is this what science is

[wolffyluna]

So, I've got the reviewer comments from the paper-that-might-get-published (by the university.)

I need to travel back in time two years, and punch myself. And also everyone else working on this project, but mostly myself.

I have spent a chunk of this morning going through several excel spreadsheets, doing forensic wtf-ing, to try and work out what data we had taken and how many samples we had. This was made awkward by the fact that we had a 'detailed' spreadsheet and a 'just the facts ma'am' spreadsheet, but we didn't label them that way, did we? No, we labelled them as 'group 1' and 'group 2', and because there were two groups, that collected different data, I had to try and work out whether the group 2 data was duplicated from group 1, or if group 2 was just really bad at measuring things.

Also, there is a stupid, repeated maths error you could drive a truck through and which might change the results. Basically, instead of calculating metabolic rate by dividing oxygen consumption by time, we did it by divided oxygen consumption by mass. Which we might have had a reason for, but it's two years later and I don't remember, and considering we were a bunch of mostly-first year biologists with a week of time, somehow I think it's more likely to be an error.

(There was a reviewer comment that was "that's an interesting method for calculation volume, you should mention in your method how it would fare against [standard method we did not know about]." I have no clue whether they meant interesting or interesting. But I am kicking myself in the future, because apparently we did not need to use the goddamned callipers for this, we could have just used the mass to estimate the volume, why didn't we think of this?)

Comments

[sebenikela]

......yeah this is how science works a lot of the time.

Sorry.