i remember everything, so who are you?

[self_composed]

Bella attends her classes with faultless punctuality, every time. She sits in the second or third row on an aisle in the middle section of seats, in the classes that take place in big auditorium lecture halls like the main section of Bio; she's willing to put herself closer to the professors in smaller classes like OS and of course her flute chair (third; she hasn't been quite ridiculously showoffy enough to climb beyond yet) is assigned. But right now, she is in Bio, learning tidbits about auxin and tropisms that the textbook didn't cover fully. She's running at about one and a half speed, just enough that she can trivially listen to and process the lecture against her memory of the text while also permitting some mind-wandering. She liiiiiikes her cognitive speedup power.

Comments

[self_composed]

"Likewise, Bridget. See you next bio class. Or lab if you go to lab and wind up in my section." Bella waves and heads in to listen to the extended violin sectional.

Her lab section meets the next day. And who should be there but Bridget. "Hi. Are you just hanging out or are you going to do the lab?" Bella asks her.

[regularsized]

"I am going to do the lab!" says Bridget. "Hi!"

[self_composed]

"Cool, you can be my partner then. We rotate around so I'm not already claimed." Bella heads for a lab table. They are going to witness the behavior of unidirectional membranes with something that has an application in dialysis. Then they are going to write stuff about that down.

This is only somewhat better than high school. Maybe there can be interesting conversations to accompany boring lab, and Bella can run at 1x, and she will be only a little bored.

[regularsized]

"It's nice having a Biology Friend," says Bridget, following Bella to the lab table.

[self_composed]

"What else are you auditing?" Bella asks, pretending to read the instructions that she memorized on first glance.

[regularsized]

"Organic chemistry and statistics. I like statistics better."

[self_composed]

"Rumor has it organic chem is terribly hard," Bella says. "What kind of doctor do you want to be?"

She's moved her eyes back and forth across these instructions enough times; she starts setting up, and hands Bridget some stuff to do too.

[regularsized]

"I haven't decided yet. That was one of the problems that got me out of it in the first place. Particle physics is much easier."

[self_composed]

"In my admission essay I wrote something about how I wanted to be a medical researcher maybe because I got hit by a car this one time," Bella says. "I'm not actually as sure as I made myself sound, though. I certainly didn't have a kind of research picked out."

[regularsized]

"Hit by a car? That sounds exciting. I have to admit, though, it probably wouldn't make me want to do medical research."

[self_composed]

"I went into more detail than that in the essay, obviously. And I don't think I'd use the word 'exciting'. By the time I regained consciousness there was no further excitement."

[regularsized]

"Things that sound exciting often aren't. Particle accelerators, for example. Actually, I lie, particle accelerators are the most exciting thing on the planet."

[self_composed]

"What's so exciting about particle accelerators? Baseball bats accelerate particles. They're not exciting."

Lab lab lab. Bleah.

[regularsized]

"I'm sure under the right circumstances a baseball bat could be very exciting. But no, I mean the big ones. The ones that let us study the basic components that make up our universe. I happen to think that's exciting as hell."

[self_composed]

"I know the kind you meant. I'd probably call them 'fascinating' instead though. If you do them right they shouldn't be exciting - an exciting particle accelerator might irradiate you or turn itself on unexpectedly or something. A well-designed particle accelerator should be pretty stable and, except for whatever experimental results you're gathering, predictable."

[regularsized]

"The experimental results are the exciting part!" says Bridget.

[self_composed]

"Then the experiment's exciting, not the accelerator," laughs Bella. "I'm sure we could use these materials to do something a lot more interesting than watch one-way diffusion, but these materials we have here? Not exciting."

[regularsized]

"What exactly is the difference?"

[self_composed]

"You could be using a particle accelerator to just replicate what someone else was doing with their particle accelerator and always get the same results they did. That would be dull."

[regularsized]

"Yes, but why would I do that?"

[self_composed]

"Because a whole lot of studies turn out not to be replicable, and we can't trust those, so we have to figure out which things do and don't replicate. Doesn't make it exciting just because it's important."

[regularsized]

"There aren't so many high-end particle accelerators in the world that any one of them will find themselves running out of new research to do. And given the choice, I wouldn't choose to spend my time exclusively replicating other people's results."

[self_composed]

"That's probably why there are so lamentably few replication studies done," says Bella. "It's a real problem, actually - the people qualified to redo studies aren't interested, so they don't, so we go by old results that one study got one time, and for standard p-values that means that one in twenty results we're relying on is just wrong. Coincidence." She looks at their lab experiment with a small sigh. "One thing I can say for this kind of silly make-work is that if it turned out these dialysis membranes didn't consistently work as advertised? Some undergrad class would've noticed by now."

[regularsized]

"If I had a particle accelerator of my very own," she says, smiling slightly, "I'd be more likely to check my own work before other people's."

[self_composed]

"Sure, but then the idiosyncrasies of your particular accelerator could still throw you off. If you're, I don't know, too far north or there's a little scratch in one bit of the machine or you're using different software to run it or it's too sunny out. You want someone in Switzerland or wherever to help you."