Alison’s New Job at AAAS: Day 2
(American Academy for the Advancement of Science or “triple a, s“)
The commute – hasn’t gotten to me yet. Waiting for that day when the Metro breaks down and I curse public transportation. But for the moment it’s kinda nice to be able to sit and read for half an hour before work. Though I do find myself thinking that everyone on the subway in DC is far too civilized. Everyone quiet, politely ignoring you while they read the morning newspaper, bury their nose in a novel, or sleep. I’m tempted to play mind games with them. Do some sort of social experiment. Is there something wrong with me for thinking that these people need their lives shaken up a bit?
The people – all seem nice enough so far. My cubemate is 60ish woman who works on graphics for the Marketing department. Haven’t heard much out of MaryEllen yet. There is an Allison who lives next door to me – I think she dislikes that I’m causing name confusion. Waiting to see what kind of nickname they decide to give me at work.
The job – it’s going to be a lot of meetings, a lot of trade shows, some mindless sending of e-mails and some writing.
The dork factor – surprisingly low. You’d expect these people to all be science nuts. Not in the marketing department, it seems – though I may be sorely underestimating these guys. To raise the bar I’ve got a quote from Bill Nye the Science Guy and a copy of the periodic table of elements that I’m gonna tack to my wall.
Bill Nye quote (I think this was from Wired – I clipped it, so I’m not sure anymore)
Q: Science and comedy seem like strange bedfellows. How do you make serious science funny?
A: How can you not make it funny? Humor is everywhere, in that there’s irony in just about anything a human does. There’s all this PB&J: passion, beauty and joy. But there’s also the futility of the whole thing. We’re just humans on this dying planet, and it doesn’t much matter what we do. We’re always setting up expectations, whether scientific or otherwise, and failing to meet them. That creates comedic tension. The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh about it.
The journal Science
The main goal of my department is to get people to be members of AAAS, the major benefit to scientists being a subscription to the weekly journal Science. It contains light science reading such as “Structures of the Bacterial Ribosome at 3.5 Angstrom Resolution”, and “Retrograde Signaling by Syt 4 Induces Presynaptic Release and Synapse-Specific Growth”. In trying to read the publication that I’m trying to promote, I find myself mentally substituting the word “blah” for any scientific term over 7 letters. This about doubles my reading speed, without much loss of comprehension. Win-win, I say.
Alas, I don’t think this apathy towards words I do not know will be long-lived. The stupid magazine has already taunted me into re-familiarizing myself with what a mole is (“The amount of a substance that contains as many atoms, molecules, ions, or other elementary units as the number of atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12. The number is 6.0225 × 1023, or Avogadro’s number. Also called gram molecule.” It can be used in making calculations about gasses.) , and I’m sure that I’ll be digging back to my high school physics and chemistry lessons to try to make sense of more of what I’m reading.
Book Review
Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss.
This may be hard to believe, but Truss manages to make reading about grammar fun – highbrow, but fun. Really. I swear. How can you not like this example of how an added comma can change the meaning of a sentence?
With comma: “Now I must go and get on, my lover”
Without comma: “Now I must go and get on my lover”
Other
A fellow Terp has a cartoon on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
Aaron McGruder was writing for the Diamondback while I was at UMCP.
See his strip-turned-toon on TV:
http://www.adultswim.com/shows/boondocks/index.html
