So I've finished my wildly popular Scientist series, which averaged a scintillating 1.25 comments per entry, and thus, it's time to sum it all up. Why did I write it?

I was at a research conference the day the series came to me, and I couldn't help but think that scientists are poorly understood by the general public. It's easy to see scientist as objective calculators. But there are other emotions that lurk beneath the surface. There's obsession, envy, the desperate struggle to stay objective when there are huge rewards for selling out, the desire for power and to control one's universe, to subjugate nature underneath your feet.

Scientist exist to test the world, but also to see if a structure of logic can cover chaos. There's this compulsive desire to keep testing things until they break, to push things to the limits, all while trying to remain self-controlled and follow standard procedure. I feel the emotional lives of scientists are horribly understudied, the way they put so much of themselves into tasks, the odd contrasts and paradoxes that go into the creation of new human knowledge. And while they try to deny it, there's always whispers of the artist around their work, whispers that the scientist denies but cannot refute, just as artists resist comparisons to scientists.

In the end, I find that science fiction itself does little justice to scientists, let alone news reports and biographies. And thus I wrote my little trilogy, and I found it hugely rewarding. What have your experiences been with scientists?

After the broken machine, there was...spouse?

The scientist was never sure how it happened. There was no discrete event that could be pointed to, no signpost or signifier. One day the scientist rolled out of bed after a sleepless night, and realized that her search was over. There were no red flags and lots of green ones, and finally he saw the checkered flag in the distance, much closer than he expected, beckoning him onward. And so the scientist made it proper in the eyes of God and the law and ma and pa, and the search was over. Not another scientist, not another crazy lover, not another machine, but someone that combined elements of all three in a satisfying blend.

After the spouse, there was...change.

Lots and lots of change, hard-won knowledge. The scientist used to appreciate the story of one-eyed Odin as a scientific analogy, now he saw it as a retelling of romance. When two become one, one loses perspective, loses the vision in one eye. But the other eye sees more than ever before, and the scientist appreciated his sharper vision. He had always struggled with prioritizing, but having a spouse gave him the ability to sort and decide in more rapid fashion. She learned much from this one man, and she kept notes as she learned, and suddenly mankind seemed an open book before her, and she gasped and wondered why men had ever seemed so opaque when they were but glass houses, easily marred with a single word that ever hurt them.

After the change there were...no experiments.

The scientist couldn't people-watch anymore. Because to know one so deeply is to know others better, and he now understood better how people worked who were not scientists. And he, scientist, was Einstein in the late 30's and Rappaccini in the garden, owner of powerful knowledge and considering its applications. And she, scientist, was Pandora with a box of power and Satan sinuously wrapped 'round the tree, now possessing something that was wanted, and able to extract a high price for it. But the scientist gave up their powers when they put on the one ring, or rather, committed those powers to the other wearer of the ring. So the ring stayed on, and so the lab gathered dust except for spousal studies. The days passed on, and the book of love lost another scientist and was the better for it.

The End.

After the crazy, there was...machine.

The scientist staggered toward the machine. She took every precaution, he donned his lab coat like it was a straightjacket, covering every inch of his flesh, protecting himself from any sudden movement of the machine. The experiments began, cautiously, safely...and finished properly. For appropriate stimuli, there were appropriate responses. Bad input was met with bad output, good input was rewarded. There was order, there was rhythm...and the scientist and the machine were one.

After the machine, there was...machine.

The scientist stayed up late (very late) and got up early, bonding ever closer with the machine. It was hard to tell where machine ended and scientist began, her hands constantly roaming along the border as if touch was taste and contact was osmosis. Osmosis? Yes, the scientist was ready to take in all input from the machine. She wore less safety equipment each time. He loosened his lab coat, left his goggles to gather dust. They understood machine, the machine understood them, and on that data they built intelligence and then synergy, pushing each other to ever greater telepathic heights.

After the machine, there were...parts.

The scientist has retraced her steps every day for a year, trying to pinpoint the moment when she broke the machine. He just remembers his final query, spoken to the machine, awaiting the machine to translate his words into action and logic as it always did. Then, the pause...and the machine's e-ink display going blank. The dots, filling the screen: ............................ she hated those dots, the way they signal pause and period, the ending of flow and the beginning of nothing. He had become an optimist, he bitterly reflected, he waited for those dots to become words, and they did.

The machine decomposed him, spit her experiments back at her, exposed the logician as liar and the sage as silly. The machine would not serve a broken human, the machine would only serve a higher machine. And the scientist looked at her hands and felt the blood inside the fingers pounding to get out, exposing her as weak animal rather than the bionic cyborg. He looked back at the machine finally, but the machine had silently collapsed into efficient piles of screws and steel, defying all efforts to be re-assembled, serving as mute testimony that the scientist...was not really a scientist at all. And she wept like Marie Curie when Pierre was crushed by the army horses, and suddenly the Nobel was far, far away...

In an excerpt from a letter to a younger colleague, the bitter scientist reports on the aftermath of the crazy lover:

...The cure is always knowledge, they say. Know more of how she thinks and acts. Know more about why he likes this and smiles at that. Build a database, build an infogram, build structures and create sutures and know, know, know.

But what does all this knowledge do? It is a pretty parlor game, sitting at coffee and rattling off her psychological profile, his sexual preferences and peculiarities. One might confuse this knowledge with actual power. One would be wrong.

They mapped the human genome, you know. They thought to build a tower to the heavens, thought that to know ourselves would be to cure ourselves. They failed, because we are not who we are, we are the the spaces between who we are, the strands and the silk and the connections.

So go on, young scholar, know it all, know exactly why she walks away from you and where you went wrong and what parts logic and illogic went into each choice he made. Your knowledge can do nothing for you. I am off, in search of one that will respond to my mechanics and methods. I seek...machine.

Next: The Scientist and the Machine

In the beginning there was data, and it was good.

A torrent of data, seeing, feeling, hearing data, constant and complex, filling the senses to satisfaction. Finally, the sample size was large enough, the study could be run. The scientist smiled, taking it all in, laughed, then exulted. The lover continued responding, initiating, creating. It was intoxicating, it was fulfilling, and finally the neurons fire and tingle and the information rushes from the senses to the brain and the scientist is delirious with data, enthralled with emotion...

In the middle there was data, and it was noisy.

Noisy data, confusing in its patterns, contradictory in its conclusions, and the scientist rebalanced his spreadsheet, reloaded her computer. Certainly there was logic, certainly this was just a matter of more study, redoubling one's efforts, recalculating one's steps. The scientist must try harder to understand. The scientist was disappointing himself, disappointing her lover, why couldn't this work? Perhaps there was a mistake, there were books to study, there were colleagues to inquire from, the experiment must work, the scientist was so close, the lover was providing so much data, why couldn't he just solve for X...

In the end there was data, and it was X, and the value of X did not exist.

The scientist broke down, sobbing among her papers, looking up at the whiteboard. The whiteboard held the last calculations, performed in the absence of the crazy lover. No data, no memories, no grand theories, just a series of arrows, arrows that should lead from point A to point B, but that instead led in a loop to E, the End, the end of the experiment, the realization that X did not exist, that there was no solution to the mystery and magic, that behind each door was another door to the vast cavern of nothingness....End was reached. X did not exist. The crazy lover was not X, to be known, but EX...the end of X.

I'm sure you've all read plenty of overwrought bloggers and journalists (note; not same thing) who have tried to weigh in on the Planned Parenthood and NPR funding controversies. It's very easy to choose a side and complain that Republicans are creating a generation of cancer-ridden, uneducated women, or that Democrats are creating a generation of liberally-biased children (or would if their mothers hadn't already aborted them all). But let's put away such childish caricatures and look more deeply at this topic.

Government exists to protect people and to assist them in the pursuit of happiness. Government is not supposed to be the direct provider of that happiness when better private sector options exist. How in the world is the government still in the radio and TV business when we have 10 million channels available to us? If NPR and PBS are so awesome, then why isn't some private company buying up all the second-rate British soaps and third-rate poets to create their own versions of NPR and PBS and make lots of money? Lack of competition from the private sector generally denotes that something is not that great of an idea, unless the idea requires tons of up-front investment that the private sector cannot or will not justify.

And let's talk about Planned Parenthood and religiously-motivated charities. Why in the world would the government fund a business, whether explicitly or implicitly non-profit, EDIT that the majority of its citizens would find distasteful that makes the government appear to approve of some controversial practices that many citizens would disagree with? This makes me upset the way our funding of Middle Eastern strongmen makes me upset; our dollars signify blanket approval of anything and everything the organization does. END EDIT. If the government truly believes that such an organization is necessary and that the private sector cannot provide such services, the government should itself install such an organization instead of working through middlemen with dirty hands.

Such organizations, by their very nature, also exist as proselytizing machines. Did the low-quality condoms you got from Planned Parenthood not work? Well, what do you know, they also have abortions available. Not at all a conflict of interest, right? Did the religious charity help you get off drugs? Well, what do you know, they want you to continue going to their services for the rest of your life. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it's the type of cycle that our government should not be involved in.

The government can pretend that it is not "directly" funding the organization's most controversial practices. But this is a ridiculous abstraction. If I give my drug-addicted sister $50 in groceries, guess what happens to the $50 she was going to spend on groceries? It goes to drugs. Any donation to an organization that engages in controversial activities makes it easier for said organization to carry out their controversial activities.

In the end, meddling by the government to score points with various constituencies leads to problems down the road. Once we take a hard look at the organizations our government is supporting, be they left or right of center, we realize that our government should never have been in these businesses to begin with. It's a long-term, systematic problem that short-sighted governmental impulses have created. And don't even get me started on the problems created by businesses getting involved in spousal benefits! Sigh.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to tend to the potted tomato plant on my window sill. If I get three tomatoes from it, I intend to claim I'm an urban farmer and qualify for subsidies. Wish me luck*!
*Ok, so MAYBE there isn't an urban farm program yet. Give it another 3 years, though.