Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
390 comments
·April 1, 2025jerf
don-code
This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college.
The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade.
The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in a DIP-8 package, which was provided to us. If you blew it up, you got a slap on the wrist. That DIP-8 was otherwise yours for the class.
I could _never_ get anything resembling linear output out of my transistor. The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault.
Eight (!) weeks into that ten week class, I found the problem: the DIP was not, in fact, just a transistor. It was a 555 timer that had somehow been mixed in with the transistors.
I went and showed the lab technician. He gave me another one. At this point, I had two weeks to complete eight weeks of lab work, which was borderline impossible. So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date.
I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.
freedomben
That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of directed attention to understanding the situation and making a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific. The only thing worse is when one of them will add something like, "life isn't fair, get over it" when it's fully in their power to make a reasonable determination.
ethbr1
The flip side of this is from the professor's perspective: some undergrad in every class will lie their ass off about why their assignment was delayed.
Unfortunately, this reality produces no good options if you think someone is telling the truth: (1) make an exception, and be unfair to the rest of the class or (2) don't make an exception, and perpetuate unfairness for the impacted student.
int_19h
It's a general problem with large bureaucracies. If you're a cog in the machine, the safest way is to always stick to the rules, and avoid any situation where one has to exercise discretion, since any personal judgment comes with potential personal responsibility down the line.
AnthonBerg
Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System – Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo, 2018
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience...
“Aggression has an adaptive significance for most animal species and is critical for acquiring and protecting territory, food, reproductive mates, and offspring. In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status (Box 2). It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing (Fish et al., 2002; Falkner et al., 2016; Golden et al., 2016, 2017).”
selimthegrim
Just wait until that teacher is your graduate advisor.
__MatrixMan__
I only took two electronics classes, but in the later one I was the class hero for just buying a bunch of potentiometers on amazon so that we didn't have to waste all of that expensive time sitting around waiting for our turn with the only good one left. It cost me like $10
CamperBob2
Literal example of "bias for action." A+
potato3732842
>I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.
This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"
don-code
Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this was a low-risk decision.
That said...
I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my standard-issue black robe.
It had less to do with my grade in this particular class, and more to do with the fact that I had a part-time engineering job - 10-20 hours a week - and was making money. When you've spent a couple of years being broke, having an extra few hundred dollars per month was a big deal. Enough so that I didn't really care about putting the extra effort in for A's - that extra time was time better spent working. B's were fine if I could afford to take my girlfriend out to dinner every month.
In the years since then, it seems like this was a good decision. That job became full-time after college, and I stayed there six years. At the end of six years, nobody really cared about my college GPA. At the end of nine years (when I next looked for a job), I didn't even bother listing it on my resume.
orlp
What I don't understand is why it took you 8 weeks to distinguish a timer from a transistor. That doesn't make your professor's reaction alright, I just find it puzzling.
don-code
It's a good question! I didn't think to check the markings on the chip. The lab tech was convinced I was doing something wrong with my setup, and likewise he had me convinced it must be something wrong with my setup.
Coincidentally, I've been knee-deep in some problems that I've applied the Cynefin framework to. I'd call this problem "chaotic", where throwing things at the wall might be _more_ effective than working down a suggested or tried-and-true path from an expert. I was pleasantly surprised just a few weeks ago where one of the more junior engineers on my team suggested updating a library - something I hadn't considered at all - to fix an issue we were having. (That library has no changelog; it's proprietary / closed source with no public bug tracker.) Surely enough, they were right, and the problem went away immediately - but I was convinced this was a problem with the data (it was a sporadic type error), not a library problem.
mikepurvis
That would be like exposing a first year CS student to a situation where "it could be a compiler bug" is one of the potential explanations.
themaninthedark
I would assume that you don't have access to the lab(and diagnostic equipment) at all times and taking other classes.
Also him being a student, having the wrong component was probably not in his mental troubleshooting tree. I would guess that it was not in the lab assistant's troubleshooting tree either.
Also once you start down the road of troubleshooting, a false trail can lead you far into the woods.
Isamu
Same package. 555 is typically a DIP-8, transistor packages are available in the same. So you would have to examine the cryptic markings and compare them with the other students, and that’s only if you suspected some fuckup on the part of the knowledgeable people.
dosman33
Ohm lordy, we're blaming the student for not having years of homebrew experience before he entered school? Sure any hobbiest knows what a 555 is, but when the lab assistant doesn't even catch it and the chip was handed out to the student this is not an entry-level students fault.
dudinax
relatively cheap lesson in the importance of knowing your hardware.
arijo
You can create a timer with one transistor and an LC feedback loop.
thelaxiankey
This is crazy to me because when I've run labs in the past, there were equipment failures literally all of the time. When you teach lots of people, shit breaks. Quite often if something didn't work, I'd just have one student swap equipment with another student to help diagnose this sort of thing.
Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.
kabdib
this happens in "real life" as well
i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate
turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely
1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips
yes, i am old :-)
henryaj
I had a very similar experience during a lab internship I took during my biochemistry undergrad degree.
First part of a project was running PCR on a particular plasmid that we were going to use to transfer a gene into Drosophila. But for some reason the PCR didn't work, and I spent almost all of my time trying to get the damn thing to run.
Everyone naturally assumed I was just doing something wrong, being an undergrad with little lab experience. After about ten weeks, it turned out that the lab tech had written up the protocol wrong and I was using the wrong primers. No wonder it didn't work.
Was one of the experiences that made me realise that working in a lab really wasn't for me...
entropyie
I ran labs in my university in Europe, in the early 2000s, and I'd like to think this would not have happened. We were selected as tutors due to our proficiency and dedication to the subject. Maybe it was a fluke, I've heard similar stories recently about local Unis.
npongratz
> From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got.
I took an exam in a high school science class where I answered a question with the textbook's definition exactly as presented in the textbook, complete with the page number the definition was found on. I knew a bit about the topic, so I then cited outside scientific sources that explained why the definition was incomplete. There wasn't enough room to complete my answer in the space provided, so I spiraled it out into the margins of the exam paper.
My teacher marked my answer wrong. Then crossed that out and marked it correct. Then crossed that out, and finally marked it wrong again. During parent-teacher conferences, the science teacher admitted that even though I answered the question with the exactly correct definition, my further exposition made him "mad" (his word), and because he was angry, he marked it wrong.
sio8ohPi
Having been on the other side of the table... there's a tactic students will sometimes use, where they don't understand the question but will simply attempt to regurgitate everything written on their notecard that is related in hopes that they'll accidentally say the right words. Sounds like you did understand it, but the volume perhaps made it look like you were just dumping. It is indeed annoying to grade.
Grading is boring, tedious, and quickly wears down one's enthusiasm. The words of M Bison come to mind: "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."
npongratz
Sure, we could speculate about his true unstated reasons for marking wrong my answer.
I highly doubt the science teacher marked me wrong for "dumping", though. He had every opportunity to explain that to me after I got my exam graded and I asked him about it. Then he had the opportunity to explain that face-to-face with my parents. He did not do so. He said that while I got the answer right, he was "mad", thus the mark against.
Besides, notecards were not allowed for any part of the exam, and I wrote my answer from memory. I think it was clear that I knew my stuff pretty well and was not "dumping" a bunch of bullshit onto the science teacher.
There was no indication before taking the exam that I would be punished for hurting his apparently-sensitive feelings while giving the correct answer (as he agreed I did). If there were, I certainly would have chosen a different medium for proving my command of the material.
Ntrails
I distinctly remember a student arguing with a teacher for a mark.
"Look sir, here in the scrawl at the margins is the answer you just said was right"
"Yes Dylan, but this was a 1 mark question. Part of getting the mark involves putting the answer inside the space provided."
a_shoeboy
I used to write my undergrad history essays in rhymed couplets because I figured the grad assistant doing the grading would be grateful for a break in the monotony and it was faster and easier than writing an actual good essay. Probably wouldn't work in the LLM era, but it was very effective in the 90's.
ninetyninenine
> he was angry, he marked it wrong.
That’s grounds for termination to me. Seriously. I would put this man out of a job and endanger the livelihood of him and his family for this kind of shit.
tomrod
And if you CAN'T terminate because of admitted emotional grading, the system is too tightly captured by outside interests to the detriment of the client: the student and society.
A teacher is a professional entrusted with the most important responsibility society can offer: training and educating the next generation. It must adhere to the highest of professional standards and expectations.
That we don't pay enough to require that without reserve is a statement on our societal priorities, and disconnected from the expectations that should hold.
EDIT: clarification/word choice
sio8ohPi
There's a certain irony in your outrage at his failure to control his emotions, even as your own rage leads you to dream of hurting his family.
alterom
>That’s grounds for termination to me. Seriously. I would put this man out of a job and endanger the livelihood of him and his family for this kind of shit.
Agreeing with you as a former instructor (who left academia for greener fields after completing the PhD).
I've had people cry on me in office hours because they come out with — quite literally — PTSD from instructors like the one we're discussing.
It's nothing short of psychological abuse of children, and it leaves lifelong damage.
It's worse than no instruction at all. I've had to have college kids unlearn things before I could teach them.
We've got to draw a line somewhere. I draw the line at actively traumatizing children.
That person should not be allowed to teach, period. We'd do both their students as well as themselves a huge favor by removing them from teaching.
By all indications, they'd be a happier person doing something else, where they wouldn't be driven "mad" by seeing that they've done a good job — which, for a teacher, means their students being proficient in the subject they teach.
-----
TL;DR: this teacher was driven "mad" by seeing that he's done a good job, and one of his students was really good in the subject.
Spare them from this pain.
interroboink
> Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.
Reminds me of Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" essay[1]
One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment
with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be
quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value
for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history
of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger
than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that,
and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they
settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because
it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number
that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be
wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be
wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t
look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off,
and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays,
and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
cycomanic
I would take Feynmans stories with a grain of salt, he was sometimes quite liberal with the facts when trying to make a point (in particular he liked to give the impression that he was the only smart guy in the room).
The actual history is a bit more complex and certainly is not reflected accurately in Feynmans retelling (maybe he was affected by confirmation bias?). See this stackoverflow discussion: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44092/is-feynma...
Eduard
context :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
Assuming Feynmann's statement is true, I find it even more remarkable that Millikan's electron charge research was published in Science AND won him a Nobel Prize without anyone noticing the very apparent mistake of using an incorrect value for the viscosity of air.
Sesse__
My physics professor told us once about a lab he had to do when he was a student himself, about measuring the adiabatic gas constant of air. The workload at that point was immense, so lots of students would just write a report and give the textbook answer—and be marked wrong.
It turned out the TA had sabotaged the experiment by putting alcohol in the bottom of the (dark glass) measurement bottle, so the measurement would be of the constant of “air with a fair amount of alcohol vapor in it”, which would give a different constant. And if you actually did the exercise, you'd get that “wrong” number, and that would be the only way to get the lab approved.
NikolaNovak
That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then.
I lived a very similar experience:
My 4th year computer science professor in software engineering assigned us a four-phase programming assignment for the semester.
My teammate and I spent several sleepless days on the first assignment, and felt some of the requirements were contradictory. Finally we reached out to the professor, and he formally clarified the requirements. We asked him, "well OK, if requirements are unclear, what are we as students supposed to DO?!?" and he answered - exactly what you did; ask the user/client for clarification. "OK, but what if we hadn't, what if we just made assumptions and built on those??". And his eyes twinkled in a gentle smile.
My team mate and I had worked in the industry as summer students at this point, and felt this was the best most realistic course university has offered - not the least because after every phase, you had to switch code with a different team and complete next phase on somebody else's (shoddy, broken, undocumented) code. This course was EXACTLY what "real world" was like - but rest of the class was trained on "Assignment 1, question 1, subquestion A", and wrote a letter of complaint to the Dean.
I understood their perspective, but boy, were they in for a surprise when they joined the workforce :)
poincaredisk
>That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then.
I teach students sometimes. I briefly considered whenever I should give them such important lesson. Very briefly: my job is to teach students my specialty, not give them life lessons. Why would I deal with potentially angry students for doing something that's not obvious I'm allowed to do? Hell, it's not even obvious it that would be a "good" (career advancing) lesson.
stoneman24
In one class I took, we were examining a range of car engines for faults and the task was to get it running.
The rumour was that the previous years class had one engine where the ignition rotor arm wire had been replaced by section of coloured plastic which was covered in the usual grease and crap in the housing.
The instructor was looking for persistence and elimination of possibilities rather than actually solving it. But one team did. As long as you solved the others that was enough to complete the class.
mikepurvis
As bad as the prior story is, I don't know if intentionally misleading the students is the right way either— what if one had realized the contamination and acting in good faith had cleaned out the bottle? What if they did this afterward and ended up redoing the experiment only to be told they had cheated?
I'm all for exposing students to something unknown, but telling them they're doing X when it's really Y for anything longer than a single lecture ain't it.
jerf
You can square that circle by announcing at the beginning of the course that there is going to be some assignment like that, but I'm not telling you which, because the real world doesn't.
I do agree this is a good point; trust is not something that should be simply squandered. Nevertheless, this is still a lesson that needs to be taught and so often students make it to the end without a single teacher that did.
Sesse__
Given that a report is supposed to tell what you did and then your calculations and conclusions, you'd better include something as dramatic as “we washed the equipment after getting the wrong results and detecting contamination”…
rlpb
The trouble with these kinds of games is that they put the more diligent students at a disadvantage. For example, someone might compare their experimental result against the textbook constant, realise it's wrong, and spend much more time trying to identify their "mistake", not realising they've been sabotaged. This puts further pressure on their other work.
One cannot argue that this is fair on the basis that it's the "real world", because all that does is reward the sloppier (middle) approach. It filters the very lazy from the average, but at the expense of the excellent.
margalabargala
Not only that, but an appropriately diligent student might notice with their eyeballs or nose that their bottle contained alcohol, and clean/dry it before performing the experiment.
Sesse__
Given that the labs were with TAs present, at that point, you'd just go to the TA and they'd tell you to write down the number even if it didn't match.
jerf
Even as I rather vigorously grumble at the status quo, let it be noted that I celebrate those iconoclasts fighting the good fight all the more for the fact that they are going against the status quo to do so. May their tenacity and creativity ultimately prevail.
veggieroll
I can totally relate. I had the same experience in grade school science class, where the teacher assigned an experiment with a suggested solution and an invitation to come up with your own method.
I was the only person in class that chose to do my own method. And, it didn't work because I didn't account for an environmental difference between my house and the school classroom. And, he gave me a failing grade.
It really killed my interest in physics for a long time. I focused on biology from then through college.
Ultimately, the problem was that he didn't make clear that the only thing that we were being graded on was accuracy, not experimental methods or precision. (My solution was precise, but inaccurate; whereas the standard solution was accurate but imprecise) Also, it's possible everyone else in class knew the culture of the school, and I didn't because it was my first year there. So, I didn't realize that they didn't value creativity in the way I was used to.
lukan
We had the task of building a highly insulated small house. Big enough to hold a hot cup of tea (and meassure how good it holds its temperature inside).
Our design was very, very good in that regard. (I used insulation building material from the house my family build at that time) But granted, it was not so pretty.
But that was not a stated goal. But when it came to grades, suddenly design and subjective aesthetics mattered and a pretty house, but useless in terms of insulation won. And we did not failed, but got kind of a bad result and I stopped believing in that teachers fairness.
potato3732842
I mean, the other side of the coin is that engineering schools are a giant circle jerk that churn out thousands of graduates every year who if left to their own devices will design things that cannot be made out of inputs and using processes that are not appropriate.
I'm not saying you gotta prioritize looks but you gotta think a few steps ahead and understand what the ancillary criteria that will make or break a design all else being equal, or nearly equal are or what the unstated assumptions of the party evaluating your work (e.g won't look like ass, can be made in volume, etc.) are.
tomxor
The irony is that you learned something. Failure is a very useful learning opportunity in understanding what affects the success of an experiment, so long as you analyse it and demonstrate that, which arguably is where you should have been encouraged and graded. Compared to accidentally succeeding while following a standard procedure.
I write learning software, and this is an interesting pedagogical weakness we've become aware of when giving feedback (the asymmetry of learning opportunity in correct vs incorrect). It can be improved through overall design, and in a digital context there are also other opportunities.
im3w1l
Yes he learned to avoid physics. Good job teacher!
morgoths_bane
That’s awful honestly, did you ever regain that interest in physics later in life?
veggieroll
No, indeed I found a way to skip physics in high school (though this wasn't really why). But, I was interested in Biology, taking almost enough for a minor in it in college.
I'm a self-taught dev now. And, that fits really well for me, despite being completely unrelated to my college degrees. I work mostly with other self-taught, passionate about software people. And I'm loving that.
But, I do have very strong opinions on institutions and pedagogy. I've gotten into some pretty epic arguments about it with my wife, who is a music teacher. And, her experience has been so completely opposite of mine.
From the way she tells it, classical music seems to be the ultimate discipline where structured education is paramount. And, I have such a negative opinion of traditional methods that it's caused some friction.
joshstrange
> you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.
This, so much this. I disliked any lab work in my science classes (in HS/College) for this exact reason. I can't tell you how many numbers I fudged because I wasn't getting the "right" results and there was no time/appetite/interest in figuring out why it was wrong, my options were lie and get a good grade or report what I saw and get a bad grade.
And yes, in college specifically, the equipment we were working was rough. There was so much of "let's ask the other 2 groups near us and we will all shave our numbers a bit to match/make sense".
cycomanic
On the other hand my experience as both a graduate and professor teaching students are equally discouraging.
1. Most students don't want to have to think. As a student I was always annoyed that we'd be given exact instructions with an exactly know result to reproduce, while this is generally not how real experiments work. So when I designed an experiment I wrote instructions that reflected more the real life experience, I.e. instead of "place the lens A 10mm from object B" it was "place the lens one focal length away from the object, to know the focal length of your lens you can use a light source at Infinity (far away)." after I left my university the instructions were reverted back because students complained that they didn't get step by step instructions.
2. Students dutifully write down a measurements that is of several orders of magnitude with absolutely no acknowledgement/discussion. I have seen speed of light barely faster than a car and mass of a small piece material in 100s of kg (usually because students forget a nano or giga in a calculation), without any discussion that the result is nonsensical.
3. Similar they make a fit like the one in the OP and don't even discuss the error bars. Or (and that's already the better students) they make a fit with tiny error bars, but get the wrong result (typically due to some mistake like above) and in the discussion say the difference to an expected error is due to measurement error.
Now I also know that there are crappy graduate students who teach because they are teaching the "only get the correct result" but it's often very difficult to improve teaching because students will immediately complain that they have to adjust to changes.
thelaxiankey
'flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible.' while I've never seen anyone flunked for this, I certainly have taken off substantial amounts of points, and seen others do the same, for 3 significant figures when 2 is the absolute highest reasonably possible (and realistically, one sig fig was what we actually wanted).
I've run the exact lab you're describing, and I think we gave full credit for anything between 5m/s^2 and 20 m/s^2 provided there was some acknowledgement that this was at odds with what was expected. We very often would check in halfway through class and either tell the kids what they were doing wrong, or even tell them to write something 'this is at odds with literally all known science and I think I don't trust this'. For this particular lab, I've never seen errors as large as the ones you've described, so your lab was likely very poorly set up.
In other cases, I've made extra time (and allow students to come in) in case their numbers were so weird as to be problematic; just depends on the lab. Any teacher worth their salt will do this. It's a shame the teachers you had were terrible and incentivized bad stuff.
If being in a lab has taught me anything, it's that doing good science is often morally difficult. Sticking by your guns is hard.
But you are right in some sense: there are definitely incentives to... misreport. The best we can do as teachers is to reduce those as much as possible and reward kids/students for being honest.
saertyaetawer
I've seen this reposted many times, many places, and I always wonder ... maybe this person was just not very good at soldering. I had professors order me to do things they didn't know how to do themselves many times. Working with zero competency and support is the norm in academia. Soldering is a bit of an art. I'm a natural, soldering, brazing, and welding are really, really easy for me, but some people never get it and never improve. I did a four-month welding course and there were some people who were no better at the end than they were at the beginning.
roadbuster
I read this in 1999 when entering university. It was so refreshing hearing a student provide a glimpse into the boots-on-the-ground reality of undergrad life at these world-renowned institution.
The closing sentence is also prescient; the author pivoted to CS, ultimately completing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison
madcaptenor
LinkedIn has him as Staff Software Engineer at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531/
sizzle
Someone send him a link to this HN post and invite him to join us!
lucisferre
I read it about the same time. My friends and I (all of whom declared Physics and most of us switched to other majors before graduating) had tears in our eyes reading it. Funniest thing I had ever read.
I'm glad he's doing well.
aylmao
Fun fact, he did end up switching to CS [1]:
> Ph.D. Computer Science, November 2004 > University of Wisconsin, Madison
> M.S. Computer Science, May 2001 University of Wisconsin, Madison
> B.S. Physics, June 1999 Stanford University
[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html
EDIT:
Went on to work at IL&M for 5 years and has been at Google for 14 [2]. My guy did indeed end up rolling in cash haha
sevensor
I TAd a semiconductor fabrication lab class 20-odd years ago. Mostly it was about making sure the students had the absolute fear of God put into them about working with HF, but there was also a bit at the end where you actually got to do a voltage sweep and characterize your transistor. If in fact you had made a transistor rather than a needlessly complicated resistor. The other TAs and I passed this paper around and thought it was just hilarious.
dvh
And then there are Etsy moms making frosted shot glass
sevensor
I would make them reread the MSDS.
kragen
I've seen an MSDS for sodium chloride USP that recommends against use in food, and says that you should wash your skin with abundant water for 15 minutes if you contact it and seek immediate medical attention if it gets in your eyes (after, of course, spending 15 minutes in the eyewash station). It also warns you to keep it away from sources of ignition, that it should not be released into the environment, and that you should not handle it without gloves and face protection.
Here, this is the first sodium chloride MSDS I googled up: https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=S64010&produ...
sizzle
With HF?! Got a link to this madness?
cosmic_quanta
> (...) the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.
This is both hilarious and more common than you might think. In my field of expertise (ultrafast condensed matter physics), lots of noisy garbage was rationalized through "curve-fitting", without presenting the (I assume horrifyingly skewed) residuals, or any other goodness-of-fit test.
HiPHInch
I took some effort to change my research interest from computer vision to DFT calculation in quantum chemistry.
Honestly, I'm kind of frustrated now, too many work is close-source in this area. The research paper will tell you everything except how to reproduce this work in minimal effort, it's like they are hiding something.
They also using a `Origin` to plot and MS Word to write paper, which is also non-free licensed, and made them harder to collaborate and reproduce.
BeetleB
> The research paper will tell you everything except how to reproduce this work in minimal effort, it's like they are hiding something.
They are. I used to work in an adjacent field. Everyone was open about doing it - they're competing with others for grants, and worry that if they reveal the secret sauce, others will move faster than they can.
You can say you performed a DFT calculation to get the result, but anyone who's studied these types of simulations/calculations knows that it's highly nontrivial to implement, with lots of coding and numerical tricks involved. So it's extremely hard to reproduce if you don't have detailed access to the algorithms.
malux85
Not only that, but DFT itself has many many different forms. There's DFT that is O(n)^3 and there's DFT that's O(n)^7 in time complexity, the wild variations are due to the different approximations (i.e. algorithm and parameters).
Saying "I used DFT" is like saying "I used a computer", its nowhere near enough info to reproduce the work
HiPHInch
You are right. But I think nearly a half of DFT calcs are done with VASP.
Particularly, if one using ASE or other higher level wrapper of calculators(like quacc), he can share all the params in just one python script.
If not, just share the INCARs and POSCARs using a github link or whatsoever.
wholinator2
Very true that they're hiding things. I actually wrote some code (that strung together other people's code) to complete a simulation pipeline for non adiabatic molecular dynamics. I was tasked with writing documentation to teach the group but was instructed to not release it anywhere publicly because other groups would simply take the method and move faster since they had more money and compute.
gaugefield
This issue also bugged me for a while. It is more of cultural issue, and older the research group is, the less likely it is for research software to be open, in my experience.
In the area of deep learning based simulations, one good example of an open software is netket. The researcher their is pretty active in terms of github/gitlab/huggingface ecosystem.
qwezxcrty
I miss OriginPro in my undergrad when we had campus licenses for, before moving to matplotlib for data visualization. matplotlib is simply too disappointing for making publication quality figures. The most recently encountered problem is how to plot with a broken x-axis, which is one of the most basic need in physical science but requires a non-trivial amount of hacking to get with matplotlib.
Open source tool or not, I don't care at all as I get the science right. I have already enough frustration dealing with my samples, so I simply want the least frustration from the software I use to plot.
prennert
Matplotlib is a bit painful. Often seaborn will work quicker, especially when using Pandas dataframes with proper column names and seaborn compatible layout.
Its annoying that you cannot create a broken axis out-of-the box, but I am sure you can wrap this to make your own convenience function: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/subplots_axes_and_figu...
qwezxcrty
That link was what I referred to after Googling, but in my case I need the width of the left part and the right part to be different, which requires setting width_ratios in the subplots and adjusting the slope of the hacky lines used to draw the broken axis symbol. seaborn also would not help in this exact case.
There is a package by some nice guy: https://github.com/bendichter/brokenaxes just to do the broken axis. But not being built-in in Anaconda is already an annoyance, and in my case it generates a figure with a ugly x-label.
I ended up letting ChatGPT generate the code for me with the two required hacks. I simply need the figure in the minimal amount of time and with the least mental bandwidth, so I can focus on the science and catch the conference deadline. Origin is a very "over-engineered" piece of software, but hey getting a broken axis is so simple (https://www.originlab.com/doc/Origin-Help/AxesRef-Breaks ). Sometimes the "over-engineering" is necessary to minimize users' pain.
mvieira38
Honestly, if you're doing scientific work there is no reason not to output the data somewhere and plot in R with the standard lib (insanely good for science style plotting but hard to use) or ggplot (what matplotlib wished it was)
foven
Honestly, when it comes to hacking things together with matplotlib I outsource all of my thinking to chatgpt to do the 80% of doc hunting that is honestly not worth it since everything in matplotlib is labelled inconsistently.
null
Paul-Craft
Archive link, since the original seems to have disappeared completely: https://archive.is/1s9Jd
janandonly
It takes a special kind of mind to appreciate this short post, not as fiction, but as truth and also as a jab at the physics sciences in general.
viraptor
More jabs available at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html and https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar in general.
ssivark
Why is it a jab at physics? It's honest and beautiful -- I imagine this is exactly what an experience on the cutting edge of experiment is like! :D
Making this measurement (an ancient discovery) with latest equipment is easy, but imagine what it might have been like for the people who actually discovered this property of germanium. Our tools/probes cannot advance much faster than our understanding of a (related) subject -- we are constantly inventing/improvising tools using cutting edge scientific knowledge from a related field.
throwway120385
I mean if you didn't already know how to solder to Germanium crystals you would have had to spend months experimenting with the material before you could get leads to stick.
robocat
Google said (AI result):
Soldering a lead to a germanium crystal typically involves using a gold-germanium solder alloy (like 88% gold, 12% germanium) due to its compatibility and good bonding properties
Plus you'd need to decide how to get a good thermal connection to set the temperature of the crystal - maybe via one big lead?
Being in the future makes some things simpler?
The little experience I've had with lab physicists showed they needed a good ability to build, debug and maintain their own equipment. You can't always rely on technicians.
lazide
Especially when the entire concept might seem absolutely absurd at the time.
RotationPedant
[dead]
analog31
I'm an industrial physicist, and the post put a smile on my face. And indeed, it's not fiction. It's a blast. You will go through times like this, I guarantee it.
I've been wrestling with a cantankerous experiment for a couple of weeks. It produces reproducible results, but they don't make sense, and the work is not in a domain where discovering new physics by accident is likely.
syndicatedjelly
I understood and appreciated it, and I’m not special
blatantly
I appreciate it just from reading enough HN and XKCD
smaddox
For those who are actually interested in this field, the proper way to measure this would be with a four point probe. You do need a constant current source and a high-impedence voltage meter, though.
Also, you don't need to solder wires to the sample. But if you want to measure the hall resistance of a thin film of a semiconductor, you can solder a glob of indium on to four corners of a 1 cm x 1 cm wafer, put it in a magnetic field, and then do basically the same measurement as four point probe, except not inline.
myfonj
Not that it is important, just spotted that the page's HTTP headers report impressive
Last-Modified: Sun, 26 May 2002 22:33:04 GMT
layer8
(2000)
(at most: https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis...)
mr_mitm
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html
Looks like he went on get a PhD in CS and is now a staff SWE at Google, according to his LinkedIn. Guess he's rolling in cash after all.
ALLTaken
You're right, I looked up and he seems to work at Google as a SWE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531
Happy he made the leap and at least get's paid well now (I hope).
robocat
The last line seems strangly intelligent:
> I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash.
Did they get a girlfriend?
djmips
Fear not, he's being paid well.
blatantly
That this is the chosen path says alot about how we as a society allocate money and value things.
palmotea
> (2000)
It was probably actually written sometime prior to June 1999, because that's when the author got his Physics BS at Stanford (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html).
I kinda want to know more of the backstory around this. What grade did he get? Or was this a private venting exercise he later put up on his webpage, once he was well clear of the course?
The author did eventually go into CS, I wonder if this project was his actual breaking point.
randlet
Yeah I want to say I remember this making the rounds (remember email forwards?) during my first year of undergrad ('99-'00) but I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact timing.
One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor.
Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times.
Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in.
Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.
The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it.
(But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)