andmaybegayer:

if I was like. Unbelievably rich. I’d want some live-in specialist researchers. To spice up my weird mansion, like those garden hermits but inside your house. You find some promising up-and-coming young academics and you set them up with a lab and rooms and all the tools they could want and pay for their expeditions to take samples of Siberian soil microbes and dig up Sumerian pottery and attend conferences on microfluidics and in exchange you get to wander into a cleanroom at seven in the morning with overalls over your plaid gown and fuzzy slippers and ask your resident optics engineer what they’re doing and they have to tell you because you just bought them a solid cube of sapphire ten centimeters across.