Ask me questions about my job?

[kaberett]

I kind of want to be excitable at people about my work (and I kind of want the human contact without needing to actually parse audiovisual cues as required in in-person conversation), so... if you are curious please Ask Me Things? <3

Comments

[vass]

(More? I kind of feel like I need to put more fluid into my face to answer your questions competently - gonna put a pot of tea on - but does that start to answer?)

Sorry for taking so long to answer. I haven't been braining well lately, and I couldn't come up with good questions.

But yes, that those were good answers, and I did read your other comments on this post too, and your job is really cool.

I am curious about the bit about organic chemistry:

it's a field where to some extent either you have an instinct and you look at reaction schemes and Just Get It, or you have to memorise a bunch of rules about what governs chemical reactions, and then every single specific reaction you learn about is an exception to the rules.

Particularly since you related that to sudoku, and it reminded me of a friend of the family who is like that with anagrams. She can glance at the target word puzzle (do they have that in UK newspapers? it's a 9 square grid of letters, and you get as many legal words as possible (no plurals ending in S, no reusing the same letter in a word, no proper nouns or foreign words, etc) using the centre letter in every word, and including at least one 9-letter word) and she'll get the 9-letter word immediately. Is it like that, a pattern recognition thing? Or something else?

[kaberett]

I think it's sort of pattern-recognition, yeah? I have no idea how I'd describe what patterns I'm spotting, though, or formalise my thought processes, I just... do the thing.