It hadn’t been past 12 yesterday when I had officially declared it a bad day for science.<\/p>\n
The hot plate I was supposed to be using extensively<\/em> broke down (again!) and I discovered that one of the good things going on seemed so rosy because I had been miscalculating some things (and misleading myself and others about how it was going so good at that end).<\/p>\n Having been through all that by 11, well, what could happen now that would make it a better day?<\/p>\n But in retrospect, I think I may have labelled yesterday a little too soon – because the day itself didn’t turn out\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>bad after all.<\/p>\n We, scientists, we label. And that’s a good thing. You should label all your solutions and chemicals as soon as possible, even before<\/em> you put your stuff in a blank bottle, but essentially ahead of forgetting what you put in there (and until you have labelled these, your life hangs in some kind of a science-purgatory where you keep chanting the words in your head until you have penned it down where it belongs).<\/p>\n But today – today when I was again tempted to categorize the day in the bad-days* section, I reminded myself that a scientist should not label her days as hastily as she should label her sample bottles.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * A “bad” day for science constitutes all days that are worse than your usual days, when it’s normal that things don’t always work the way you want them to. A “bad” day happens when you discover having an outlier compared to your average kind of day (which can normally be rated quite close to each other on a scale of 1 to 10).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It hadn’t been past 12 yesterday when I had officially declared it a bad day for science. The hot plate I was supposed to be using extensively broke down (again!) and I discovered that one of the good things going on seemed so rosy because I had been miscalculating some things (and misleading myself and … <\/p>\n