01.05.07
Those Weird Pictures in the Sidebar
Some of our highly observant readers may have noticed that I’ve added a “currently reading” section to the sidebar showing the covers of — you guessed it — books that I’m currently reading. Right now those books happen to be Next by Michael Crichton and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. My wife ended up getting me Next for Christmas after I showed some slight interest in the book during a walk through Costco in November. She showed her exceptional brilliance by splurging for the CD audio version, so I can listen to it 25 minutes at a time on my way to and from work/school.
Our lab manager at work gave me a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for the holiday (thank you!), and after browsing through a number of different topic areas, I came across this weird book about human cadavers that had been recommended by a professor named Raymond Lee at WSU when I took his introductory biology course as a freshman. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers has been a very interesting read, but I haven’t gotten very far due to all of the holiday fanfare and lots of projects requiring my attention at work during the winter break. Spring semester starts up again on Monday, so I can only imagine that Stiff will take a back seat to textbook reading in the very near future.
With any luck, I’ll finish these books and offer my comments for those that may be interested.
I think you should take some time to unwind each week by reading something totally unrelated to science, school, and work. Stiff is still peripherally related and you never know how your mind could use that breath of fresh air and different way of thinking. Hope I’m making sense. This cold’s got me feeling a bit jammed.
It sounds good on paper, but in reality I know that it won’t happen very often. Of course it does feel a little more relaxed so far this semester without having to worry about any lab reports (aside from the manuscript I’m working on). Those damn lab reports take up WAY too much time; many of my co-workers in the lab have commented on how ridiculously anal the lab report requirements have become, and we all know the instructors themselves are not adhering to the rules they prescribe in their own lab notebooks.
Anyway, I probably have only another one or two courses that will require a lab notebook or report(s), so I should consider myself lucky. But if any lab instructors out there are reading, RELAX ON THE LAB REPORTS.