Academic Friday Nonsense from PhDComics.com

..Because Anders is a hyooge "Peanuts" mark for reasons unknown...

Any NMR people in the hizzouse?

PhDcomics hit the nail on the head yet again. I've seen my fair share of these. For schtuff that has to be handed down pretty much before the experiments have been completed and any sound conclusions can be drawn *cough*conference papers*cough*, I might even have perpetrated some of this..

When I was a grad student back in good ol' NC, my advisor was infamous for assigning tasks which "would only take 15 minutes - tops". One such 15 min task handed to me took me a good couple of months to complete, and I was not the record holder. By far. This particular "advisor trait" was something I didn't hand down to my own grad students, but recent events - and to my defense: instrument breakdowns - may prove otherwise. Dammit!

How true is this............do ya recognize the TV shows in question? I love how on CSI - be it the original, CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI Rome Wisconsin, CSI Lincoln Nebraska or the upcoming CSI Trenton New Jersey - some head schnuck can wipe a Q-tip across the floor of a crime scene, hand it to a former street thug/fashion icon/supermodel/gambler/Navy SEAL/astronaut. Said glorified gofer will promptly don a lab coat over his or her Vera Wang ensemble, and science ensues. The Q-tip is dipped into a plethora of test tubes, each yielding a different color. The test tubes are subsequently spun down in a centrifuge and placed in some form of advanced instrumentation which invariably ends up being defined as a GC-MS. Ten seconds thereafter, they show the results which in addition to the info you would expect from the instrument in question also gives you a recent picture of the suspect, his address, favorite colour and high school yearbook entry. Best of all; the same CSI guy who swabbed the crime scene gets to arrest, prosecute and sentence the guy (invariably) they determine to be guilty. Exactly like real life, eh?