After all, today's young hozhed is a member of a pretty diverse crew. They might be found in the midst of late-night hacking, culture-jamming, spontaneous dereferencing, historical inquiry, musical shenanigans, road trips, or lime Jell-O™. They might be tracking down the last surviving copy of Highway Gothic, installing NetBSD on their Alphen (since Linux is so…1995), reading Gaiman and Tepper, or playing capture-the-flag on government property (ah, but which one?). They may be a force for great good…or great evil. But they are, and will remain, a force for great fun.
How does science tie all this together? Listen to track 12 of Miscellaneous
T (from the band They Might Be Giants). Turn your apartment into a chemistry
experiment. Deduce the nature of life from the deeply interrelated crumbly
bits in a bag of potato chips. Determine the relationship between vulcanized
logic and the rubber science we get every week on Star Trek. Assign yourself
as an exercise for the teacher.
Science is a mechanism for looking at the world; it provides a lens
for analyzing the absurdities of life and re-engineering them. (Ha! Never
thought I'd get around to a point, did you?) It provides a framework for
piling up factoids of reality and twisting them around for your own convenient
purposes. It gives you something to talk about the kind of parties that
people tend to about these kinds of things about.
This issue, we deconstruct the fallacious urban legend of the left and
right brains, and demand that you stop hiding behind the crutches of discipline.
Art is science, and science is art. And algebra and iconography are both
important survival skills which you, the home reader, will need for that
inevitable day when you are stranded on a desert island without a network
connection or an e-mail address, and need to re-invent Western Civilization
from scratch and sugar.