One of my Russian friends from Caltech once brought this up at dinner. (I'll skip the name of the person because aspects of the context will become obvious, so I won't be naming names publically for this example.) He mentioned that an old Russian proverb went along the lines of 'Unlucky in life, lucky in love.' I got the impression that the gist was that when things are going really poorly in certain respects (say, academic respects---this guy mentioned how his extensions had run out long ago) that that is when one finds love. (Given that I only heard an English approximation, there are plenty of levels at which inaccuracies can occur.)
OK, so today has been absolutely horrible.
I was "finishing" up a page proof for an accepted article only to discover increasingly large errors. When my collaborator found something this morning, it looked like it would lead to redoing some numerics, but there didn't seem to be any reason to expect that the plots would look much different, so I figured I would suck up the annoyance, redo the plots, and then we'd be done. In redoing this, I went over the entire code again and noticed a fundamental error in this code (fuck!), so that those plots (and this aspect of the numerical conclusions) in the paper were wrong and there was no reason to expect anything similar. I'd be annoyed enough (potentially very annoyed) if this were at another stage of the process, but we have the damn page proofs! My headache is increasing because in the process of doing numerical experiments, I have found that the new version of Matlab I recently downloaded has an extraordinarily annoying bug so that if I try to plot in real time, it constantly forces Matlab to be the front window, so that I can't, for example, type things in pine if I want to see how the simulation is going while I run things. This is making the whole process last longer at each step of attempting to fix things and also prevents me from multitasking as easily as I'm accustomed (my laptop is at home, although I believe that's going to change tomorrow...).
Even worse, the problem was avoidable. First, I could have noticed this during any of the other numerous times I went through the code. Second, it turns out there was one time that I did notice it (while the paper was in the hands of referees, at which point I was annoyed we had submitted the paper before I caught the bug) and I had made a note to myself to fix it when the report came back (I should have fixed it on the spot and noted that I had done that) because I was in the middle of something else (I can't say what now). The report came back many months later because there was a long delay with the referees on this particular paper and by that time, I had (naturally but annoyingly) forgotten about this and then I didn't notice it when it was time to deal with their comments. While dealing with this, I found another error in the code (of a very different type, but still annoying) that I had not noticed before on any previous occasion, so I actually need to rerun all four of my numerical simulations and not just two of them. I think that two of them will come out roughly the same as before (just scaled differently, which is fine), but the original two I needed to change and at this point they're spewing garbage, which means we'll probably end up removing them. (I'm going to switch to angry music mode very, very soon. I should have had the playlist ready...)
OK, so in sum I have egg all over my face; I feel both embarrassed and depressed (I had to tell my collaborator that I'm a complete dumbass, though I didn't use those exact words); the errors were avoidable and my fault. This has been one of those days that makes me wonder why I bother with all this shit. At the moment, I am in a very deep local minimum of my happiness landscape (although at least nobody is preventing me from peeing). This sucks.
Let's see... I know some of my students have been known to show up here on occasion, so maybe I should say that you shouldn't let this discourage you from having a career in science. No really. I'm serious. The lesson here is that profs (and other professional scientists) still fuck up big time ("I'm on my way! I'm making it!") and it's not just something restricted to Caltech (or other) undergraduates. ("I'm a human beeeeeeeeeing!") Now that you think I'm completely crazy...
Oh, and I should probably bring myself back to the start of this rant. So, I'm kind of hoping this proverb comes true, and I actually do have a specific person in mind (whose name I don't know, so I would actually have to find out about things like personality for the proverb to work at all in this case), although I'm having a bit of a problem with all those silence and hold person spells that keep getting cast on me (and whose saves I keep failing). [I should mention, though, that today's excuse is better than usual. I was in the middle of a meeting outside Red Door with a collaborator on a different paper whose referee reports we just got back yesterday which started about 5 minutes after I first became aware this morning that the shit had hit the fan. If I had any sort of cojones, I'd have stopped the meeting then and there and gone up and said 'hello,' but then given that the meeting was actually important, the barrier (which is very high for me anyway) was even higher than usual.]
Did I mention that I'm having a bad day?
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