I, Nerd

In my high salad days, I was a terrific nerd.  I've gone through several variants of nerdiness since high school, some of them classic archetypes, some boarding on normal, some scary in their own right.  After college, I became much more balanced and even sociable to the point that I had actually forgot just how bad I used to be.  Here's a sample:

Starting around junior year, I was on the chess team in high school.  More than that, I spent my lunch hour in the math teacher's classroom (he was also our coach) mastering chess problems and playing speed chess, and this during a time I actually had my own car and could have propelled myself into some inchoate form of popularity by leaving campus and eating at the "cool" joints.  I spent thousands of not-very-hard-earned dollars on Magic: the Gathering, played in local pro-sanctioned tournaments, and still own most of my cards, though I don't play anymore.   I played a druid in AD&D until my teenage hormonal imbalance made me angsty enough to graduate to Vampire: the Masquerade.  I even played MUSH (Massive User Shared Halucination) text-based games over the Telnet, logging in days, maybe even months of my life role-playing alternate identities.   Like most boys, I was fascinated with dinosaurs, but my devotion remained long after most healthy children take up sports-- or for that matter, begin dating, move out of their parents houses, and have children.  As a child, I watched Bill Nye the Science Guy, Beakman's World, and literally took notes on MacGyver, once building a small fertilizer bomb based on what I learned from an episode.  Only two semesters of science were required in high school, but I took a class every semester for four years including my favorite science of physics, which ironically, I nearly failed due to my then-developing lethargy toward homework and complete inability to do even the math required to play Scrabble.  I even read chapters that weren't required, and spent my free time reading books by Asminov, Hawkings, Sagan, and Greene.  Once, on our senior trip, I found myself in a hotel room in Paris explaining general relativity to a drunk line-backer because he wanted to understand his place in the cosmos.  I was also one of the proud few who knew how to optimize the first megabyte of RAM in MSDOS to ensure my PC could run Descent as efficiently as possible.

I'm not trying to say I was smart.  Far, far from it.  I was never in any advanced classes in high school.  Laziness has been the bane of my academic achievement since I first realized, in first grade, I could save myself the trouble of loading my backpack every evening if I just left all my homework in my desk and did it hastily the next morning.  Since then, I've been sublimely lazy. On top of that, I have the memory capacity of a Cassio wrist-watch.  I've been bested at the Memory Game by four year olds and often can't recall major events or people in my own life.  I did, some how, pass an advanced placement test for math in middle school but I never actually bothered to sign up for it.  I'm positive, though, if I did I would have been drummed out in less than a week.  Really, there must have been an administrative error that occurred after they reviewed my test because math and I just do not get along well.  Maybe the scan-tron machine, after decades of boolean input, decided to take a more artistic interpretation of my penciled-in squares and decided my test was "pretty."  I don't know.  I do know that I can't be trusted to balance a check book, or give small change for a dollar, or calculate a tip, or even be the banker in Monopoly without unmitigated, economic disaster.  

Why I am writing about all of this?  I guess I've just been reminiscing, and lately my old nerd-tastic tendencies have been coming back in full force.  My love of science being chief among them.  I'll make no bones about it, science was my first love and that love has always been around since I was little.  I was memorizing latin names of megafauna as soon as I could read them.  I was catalogue rocks from the yard as soon as I could walk out the door unsupervised, and at every stage of my life, I've wanted to become some form of scientist: a micro-biologist, a geologist, an astronomer, a paleontologist, a forensic scientist.  Lets face it though, I've never been all that good at it.  Real scientists are fastidious and comprehensive.  They can spend nearly their entire lives in dedication to a single experiment, and the rest of their life in defense of that single experiment.  They tread water just to keep up with their peers, overwhelmed with results, data, new experiments, new theories, even new BRANCHES of entire sciences.  Its an entirely UNromantic reality they live in and you just have to have the personality to cope with it.  I don't.  

I love to read about it, though.  I love to be part of it in that small way, but not immersed in it.  I couldn't live like that.  I am, however, starting to find myself more and more interested in communicating the sciences to other people, in writing about them.  I have always had that talent and I'd like to find the opportunity express it more.  These days, with our scientific education lack so severely in our schools, its more important than ever to encourage people's natural curiosity of the subject.  And people are curious.  Its a natural human survival instinct to want to know how the world around you works.  Our anti-intellectual culture has a way of stigmatizing that tendency, but with a little nurturing, it often comes back to life.

Climate Change, or more popularly, Global Warming, is a scientific subject that, in particular, needs a hefty amount of explaining.  Unsurprisingly, the media has done a piss-poor job so far and some one needs to do it.  I've reading up in my spare time on climate sciences and in the next few weeks I intend to blog a bit on my take of the subject.  I'll see you then.