I was reading a webcomic today called xkcd.com by a really clever fellow named Randall Munroe today that mixes geek stuff, romantic commentary and existentialism and I realized that I have a terminal case of a syndrome I will call Techie Envy. Turns out Randall, in his day job played with robots at NASA Langley and holds a degree in physics. And he's cleverer than I am. WTF?

I think I first discovered my simmering Techie Envy when I became friends with Ted Kolberg at Stanford in 2005. Ted has impeccable music taste (turned me onto LCD Soundsystem BEFORE James Murphy was a hipster household name) and is a really great writer and of course, Ted is cleverer than me. Oh yeah, and Ted is a physics Ph.D candidate who works at the CERN Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border.

How dare these nerds be better than me at philosophy, irony and life, in addition to having a whole wondrous world of thought available to them through higher math and science? It really kills me.

In a really small, fuzzy pond like USC's journalism school, I suppose I am techier than most. (Slashdot!) I can pick up new software pretty quickly, code HTML, write JavaScript (my webpage got second place at Stanford's CS105 intro class contest, w00t) but let's face it--I'm no techie. My science class area reqs at Stanford were a conceptual physics class, Natural Hazards (rocks for jocks) and basic computer science.

What makes me really sad :( is that boundless curiosity, empiricism, skepticism, the scientific method and all that good stuff are the core values of who I am, but my education and skills don't match. Given my curriculum vitae, I should be asking not "how does it work?" but "so how does the representation of whaling technology in Moby-Dick make you feel?

Philosophically, I'm a techie I guess, but I never took calculus (AP stats, shame) and I'm preparing for a career in journalism, a field that bases most of its evidence on collected small-sample consensus (hearsay) rather than truly empirical techniques. The fact is, by the time you get all the facts properly observed, the story is over. So we have to rely on a small group of people that say something is so and hope they're not lying. I'm actually wincing as I write this.

Incidentally, I'm typing in Notepad so I don't get any nasty characters or smart quotes in this text. See I know about that stuff...now if only I was on Linux.

The Techie Envy problem is deeper than that too. It makes me love things I'll always be second-rate at. Strategy gaming is my favorite pastime in the world, but guess what? Math brains do better there. I learned Nash's equilibrium from a Ron Howard movie. Ditto my other interests--sci-fi, engine mechanics, webdesign. I can do all these things passably, but I get the answers from web tutorial FAQs written by actual techies who actually figured them out. I'll never be the open-source pioneer in anything other than writing about feeling insecure about Techie Envy. And that's just hyper self-conscious meta-blather, something out of which we fuzzies have made a living.

So, in true scientific fashion, now that we've diagnosed the problem (Techie Envy, a love and respect for all things empirical, but a lack of core skills or aptitudes to do them myself), let's attempt to draft a solution:

A) Get better at math and science. Simple to say, hard (or impossible) to do. Ted had to hold my hand through the most basic Schwarzschild radius calculations in my wimpy astrophysics class. I've pushed my brain many times to level up but I do have a wall where the elegance and order of numbers eludes me. The real techies I know talk about seeing the numinous dance of the spheres and finding great peace in their calculations, but I'm always gonna be like wait, uh, how do I solve for X?

B) Let go of the insecurity and be confident in the skills that I have. Awww. Cute. He can blog about science. Being a science and math fan and unable to practice is, in the words of Mike Nichols responding to movie critics, like being "a eunuch at a gangbang." We live in an ever-techier world (ni hao!) and we as a country are going to lose if we don't step up. The same goes for journalism.

C) Get really mad and defensive about it and retreat further into rarified fuzzyland. This option would be the "screw you, I'm going to get my MFA" path. Not a pretty sight. Next.

D) The Buddhist middle path. This solution (despite similarities to B) is probably the only appealing one of the bunch. I will never get a Nobel prize. Or a Pulitzer. Or heck, even a Webbie. But what I can do is learn about fascinating things happening on the bleeding edges of science, technology and culture and report on them in a way that is comprehensible and readable without being reductive or simplistic. In short, there is crucial progress being made,such as the research being done by joint teams of lawyers and forensic scientists at Hastings College of the Law, that is changing our culture, our legal system, our lives. That's a story I wrote. Hopefully, there is a market demand for me to build a bridge from lofty science to regular folks. And maybe, just maybe make it clever, exciting, thought-provoking and fun to read.

At the end of the day, will I always be less than? When I was eight years old, I had to do one of those What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? (pick three) worksheets that they give you in school. I picked 1) Astronaut 2) Paleontologist 3) Writer. I guess, as I sit here at my Windows machine at the beginning of my 25th year of life, I am going to have to learn to be a contented number 3 who writes about numbers 1 and 2.

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