notageek

I’m perfectly aware that, less a few generally-recognized rules of conduct, like not naming things after yourself and sticking things you don’t understand with long acronyms, scientists can name their discoveries pretty much whatever they want. I’m also aware that most substances get slapped with names before their structures have been elucidated, so researchers usually pick a functional name, or one related to the source, and add “in” to the end. Moreover, I’m acutely aware that non-English names often sound pretty stupid when translated into English. Daigaku, to pick a random example. Who the hell thought up “big school” to mean “university”? Probably “dai” as a prefix has some overlapping but not completely congruent meaning to “big” and all that and blah and stuff.

So let’s review today’s cell bio lecture: Microtubule-Associated Proteins is a functional acronym, as is Microtubule Organising Centre. Catastrophin and kinesin are functional names, even if catastrophin is a little silly, because the microtubule disassembly process is actually called catastrophe. And katanin is a dumb para-functional moniker that sounds like it was thought up at the last minute for an article rushed to publication by an extraordinarily dorky fangirl/fanboy researcher.

I mean, come on. Katanin. Swordin. It doesn’t even describe what the enzyme does very well. Scissorin would be better, or for that matter hasamiin, but that just don’t sound so cool.

I suppose there is the remote possibility of the research having been done in Japan, but where English-language papers are often full of newly-coined terms, Japanese evo papers are more often full of numbered discoveries. Maybe that’s a function of bacterial strains rather than new enzymes, but I’d like to think Japanese researchers wouldn’t let each other get away with being so lame, either. Katanin. Geez.

Or rather, help me do someone cool and awesome and deserving a favour.

There’s a certain aggressively mediocre book I invested a couple waking days of my life in, didn’t finish, and got bored to tears by. Sleepy tears, not tears of pain, but tears nonetheless. Its author has several more entertaining, more fluffy-yummy-readable-no-work books out, and I blithely assumed this would be along the same lines. Because of the author, this book is, IMO, way more popular than it deserves.

This book, of course, is Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson. Its ISBN is 0380977427.

There’s another book, a tech-based thriller with sexy hot scientist chicks, plenty of actual sex, plenty of science, plenty of eat-it-up good plot-essential action, and not nearly enough people know about it, IMO, because of its author. And publisher, I suppose; they are, in this case the same.

This book, I am sure most of my audience already knows, is Acts of the Apostles, written by John F.X. Sundman, and it is way more deserving of the audience who bought Quicksilver than Quicksilver itself is. In my extremely unhumble opinion. Its ISBN is 192975213X. At any rate, the marginal utility to John “ambiguous middle name” Sundman of someone purchasing his book(s) is unquestionably higher than the marginal utility to Neal “can’t write a good ending” Stephenson of someone purchasing one of his. So besides spamming your entire family and social quadrilateral with the coolness of books sundman, please join me in rescuing the Stephenson audience on Amazon from a fate worse than The Big U, by recommending Acts of the Apostles in its place. In Quicksilver’s place, I mean.

“I like the endosymbiosis idea,” a group member said, after the class split into groups to discuss the genesis of the Archaeal, Eubacterial and Eukaryotic lineages.

“The wha?” I asked articulately. The endosymbiotic theory is the rather well-supported idea that chloroplasts and mitochondria derive from cyanobacterial and alpha-proteobacterial lineages that were engulfed by primitive eukaryotes, and it hasn’t got a whole lot to do with ideas on how the major domains diverged, except as a side-effect of eukaryotes becoming heterotrophs.

“You know, the one where the two come back together,” she said, forking two linages in the air and bringing them together to illustrate what is generally known as a chimerical genesis.

“That’s the chimera theory.”

“Yeah, endosymbiosis.”

“That’s not endosymbiosis. And you did a different chimeric lineage than the illustration you were talking about in the book.”

“Anyway,” says the fellow in the group with whom I survived high school. “Let’s talk more about the LUCA gene pool idea, which is kind of like how Woese was talking about the progenote having gene trees but organismal networks.”

“Yeah!” She starts drawing. “there’s like tons of endosymbiosis going on in this pool of last common ancestors.”

“That’s not endosymbiosis, that’s lateral gene transfer.” How can you possibly confuse the two? “I like the gene pool idea but it’s really just a way of shoehorning early evolution into current evolutionary principles, and in a sense it really just shoves the question back in time and obfuscates it.”

“Well I think it’s really too limiting to talk about it in two dimensions. I mean, it’s really a lot more complex than that and it’s just…hard to express.”

“Yeah,” another group member chimed in. “All these papers we’re reading, the thinking is SO LINEAR.”

“Yeah, it’s just so two-dimensional and doesn’t take so many things into account.”

Indeed. Like how some people don’t have any better ideas, or can’t point out the flaws in the current model except for “linearity”, or how they can’t articulate how the use of another dimension would improve their model except by “complexity”, or how they resort to the wispy awe of environmental science majors when asked to propose possibilities.

Maybe they ARE environmental science majors, come to think of it.

A few weeks after I started seeing the person who is now my partner, I suddenly, burstingly, HAD to explain something: I am really boring. Really boring. I don’t like large groups of people, loud music or feta cheese. My hobbies include cooking and gardening. I attend the prepharmacy club, and I like museums.

On planes I’m content to hide behind my book until it’s time to start popping Dramamine, but once I landed one of those chatty plane seatmates who seem to believe either that other people enjoy random bursts of conversation with people they’ll never see again, or that deep connections can be formed in the space of a flight from LAX to EUG. My nosy seatmate, who I suspect was fresh out of a team-building seminar, asked me what I want out of life. I, hoping to shut hiim up with the sheer mundanity of my aspirations, said, “A house. With a vegetable garden, and cats. And maybe kids and a husband.”

It’s not entirely untrue, because “really fucking boring” is just another way of saying “comfortingly stable”. I don’t have to have a house with a vegetable garden, but I want the safety and stability that they represent.

And I’m aware that’s appalling to a great many people, who think that life is about living to the fullest extent, about seeking challenge and adventure and reaching to extend and pusing to endure and not giving up one’s dreams. I, clearly, have given up the dreams of my younger self.

Let me explain about my younger self. I have been depressed for half of my few years. It didn’t get really bad until a few years ago, but middle school and high school consisted of a sustained effort not to think about the future. My grades were so fucking good because I wouldn’t think about anything else. For a period of several years I planned on a distant future suicide. My younger self didn’t have wild dreams about travelling Europe and working shitty waitressing jobs. I’d make a shitty waitress anyway. My younger self didn’t have fucking aspirations about adventure and potential and honour and glory. My younger self was in too much fucking pain.

I can recognize that pain now as being minor relative to what I have survived now, and I can recognize what I have survived as being Not Really That Bad. But my younger self didn’t know that, and never came up with the overextended fabrications that are supposed to consistute the ideas young people have about their futures. Contemplating seriously a future that is not miserable or even just tolerable but that includes genuine joy is both a recent development and fucking revolutionary.

I realise that my parents have a house and a vegetable garden and are happy, and that I have ostensibly conflated factors in my belief that the foundations of my happiness will be similar, but it would be just as stupid of me to blindly assume that I am so different from my parents as to assume that my happiness is of a piece with theirs. I have done neither. My own “fullest extent” is not determined by someone else’s higher tolerance of adrenaline, or someone else’s ill-suitedness to the details of my quiet happiness.

Yesterday I turned in my application to the UW School of Pharmacy to my own school’s Career Center, where the Reference File Specialist (Who is named Jen, but I don’t know her last name) will put my reference letters in and toss it in the mail. I have already applied postage.

Getting that done should be a relief, but knowing that it’s out of my hands is not as wonderful as I thought it would be. Sitting around until March waiting to get called for an interview is not relieving, and neither are the sudden twinges of panic that I missed something in my forty-odd scannings of my completed application form, and that because of a blodge on the page or forgetting to put down where I did some of my undergraduate work, I’ll be denied admission. I know that I put that down, but I might have missed something else in the entire four-page application form.

At some point on Thursday, after waiting weeks for ETS to send my 6-year-old AP scores, and after several bouts of panic involving UW not accepting IB scores and my therefore having neither a freshman general biology sequence or the composition requirement, and my statistics class being four quarter-credits, and transcripts being processed incorrectly by certain testing agencies, I decided that my application was not going to get any better by my reading it ten more times. So I enclosed the money order for the application fee, because I don’t write cheques, and I shoved some extra papers in to weigh it for postage, and I handed it over to Jen.

Then I went to the library and checked out a copy of “Flemish Polyphony of the High Rennaisance”.