Robusta data

Coffee fuels science. I've made many colleague buddies in long lines at espresso kiosks at conferences, or stumbling around at dawn in small American towns in search of cafes serving real coffee. Smart bosses don't step between scientists and their caffeine; they find creative ways to use public or grant funds to purchase the latest coffee brewing technology. I was once invited to apply for the directorship of a prestigious European institute, and my campaign promise was to install an espresso maker in the cafeteria. The response from one of my moles was that after my last visit, free automated multi-brew machines had been installed in every hallway. For some reason, I did not get the job.

Most labs go through a steady stream of broken carafes and calcium encrusted heating coils. We beta-test all new capsule based brewing systems, scoffing at colleagues who pretend to be content with freeze dried instant coffee. In the days when Netscape was the Internet browser of choice, some enterprising Scandinavian grad students set up a web cam (although that label had not yet been invented) to transmit photos of their coffee pot as it became progressively mouldier. They changed the pot now and then, in order to keep their viewers engaged, and perhaps to ensure adequate replication of their experiment. People still seem compelled to post pictures of mould in coffee cups. True, we seldom wash our mugs. On a good day, we rinse them once or twice, but despite this, a scaly brown scum builds up on the inside of the vessel as the weeks and the months pass. Then, ordinary soap or dishwashers hardly touch it, and we need to resort to a universal solvent like the all powerful nitric acid (this is a joke... do not try this!).

We are not supposed to eat or drink in the lab, as all institutional, local, provincial, national and international regulations explicitly state. Coffee seems to be an unwritten exception, as an inspection of any lab garbage can will surely reveal. We rationalize that somehow it is okay at our desks, even if the desk is in the lab. After all, toxic chemicals, microbes and radioactivity do not spontaneously search out and jump onto coffee mugs, do they? It is not for nothing that all computer manuals warn you not to spill coffee on keyboards or CPUs. Just because caffeine speeds up neurons, doesn't mean it speeds up computers.

I did not start drinking coffee until I started my PhD. Coffee break was a good opportunity to talk with my new lab mates, to try to learn their strange language and mysterious ways. I drank this highly concentrated, delicious fluid, really liked it and often had a second cup. Soon, I was eagerly craving the call of the coffee bell, salivating like Pavlov's dog. Drawing was part of my work; there was a uncontrollable vibration in my fingers at some times of the day that made my doodlings look like they were produced on an etch-a-sketch. I did not drink coffee at home, and it took me years to figure out why I always had lingering headaches on the weekends.

When I first started working in labs, I was shocked at the amount of time people waste at coffee breaks. Now, my lab's afternoon break is our main opportunity for free wheeling discussions, which often go on for 45 minutes, half an hour longer than regulation time. Some days the caffeine really kicks in, making the quietest of colleagues into motor mouthed speculators. We get some of our best ideas this way. Only a few of them involve more efficient caffeine extraction and delivery mechanisms.

Technonostalgia

Today at coffee break, a riff began about technology that once seemed cutting edge but that is now obsolete. Like the Yorkshiremen of Monty Python, we each tried to outdo the wistfulness of the clueless youngsters.

"When I did my masters thesis," said our most recently hired staff member, "all my data fit on one USB stick. 18 GB of data on one thumb drive."  

"When I was your age," I said, "nobody knew what gigabyte was."

"I used those hard 3.5 inch disks for my MSc," said someone else.

"Mine was on floppy disks that actually were floppy. We were afraid that if the disks bent the wrong way, all the data would be lost, so we made as many backups as we could. The computer didn't even have a hard drive."

"I remember when the monitors had no colour, and there were just these blinking amber letters."

"When I did my masters," I said, "I lived in a hole in the road, with a cardboard box for a roof."

Later, walking back to the lab, I said, "We think our technology is so cool now, but ten years from now, people will laugh at our huge cell phones, sighing about the days before phones were implants."

Same thing for lab equipment. We spend a lot of time writing experimental methods, ignoring the fact that many of the kits and machines we use to obtain our data will be unavailable by the time our papers are published. Obsolete equipment accumulates in labs like dinosaur bones in an archeological site, waiting to be scooped up, polished, and deposited in a Museum of the History of Science. Some people actually collect old lab equipment, as if it were as interesting and valuable to society as old baseball cards, antique ceramic shoes, or used postage stamps (the stickers that were once used to send email when it was still written by analog on paper and transmitted by couriers on horseback).