After dinner at work last night, I met a new postdoc working down the hall from my office. I said hello, attempting to overcome my social awkwardness, and asked what type of research she does in the chemistry department. She replied “I’m an experimentalist. You, ahem, must be a theorist.” Whoa!

How in the spirit of chemistry did she know?! So I asked. She replied “I can just tell.” Baffling! Then I looked down and realized the first corollary and theorem, in my developing theory of how to not behave like a theorist (hereby termed atheorism):

Corollary 1: Chicken noodle soup shrapnel on a shirt is neither necessary nor sufficient to indicate someone is a theorist.

Theorem 1: Chicken noodle soup shrapnel on a male wearing a t-shirt that says “Visionary Women: Challenging assumptions and inspiring change” from 1993 is sufficient but not necessary to indicate the male is a theorist.

It turned out that I had forgotten to bring dining utensils with my dinner to work. Slurping Campbell’s chicken noodle soup seemed like a good idea at dinner time. Forgetfulness is also typical theorist behavior and will be a later theorem, when my sinful theorist nature catches up with me.

Sincerely,
A devoted atheorist

It’s 6:42 am, and polls opened 42 minutes ago here in Indiana. I was 5th in line at my polling place at about 5:51 am, just in time to watch the live news report and be on camera for a few minutes. This was my first primary vote, my first in-person vote in Indiana, and actually my first at-a-machine vote in history (Oregon is all vote-by-mail).

Man did they have issues. As soon as polls opened, each one of their check-in machines crashed at least 10 times. They thought it was due to high activity around the state on whatever servers run the system, but find that sort of hard to believe — it’s not as though everyone was really powering through at 6 am. Though they had tons of issues actually getting people to the polling machines themselves, once I was there, it was surprisingly smooth. Dare I say the voting experience itself was perfectly acceptable. I have no idea what types of machines they were using and my thoughts on electronic voting machines are well known, but absent these more theoretical complaints it couldn’t have gone much better.

This is probably the first election I’ve voted in where there’s some major ambiguity as to who will win (the democratic nomination). Cross your fingers everyone. Cheers.