You may call me the Keeper of the Data

This week was rather discouraging up until today. It seemed like I was surrounded by scientists being negative toward each other. I went to a seminar on Wednesday, and all the older professors completely thrashed the guy's work. They kept telling him that his method was wrong and accused him of building a large boom on the front of his boat not because it was necessary and useful, but because it was phallic (and it was). The lecture was completely outside of my area of interest, so I don't know...maybe they were right. However, his work was fairly preliminary, and it seems to me that they could have phrased their criticism in a more friendly and productive way. Not twenty minutes after I got back from that, my advisor's wife (a physical oceanographer) came in complaining of having received a "rather prickly review" on a paper she's trying to publish. Even when I sat down to do some research, the first thing I saw was an account of the arguments that went on at a conference. I've always thought it would be funny to watch the old men throw pencils at one another, but I don't really want to be the target, and it all seems so one sided. Yesterday, Joe (the recently graduated student whose time series collection I've inherited) finally came in to explain his methods to me. He kept telling me how the work I'm going to do this summer is going give him an answer for all the people who doubt his conclusions when he presents them. To make matters worse, according to his methods, I won't be sleeping from June to September for the next five years. Needless to say, I was getting pretty grumpy--you know how I feel about sleep--but today, I went to the hardware store, and it made everything better. I built a thing, hard to explain really, out of PVC. This is why field biologists are the happiest people on earth even if they do pick on each other a little too much for my taste.