Your Friendly Neighborhood Scientist

I know from past experience that living outside of one's native country can cause your patriotism to pop up in the oddest of places. I don't mean that you will suddenly have the urge to shout, "I'm an American!" on the subway or anything, but you may end up cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner for two people or buying a basketful of a brand of cereal that you recognize but never even ate at home because you failed to figure out the Swiss Post Office that day. Recently that patriotism popped up in the form of our absentee ballots. Kris and I were so enthusiastic that we made ourselves some tea, sat down with our ballots and laptops, and complained that the ballots didn't come with a little "I voted!" sticker. Like I said, strange places.

The great thing about absentee ballots is that they let look up every candidate and read about every issue with the ballot right in front of you. You could take hours to fill it out.  

On the other hand, the terrible thing about absentee ballots is that they let look up every candidate and read about every issue with the ballot right in front of you. You could take hours to fill it out. 

Studying up on this year's election revealed some interesting things. Not so much about the issues issues; that would have been nice. No. This year I learned that in a state-level race between an idiot, a bigot, and a fanatical activist, I apparently prefer the fanatic. Sure, she may shout slogans and chain herself to her desk to show her commitment to a meeting, but at least she will have read up on the issues and doesn't dismiss an entire sub-population of the country as lesser people. 

I also learned that it is seemingly fashionable to use some part of your campaign website to hate on scientists. Come on America. If politicians bother to put down science in their campaign materials, it must be seen as a selling point. It must be seen as something that will help get them elected. Why?

That said, at least we didn't pull an Italy. For those of you unfamiliar with the situation, the italian judicial system recently convicted a group of scientists for failing to predict an earthquake. As a member of the scientific community, I find this upsetting. As someone who just spent five years discerning a ~800,000 seismic history from the plate boundary that has yielded some of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, this gives me stomach pains. Americans may currently be enjoying writing off scientists along with other questionable practices, like wearing jeggings and the use of puns during serious news casts, but at least we haven't done this. 

I'm not going to turn this into a rant about why our culture has turned its back on science; too many people far more eloquent and gifted than I am have already made that point better than I ever could. Instead I want to use this post to make another point: 

Scientists are people too. Just weird ones. 

Like our common understanding of most careers, the average person gets his or her image of a scientist from popular culture. But based on movies and television, that would mean that all lawyers are eloquent and attractive and spend most of their day drinking coffee in thousand-dollar suits, and over the course of five years all surgeons must have sex with all other surgeons. I imagine at least some part of those analyses are inaccurate.

Television representations of science and scientists have their own short comings. We do not all work in futuristic-looking labs in designer clothing while listening to The Who. We don't all have access to the latest technology, and we certainly aren't all attractive enough to be on the covers of magazines. We also aren't all mentally unhinged from our secret histories of hopping through various timelines and dimensions. The reality falls somewhere between the squints on Bones, the cast of The Big Bang Theory, that arrogant math jerk from Good Will Hunting, and Doc Brown from Back to the Future. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Scientists often laugh at these representations. I know that as a geologist most people base my job description on Jurassic Park or Tremors. This is adorable at parties and deplorable in politics. To deal with the rift that exists between the daily life of scientists and who society thinks we are, we turn to humor. Two of my favorites are xkcd and phd comics. For example, see how each of these web-comics handles the tv-science versus real-science problem. First, xkcd. 

...and television science, according to PhD comics. 

Taken a step further, PhD comics addresses how these misrepresentations of science affect those we know and love. Sadly, this happens more often than any of us would like to admit. 

All of that being said, scientists are not completely in the clear. There is a reason that we are so easily parodied. There is a reason that, if you showed up to a costume party in a lab coat with crazy hair and some goggles, people would know you are a mad scientist. There is a reason that Sheldon Cooper is freaking hilarious. I believe that xkcd uses the following comic to display this fully. 

In general, most scientists know that they are a little off. Sure, a few think that everyone else in the world is off, but most of us know. How do we get this way? How do people go from the curious and mildly self-destructive person represented in the comic above, to the socially non-functional person represented in the xkcd comic below? 

Basically, the problem is that we surround ourselves with other scientists. We go to labs and universities and spend the day talking to other people who have spent years devoting themselves to a singular task. We surround ourselves by people who are all doing this: (phd.comics)


















It isn't glamorous. We may be weird, but when encouraged that weirdness yields cell phones and cancer treatments and plastic and gortex and heart stints and electricity and the internet. Most of us want to make the world a better place. Most of us genuinely want to make sure that the things we put in text books and teach our doctors are as close to the truth as our most accurate methods can get us. When new methods develop, we don't complain about having to do it again; we fight over the chance to get to. We fight over that chance to slog through that mud and compile those samples and come up with the best data possible. That person collecting dead fish and sleeping on the lab floor pursuing truth certainly isn't your local congressman; it's your friendly neighborhood scientist.