Residency

I think I know what residency feels like.

Two nights ago I went to bed at 1 AM and was at a meeting by 8:00 the next morning. Last night I went to sleep at 3 AM and was in the lab by 7:00 today. I had to leave a message on the chalkboard in the tutoring room that I had run to the cafeteria to get some food so that I could eat tonight.

And I have a lab report due tomorrow that I have only barely started. (I got 14/20 on the first one, so I need to do just a little bit better... just a little.)

On the flip side, this morning and afternoon I had some great conversations. Three things:

First, I met with the chapel vicar this morning to talk about New Haven, Yale-New Haven Hospital, and med school in general. She's a really awesome person, and gave me a lot of great advice. She also has a friend from Yale Divinity that works in the chaplaincy at YNHH, and if I get an interview she's going to put me in contact with her to tour the hospital when I go. A Gustie is at YSM now as well, so I now will have that contact. Incredibly sweet.

Second, I met with Raj, the head of the Diversity Center at Gustavus. He has some students for me to tutor who aren't really comfortable coming to the larger sessions the chem department puts on. I'm now tutoring in three separate settings. The more the merrier, I guess. I'm starting to get a big head.

Last but not least, I watched the Q&A session to one of the Nobel talks today, the one about ethics/morality and science. Of course, the presenter's (George Ellis's) British accent helped. Surprisingly antagonistic was science writer Thomas Levenson. He was actually (I can't believe it) arguing that human life and consciousness was meaningless, in his words no more important than any other physical process in the universe. Most important to him, of course, was the process by which the sound from his mouth was ingratiating the hearer with his bullshit. While his statement was true at one level -- i.e. life and consciousness are biological, chemical, physical processes -- at another level his is the precise kind of statement that led Einstein (whose discoveries were honored at this conference) to shirk pacifism when Hitler came to power.

Suprisingly helpful to Ellis was string theorist (now my new favorite) James Sylvester Gates (aka Jim). I can't remember his exact words, but Gates said that science is a "helpless optimism." He said that all scientists wrestle with the nagging suspicion that what they are investigating is meaningless. Some questions that he asks he will never know the answer to in his lifetime. But, scientists always hope that one of their ideas might mean something entirely significant to someone down the line. Science is like a "message in a bottle" we send into the future. I have to read his (non-technical) introduction to superstring theory sometime.

George Ellis was good too, and really reminded me of Tim Ingold, my anthropology professor at Aberdeen in his eloquence. Something he said that I entirely agreed with: the reason that science is "scary" to people is that some fundamentalist scientists make it so. They claim that science entirely does away with any ethical or moral system (he included Richard Dawkins in this group, which got me on his side quickly). That forces religious people to totally abandon science if they buy into their arguments.

Thats it.