Kooky Strangers

In my bid to know more people, I've been making an effort to chat up a stranger a day. Unfortunately, I come across as a neurotic freak who likes to talk too much, which is a total misnomer for me since I can win the prize for shyest person around. I'm looking at this exercise as also a way for me to practice my social skills so that in any social setting I will have more than algae, biology stuff, or anything remotely 'bookish' to talk about. Actually shy isn't the right label either since I've been known to be kind of kooky sometimes. It's just hard for me to make everyday conversations, to participate in small talk since I usually have nothing small to say, hehe. I remember last Christmas, I was at this party function where I met a film major who was attending SFU too. After the requisite school talk (how many years been there, sucky class scheduling, the tomb-like quality of the AQ) conversation sort of petered out. So I started asking him about his major and what made him decide on film as an area of study...

Film guy: ...*yadda yadda film is so fun, innovative, inspiring, yadda yadda*...

After several minutes of this, he made some remark along the lines of those "science people" and how science can't be as "fun" and how we never venture outside of our labs in SSB (south science building).

me: *blink* ...

Science... not fun?... *boggle*

In a bio class I took couple of years ago, we studied algae. Algae, the green mucky stuff we see all the time in fish tanks, the kelp in the sea, the murkiness in ponds. We're lucky, we live in the part of the West Coast with the most kelp diversity, since this is the region where the northern species meet the southern ones. Anyway, that particular lab was the one that got me truly interested and a bit obsessed in microscope work. All parents should buy their kids a dissecting microscope. There was an algae sample we looked at, Hydrodictyon. At first glance, it's a nondescript meshy mess of green stringy stuff, but under the microscope, it's a wondrous geometrical pattern of hexagonal shapes. Okay, one might ask what _is_ so special about that? For whatever reason, the sample I had contained a bigger hexagonal-shape mesh. A closer look showed that the smaller net of hexagonal shapes folded upon itself to form a rod like cell and that in turn became a side of a bigger hexagonal pattern. There seem to exist 2 levels of organization! The image reminiscent of fractal art! Still, one might ask again what _is_ so special about that? Just think about it, that such a tiny organism, each cell only about 100 micrometer in size is able to coordinate itself into 2 levels of organization. As a higher level organism, I can barely coordinate matching socks. It makes me want to know more, the mystery behind it, is it chemistry, or electrical activities of the cells that causes them to fold their net to form a bigger net?

As you might have guessed by now, film guy did not stick around. Too bad, he might have been inspired to do a documentary on the magical world of green algae. I spent the rest of the evening chatting with a friend on the problems of construction work in the winter and how they compensate for the expanded wood due to winter wetness.