And for this simple reason I bring both to the table whenever I begin a new project. One half is logical and fascinated with puzzles, probabilities, educated guesses, statistics, quantifying the unexpected: the electron, if you will, the half that is 'the void.' The creative side, although perhaps seen as its polar opposite, compliments the logical. It's the adrenaline I feel when challenged to make something from nothing or using existing pieces to form a completely different product: the proton, the half that obsesses to 'fill the void.' So while one side prompts new questions and uncovers more challenges, the other side works to answer the questions, to meet the challenges.

In her book Writing Machines, Katherine Hayles says it best as she recalls her move from laboratory to communication science:

The clarity she prized and the deep explanations were as thrilling as ever, but the focus became increasingly narrow as she spent less time in classes and more time in the research laboratory coming to realize what every practicing scientist knows, that laboratory science is 95 percent mundane exacting work and 5 percent inspiration. In an odd way this environment began to seem less like a release from parochialism than a return to it, living within narrowly defined boundaries where large questions are ruled out of bounds. Perhaps the problem lay in her particular research. What is it about, she would ask, and her colleagues gave eloquent and detailed answers. But when she asked them the questions that were bothering her -- why is it important? what does it mean -- they laughed and shrugged them off, looking at her as if she had committed a breach of decorum. She knew, of course, that cutting-edge research was going on all around her and that it sometimes led to momentous conclusions, but she began to suspect this was the exception rather than the rule -- the reward for long years of laboring day after day on work that seemed stubbornly to resist the penetration of human thought into resistant materiality...[She] did not mind hard work, in fact thrived on it, but she yearned to ask the big questions (13-14).

Writing gives me the chance to explore and communicate a variety of ideas in different industries, multiplying the possibilities.