the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3607

Sounds just like my high school-undergrad experience (except that I only had one real lab course after high school). I just figured some of us were born to be theoreticians, because we're hopeless in a lab.

Problem was, I was a good science student, and the high-school science teachers--especially the chemists--would try to nudge me into doing lab stuff, perhaps hoping I'd get better at it if sufficiently encouraged and motivated. I remember one "advanced" organic synthesis I was allowed the privilege of undertaking. (As we didn't really do organic to speak of in the curriculum, any organic synthesis was considered eo ipso advanced.) The blessed stew sat on the hotplate for three days a-refluxin' up and down its twisty column of glbutt within glbutt like there was no tomorrow and stinking up the whole building, but the lovely ester that was meant to smell like banannas (or whatever it was supposed to be) never did manage to emerge from the soup. After a decent interval, we pronounced the experiment a success inasmuch as I had managed to conclude it without breaking any of the more expensive bits of glbuttware involved.

In the end, I cut the Gordian knot altogether by studying music instead of a sci-math-tech field, but that's a different story. I did Psychoacoustic Projects Lab for my undergrad lab requirement -- still didn't manage to gather data that one could draw a trend line through, but learned some useful things, mostly because they had to teach us some psychoacoustics starting from scratch before turning us loose to frame hypotheses and test them in the lab. Also got to (ObAFC) handle with my very own personal hands a real mini-computer with blinkenlights front-panel switches and DECtapes and everything, so in some ways it was a formative experience.

I suspect you are on to something; I'll have to think further about that insight myself -- the experience may start to make sense...

Nonetheless, the more-or-less uniformly disastrous labs taught me an important lesson, which I only later discovered had been embodied in a proverb: It theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.

-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.

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