I’m writing this on the eve of an early flight, so I’m feeling nostalgic for the high school days when I kept a very strict, self-imposed bedtime and any procrastinated 5-paragraph essay which I had, until minutes before, been laboring over sentence by sentence got wrapped up in a really unhinged, self-contradictory stream-of-consciousness in which I inevitably admitted to not really believing anything that I had just been claiming the moment the clock turned 9:30PM and I started feeling loopy and not a little encroached upon.
I’m ready to admit that most of what I’ve been torturing myself over has been trying to shoehorn a bunch of indirect brags about how good I am (was?) at taking tests into evidence for what is probably too simple a claim to justify a blog post.
In writing them out though, I realized that they mostly make me sound lazy, and it’s more dignified to brag directly anyway.
(I’m weirdly very good at taking tests relative to how much I study or know.)
However, since I’m also far too invested at this point to totally abandon the post, I’m just going to go ahead and publish it and replace the bragging with unrelated anecdotes.
Among my least favorite neologisms is the acronym STEAM, standing for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math.
It’s not that I have anything against the Arts as a field.
It’s not that I value it any less than those other fields.
I don’t even have anything against cross-disciplinary work or education.
But STEM isn’t just an acronym of respectable fields.
They all clearly have something else in common at least aesthetically.
If you let in Arts, you’d have to let in Literature and then we’d have LAMEST which just wouldn’t do.
Nevertheless, it got me thinking about what the connecting thread of STEM was (other than its devotees all wearing pocket protectors).
Since STEM is almost exclusively used in the context of education (if someone told me they worked in STEM, I think I would assume they worked in STEM education), let’s start there.
In my experience, the curricula of Math and Science classes diverge from what would be considered “doing” Math or Science.
The classes are mostly about teaching facts and some skills to get you up to speed on what everyone’s figured out so far.
And not even everything either, just the most basic things from the few most fundamental areas or Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, and maybe Statistics.
And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
If you go into any technical field, the groundwork is probably covered by one or some of those.
However, the necessary evil is that this format gives the impression that all school subjects are sort of the same with the only difference being whether you’re learning Science, History, or Literature flavored facts.
I don’t think I’ve ever taken a “Technology” class, and I dodged all the engineering classes I could at MIT.
From being surrounded by engineering majors, I did glean that there are good classes that do plenty of hands-on engineering-type projects that are much more than following a set of instructions.
But that’s at a school that was founded on the premise that college should provide practical knowledge so much that its motto is Mens et Manus and it has 1/4 of STEM in its name.
My impression is that most people end up in engineering careers because they took a lot of science classes and engineering was the non-academia option as evidenced by the fact that the major you do to become a software engineer is computer science although I guess that’s the exception rather than the rule.
I wonder if it will change soon to align with all the other engineering majors.
Anyway, the point is that doing Science and Engineering are very different from each other and each very different from being a student.
The motivation of the Scientist is to understand the world, and the motivation of the Engineer is to bend the Universe to their whims.
They’re mutually beneficial, but a person who was leaned more towards one motivation might feel out of place in the other profession.
If there is a similarity it’s that both achieve their goals by constraining physical systems.
The Scientist by, like my sister’s revelatory-to-her-younger-brothers Clue strategy, constraining the possible answers to the question.
The Engineer by eliminating anything that can go wrong.
A long time ago, someone told me (in a lecture or talk but other than that I don’t recall the context) that one night camping he stepped on what he thought was a bent stick that hit him in the leg but which actually turned out to be a snake that bit him which has ever since been a big fear of mine.
A month ago, on a dark morning, I was running through Woodland Park after a loop of Greenlake when I felt something hit me in the head.
My first thought was that I ran into a branch which is something I’m used to doing and that’s pretty much what it felt like aside from being sort of on the back of my head.
But since it was dark, my immediate next thought was that it was a snake.
I took a few more steps to continue my run, but it was too weird, so I turned around to see whether there were any snakes on the ground slithering away or any weirdly shaped branches that looked like they could hit you on the back of the head.
Just as I was turning around, I got the impression of an ~18-inch grey bird about to hit me in the head again.
With the investigation wrapped up, I booked it out of the park.
A cute little food shop recently opened in my neighborhood.
It originally had an engraved wood sign that said “Pique-nique” and a picnic basket.
The internet informs me that “pique-nique” is just the French word for “picnic”, but I assumed it was just meant to rhyme with “boutique”.
But it was recently changed, by putting another engraved wooden sign that says “Baskette” (not French for basket) over “Pique-nique”.
I hope they changed it because people didn’t want to be angry while eating al fresco.
Maybe I’ll check it out in 6 months when it gets to be picnic weather again.
This week, I had a flash of a memory which I haven’t thought of in a while.
I searched through my mood tracking app, and sure enough, 30 months ago, on May 1, 2021: “good “Good 17 miler out along minuteman. Met Esha and walked around. Crazy roller skating robert came up and talked to me in Boston common. Feel slightly feverish. Watched carol”
Did you spot it?
I checked my diary entry from that week to compare.
It was mostly about wanting to start a blog, but there were more details:
I was sitting in Boston Common reading when this guy who introduced himself as Robert rollerbladed up to me and struck up a conversation.
He looked pretty average and said he was 29.
He told me how he was going around asking girls out (because he had read this book called No More Mr Nice Guy) and he was 0/5.
So I gave him some advice and listened to his life story a while when this attractive girl walked her dog past us.
He shouted something like “Excuse me, would you like to go on a date?” At her.
She basically ignored him, didn’t make eye contact but shook her head slightly.
It was such a bizarre experience.
I had been giving advice assuming he wasn’t actually just shouting at random strangers.
Then he told me he thought I could benefit from reading that book.
Which I definitely won’t now.
I wish I could say that I was reading a cooler book at the time, but it was definitely either Getting Things Done or The 4-Hour Workweek.
A little earlier and it would have been Schopenhauer’s Porcupines or later and it would have been The Metamorphosis which both would have made it much funnier.