Every good blog needs a signature recurring element. Dave and Greta have Casual Fridays, RPM has Double Entendre Fridays, Grrlscientist has Birds in the News, PZ has Say Mean Things About Religious People Days-That-End-In-Y, Orac has EneMan...
I'm not organized enough to commit to posting things in a certain category on a specific day of the week, butlater today (through the miracle of scheduled posting) I'm going to roll out an intermittent series of posts based on True Lab Stories. As the original post says, these are not moral or uplifting tales. They won't necessarily have a coherent point, or even make much sense to anybody who hasn't been an experimental scientist (yeah, this'll boost the blog traffic...).
True Lab Stories are the sort of stories that scientists tell each other when we get together in bars at conferences, the way doctors tell Bizarre Patient Stories, or help-desk geeks tell Stupid User Stories, or plumbers tell Asshole Customer Stories. They're amusing anecdotes about the trials and tribulations of life in the lab. Science is like any other business-- the innate perversity of the Universe sometimes steps up to smack you upside the head, and sometimes it's funny.
Some of the True Lab Stories will be things that actually happened to me, some of them will be things that happened in labs near mine, some of them will be things that happened to a friend of a friend of a post-doc at another institution. All of them are True, even the ones that are urban legends.
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This has great potential. A colleague uses the phrase "demonic intrusion" to explain certain experiments that have gone bad due to unexpected and unforseeable problems (think laboratory plumbing accidents).
Yep, I think every blog from an experimentalist needs this category (such as my own "How Not to Do It" series). The material is inexhaustible, since stupidity sure is.
I considered making the whole category title "Lunatics I Have Worked With and Their Life-Threatening Ideas".
Really looking forward to this series.
Oooh, I like this one. I may have to contribute.
Correction: It's "Say True Things About Religion Days-That-End-In-Y". Well, though, maybe you're right...saying the truth about religion does tend to be cruel.
I'd share my True Lab Story that explains why I always keep a spare pair of pants in my office, but it's just too embarrassing.