SCIENCE

Hello, my friends.

Let's talk about something different today.

You might have gathered from this blog that I'm more of an artsy person. I feel at home on the "soft" side of the science spectrum. This spectrum is basically maths on the hard side with only a very limited, precisely defined number of correct answers and for example literature on the soft side with a very broad, undefined variety of possibilities.

Fun fact: At school, sciences are usually my worst subjects. Seriously. You don't want to get me started on my chemistry lessons. So while I always valued science when other people did it, researching stuff and curing illnesses and so on, I never thought I could actually, really care for it myself.

Then I became a nerd. As in, recognised I had been one for all my life. Because that realisation had me spend my time more around nerd-related things, which ultimately got me in touch with more sciencey stuff as well. And it turns out, there's so much more to physics than they teach you at school.

I could, right now, by heart, tell you the name of all six kinds of quarks, when they were discovered, and what they do. And I sure as hell didn't learn that in school. Things like that song that you randomly find on the Internet are so easy to access and so fun to use.

The Internet taught me that science, be it biology, chemistry or physics, can be incredibly interesting and even beautiful. Have you seen some of those pictures of galaxies? THAT is perfection. There are people out there who will talk for four minutes on a YouTube video and have you marvel at the extreme serendipity that is your existence. Seriously. It's awesome.

But even with all that, I never would have thought that I could be interested in taxidermy. Of all things, I am glued to my computer screen watching a twenty-something young woman with a pink flower in her blond ponytail cut up, skin and dissect a dead wolf. You have no idea how terribly fascinating (yet kind of gross) that is.

I'm talking about Emily Graslie, former art student who discovered her true passion by sort of accidentally walking into her university's zoological museum. She did a lot of volunteer work there and, after being featured in one of Hank Green's (www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers) videos, she was able to start her own YouTube show called The Brain Scoop where she shows her work in the collection or talks about related subjects like domestication.

While I'm not exactly planning on pursuing a career in taxidermy, I find Emily's videos extremely interesting. She has a very bubbly personality and was very comfortable in front of the camera from the first moment. Besides showing her viewers how a wolf looks from the inside, she also has first-hand experience on how the US government (and I'm pretty sure they aren't the only ones) cuts more and more money from the science and education budget, pretty much dooming small collections like the ones Emily presented.

So I guess what I want to say is, I care about science even though I'm not a science person, and I think not enough people do. So spread the word. Or something.

Love,
Jojo