One of the things I love about my life in Sweden, is the fact that I’m surrounded by academics almost 24/7. This by all means doesn’t imply that my friends and family back home are stupid, but there is just something about scientists and their sense of humor that makes a conversation that little bit more challenging. So yesterday, during the post-symposium free pizza-bar, I wrote down some of the jewels that made us crack up, but might have had any non-scientist in the company frown their eye-brows.
- One of the PhD-students wanted another piece of pizza and although she preferred a Napolitana pizza that was on the next table, she settled for a Margarita that sat on our table because “the distance-to-taste ratio was more favorable” for the latter.
- Another PhD student is Serbian, and we were joking on how former Yugoslavia seemed to keep falling apart, with new countries separating every year: “the half-life of Serbia is shorter than that of beryllium-8”.
(in reference to radio-active decay) - Our oldest professor has volunteered to be a mammalian cell-donor to anyone who finds him should he drop dead in the lab. One condition: he is to be second author on the paper when any results coming from his cells are published.
(a number of groups in our lab use mammalian cells for experimentations. everyone who has contributed to a scientific discovery, gets a mention as an ‘author’ when the discovery is published – the higher in the author ranking, the higher the contribution was)
Image by dump9x via Flickr
- We have a series of these little wooden brain teasers in our coffee rooms. When one of the guys finally managed to put one together, he exclaimed: “I conquered entropy!”.
(entropy, in its simplest explanation, is a measure for the degree of chaos and solving a puzzle creates order from chaos.) - One student was talking about a former teacher of his, who was apparently very… curvy… . They had determined an estimation of her actual weight, not by putting her on a scale, but by studying the bending of the light caused by her body.
(Einstein predicted that objects of large enough mass can bend light – this is used in astronomy to calculate masses for planets etc.)
The light-bending effects of a black hole.
A World of Lies 
I know exactly what you mean. There are different people in my life that I enjoy talking to for different reasons. Some of my family I just can’t talk to at all. I have more intelligent conversations with my three kids than I do some adults I know. There are some people I just refuse to talk to because I’d like to preserve the last few brain cells I have.
I sometimes feel guilty for preferring to hang out with my ‘scientist friends’ rather than those I’ve known for over 10 years… it’s not like they’re stupid, or ignorant, but their topics of conversation just seems so… mundane… sometimes. Then again, sometimes I’m happy to converse at a ‘lower level’, and not have to think so hard constantly to keep up with everything ;).