My first year I was actually considering Chemistry and Computer Science.

Getting people to give that up is a major point of the first-year courses in that. Chemistry I just realized that I had considered myself a STEM type back in school because I liked science fiction and I was good at doing sums in my head, but I wasn’t actually good at this and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

CompSci, it was partly just that what I was interested in about that was not at all what a research university does in that sector. Like, I wanted to program (because vidya, like everyone) and the attitude was more like “crafting a program is trivial and uninteresting, the real business is applied recursive abstract math”. Also the 102 professor was a terrible teacher and didn’t remotely care, kind of assumed we’d teach ourselves languages and so focused on hammering home his personal file cabinet-based metaphor for protected classes.

I knew someone who did go through the program, and on to get at least a masters’ degree with it. He was an asexual rabbit furry (which I just now realize is kinda funny) who I think maybe converted to Quakerism? Big on animal rights and pacifism and whatnot. Anyway, the NSA phone-monitoring thing didn’t remotely surprise me because in like 2005 he was like “well, our team got a grant to develop a system to apply incredibly complex DSP algorithms over absurdly huge arrays, and there’s no name attached, and I have no goddamn idea what it even does, but there’s only one force in the world with remotely enough capacity to implement it”.

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history where one of the plagues absolutely wipes out European Christendom. (For a book that’s partially set in both Japan and Anatolia, the sexy intergenerational bathing bits are remarkably brief and rare.) He leans too far on parallels - there’s I think a not-Galileo and a not-Newton at least, and the “feminism is totally compatible with Islam, and could indeed rescue it from itself, in alliance with Science!” bits are 2002core as all hell. But the thing that most bothered me at the end after not-World War I/II was when all the scientists in the world get together and are like “for the good of mankind, let’s make sure no one ever learns nuclear fission”, and it’s like dude, for a guy who specializes in writing about the role and function of scientists in culture, you seem to have no fucking clue about the role and function of scientists in culture.