Science! at the dinner table
Author's note: I started this post, like, a week ago, and I'm just now finishing it, so the italicky part is the stuff I wrote a week ago and the normal part is anything but.
I really need to get going to class, but I thought I should post something about my new weird life and the evidence of it displayed last night. As a graduate student, I'm required to take a 1-credit seminar course each semester, so this semester, I'm taking one called Adaptive Peaks. Aside from no one knowing for sure what the name means, it involves hosting scientific speakers for 1-hour lectures. In preparation for each speaker, they send us a journal article that they either wrote or is related to the subject they'll be presenting. Then we students get together as a group and discuss. This week's presenter spoke about how a peanut is neither a pea nor a nut the geologic evidence for previous periods of carbon-driven global warming and, based on the fossil record, what happened to life on Earth during that period.
Anyway, long story short, the presentation was a whole lot of unfun. I kind of wanted to go home and drown myself in Tequila after that, but I was reminded that I had volunteered to go to the ritual dinner after the speech. My only information on this dinner was that we were required to go to at least 2 per semester, and that several members of the faculty would accompany us graduate students to the dinner. I figured, "Hey, if faculty are there, I can at least get to know some of them better since I'm stuck with them for at least 2 years." So I volunteered to go. It was only when I got to the restaurant that I learned the faculty had bailed on us. And the speaker had brought her garrulous husband. And that he was also a strongly opinionated scientist.
So there we were, three grad students and two professors, neither of whom we had ever met before. So, of course, we had to talk shop. I was really lost for most of the conversation. The speaker's husband spent a lot of time talking about taxonomy and how it fit the broken-plate theory, and the speaker lady was like, "I hope it's not true because it means everything we've ever done is meaningless," and I was like, "I love lamp." The guy even shooed away the poor waiter that was just trying to take our order, not once, but twice. Eventually we got dinner and talked some more about global warming and before I could order some hard liquor, the guy essentially shouted, "The problem isn't energy, it's the population! There's too damn many of us! We need to stop paying people to have kids!" (Here he was referring to the government's practice of giving people additional tax credits for having more kids, and not referring to some weird form of prostitution.) And while there is merit to his argument, it's not the best thing to shout out in the middle of a restaurant full of Italian families. So we got some looks. And I started understanding why most "normal" people think scientists are alien life forms. Note to scientists everywhere: Let's try being less socially inept. People might actually listen to us once in a while.
After some more awkward conversation in which I had to try to seem like I knew what everyone was talking about ("Yes, I believe my favorite is the Oligocene epoch.") we finished dinner and decided to order dessert. And suddenly it was parlor trick time. I learned how to suspend a bottle of ketchup above the table using only 3 glasses and 3 knives. I learned how to rearrange knives to get the olive out of the martini glass. I learned that no one will ever listen to what scientists have to say because we are inherently weird.
I think I deserve a merit badge.
I really need to get going to class, but I thought I should post something about my new weird life and the evidence of it displayed last night. As a graduate student, I'm required to take a 1-credit seminar course each semester, so this semester, I'm taking one called Adaptive Peaks. Aside from no one knowing for sure what the name means, it involves hosting scientific speakers for 1-hour lectures. In preparation for each speaker, they send us a journal article that they either wrote or is related to the subject they'll be presenting. Then we students get together as a group and discuss. This week's presenter spoke about how a peanut is neither a pea nor a nut the geologic evidence for previous periods of carbon-driven global warming and, based on the fossil record, what happened to life on Earth during that period.
Anyway, long story short, the presentation was a whole lot of unfun. I kind of wanted to go home and drown myself in Tequila after that, but I was reminded that I had volunteered to go to the ritual dinner after the speech. My only information on this dinner was that we were required to go to at least 2 per semester, and that several members of the faculty would accompany us graduate students to the dinner. I figured, "Hey, if faculty are there, I can at least get to know some of them better since I'm stuck with them for at least 2 years." So I volunteered to go. It was only when I got to the restaurant that I learned the faculty had bailed on us. And the speaker had brought her garrulous husband. And that he was also a strongly opinionated scientist.
So there we were, three grad students and two professors, neither of whom we had ever met before. So, of course, we had to talk shop. I was really lost for most of the conversation. The speaker's husband spent a lot of time talking about taxonomy and how it fit the broken-plate theory, and the speaker lady was like, "I hope it's not true because it means everything we've ever done is meaningless," and I was like, "I love lamp." The guy even shooed away the poor waiter that was just trying to take our order, not once, but twice. Eventually we got dinner and talked some more about global warming and before I could order some hard liquor, the guy essentially shouted, "The problem isn't energy, it's the population! There's too damn many of us! We need to stop paying people to have kids!" (Here he was referring to the government's practice of giving people additional tax credits for having more kids, and not referring to some weird form of prostitution.) And while there is merit to his argument, it's not the best thing to shout out in the middle of a restaurant full of Italian families. So we got some looks. And I started understanding why most "normal" people think scientists are alien life forms. Note to scientists everywhere: Let's try being less socially inept. People might actually listen to us once in a while.
After some more awkward conversation in which I had to try to seem like I knew what everyone was talking about ("Yes, I believe my favorite is the Oligocene epoch.") we finished dinner and decided to order dessert. And suddenly it was parlor trick time. I learned how to suspend a bottle of ketchup above the table using only 3 glasses and 3 knives. I learned how to rearrange knives to get the olive out of the martini glass. I learned that no one will ever listen to what scientists have to say because we are inherently weird.
I think I deserve a merit badge.