it's a small world...

[iridium]

work was slow today, and i was bored, so i was poking through Analytical Chemistry online. it was very odd to realize that the reason the name of the second author of the top article sounded kinda familiar was that, as it happens, she was my next-door neighbor during my third year at MIT/Haus. and the work's even roughly in my field, too, so i pretty much understood the whole article.
which reminds me: i noticed another MIT/Haus person's name in the presentation listings for this year's MicroTAS, too. haven't seen her in years, and last i knew she was doing aero/astro. ...and it turns out that an MIT person who i first met in New Mexico five or six years ago went on a field-test trip this summer to the Atacama desert with my boss, one of the grad students from my lab, and a whole pile of chips that i made.
freaky.
sometimes the small-world thing is neat, and sometimes it makes me want to move out to a little adobe house out in the high-desert middle of nowhere and let my world get bigger again.

[edit: Anal Chem updated this evening. the article's in the July 15 issue rather than the Aug. 1 issue.]

Comments

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

what makes it a smaller world is that i added you mistaking you for uridium, who's my friend's fiance and neighbor, and he went to MIT too. but he studied trains or something.

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

as in, not my friend's neighbor, but he used to be MY neighbor.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

bizarre. Uridium appears to also be an old Commodore 64 game, too.
any idea what year he was at MIT?

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

nope but he's in his late twenties i think, which means he couldn't have been the frat boy who beat the shit out of me in 2003 because i had blue hair and he was drunk. :(

you could probably just ask him, he's a really nice guy. and looks EXACLY like lt. commander Data from star trek.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

just went and poked at his userinfo, and there are at least two or three different lines of connection i can make between myself and him, just based on the lj friendslist. the shortest one is three degrees of separation (me -> (lots of people) -> obra -> uridium). not surprising, i guess, if he's in his late twenties, but still...hmph. freaky.

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

Dude, you both went to MIT. I went to BU and I can find a hundred million connections to people from BU, Northeastern, Harvard, MIT. If you're still living in Boston/Cambridge (or did during college) that means you both got drunk at the Republik or watched shitty bands at the All Asia Cafe or pretended to know what you were drinking at Bukowski's or took dates to the Bar Code or wahtever before it became something else. It's a small city and a small world. But I'm excited to go back to it for a week in August.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

yeah, yeah, yeah. it's a tiny city, and i knew that. i didn't know many non-MIT people though, sadly. it's too easy for that place to be a tight little bubble.
*little smile* i'm really just grousing about the small-world thing.

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

the only MIT people i know aside from drunken people i've randomly met in bars are some guys who work in experimental robotology or whatever the fuck, because there was some dude who made artificial legs or something. pretty cool but i didn't understand any of it. :(

[iridium.livejournal.com]

heh. i can think of three or four people who do robotics work, offhand, but i don't think any of them make artificial legs. one of them plays with big red daleks and build hydraulic stilts in his free time, though.

[uridium.livejournal.com]

On some days I think too many people are connected to obra for it to count as something in common. Maybe people without a connection to him could say that they all have that in common with each other....

[iridium.livejournal.com]

heh. yeah. i'm sure i've met obra, probably on several/many occasions, but i still don't have a good name-face match, and he's not someone i know well.

other connections:
you->teafox->nepenthe01->loxocele/christianb->me
you->susannalk->eisenbud (who i've probably met)->fyfer/coraline/whole pile of people i know->me
you->melissaagray->avacon->me
you->cavedwellers->coureton->lerta->me
you->cavedwellers->memerath->chanaleh->nacht_musik/lyonesse/etc->me
and this is an odder one, i think:
you->muppetk->pixel->plymouth->me

and these are all, as best i can tell, relatively *different* connections.
(words/names get stuck in my head fairly easily, so i was going by unknown usernames that seemed familiar; some of them were, from glances at friends' profile pages.) ...pardon my social-network geeking. i'm all done now. :)

[uridium.livejournal.com]

Good god. I count three totally different phases of my life in there. I knew Eisenbud in high school, I just didn't know he had an LJ, To make that clear, you are now telling me about the livejournals of people I know.

I really need to find the time to become more paranoid.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

*laugh* somehow, i'm not surprised. my connections in that list include people i know through four or five (relatively) independent MIT social groups.
and note that pixel is someone my friend plymouth knows through connecticut/art-car circles, entirely unrelated to MIT (i think). round and round it goes...

[iridium.livejournal.com]

oh, no...i shouldn't have gone and done that. i went and poked around more, seeing which connections i could find. and mit/boston/etc is apparently just one clusterfuck of a black-hole of a social network. everything gets sucked in and smushed together by its inescapable gravity. arghh!
(like i said, some days this entertains me. today it makes me want to go hide in a cave in bhutan for the next six years. i hear they've got yaks.)

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

It's only natural. Like I said, chances are you've probably met socially already. Who knows! The internet/real life thing happens to me way too much for me to be comfortable or cool with it anymore but I used to be futhman, which carries a certain amount of notoriety I guess.

Are you still in the general area? Also, I'm going to invite uridium to this conversation too, he'll be amused.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

it's possible but not all that likely that i've met uridium -- the connections seem to be mostly to a social group that i've only gotten to know better recently, and which i was peripheral-at-best to when i lived in cambridge. (and i don't recognize the name futhman...sorry. *shrug* i never did get much into the internet-social-networking thing, or at least not into doing it intentionally.)

i live in oakland, these days, and don't make it back to cambridge/etc all that often. might get back there for a couple of visits next year, with luck.

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

eh futhman was only known to BU undergrads and internet retards, neither of which you are. it wasn't as much of internet social networking as a fat man self-indulgently shitting blood on THE INTERNET.

if you're ever there when i am (which is unlikely, since i'm planning to spend the rest of my life in bangladesh) then let me know.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

yeah, i'm decidedly neither a BU undergrad nor an internet retard. *laugh* can't say i'm all that sad to have missed out on the shitting-blood bit.

i'm most likely to be there around the first weekend in may (or last in april, if it overlaps), for the bigass 3-day party that the place i used to live throws every year. you're welcome to come, if you happen to be around then.

[uridium.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I named myself after the game (which sounds kind of lame now that I saw it explicitly, but everyone's gotta be named something.) And I only went to grad school at MIT, 2000-2002, so I didn't meet a lot of undergrads. I had blue-green hair my first year there if that rings a bell.

[liquidexplosion.livejournal.com]

hahaha YOU had blue-green hair?????????

[iridium.livejournal.com]

naming yourself after a c64 game is only slightly geekier than naming yourself after an obscure element. :) so i can't give you too much trouble for it. ;)
i probably dyed several people's hair blue (or green or whatever) during rush of 2000 & 2001, but i think they were mostly undergrads. hm. what else? i lived in Senior Haus, did materials science, spent a lot of that time ('00-'02) buried in a lab in the basement of building 4, working on my thesis research.