Betwixt Jobs

Getting involved in diet/exercise stuff professionally means I need to venture further into biochemistry land. This requires me to confront a harsh reality: I’ve managed to not have any biology courses since 7th grade. I squeaked through high school without ever having to take a bio class. In college, I started taking a bio class but that was during the semester from hell and I ended up having to drop it due to the rest of my life crushing me.

So here I am learning all this cellular stuff and everything essentially from scratch, and it’s painful. Not because I’m not interested in this stuff–I’m actually extremely interested in anything that furthers my understanding of how the human body works–but because the way biology is taught runs very counter to my learning style. In the CS classes I took, it was all about concepts. Concepts which can be applied regardless of the details of the particular system you’re working on. My body is very well tuned to learning concepts at the expense of not being so well-tuned in detail-land. Who cares about details? If I need the details, I’ll just look them up .

This is where I do very poorly with biology learning materials, at least the introductory materials. I have several books I’m reading and I’ve also been listening to several podcast lectures, and they all have the same problem: you have to learn 800 billion terms about all the different components of a cell and all that stuff, but the actual concepts behind how they work do not come to much, much later. This is the worst possible learning environment for me, as I have nothing to latch onto and I have to resort to rote memorization, something I do very horribly. In order to pass the required learning unit quizzes for my nutritional certification, I have to memorize things like the fact that lipids include things like fats, waxes, sterols, vitamins, etc. What the hell is a sterol? They’ll explain that later. What the hell is a lipid? What is the common feature of all these things that group them together? They’ll explain that later. Every other sentence in biology books contains a phrase along the lines of “the reasons for this will be explained later in this chapter.”

I’ve been making note cards out the wazoo to help me keep track of all these terms. Because there is a buttload of terms I have to learn. And unless I spend time investigating each and every one of these terms until I have a satisfactory internal representation of them, all I’m doing is reciting definitions that mean very little to me. When dealing with literally hundreds of terms, this research could take me forever.

As I go through this ordeal, I found myself appreciating how the computer world deals with details. So many details are specific to one system and/or are ephemeral, so in that field there is more of a need to optimize the transfer of details. This is why things like javadocs and other API documentation are so incredibly useful at transmitting a great deal of useful information very efficiently. I keep finding myself wishing I had javadocs for biology. That would make certain details very easy for me to process, like the fact that saturated fat is a subclass of fat, which is generally a subclass of triglyceride, which in turn is a subclass of lipid, which among other things implements the hydrophobic interface. That’s how my brain wants to process things. What are the superclasses and subclasses of this thing I’m looking at? What are its inputs? Where do those inputs come from? What are its outputs? What consumes them?

So yeah, this is all a bit jarring, especially combined with the fact that my brain isn’t quite as spongy as it was the last time I took any classes. But on the other hand, I’m really enjoying learning more about how the human body works. Every new piece of information I get gives me a deeper understanding of what’s going on inside of me. It’s weird how this vessel you inhabit every day of your life can remain mysterious and only superficially understood even after years and years.