The Isle of Marm

My longstanding public affection for R.N. notwithstanding, isn’t it the best when someone phrases the problem so …correctly?  This frame is from yesterday and I literally had a bit of a moment at my desk as I read it.

NB: Printed out copies of the pleasure calculus strip  and the party of functions strip are still epoxied onto the front of my old computational notebooks in the Archives in 94720. 

(The Seaward Is Not An Option.)

Not just everyday people have doubts.

(I like this far more than I should.)

Looking for data from before I got competent at file naming is aggravating.  However, I did find the data from two non-marathons worth of literal experimental “running” for sweat collection. 

The RDA for B5 (Pantothenic Acid) is 5mg and I don’t remember why I wrote that its Molecular Weight is 476.  Because it isn’t.

Best note is probably “BETTER THAN SYRUP! BUT CARBONATED. BLECH.”

Human Subject 0 was so bummed that these sweat samples didn’t get used.

Work has implications.

“When you find that you have written a sentence more than 30 words long, I want you to diagram it to:

1. Punish yourself,
2. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and
3. Break yourself of this habit.”

—Beloved former boss/co-author, who should probably remain unnamed

“Mentors & Tormentors” is probably going to be a really important chapter in I’m Not a Mad Scientist: I’m Just Disappointed. 

(alternative mental image for “a compound called ‘testosterone’”)

My syntactic rigor has not always been sufficient to make me insufferable.

In the proof I’ve been reading, my coauthor found 2 things to correct.  I’ve found 89.  Not even weird diction things!  I fell asleep last night thinking that I’d just let it go. 

I woke up today knowing I Mexican’t. 

Who’s got two thumbs and loves jokes about handedness?

Fun fact: I went through a stage where I kept a lab notebook with my right hand and a non-lab notebook with my left hand.  One of those notebooks was chock full of craziness.  Of course, once it’s peer reviewed, people stop thinking it’s so crazy.

</long dark teatime of the soul>

Bibliotecadventures #1. The BCCC Library

I went through a stage, in the late 90s, where I could only make stuff on the unbleached recycled paper from the BCCC Library.  It was my magic-feather.  I’d grab a ream of it and tear the tractor treads off and then: anything.  Bleached white paper in notebooks, thin stationarily-interesting vellum, thick card-stocky art paper—I’d choke.  (Then.)  I have a stack of moleskines in my livingroom (#36) that people have given me over time because they are nice (the people), they are nice (the notebooks), and I am “arty” enough that it is a reasonable bet that I will appreciate them.  And I do… appreciate the sentiment.  But I find bound pages unnecessarily terrifying.  Keeping good lab notebooks has helped push against this, but gimme a low-stress stage and that’s where I’ll work prolifically: a little off-white, a little unpolished, and everyone’ll be more comfortable.

There are, admittedly, 2 tiers of work, though.  The papyrus phase has felt pretty high stakes, in as much as I don’t have tons of the stuff around (heritage-wise, I do know how to make it, but I’m not actively growing those plants, so “phase” acknowledges ~limited lifetime,) so I kind of do have to get in the right place, execution-wise.  But, when it’s worked, it usually has worked pretty well.  Tier 1: High risk, high reward.   When the stakes are lower?  3x5 post-its, Toaster pastries, Etch-a-sketches, Anything digital: I will crank all sorts of things out.  But I can hide my mistakes.  I can bypass the need to do a project “in order”.  I can bury the horrifying experiments gone awry.  I can scan and trash.  Even babies can “generate content”.  Sometimes it’s called “pooping”.  Sometimes it’s still awesome. 

I worried briefly, in October when I was moving the pop(t)arts from my brother’s freezer in the South Bay to a lab fridge in the East Bay, about where I left the tortilla I made before the Hodgtortilla.  It was grotesque. (Er, more grotesque; and, unfortunately,  obviously my doing—which led to the panic that it could be found, traced back to me, then: shame.)  I realized, seconds ago: I totally ate it.  With peanut-butter and…something that went well with peanutbutter, but wasn’t usual.  I think it was fake american cheese product from the dollar store.  Because that’s how you roll when you’re freelancing!  “Dr. Marm’s made this month’s rent by drawing Ming the Merciless for a tee-shirt, let’s have some celebratory cheese simulacrum!” I did, and I did.  Fall of 2009 was a wonderful, albeit confusing, time.  But—Tier 2: Low stakes. Occasional experimentally delicious rewards.

Back to the library—over 2 decades prior, as the BCCC was also the home-base for my preschool and where my mom worked, I likely logged more hours there than probably every library afterward besides UCB Chem and maybe ORNL Res.  I read every book in the young persons’ section by the summer of 1988.  They’d let you take 8 books out at a time, so I would make a pile of 16 books and take 8 out on my card and 8 out on my mom’s.  Fascinatingly, I’ve never gotten remotely close to maxing out a credit card, which I only just now realized this behavior is reminiscent of.  In H.S., I’d go there a couple nights/week because it would give me 3-4 hours in the evening to “do research” without parental supervision.  

Note: I did not do anything especially inappropriate or especially cool—I got good at origami and wrote papers to fund my extracurricular excursions (a little inappropriate, but in a “maybe the ends justify the means” way)—but, it was just a place of relief from the weird stresses of being.  Also, toward the end there, I realized I could pull 11x17 paper out of the photocopiers if I wanted bigger sheets without the perforations.  HUGE. THIEF.

Ironically, though I was responsible for the design of the laser safety manual back West, I wouldn’t actually have any lasery responsibilities until coming back East. 

The best part of laser safety is the fish.

1. Make an observation
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Validate hypothesis
4. Pee in pants a little

Novelty is fine, but consistency is fundamentally gratifying.