{"id":2038,"date":"2004-03-14T11:35:16","date_gmt":"2004-03-14T14:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=840"},"modified":"2010-05-08T22:28:08","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T01:28:08","slug":"best-lab-report-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2004\/03\/14\/best-lab-report-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Best lab report ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While I&#8217;m being nibbled to death (or at least to distraction) by lots of little incidental unrelated-to-each-other problems <em>and<\/em> racing to finish my new application, the nice folks at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2004\/03\/13\/potty_mouth_and_labr.html\">Boing Boing<\/a> side-tracked me to what may be the best lab report ever: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.wisc.edu\/~kovar\/hall.html\">Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;The upshot is that if you heat up a sample of germanium, electrons will jump from a non-conductive energy band to a conductive one, thereby creating a measurable change in resistivity. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting &#8220;to first order&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Now, let&#8217;s look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don&#8217;t. I see a bunch of crap.<\/p>\n<p>Christ, this was such a waste of my time.<\/p>\n<p>Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe 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&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The report is by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.wisc.edu\/~kovar\/\">Lucas Kovar<\/a>, who also says:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have recently removed my old stuff in the interest of not looking like a twit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Heh&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I&#8217;m being nibbled to death (or at least to distraction) by lots of little incidental unrelated-to-each-other problems and racing to finish my new application, the nice folks at Boing Boing side-tracked me to what may be the best lab report ever: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass: &#8230;The upshot is that if you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sci"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-wS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}