Interview from sarastro_us

[tylik]

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions of a very intimate and creepily personal nature. Or not so creepy/personal.
3. You WILL update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1)What exactly are you working for a degree in? It makes my head hurt just thinking about it...

That's almost reassuring, it makes my head hurt too, but I've generally assumed that it was just the accumulated ambiguity of the situation. This is going to be a much longer answer than you probably expected...

The plan was originally genomics, and since my undergrad work is in such useful and relevant fields as Chinese language and international studies, I figured that I'd take a year to take some of the chem classes I'd missed before applying. (I'd talked to the genomics department, they generally liked my computer background and gave me some ideas what holes to fill in.) And I decided to take a few other classes, just for fun.

At the same time, I was looking for a lab to volunteer in, so I could get some applicable research experience. And in one of my classes I met Valerie Daggett, who introduced me to Molecular Dynamics... I was so enchanted by this that I ended up going to another lecture she gave elsewhere, and in my usual fashion peppered her with questions afterwards. She asked me about my background, we chatted a bit and she mentioned that she could really use someone like me. I went home and stressed about it for a week, because I really meant to work in a genomics lab, but I liked Valerie, and it did sound like a good fit, so I took her up on it... that was December of 2004, gods help me. Oh, yeah, and the whole thing was complicated by the fact that Valerie had assumed that I was a BHI grad student. She was rather surprised to hear that in fact I was a Chinese major (if a returning to school generally aiming for genomics Chinese major) but took me anyway.

So I was supposed to build a SQL database to for the dynamic protein simulations the lab produces. For reasons that now elude me, I got really frustrated by the limitations of SQL (well, okay, we're talking MS SQL, it's easy to get frustrated) and decided it would be much cooler to implement this as a multidimensional analysis optimized database. (And in a way, I was right. Though it's past cutting edge and right to the bleeding edge... is bleeding cooler? It's not cooler than cutting, but SQL wasn't doing any cutting.) So it's over a year later, and I'm still on this project, though I'm under orders to wrap it up, or at least publish, by the end of the quarter (whee! my first first-name publication! Assuming I can get anyone to publish it.)

Honest, this is all relevant. So meanwhile, I've been studying biochem, and taking the stray genomics course, and talking to people from other labs (I have a number of labs that have expressed interest in my working there, if I can ever manage to leave this one, even if only for a little while). Oh, and I was supposed to apply to grad school in January, but due to having to take a bunch of time off in December due to a spine injury, that got postponed a year.

So next year I'm applying to Biochem, Genomics, Molecular Biophysics Structure and Design, Molecular and Cellular Biology and BHI (biomedical and health informatics). That's roughly in current order of preference, though the first four get shifted around a lot. I can learn the things I need to learn, and do the kind of stuff I want to do in any of them. Oh, and I might be applying to MSTP if my physical health stays stable and mental health does not.

2) At various times, I have studied six different European languages in some depth. I have found that it is certainly true that, the more I study, the more it helps me pick up other languages, but it's also affected the way in which I speak English. How has studing non-European languages affected your speech and thought patterns?

This is a great question.

I'll start with thought, because it's actually the easier piece. I am not an inherently verbal thinker, though my verbal layer is pretty well developed. I can think in words, it's not my most natural or quickest mode. (OTOH, the verbal layer is usually turned on, and so usually in the background of my mind there is a string of verbal commentary which may or may not be useful or applicable, often serving as kind of a chorus to whatever I'm thinking about. Sometimes when I am giggling for no reason at all, this is why.) So studying other languages mostly made me more aware of the ways in which these layers were separate, and how the interfaces worked.

But that's all relevant to internal processing. The other side of it is that when I am reading, or talking to someone, I am processing those words, and in that way I am thinking in words. And when I think in other languages, my thoughts are in different shapes. It's almost a sensual pleasure, and a big part of the reason I kept on studying languages. Some of this is structural -- languages put different emphasis on what kind of information is most important (I'm thinking of the Turkic hearsay tense, or that Chinese tends to be aspect rather than tense oriented). Some of this approaches being cultural -- for instance, Chinese to me has a certain operative character to it, but also a very particular kind of clarity. There are things I can say, very whole heartedly and sincerely in Chinese, but that I can not say in English without them being sappy, or ironic. Some of it is simply that the words do not map the same. Words do not map to discrete meanings, but to clusters and relationships, and both the boundaries and what is being mapped are different in different languages.

I've generally become more aware of the structure of how I speak English, in almost a sculptural sense of how I fit words together to try to produce a description of what it is I am thinking of. I've also become much more aware of grammatical relationships, and sometimes more precise in my grammar. Often, also, I'll find myself wandering into speech patterns that are reminiscent of how one might translate the grammar of another language into English. Sometimes, this is habit, sometimes it's because I like the shape and texture of the grammatical construct in the other language better.

I also find that I prefer different languages for different things. I usually annonate chemical diagrams in Chinese, left to my own devices. I think this is because English has always been vaguely frustrating to me in its linearity, and Chinese to me feels less linear and fits more easily into how I think about structure. This is, obviously, I hope, highly subjective.

3) What are your thoughts, as a Western scientifically oriented person, on the existence of Chi? Im most interested to see if you can separate your experience as a martial arts practitioner from your observations as a scientist.

Hmph. In this context, it might be worth noting that I was a witch before I was a martial artist...

I think asking about the existance of Qi (don't mind me, I prefer pinyin) is asking the wrong questions. Qi is a traditional term used for describing a number of possibly related experiences and tecniques. It's a model, the way lewis dot structures are a model -- they aren't accurate pictures of atoms, but they encode certain things about them in ways that are useful for understanding certain kinds of interactions between them. It's not a discrete thing that exists, per se, but a way of understanding a number of things. I think it is best approached as an engineer -- when the model helps you, it's a good model. When it limits you, use another model.

Many things that the Qi model helps you do, on a physical level, can be explained biomechanically. But I think it's easier to grasp and use them, especially for many people, in terms of Qi. *I* like to know all my joints and muscles by name, and have a pretty good understanding of the physics of what I'm doing, but it's a pretty cumbersome way of understanding things. And you can lose things, or miss answers with the more cumbersome model. (But then, you can do the same thing with the traditional model. So I collect models, and rotate through them, and particularly enjoy what they tell me about eachother.)

On the more purely energetic model... Qi is sometimes useful, especially in areas where other models are still in rudimentary form. I feel like it provides a lot of intuitive insight into how our minds work (I was just talking with someone about how there seems to be particular functionality in the brain put into mapping our immediate surroundings, in ways that correspond, I think, to the sphere of sensation... okay, different tradition, but...) and how many of the living systems we interact with and are part of function. I don't see it as either a replacement for or in opposition to Science.

4) I have had an ongoing discussion with seattlejo about how I dont think that the mere belief in the validity of non-monogamous lifestyles is sufficient to found a community on. This is why (IMHO) you find pagan and kink threads running through most, if not all poly social gatherings. What do you think? Do you think there is a real poly community, or do you think that we get too often lumped in with other subset groups with which we share members?

First off, I don't think there are discrete pagan and kink communities, either. I think it is very rare to find such communities, and that they tend to be most likely to arise when there are few members of whatever the group in question is, and they feel a fairly great gulf between themselves and the rest of the community. I'd rather model is as numerous webs of people, many of which overlap highly, others of which do not.

There are forces that draw groups of people together. Some are internal -- it's nice to have a group, to have family, and it's nice to have people with whom you share important things. (How important different things are depends a lot on context.) Some are external -- a high degree of hostility or other kinds of alienation from non members of the group will often lead a group to hold more tightly together. But at the same time, there are constantly forces pushing us apart -- our affinities with and membership in other groups, for instance. Personal conflicts. Apathy. Simply not wanting one's own identity to be too much wrapped up in the identity of a group.

Personally, a lot of my friends are poly, but a lot are not. I'm generally supportive of poly community events, but I'm not hugely involved in or attached to a poly community. *shrug*

5) And now for a bit of frivolity, do you ever get seasick on your houseboat? ;-)

Nope, the more it rocks, the happier I am. Though once I did get a little off balance when I was showering in a windstorm.