Learning a New Language

I developed a valuable skill during my time as a research scientist working on geological projects from all over the world. Within a matter of weeks of starting each new project, within days if pressed, I needed to learn geological formation names, lithologies, depositional environments, georeference points from the present and the past to place the geological events in time and space...in short, a new subvocabulary suited to that project. I call it a subvocabulary because it fit into my existing geoscientific language. I didn't need to relearn how deltas formed, but I did have to learn that there was a delta in this particular basin at this location at this time fed by this river bringing in these kinds of sediments.

This skill was extremely helpful when I was developing introductory training courses at Aramco. I was able to integrate and even expand upon the knowledge of the geological history of the Arabian plate, incorporate that into training materials, and deliver it with some expectation of success to the new geologists.

This kind of learning isn't done in a vacuum. I had colleagues to bounce ideas off of, I was provided or obtained for myself the literature that I needed to learn the framework of each project. But I also developed my own methods for organizing and displaying the information that allowed me to learn a lot of things in a short period of time. It looks like magic but it's really just a lot of hard work.

I'm putting that skill to use again as I learn an entirely new language, that of animal nutrition in general and poultry in particular. A year ago, reading a passage like this would have had my eyes rolling back into my head within seconds:

The increase in the level of PL ALA was accompanied by significant increases in levels of the major n-3 LCPUFA, EFA, DPA, and DHA (all P < 0.001) with the highest level of n-3 LCPUFA observed at the highest level of dietary ALA.

I kept it short to spare you. 

It's just another code, isn't it? I can draw on what I've learned in the past year to break it down thusly: 

LCPUFA or long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, specifically those with a carbon-carbon double bond located 3 links from one end (they are considered "healthy" fatty acids) are synthesized inside our bodies (chickens and humans, for example) from a shorter fatty acid called ALA or alpha-linolenic acid. Neither humans nor chickens can make this shorter precursor molecule; we have to consume it in our diets. The P variable refers to the results of a statistical test of the significance of the amounts of the longer fatty acids that the chickens made in their livers; simply making "more" isn't a robust observation. We have to ask, did the chickens make more than would be predicted from various measures of mean or average or expected performance? In this case, the chickens did make statistically greater amounts of the longer fatty acids when they consumed more of the precursor molecule in their diets.

Is this my fourth language, after English, geology, and French, a distant third? Maybe it is an expansion of a language I already know, one that we could simply call science. 

Either way, I am confronted with a familiar task: organizing a jargon, figuring out its sometimes arcane but hopefully mostly logical rules and standards, and internalizing it so that I can begin to use it.

I'm doing this masters project on a very short timeline, although that too isn't unfamiliar territory. Good thing I have a few magic tricks I can use!