Dr. Shellie

Last week I went go-karting. I had never been before, and I was picturing the Indy 500– race cars, an outdoor track, and grandstands. I was terrified. So I was relieved to find that driving a go kart is pretty much like riding a lawn mower. The racetrack was nothing more than walls of stacked-up tires inside a warehouse– pretty twisty but definitely not scary.

Our group of 20 suited up in jump suits and helmets for the practice round. I started out like the cautious driver I am, braking into the turns and trying to avoid skidding around on the floor. Meanwhile, my teammates zoomed past me, screeching into the turns and lapping me effortlessly. Towards the end of the practice session, I noticed a giant projected score board on the wall, listing everyone’s times. Darn. I was last.

When we got back to the waiting room, I realized just how bad my performance was. While the first-place driver had a lap time of 30 seconds, mine was 50 seconds. Clearly, I thought, it was possible to go MUCH faster. I would just have to learn how. After grilling the winner for tips on technique, I headed into the 2nd round with renewed enthusiasm. I was not going to be last this time!

Aaah, wishful thinking. I headed in to round two gunning every straight away, braking at the last minute into every turn. For a lap or two, I climbed to second-to-last place. And then I started to slip. Firmly in last place again, I got hit hard by another car. My ankles hurt, and I got scared. I considered giving up. But no– I was not going to lose! I gritted my teeth, pounded on the steering wheel, and set off again, zooming around the track and skidding around the turns with the accelerator pressed to the floor.

Well, I lost. Not as badly as the first time– only by about 5 seconds per lap. But I still lost. As it turns out, some of the other drivers had not only honed their reflexes over years of video game playing (who knew the simulations were that physically accurate?), but were less afraid of crashing!

On the way home, I tried to revert to "normal" driving. It was tough– I kept wanting to race up to the stop lights and then slam on the brakes. Afterwards, adrenaline still high, I picked fights with friends all day in hopes of winning political arguments. I hate losing. But go-karting was fantastic.

LASERS:

laser tag, laser eye surgery, laser pointers, laser-guided missile systems, laser welding, laser detection of gravitational waves, the laser in your CD player, laser spectroscopy, laser rangefinders…

Try THAT next time you have to argue for funding of basic research. Do you think Einstein had your hypothetical future CD player in mind when he was playing with the idea of spontaneous and induced emission?

Somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve been suffering from some kind of ambivalence about the Internet. And since just about the only possible (long, long term) social benefit of my research I can come up with is that some day, years from now, it will make the Internet faster, I thought I should get to the bottom of it. So here goes:

Things I like about the Internet (in random order)

• Looking up articles online– much faster than when I had to go find them in the library.
• It’s much easier to find/apply for colleges, grad schools, jobs… remember when you had to look up these things in books or newspapers?
• Keeping in touch with friends
• It’s easy to look up opening and closing times of stores, addresses on Google maps,…
• I can figure out what to do with my cardoon (that’s a vegetable) in seconds
• Wikipedia. cool.
• Craigslist
• Reading New York Times Sunday magazine and the New Yorker
• My blog

Bad stuff about the Internet

• pedophiles, stalkers, etc.
• 419 scams (which are allegedly fueling the growth of the Internet infrastructure in Nigeria, by the way)
• 80% of Internet content is porn
• with the Web comes Addictive Web Surfing
• MySpace still creeps me out
• The kids I teach have a really short attention span and I am blaming it on the Web.
• Stream-of-consciousness blogging

Hmm… so, in summary: the Internet has hugely increased our quick and easy access to a huge range of information, breaking down geographical barriers. The cost is a slight loss in the meaning of time and space– instead of reading the New York Times every Sunday morning in that coffee shop 4 blocks over, I can read it any time I like from my own sofa, with the danger of losing hours to unchecked surfing. The Internet has also hugely increased our ease of communication– with a slight cost of making life easy for all the stalkers/perverts/identity thiefs out there. The Internet has enabled self expression, self-publishing– with a slight cost of an increase in content-less content. But I guess if I’m not that interested in stream-of-consciousness blogs, I don’t actually have to read them.

So, OK, the Internet is a good thing. Phew! 

I have noticed a syndrome among researchers in my lab. I’ll call it "Only-says-’hi’-when-he-has-results disorder." It afflicts a certain type of  individual, who is rarely seen in the department during working hours, preferring instead to work from his home computer, spend time in the library, or come to the lab between midnight and 6am. If you do see him in the hallway, he will probably give you the briefest of nods and continue walking. After all, he saw you yesterday, and yesterday is pretty much the same as today, is the same as last month, right? Such seemingly arbitrary time divisions fade to insignificance when you are solving important problems.

Then, one day, at a departmental coffee hour, he will pop up out of nowhere with a huge grin. "HI SHELLIE! HOW ARE YOU?" (no pause, here) "I was working on a problem related to crystallography of the surface modifications of carbon nanotubes" (insert actual sensible topic here) "and found this fantastic result– it turns out that by using magic-ase solution, I could supertwist the amino chains and show that blah, blah, blah…" Darn. Now you are stuck there for half an hour, forced to make murmuring grunts to acknowledge his brilliance. Darn. Using magic-ase to supertwist the amino chains (or whatever) was a pretty good idea. Why didn’t you think of that?

At this point, syndrome-afflicted individuals differ. Some abruptly walk away. Others follow up their monologue with the question "So what are you working on?" followed by a somewhat doubtful "do you think that’s a good area to be working in?" Either way, your ego has been effectively deflated for a bit. As yet I have no solutions. Any ideas?

Larry Summers has resigned as president of Harvard… but I keep hearing about his infamous comments on women in science, even now. I just found this great position statement from AWIS (Association for Women in Science) on their website today. Check out the impressive list of cosigners. I also found this excellent op-ed by Virginia Valian written last year.