brithistorian decided the five questions meme looked like fun after all, so he asked: 1. Who is your favorite physicist, living or dead?I love Jen. Jen is awesome. I'm also greatly fond of Lars and Josh, and Dennis was a wonderful advisor and remains a good friend. I wonder how Nate Miller and Rauha Rahkola are doing sometimes, and a bunch of my lablings. If Peter Scherbring popped up to say hi, or Katherine O'Connell, that would make me extremely happy, because they were good lab partners in my worst semester at Gustavus. (And hey, what's Google for?)
Oh, someone the rest of you have heard of? Niels Bohr. He embraced the weird really, really well. Also he handled just dozens of brilliant people bouncing ideas off each other, and very few people have the skills to do both science and scientist-wrangling.
2. If your life were a science fiction or fantasy novel being written by someone other than you, who would you want the author to be?
Eep, no! Science fiction and fantasy writers are mean! I suppose picking someone who already loves me and would be nice to me is dodging the question? This is hard. Horrible things happen to the characters in all my favorite books. (You didn't think I meant to exclude myself from the mean, did you?)
I tend to want to specify not just writer but era or subfield. "Short story Nancy Kress, not novel Nancy Kress! Early Sarah Zettel, not late Sarah Zettel! Mid-period Joe Haldeman!"
Not Susan Matthews, let's say that. And don't let Catherine Asaro or Charles de Lint anywhere near the plot of my life, either. The former would end up with me tortured or dead, and the latter two with me torturing or killing other ruby-eyed and/or desperately artistic characters.
3. If you could instantly gain the ability to play any musical instrument, what would you choose?
I think I'd have to go with French horn, on the theory that I'm unlikely to pick it up without magic. I could go learn to play all kinds of other things on my own, but I'm never going to sit down and learn the French horn out of the blue. But it's so murky, I just love that.
4. If you had to choe to play one sport (team or individual), what would it be?
(Choose, I assume.) Ummm. Sport. As distinct from activity or game or art form or discipline. I am not so much for sports, is the thing. (The team sport thing is People again.) Probably tennis. I played a bit of tennis when I was younger.
If this one was the magic ability question, I'd pick hockey, no question. But without magic abilities? Here in Minnesota where a lot of women are a lot bigger than me and have been playing since they were big enough to stay vertical on skates? Uh, no thanks. (I loved floor hockey in high school, though. I have pointy elbows, and lots of people thought they could slash and check the girlgeek without consequences. Heh. No.)
(
timprov was so sad when he figured out that Tam Lin was set too early for Molly to learn real hockey. I'm a little sad, too, when I think of it.)5. In this 5-question meme, do you think you learn more about people from the questions they ask or the questions they answer.
Depends on the person. Some people are going into personal depths with their answers. Others are not. And some people's questions are complicated and offbeat, and others are not. For me, it depends on how I know the person, how much time and energy I have at the moment, etc.
I'm still up for being asked questions if you feel like it, or I can be done now. Whatever. I'm reading
porphyrin's copy of Mark Budz's Crache, and it's doing interesting things. I'm not yet sure whether I like it, but it's worth my time for sure. It's got a lot of smooshed-together words, though, and they're getting to be a bit precious for me, and I'm not sure I actually care about any of the characters. We'll see. 