, since I have just now learned that one can tune a Tesla coil to specific resonant frequencies (how I didn't know this before escapes me), I am going to go incorporate that into my zeppelin's coils.

Meanwhile, please vote on the poll to your left to appease my ego and enjoy the video below (which I post even through The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is currently frustrating me because I finally beat the giganticbastardtentaclefish in an underwater fight and now I find I am stuck playing as a wolf again! Ocarina of Time, though...they'll probably never top that).