Scalpel in My Head, Wielded by Mine Own Hand

I am an imbecile.

I am also a genius.

How do I manage to operate simultaneously at both extremes of intelligence? It's not as simple as a statistical mean, but rather a wild and exhausting oscillation between them, careening from high level metacognition to struggling to tap out a single important word that I can see in my posterior inferior frontal gyrus, stubbornly not moving despite my need of it.

Simply put, I wouldn't have the slightest clue that I am intelligent if not for others around me reinforcing their perception of my intelligence upon me. This isn't to say that differences in processing speed, retention of information, or synthesis of broad principles would not have eventually become apparent to me, but they would have taken quite a while as I, and others, have found myself to be profoundly dense when it comes to the nuances of human emotional social behavior. Basically, this stems from the contrast between feeling my sentience buzz with tantalizing data and sometimes feeling remarkably stupid.

I am aware that feeling stupid or feeling smart is an entirely subjective internal experience. Furthermore, it is likely that feeling remarkably stupid is actually due to being able to perceive my mistakes and/or shortcomings in their full implications and on (perhaps too) many scales. I am not writing this to polish my own ego here, this is speculation. I have been very frequently puzzled by other peoples' behaviors, and this is not the pleasant, relaxing kind of puzzled where there is some verifiable formulation of the question to begin with*, but the kind of maddeningly unquantifiable mystery that follows no logic except self-interest.

I don't understand most people. I believe I understand a large aspect of them, but I don't understand why. I have met so many people who seem content to live in the shallow end of the pool, who have never regarded information as anything other than temporary and fleeting, and I cannot help but wonder why they are content with it. Sure, everyone becomes a philosopher on their deathbeds, but what of the rest of their time before it? I cannot relate my frame of experience to theirs. I make no claim that my mode of thought is superior. I cannot comprehend satisfaction without questioning the vast beauty and complexity of the world sparking all around me.

On the other hand, nerds and scientists are comprehensible people. They operate on the same strong currency of curiosity and wonder that I do, and as such I find them much much much more relatable than most "normal" folks. Sometimes I amuse myself by trying to view the nerd/hacker/scientist cultures of which I am a part like I am an outsider to it, and the way that we interact with one another is in many ways fundamentally different. We are scientists, nerds, or hackers because we love what we do and are deeply emotionally vested in the outcome of our clever work. We question the world around us and reinvent our relationship to our understanding thereof frequently, and that, more than anything, is what sets intelligent people aside from others.

*E.g., a jigsaw puzzle has a solution if the complete set of pieces are placed in the correct spatial sequence, or the structure of a protein may be hacked to test its function in measurable environments.

Dinosaur Scientists

HD isn't doing me any kindnesses, but I stand by my thesis: we need more dinosaurs! Or robots!!! Or robot dinosaurs. Just something more charismatic than "Scientists have discovered..." in media reports as though we're all faceless data drones. I mean, if sports teams can have mascots, why can't we have them too?

Muffin Ravioli

In theory, ravioli are watertight. So maybe this will work. But I'm not certain.

Background:
I like food. I like science and the engineering/hacking methodologies. But I know it's not a good idea to eat off of labware, so the natural solution is to hack food. To this end, I am hosting a food hacking potluck with many of the local hackers this coming weekend*, and I've been trying to figure out what to make.

Experimental Aim:
Essentially, I want to make blueberry muffin ravioli. I will serve it in a mango avocado basil reduction. Now, making either raviolis from scratch or muffins from scratch is relatively straightforward, but combining them so that the ravioli is still pasta-ey and the muffin is still muffiny is an issue. Will pasta cook if I just bake it in the oven? Or do I have to boil it first? I know from literature research that lasagna noodles must be boiled before being baked. It is possible that I could blanch the muffin batter-filled raviolis in boiling water and then bake them, but I am concerned that this would lead to leathery pasta shells. I mean, honestly, I think my best bet is to cook the ravioli squares first without muffin batter, fill them, seal them, and then bake them moist.

What do more experienced cooks think?

If this falls flat, I have a backup plan: caramel-filled radishes breaded, fried and then served with a sour pepper sauce.

*I will be posting pictures and recipes of the things that turn out tasty.

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.

On Recognizance of Competence

Recently I had some business cards with my personal contact information printed up to help me network more effectively and remain in touch with the awesome people involved in science and technology that I've been meeting. As these aren't for work, per se, they have a picture of a Velociraptor skeleton, a quote from Mark Twain ("The more you explain it the more I don't understand it." A good reminder to keep things simple and short, I think), and "Awesome Scientist #17" as my job title, even though it doesn't signify exactly where I work. I'm not sure exactly who the other 16 are. About this time, I realized something: people think I'm smart. This is strange.

I don't know that I'm smart. I don't feel any differently and I cannot imagine being any other way. Frankly, most of the time I feel stupid because there is so much that I do not know and that which I have captured in my mind is so insignificant compared to how much awesome there is to learn. I only know that I am smart by interacting with other people and seeing the reflection thereof. I used to be more reclusive and introverted, counting bacteria by day (doing science) and making music alone at night, but now I have been forcing myself out of that bubble and taking on challenges and actually talking to real people*, doing SCIENCE in the new lab job, and dropping awesomeness and scientific knowledge through the informal molecular biology classes I've been teaching in the Makerspace (Youtube soon). Through all of this, I have come to realize that people actually value my knowledge, experience, perspective, and opinion. I have more opinions than anything else, but it's still a bit strange because I still feel as though I haven't done anything truly awesome that deserves any respect yet.

I probably never will. I realize this, because I know that my ambitions and analytical nature will never let me rest because there will always be more science and/or awesome always going up or something else shiny will captivate my interest. The positive side of this, I think (self-delude?) is that it'll keep me busy, and that's a very good thing as a bored Toaster digs out his backpack of tools and starts taking things apart. The other positive of this is that by taking on more, I hold myself to doing more and am forced to learn how to synthesize all the enzymes to help masticate all that I've bitten off. I used to read scientific papers for fun, but now my boss sends me papers faster than I can read them. I used to make music just for my own enjoyment, but after doing in impromptu live set I have been volunteered to make live music at an art show in 10 days (and all I have prepped are 2 remixes of the Leekspin song). I used to tinker using just my own limited tools and experience, but now that I've helped create a cooperative makerspace I have access to a much wider range of tinkerables and tools (I even coined a new term last week; making a silly, simple mistake now has the swear word: "BLOOTLELOOT!" attached to it after I mistook a diode for a resistor and soldered it to an LED). I used to play with data for weeks just out of curiosity, long after the main aim of the experiment had been answered, just to see what I could draw out of it, but now I have so many data sets to mine that pure play has transmuted into teasing the data for the prettiest results.

These are good changes. It was silly of me to ever think I should first know what I was doing before trying. This is much more informative.

*Not that bloggers aren't real people, but Internet-based communication is easier because it has a backspace key.

Against Megalomania

The public has an odd image of scientists are reclusive loners with deep eclectic streaks and megalomaniacal tendencies. Eclecticism aside, it should most vehemently noted that megalomaniacs are, by their very nature, doomed to failure, so as a scientist you shouldn't even try. Yes, it may be tempting to ponder as you blearily load Blue Juice into agarose wells and wonder why you bothered to crawl out of bed. And yes, you may know, in your data-ey heart of hearts that the world would be a better place if it was ruled by a rational scientist*, but the truth is that each and every megalomaniac aspirant begins their path to conquering the world with grand visions of uniting the world as one cohesive and peaceful society. Then they inevitably make 2 mistakes:

1) Try to invade Russia.
2) Fail to take into account that people actually live in the world.

First of all, it should be noted that unless you've found a way to animate snow men as soldiers, you will never successfully conquer a very cold, wintery Northern country (except maybe Canada). The people that live there are used to the staggeringly brutal winters and know how to use it as an advantage against you. To understand that this is true, you only have to look to the historical examples (of which there are relatively few) where one Northern country tried to whup another militarily instead of just economically. In the Winter War of 1942, Finland and Russia fought a nasty border war. The Russians attacked on snow mobiles, and the native Finns who knew the land ambushed them, guerilla-style, on skis. Russia tried to use tanks, but really should have known better: they got stuck in freezing mud. Moscow may be flat, but Karelia and Finland are full of lakes, and what looks like dry ground between lakes is usually actually a swamp. Finland eventually lost this battle because they didn't have the supplies to keep fighting, and they wound up losing a substantial amount of territory in Karelia and also lost the important industrial city of Viipuri (now Vyborg).

Secondly, in almost everywhere on the planet, in every little nook and cranny where you'd least expect to find them, are people. Living there. With histories, and traditions, and individual languages and land rights that make the task of being their benevolent ruler aggravatingly complex and bureaucratic. You're stuck with them. You have to deal with them, regardless of whether or not you want to because, if you're in charge and decide to ignore them and focus elsewhere, you'll have a steaming pile of rebellion dropped right into your fancy oatmeal. And let's face it: rebellions are an expensive pain in the ass. You've got to send soldiers to keep them from taking it out on any vulnerable scapegoats, you've got to rebuild whatever they manage to destroy (never underestimate the sheer raw power of 10,000 angry people with hammers), and then you've got to figure out whatever the hell it was they wanted in the first place. Pain. In. The. Ass. Instead of eating exquisite grapes off the juicy bodies of your servants and having your wine washed in fancy feet, you've got to rule the people.

Alternatively, you could conquer the world and set up a Parliament so that the people you now have to rule would feel like they had some say in things, but then you'd also have to deal with Parliament interfering in your wishes. And if you decide to go even further and let Parliament actually rule and be a figurehead emporer instead, well, let's just say you're setting yourself up for a coup d'etat, and once the whole world is pissed off at you there's no where for you to flee to.

Isn't this sounding like a massive bother? Wouldn't a nice cup of tea and a cookie be better instead? I mean, if you're going to rule something absolutely, start somewhere where you can decide who gets to live there. Like the Moon. If anyone tries to rebel you can politely tell them to go walk it off outside.

*Because if we let an engineer run the world everything would suddenly have 3X as many buttons, 1/2 as many useful functions, and nothing would be properly labeled.

A Proposal

PROBLEM: At conferences and meetings of scientists, it is difficult to differentiate the academic ranks of the various attendees. This greatly complicates politeness and increases the risk of disrespecting a big shot who will then sabotage the entire rest of your career for your unwitting slight.

SOLUTION: Conference attendees shall wear hats, with the fanciness of said hats increasing as their academic rank increases.

SCHEMATIC:

Undergrads = berets of various colors (by lab or school)
Grad students, pre quals = Fezs
Grad students, post quals = bowlers
Post-docs = tri-corner hats, add 1 feather to hat/successive post-doc
Profs w/out tenure = princess cone hats, add 1 sequin per publication
Profs w/ tenure = princess cone hats w/ gauze streamers, add 1 sequin/publication
Departmental chairs = fruit baskets with real fruit
Journal editors = appropriate hat + bling
Techs = top hats, fancier ribbons indicating greater experience
Lab managers = fedoras
Core facility staff = cowboy hats
Journalists = cat-earred head bands

Laboratory Conversations

Toaster: "How best to clean out the Micro-Q?"

TechnoGrad: "Spray in ethanol and dry with the air outlet, but be careful because if you put it on there it'll shoot across the room."

Toaster: "That could be fun."

TechnoGrad: "Not with the Micro-Q, with regular pipettes, yeah, but not with-"

Toaster: "But last time I was shooting pipettes across the room you weren't happy."

TechnoGrad: "Yeah, well, now I'm in the other room."

Toaster [not listening]:"...although that could have also been because I was shooting them with an improvised slingshot at your head..."

Student2: "Uh..."

TechnoGrad: "Who said scientists aren't fun?"

Student 2: "Uh...well,"

TechnoGrad: "Gotta love scientists, gotta love science!"

Student 2: "Uh..."

TechnoGrad: "But not in that way!"

Toaster: "Hey, speak for yourself!"

Career

Today is one of those days where I am wondering why I am trying to be a scientist at all.

I see my PI struggling to pull down enough funding to keep the lab going. I see other PIs in the same boat, always running themselves ragged and noses worn to bloody stumps by the grindstone. I see jaded graduate students swollen with regret and post-docs seething with frustration. Is this what I want for my future?

Once upon a time I had pinned my dreams for the future on this. Now I look back at the myself of then and facepalm violently.

But still, what's to say that in 15 years with lots of experience and a Ph.D. I won't look back at the myself of now and vomit out my ileum in jaded disgust over my possible present naivete? Even now I kinda sorta feel that I should have gone into computer science because it also offers intellectual thrills but without the 20ft. deep mud bog soccer game of scrambling for grant funding. I thought that I was going into a job that'd be thankfully cubicle-free and secure in spite of my plans to go ahead and get into grad school fairly quickly. Although I don't have a cubile, I do have a bench and a desk, so there's not much difference. And security depends entirely upon funding, which is nowhere near as secure as I once believed. I mean, I can certainly get my intellectual kicks from science and I can definitely be happy afloat in a sea of carbonated data and statistics, but I can't eat ideas (I imagine that great sparkly ideas would taste like cookies and terrible bad ideas would taste like rancid butane). The payoff in an academic career is so far away, and the crap to wade through to get there so deep, that I really have to wonder whether it's even worth it in the first place. Yeah, sure, SCIENCE!, but...years and years and years and years and years and years of science, science, and nothing else. I have been happy to create and conduct science, but will science consistently continue to be a source of happiness for me throughout the rest of my life?

Maybe I'd be less existentially gloomy if I'd remembered that whole lunch thing today...

Partly at least I know why I'm doubting my plans thus far. I've invested my time in other difficult things before with no real substantial happiness payoff. Logically, I know that science is not a cello, but still: the point stands. I know that I could put my head down and ball up my fists and plow through everything in my way (sisu!), but right now I'm wondering what the risks of missing almost everything beautiful and joyous along the way are. I know that life aint' all butterfly turds and puppy chuckles; I know that being successful at anything requires major investment of self, time, and energy. I want to sink my teeth into science and tear it a new hole it never knew it needed so badly, yet sometimes I doubt that I'll ever be anything more than just mediocre.

Maybe it's a screwed up way of looking at things, but I'd rather set out to do something and fail outright than to be mediocre in that goal, because then I wouldn't be learning anything...

I'll probably blather on more about this later. For now I should go seek food and find a program to remind me to eat regularly instead of going without food for 10-12 hours at a time (today only for about 8 hours, but 10-12+ isn't unusual for me).

Images of Scientists

Why is it that all popular images of science invariably involve a white dude/tte in a svelte lab coat holding up a flask of some colored liquid and gesticulating at it with gloves hands? Sure, sometimes I'll hold up a beaker of agar to make sure that it doesn't contain a lot of bubbles or burny peely stuff, but I do NOT spend my whole day filling oddly shiny beakers with food coloring and discussing them with my colleagues.

Yet, in society, these images persist. I guess, perhaps, that these images serve to differentiate us scientists from everyone else. If we were shown with hand tools, then we might actually be mechanics. If we were shown with scalpels and forceps, then we might actually be surgeons. If we were shown sitting in front of our computers crunching data, then we might actually be accountants (they're almost as sun-starved as most of us). Beakers and mysterious colored liquids are sciencely! So are lab coats and wild gesticulation!

It would be much more accurate to show biologists, molecular ones especially, wielding micropipets and microcentrifuges, perhaps even gesticulating at a hot water bath or incubator. But, now that I think about it more, it seems that a micropipet just isn't as sexy as a 2L Erlenmeyer flask filled with grape juice. Therefore, I dare a supermodel to just try to make focusing a fluorescent microscope on a single strand of rhodamine-labeled actin look sexy! If Tyra Banks can't do it, no one can (maybe Iman). Suddenly it appears that I don't tune my fiancee's TV shows out quite as well as I had believed...

Uh...

Anyway, there are stereotypes about scientists that can sometimes be kind of accurate, at least part of the time. Let's examine them a bit:

1) Scientists wear glasses. This is frequently true, and perhaps even observed at a greater frequency than the general population outside the lab. However, it could also be true that those outside the lab are more likely to wear contacts to correct their vision.

2) Scientists have wild hair. This depends on what you could call wild. Most men in science maintain either conservative short hair or let it grow very long. I have yet to observe any hairstyle trends (beyond low-maitenance) among female scientists. It is possible that scientists are more likely to avoid going to go get hair cuts when they need one. It is also possible that scientists are less likely to brush out the bedhead in the morning.

3) Scientists are nerds. This is true. Mostly (there are always a couple of exceptions). Otherwise we wouldn't be scientists in the first place.

4) Scientists are all anti-social deviants who universally aspire to mad, crazed experiments. This may be true. We all have our moments where we indulge ourselves in a cinematic mad scientist trope. But by in large, scientists are just dangerous people who are better kept busy in the lab than bored on the street (consider: since scientists are generally inclined to want to know how things work, how safe would it be if all scientists were working from non-standardized improvised laboratories?).

5) Scientists have bad hygiene. This is only true if we have a shitton of data that needs to be crunched into a grant application or presentation by tomorrow. Therefore, this is always true because there is always a shitton of data to go through. However, it is not true so long as one does not consider the standard of hygiene to include several daily facial scrubs, moisturizers, daily shaving, perfume, and ironed clothing. In conclusion, our bad hygiene isn't nearly so bad as it is often made out to be.



Huh. I started this post out with a point in mind. And then somewhere I lost it. As such, I apologize for rambling.

Typical scientist pictures!!!!1!:
Oh, wait, they uploaded to the top...