Its a Geeky Story

Ahem, ahem. Ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for the geekiest, nerdiest, smartest girl in the room (drum roll please) Poornima Ramesh aka. Vaishali's sister!  We are glad that she readily agreed to guest write for Prolix this week. Without further ado, let's see what this wonderful person has to say.

A few weeks ago, Vaishali wrote a post about how hard it is being a Humanities student. Well, it's not a bed of roses for the Science ones either. Everyone expects you to be nerdy, boring and wear spectacles all the time. Despite that, being a science geek has definite advantages. So here's my list of why I love science:

1) You have really great excuses:

If you get in trouble with your parents or if you're in a situation that you'd rather avoid, science provides you with the most amazing escape routes. For example, let's say you've broken the TV set by throwing your remote control at it (because that's what you do every time HBO has the gall to run one of the Twilight movies). And your mother is spitting fire at you. This is what you should say: “According to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, every system in the universe prefers to be in a state of disorder or increased entropy. So you see, mom, I didn't really do anything wrong. The TV wanted to be broken!” And voila! Problem solved!

2) You can be an annoying-people-repellant:

If you're in the company of someone who is just plain irritating or if you have a low socialization threshold, then spouting scientific jargon is an awesome way to get rid of them. Here's a demo: So did you hear about the new breakthrough in evolutionary theory? It seems that the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium was just an alternative to the Red Queen hypothesis and basically, all population curves ultimately tend to settle into stable Gaussians even though they can go through Poisson, binomial and Boltzmann distributions....are you zoned out or have you left the room? Yeah, so you get the idea.

3) Movies and advertisements become hilarious (or woefully depressing, depending on your point-of-view):

Did you know that Surf Excel has vibrating molecules? What's so funny about that, you ask? Well, this company is marketing their product based on something that's true about...let's see....pretty much every single thing in the entire universe. And have you seen that movie where Rajnikanth swallows a speeding bullet and spits it out in two pieces, each of which then kill a bad guy? That little scene breaks so many laws of physics and biology – the relatavistic laws, Newton's laws, Stoke's law, physiological constraints....I don't think there are enough fingers attached to the entire Indian population to count them.

4) You get to act like, Einstein, Feynman, Curie, Heisenberg, etc were all your best friends:

For example:

You know that Darwin didn't really come up with the theory of evolution on his own right? He sat on it for 12 years before Wallace told him it was right. <shaking my head in exasperation> Poor guy!

And Scrodinger's really macabre. I mean, the guy used dead cats to explain his theory. Dead cats! What the hell!

See?

5) Everybody treats you like you're a genius (if you ignore the fact that they also expect other..(ahem!)....not-so-positive things)

Well, obviously, if you're a science geek, you've had to go through tons and tons of books (each the size of 10 Lord of the Rings books). And if you're an Indian teenager, then you've also solved close to a billion calculus problems and worked out gazillion reaction mechanisms for IIT-JEE or BITSAT or whatever random combination of the English alphabet that you can think of. If you thought Dr. Doofenschmirtz was cool, multiply that by 100 and you get the average science geek!

Hopefully, all of you are now thinking about making a career change to science. Or at least, you agree with what Bill Gates has to say about geeks. Thank you Vaishali and Sanika for letting me write for your blog. And Nikita, I hope I've followed your rules closely enough.