Nerdery

[liv]

Work is a bit politically frustrating at the moment, so have some silly links:

joannas found the personality quiz I've been waiting for all my life: What kind of protein are you? I am a transcription factor, which considering how much of my work has in fact been on TFs, is a particularly pleasing result. It means that I implement decisions by switching genes on and off, thereby delegating other proteins to go off and do useful things. Which sounds about right for someone who spends her non-research time teaching baby doctors and switching them on to go and cure people.

ETA 1: If you're getting a result like "analyst" or "nurturer" you need to scroll up to the top of the picture to see what kind protein you actually are. Yes, it's very bad UI design, I hadn't realized that it was making the descriptions more prominent than the actual result. Sorry about that!

There was an XKCD with biochemistry; there's no point linking to XKCD really cos just about everybody follows XKCD. And that strip isn't closely related to my work, but it's the chemistry a couple of levels under what I do, so it made me feel loved.

All the academics on my Twitter feed are linking to this silly Guardian article about why academics have a bad dress-sense: because we're not alienated from our labour, apparently. It's a charming thought, and there is a serious point buried in the article, which is that many female academics work just as hard on coming across exactly the right degree of nonchalant about appearance as they would on being impeccably presented if they worked in a sector that expected that. Me, I dress badly because I can't be bothered to spend time or money on clothes, and because I'm fat enough that there's no low-effort way to look good. But it's nice to pretend that it has something to do with Marx or feminism or something.

ETA 2: redbird absolutely nails the analysis that's missing from the article: "Even without choosing to dress that way for Marxist or feminist reasons, you can make those choices without a lot of stress in part because of your specific work and class situation." Yes, that. That's the conclusion the article should've come to, thank you redbird for fixing it so succinctly.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

The one time I met you I thought you dressed like someone who ENJOYED their outfit regardless of small matters like fashion or even cohesion. But that could be me projecting my immense love of swooshy skirts...

[liv]

Thank you, that's a lovely compliment! I do in fact wear almost exclusively clothes that I like, but I don't really know how to do outfits. So yes, I don't follow fashion and I'm quite bad at coordinating different things I like together, but I generally have positive feelings about anything I put on, either the colour or the style or something. And yes, I do in fact love swooshy skirts. I would love well-fitted trousers just as much but well-fitted trousers do not exist off-the-peg for people with my figure, so on average I end up a lot more femmey than I really am.

[kerrypolka]

I second this, you seem like someone who dresses in a way you like rather than a way you feel you ought to!

[vatine]

Apparently I am, too, a transcription factor.

I still can't fodl a paper crane, though.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm really crap at origami and similar three-D skills, I just study things that are amazingly good at it!

[kerrypolka]

I can't be bothered to spend time or money and I'm fat enough that there's no low-effort way to look good sound like they have a lot to do with Marxism and feminism to me, but I recognise I'm quicker to connect everyday life choices to those things than probably most people! :)

[liv]

You may in fact have a point there. I'm kind of frustrated with the article, because it talks about Marxism but has zero class analysis, and the academic "scruffy formal" style has a ton of class interactions. But it is of course a fluff piece, so I can't complain too much.

[merrythebard]

I too am a Transcription Factor, apparently! Though alas, I know too little to know much of the implications of this. :-)

FWIW, I love the way you dress, and thoroughly agree with highlyeccentric that you dress like you're enjoying your clothes. It is lovely. :-)

[liv]

Awww, I am really delighted by this post attracting lots of compliments on my clothes, that's not at all the reaction I was expecting. Thank you, that's a really lovely thing to say. It's true that for parties with friends I usually dress in clothes I just purely like, and don't worry about subtle status issues such as can apply at work.

[nanila]

Are transcription factors known to attract other transcription factors? Because you've got at least three in your DW circle. :)

I dress OK (being average-sized and knowing a couple of brands I can count on to make clothes I like both help) but looking after my hair properly and wearing makeup to go with the decent clothes is a haphazard business at best...

[liv]

I can't think of a way to phrase this that doesn't sound like an innuendo, but yes, transcription factors very much attract other transcription factors. Which is to say, the whole way that the transcription program works is that TFs nearly all work in pairs and you can get lots of different combinations of pairs which have different effects. In fact, I'm starting to think that I should follow up the silly meme by making a post about why TFs are cool and interesting.

I'm impressed you can manage dressing ok, even if hair and makeup are haphazard. Even that level feels kind of beyond me, but I admit that's partly because I'm disinclined to putting effort in to learning the skill.

[ursula]

I keep hoping there is some magic way I could dress that would make people not mistake me for an undergrad, but apparently I am doomed until my hair goes gray.

[liv]

Sympathy. I am one of the youngest faculty anyway, and I look young for my age, and there is no way that any amount of career advantage would motivate me to cut my thigh-length hair, so yes, I'm going to be taken for a kid until I'm grey. I've tried clothes with more tailoring than I'd normally go for, and it helps a bit, but only a very little bit.

[rysmiel]

For what it's worth, acquiring visible grey has not stopped people mistaking me for an undergrad this last couple of years, though it looks like this year I might finally manage to make it through to the end of the current term without being mistaken for one.

[kerrypolka]

Also, I'm (a?) kinase! I feel all of the booze related questions may have weighted things somewhat...

[liv]

Actually, what a kinase does in the cell is a lot like what you do IRL! They receive information from the body and the outside world and turn it into messages which they then pass on to the actual bits of the cell that do stuff.

[forestofglory]

I'm an analyst.(I still find these types quizes a bit irritating for there lack of options and nuance.)

Also I don't follow XKCD I just read it when someone links me to it. This seem like a good way to get the highlights, which is what I want.

[liv]

Yeah, personality quizzes like this always lack nuance. Mostly I just fill them in for three minutes of entertainment when I'm bored, but I liked this one for being so ridiculously nerdy about my own professional field. It doesn't mean anything that I'm supposedly a transcription factor! (The 'analyst' result is actually part of the description, not the actual definition of what kind of protein the quiz thinks you are, but it's bad design on the part of Cell Signal to make that so unclear.)

And yes, the highlights version of XKCD is a good idea. Munroe is pretty damn brilliant but not so brilliant that every single cartoon is a perfect gem after all these years of doing them three times a week.

And the comment I was going to make before rysmiel distracted me

[redbird]

Without even reading the article: a friend of mine in high school was fond of a quote from Marx, to the effect that we make our choices, but we don't choose the circumstances in which we make them. So, even without choosing to dress that way for Marxist or feminist reasons, you can make those choices without a lot of stress in part because of your specific work and class situation.

[liv]

Yes yes yes this is brilliant! You are exactly right that what the article completely fails to acknowledge is that academics get away with dressing "badly" because of our class status. Thank you for expressing the key point so clearly and succinctly.

[davidgillon]

Apparently I'm a nurturer, which I hadn't even realised was a style of protein.

WRT clothes, my sister's opinion is that I was clearly somewhere else when the coordination gene was handed out :)

[liv]

The quiz is a bit badly designed in that the results screen puts your actual protein type result as the title of the picture, which means it's easy to skim over. Nurturer unfortunately isn't a type of protein, and I can't easily reverse engineer the quiz to find out what protein type it in fact corresponds to. Sorry about that.

The options are, I think, transcription factor, receptor, metabolic enzyme, kinase, chaperone. Which is a bit of a limited selection, maybe there are more I haven't found yet. Receptors get instructions from outside the cell. Kinases pass the message on from receptors to the rest of the cell machinery. Transcription factors switch genes on and off in response to this information. Chaperones help the new proteins to mature, so that's my most likely guess for what the quiz would describe as "nurturer". And metabolic enzymes actually do stuff by altering the chemistry of the cell (all the protein types are enzymes in fact, but it seems like the point of specifying metabolic ones is that they actually directly do biochemistry rather than altering other proteins.)

[ewt]

I am an analyst, apparently.

I am not really an academic but my clothing choices often boil down to "will it look sortof OK rumpled?". I seem to be congenitally scruffy, I can spend as much or as little time as I like getting dressed but 5 minutes later I will look like I've been through a hedge backward.

Trousers almost never fit but neither do tights, and leggings with socks always look a bit less smart.

I always dream of a capsule wardrobe of things that Just Fit and Go Together but the reality is I wear clothes out fast and also like a lot of different colours/styles so usually have more clothing than I can usefully wear and what I actually want is in the wash. I kind of miss being sortof goth and only wearing black, which simplified things somewhat on a day-to-day basis but made shopping for things that fit me more difficult.

[liv]

Analyst = transcription factor, I think, cos that's the result I got. I didn't realize until people started commenting with personality types instead of protein types that the quiz is really unclear, it displays the actual result as the title of the picture where it's easy to skim over, especially if you don't know that names of proteins is what you're looking for.

Much sympathy on the clothes issue. I think your figure is even further outside what useless clothes retailers consider "typical" than mine. And yes, congenitally scruffy is a problem for me too, it's not only that I'm too lazy, it's that I'm too uncoordinated to make my clothes look smart.

I like the capsule wardrobe idea! But yes, it's very difficult to achieve because capitalism thrives on cheap clothes that wear out fast and need replacing.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Clothes is a difficult thing generally. I mean, I often feel bad wearing the nice, femme clothes that I feel comfortable in, because they're usually coded as more effort than yoga-trousers and trainers in which I do not feel comfortable. But as Colin pointed out last time I was dithering about a new skirt, it's not actually more expensive to buy a nice skirt than a pair of jeans, I did need one of the two, and it would make me happier. Happily, that advice did stick because that was several clothes-buying episodes ago.

I've been flirting with the idea of make-up again - Judith arts voraciously, and part of her self-expression is not just on paper but her skin as canvas, she loves make-up for that reason. So it seems a good time to start wearing some again, and I've ordered some and dug out what I had and you might actually see me wearing make-up. But I probably wouldn't wear it in 'work' type situations because again, it would be coded wrong. Too much effort, too much time, maybe?

[liv]

I hear you. I have gender angst too, because I want to wear bright colours and comfortable clothes that are easy to move in, and those are coded femme. Lots of people think I have a religious or gender identity principle against wearing trousers, but it's purely that I can't ever find trousers that fit. And I don't find jeans comfortable or low effort, even though I know they're perceived that way.

I'm glad Colin convinced you buy skirts you like. I enjoyed your recent post about possible clothing choices :-)

Interesting thought about starting to wear some makeup to encourage Judith! I'm terrified of makeup, partly from a coordination point of view, if I put bright colours on my face and do it clumsily it'll be really really obvious. And also from a gender coding point of view, I'm perhaps irrationally scared that if I wear makeup people will think I'm the kind of feminine that includes putting lots of effort into appearance, and there's nothing wrong with that and it shouldn't scare me, but it does. I can totally appreciate makeup on people who are not me, though!

[daharyn]

I am also a transcription factor? I don't know, I feel all over the map these days so that probably just reflects my current state of mind.

OMG academic dressing. Rant follows. At my new job I am one half of a team that is meant to be equal, and the team is managed by someone interested in being collaborative and generally not hierarchical. But I am a good 14? 15? years younger than the other half of the team, 25+ years younger than our manager/supervisor, and the only one who is still without a doctorate. Also, while I now have a tiny bit of visible grey, the other two are clearly adults, and I definitely still get mistaken for a student. So the way I manage my wardrobe each day is intense. Today was fancy-ish with quality accessories in a signature power color because of a tres important strategic meeting with higher-higher-higher-ups, but two days ago I was bouncing around a day of peer meetings and research in a tunic with birds all over it and a pair of leggings. I've decided to A) wear what makes me feel confident about that day's tasks B) make sure I'm really clear on the day's calendar before I make my choices. It also depends on what buildings I'll be in that day--our divisional home in the org chart has a lax dress code, but the physical location of our team office trends formal--and who else will be in any meetings I'm in. (Incidentally, I'm still waiting for the day when I don't have at least one meeting. Today I had 3 meetings and a lunch, which is more typical than not.) C) make sure it doesn't all look too "East Coast," so as not to arouse too much suspicion about my motives. (Seriously. That is a thing. If I'm not going to wear visibly natural fibers that day, I better have a darn good reason why. And I have to get a coat that is less New York and more Oregon, on my next check. I am getting comments about the coat, and it turns out not to be all that water-resistant, anyway--as I learned the hard way earlier this week.)

[azurelunatic]

And I am a chaperone! I facilitate things happening for others.