We Are Monks.

I have mentioned before that I have this kinda awesome job at the college library now working on an archiving project. Well the below pictures are some of the more interesting things I have come across lately.

I love this job because my brain is calibrated to absorb the maximum amount of useless bullshit and because the stuff I have to do during the day doesn't even feel like work! Mostly it just feels like stuff I would do for free if I was really, really bored.

I (and the people I work with) are pretty much the modern version of those monks who saved civilization by writing everything down during the Dark Ages … basically.

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Reading is Sexy.

So I have mentioned before that I work at the school library on an archiving project that allows me to spend my time around four decades’ worth of thesis projects. There are many things about this that I love, but one of them is that I encounter all of the wonderful and interesting thesis titles. Thesis titles, by virtue of being all APA analytical and specific, tend to be wonderfully descriptive and wordy in a charmingly Victorian sort of way. For instance, here are a few real examples:

- Comfortable interpersonal distance as perceived by educationally handicapped children.

- Analysis and design of a phaselocked loop system for tracking a linear frequency modulation signal.

- Leisure patterns of professional clergy within the United Methodist Church in the greater Los Angeles area.

How can you not find these things fun?!

Today however, was a banner letter day because today I found my favorite title so far. It’s a bit of a dark horse, I’ll admit that, because while it is charmingly Victorian it isn’t the most clunky and uselessly unwieldy title I’ve come across. Rather this one wins more for content than style, although the style doesn’t suck either. Are you ready? Okay, here it is:

Erotic coital fantasies of monogamous and nonmonogamous female graduate students: a normative study.

And I feel no shame in admitting that I read the WHOLE THING and it was fascinating and better written than 50 Shades of Grey. Not that it needs to be pointed out, but you ladies are into some weird stuff and I totally understand ALL OF IT now. Seriously, because it was a ‘normative study’ there were multichoice surveys and stuff. Very illuminating.

Oh, and here are some completely unrelated images. This stuff is all, basically, out there for the public to see now (because of the project I’m helping with) so I don’t even think I can get fired over posting any of this!

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Abstract.

So I have myself a little job working in the library at school. I’m one of a few student assistants helping with an archiving project that involves digitizing several decades’ worth of Master Thesis projects. To some people that might sound boring as all fuck, but those people don’t read this blog anyway. I find it to be completely FASCINATING and I fear that I am going to end up falling in love with Library Science, but that’s a whole other story.

This story is about how one of the things I do is (basically) review and upload each thesis abstract. Essentially I spend hours reading these super short little summaries of each thesis and there’s no telling what they will be about from one to the next and some of them get extremely technical. Well I have absolutely fallen in love with the weird, super-specific, and obscurant language of these things. It is as if there is a bizarre sub-language going on that I never knew about before; both mysterious and strange. So here now I will share with you some of my favorite thesis titles (so far):

- Vector Photon Miss Distance Indicator Ground Station

- EEG and Behavioral Correlates of Amnesia Induced by Pentylenetetrazol in Chicks

- Comfortable Interpersonal Distance as Perceived by Educationally Handicapped Children

- An Electronically and Mechanically Tunable X-Band Gunn Oscillator

- Defensive Attribution of Responsibility for a Happy Accident

(BTW, I’m not making fun of this weirdness, I do genuinely love it.)



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