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Friday, April 09, 2004 Backups Well, I finally gave into my paranoia and have started to scan in my lab notebook. It's not so much delusions of grandeur but a nagging worry that the chronicles of all my experiments for the past year would go up in a glorious and raging inferno. So yes, my lab notebook is on paper, like a lot of other people's lab notebooks. There are some people, however, who write their lab notebook on computer. It's not the same as handwriting it, not as personal. At the same time, it's also somewhat unreliable--the typing part, not the scanning part--since it can easily be altered by a simple press of the delete key. Then again, keeping a lab notebook is not so much different as keeping a diary or journal and it's not such a short leap to think: hey, why not blog the whole damn thing? But even though a lab notebook usually makes for boring reading on a Friday night and is rather impersonal (I don't know about your lab notebook, but mine doesn't have any emotional gut spilling in its pages), it's just one of those things that you just don't put online. Yes, this contradicts the whole notion of everyone having access to information, but there are problems with how everything else is set up. Like publishing and credits and "scooping". It's one of those real world and human concerns that override the pursuit of science and information. Which is, unfortunately, too bad. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 5:18 PM : ]
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