Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Why I'm not a scientist

This is why I’m not a scientist. I spent several hours yesterday working on my chemistry lab. We’re studying reaction times and rates. We’ve done an experiment or two (or three or six or 14), and were using our measurements to determine rate laws for the reactions, and so on.

Now, the experiments in question were done over a period of about 2.5 hours. I spent at least three hours yesterday trying to interpret the data and do the required calculations. Guess what? In all that time I came to discover that I had done the math wrong about three times (I couldn’t get the units to line up right) and now I get to start over from scratch, almost.  So much for me knowing what I’m doing.

I keep trying to tell myself, “Oh, now I know how NOT to do it!” but it’s not much consolation. While I know that (theoretically) we learn to know what something is by first knowing what it is not (such as, “I know this is a pencil because it is not a grapefruit.”), I’m still frustrated. Oh well. At least in the lecture class I’m having fun.

Oh! I almost forgot to tell you. I got my grade back from my first anatomy test. 94 out of 100! Not bad, if I do say so myself. Of course the teacher gave everyone and additional ten points for one reason or another but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

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