Doctor Vector's Existential Funk

Normally I'm not a fan of the "here's whatever boring shit I'm dealing with this week" blog post. Cuz...vomit. But here comes one.

One of the best teachers I ever had in my life used to work in a school for the mentally handicapped. One of the best things about her was that she had zero tolerance for bullshit, and she spoke very openly and frankly about...everything. Especially the un-PC stuff that goes on everywhere, including the "special school". The people who taught at the school were forbidden to call someone a "biter". He or she was an "individual who bites". And so on. A couple of behind-the-scenes acronyms that the teachers used to describe their students when they (the teachers) were having a smoke break, far from the ears of the administrtion, were OTL and DAP. OTL is Out To Lunch and DAP is Dumb As Post.

I've been OTL lately, and I don't mind telling you about it. In fact, I've been telling you about it all along, just not identifying it as a problem.

I'm also lazy, so the rest of this post is just copied and pasted from an e-mail I sent Mike a week or two ago.

...It's not that I don't want to do useful dinosaur work; it's that I can't get myself to do any.

On July 20, I had my first really productive day since moving to Berkeley. I was poring through refs all day, figuring things out, building momentum on a problem. By sundown I was feeling pretty good, partly because I had learned some things and gotten some work done, and partly because I felt like I was tipping into being On. Which I really needed, and still need, to be.

Then that night I got the invitation to the rocket launch. The lightning bolt that should have fired me into paleo-mania shot me into rocket-mania instead. It's not just that I didn't fight it. I felt powerless to fight it. So I spent the last month doing the minimum amount of work possible for the UCMP and geeking out on rocket stuff the rest of the time.

I know the rocket mania won't last forever. It will sputter out and something else will take its place. I dearly hope that it's paleo-mania, because I need to get some work done. One of the reasons that I set up the rocket blog is so that when I go "off" rockets I won't lose all the information I've dug up over the past month. Hopefully it is something I can come back to in six months and pick up where I left off.

The launch was Saturday. Everything worked out perfectly. I got my rockets built, and I flew them successfully. Then I shelved them. Vicki got me a nice big toolbox to serve as my rocket toolkit and range box, and I got all my rocket stuff off the table. The lab, such as it was, is no longer in existence--everything is packed away. Yesterday I forced myself to sit down and work, and I did.

But it was robot work, and I can't stop thinking about rockets.

I am honestly starting to think that I might be slightly bipolar, or obsessive/compulsive, or whatever the term is these days for someone who flipflops between crazy mongoose energy and utter apathy and sloth. Intellectually, I know that it is time--well past time, in fact--to put the rockets away and get back to paleontology. But I can't seem to convince my subconscious of that. Thinking about rockets is like scratching an itch, like finally finding a comfortable position when you've been tossing and turning all night. Speaking of, I've been dreaming about rockets. Designing them, building them, and launching them in my dreams.

The other thing is, matters paleontological interest me not at all right now. Sauropods, pneumaticity, body size...bleh. I just don't care. I can't muster up any feeling one way or the other. All of those things that I love thinking about all the time when I'm On have no more fascination for me right now than the fine points of corporate tax law. And when things do eventually flip, I will feel about those things the way I feel about rockets now, and rockets will be completely off my mind for a few months. But I don't know how to force the flip, or whether it can be forced at all.

I don't know what to do.

I am going to leave the rockets in the closet. I am going to get back to paleontology and just work until I fall in love with it again. If you have any comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

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So. Mike responded that I'm not nuts, I'm just undisciplined. Well, who can argue with that. But the undisciplined guy who has a hard time concentrating on work during the day is sharing a head with the nut who dreams about rockets at night, who can't stop thinking about rockets even though he wants to.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

Re: having it together

Sarah Werning, who does cool things with Tenontosaurus, is joining the Padian lab this fall. We have a couple of strong connections. First, she is just plain awesome, much like yours truly. Also, she did her Master's thesis work with Rich Cifelli at OU, who advised me on my Master's. And now we share the same Ph.D. advisor.

Sarah wrote this in response to the previous post, and gave me permission to post it. My response is below.

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SAYS SARAH:

I tried to post a comment to your blog but couldn't, as both the visual verifier and the handicap audio verifier wouldn't work. So here you go, my response to your most recent post:

Yes Matt, you do give off the air of someone who's got it together. It was a teensy bit imposing as I toured Berkeley, because all of Kevin's students (and all the other IB'ers I met) seemed to have their shit together on a higher plane than I've ever experienced. The whole time I was there, I was thinking "What the hell am I doing here, this guy is a student, but he has like a dozen pubs and knows his shit backwards and forwards, and I have second- and third-tier degrees from public schools and no pubs and I still get things like when to use fewer or less confused, and am socially awkward to boot". It's even worse if you compare yourself to people like Kevin or Rich or Neil Shubin or anyone else that basically reinvented the wheel at 25 and went on to be the King of Science by 30. I mean, I'm 27, I'm just starting my PhD, I watch cartoons and read comic books, and I asked my mom to make me a pirate coat for my last birthday. How can I possibly compete with these other applicants to get into a school like this?

But then I remembered that you were five years into your PhD, had several pubs from your MS, had been meeting and collaborating and talking wih people in the field for five more years than me, and if there was any time in one's life that one SHOULD act like they know what's going on, right before you start hunting for jobs is a good time to do it. The thing to remember in grad school (as in life) is that comparing oneself to others is a neurotic exercise in pointlessness, because it's all relative. People who spend all their time ranking themselves against others make bad scientists and bad advisers, and ironically come off as insecure and unknowlegdible, in person and in publication.

You should ask me to give you the full version of my Broken Genius Theory of Averaged Humanity sometime (note: better with beer). The Reader's Digest version goes like this: At UIC, I had a Physics professor, an endowed chair who had some sort of genius grant and who knew how to make the quarks dance or something along those lines. But he had a personal assistant who, in addition to her other duties, had to go to his home and lay out clothes for him to prevent him from coming to school in his PJs. Now, I'm nowhere near that smart, but on the other hand, I can dress myself, so it all averages out. How many brilliant scientists do you know who are on their third or fourth failed marriage? Or who have serious alcohol or drug addictions? Or who have all the social skills of a depressed mule on crack?

So, yeah, it'll be ok.

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SAYS MATT:

You're dead right about the pointlessness of comparing yourself to others. First, I think we rarely make the appropriate comparisons. It always freaks me out how much work Larry Witmer has done, but he got his Ph.D. the year before I graduated from high school. Jeff Wilson is closer to my age and has done a hell of a lot of work, but he go his Ph.D. when I was halfway through my Master's work. So it's pretty ridiculous to compare track records with either one of them.

Hell, Randy Irmis is about to start his third year of grad school and he has more publications that I do after eight years of grad school.

And measuring yourself by comparison to others is a losing proposition anyway. Have you read The Dechronization of Sam MacGruder? It's a time travel novel written by George Gaylord Simpson. I don't think it was ever published in his lifetime. Stephen Jay Gould wrote the forward, which includes a capsule biography of Simpson. It's not a flattering picture. Simpson basically died alone. He'd alienated most of his friends by being an asshole, and he spent the last few years of his life almost crippled by insecurity. He was worried that he hadn't done enough, that he hadn't sufficiently left his mark on the field. That was a very good thing for me to read. If G.G. Simpson felt like he wasn't enough of a badass, strongly enough that it helped ruin the last years of a long, productive life, then there is no point in playing that game. Life is too short, too unpredictable, and the limit is one per customer.

I'm not great at delaying gratification. Or, maybe I am. Who knows? I haven't really checked. That may sound like a funny thing for a graduate student to say. The normal take is that we're all sacrificing our current happiness so that we can be safe and tenured someday. But it's never seemed that way to me. I've been really enjoying myself all along. Doing research is the most fun you can have with your clothes on, writing is not always fun but the results are gratifying, and publishing is a rush. That was true when I was doing my undergrad research, true when I was working on my MS, and it's still true. If I ever reach some stratospheric level of academia where it stops being true--or where I have to stop doing those things--then I will have gone too far. The fact that someone may pay me a decent salary and give me tenure to keep doing the things I love is pretty amazing.

Before she graduated this summer, Vicki lamented that we'd been in college for 13 years. And I was like, "Yeah, so what? You say that like it's a bad thing." The meaning of "school" changes completely between high school and grad school. For the first part of your life, "school" is that place that you have to go to do things that you hate. Once you start doing research, "school" becomes that place that you get to go to do things that you love. So the whole meaning of "I'm in school" changes utterly.

Since we've both brought up publication records a couple of times, I'll say a few words about that. First, it ain't quantity that counts, it's quality. Nobody is going to think of you fondly just because you publish a lot (I could name some names here, but I won't). On the contrary, one good paper is enough to fix someone's place in the field. One of the cool things about Berkeley is that the job search process is so transparent to students. It makes it really clear how much various factors contribute to someone getting a job. A good research track record is important, but it can be totally undermined if the person doesn't know how to communicate articulately about what they do, or if he or she is an asshole. And if you look at various faculty members, their publication records, and when they were hired, you can usually point to one or two papers and say, "Okay, those were the ones that helped them get the job."

Now that I am getting closer to being on the job market, it affects the way I think about every paper. Even before I start writing, I'm thinking about where I'm going to send it, and wondering if it will be out by the time I'm going for job interviews. This is inevitable, but I'm not entirely happy about it. When I wrote my first few papers, my academic career was still far enough off that I was not thinking about the papers as job-getting devices, but just as ways to communicate cool stuff that I'd learned. I think those papers were probably better for it, and I certainly had more fun writing them. The only pressure was to do good work, not to appear tenurable.

And this is probably self-evident, but when you just try to do good work, you're probably more likely to produce one of those career-making papers than if you set out to produce one by artifice.

I have more to say, but I'll save it for another message/post.

The umbrella effect as applied to marine mammals

You know the umbrella effect: if you carry an umbrella, it may not rain, but if you don't, it's sure to. Same deal with taking a book when I hop in the car to go literally anywhere; about 95% of the time I don't need it, but any situation in which you're stuck for an hour or two and wish you had a book is by definition unforeseeable, so it's better to have a book along just in case.

Yesterday afternoon we went for a long walk along West Cliff. I almost grabbed my binoculars as we headed out the door. I consciously thought, "Hey, maybe I should take my binoculars." And then my stupid brain said, "Nah!"

Stupid, stupid brain.

Within five minutes of getting out of the car, we saw a pair of sea otters frollicking amongst the kelp. Just far enough out that some binoculars would have been great. Oh, and there was one rock a ways out where some sea lions were having a lay in the sun convention. And then on the way back we saw dolphins. I've never seen dolphins from shore at West Cliff. Finally, as we came around to Lighthouse Point there was another sea otter just about 50 yards from shore. Fortunately, I had a digital camera; unfortunately, it was the lo-rez POS we got for taking pictures of London. Here's my strikingly Nessie-esque photo of the alleged sea otter; you'd be forgiven if you thought it was a dead mime, or a really big bird dookie.


One of these days I'm going to get some of those binoculars with the digital camera built in, and I'm going to wear them everywhere. I don't care how stupid it looks. We can talk about stupid after I get ultrarich from selling my photos of Sasquatch and UFOs. I'll be that one guy who really did have binoculars and a camera ready when that once-in-a-lifetime event happened.

Yeah!

Oh, there were also shitloads of cormorants and pelicans, as always. Hardly worth mentioning. I'm just piling on the tetrapods to hopefully make Darren jealous.