Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Cold rooms are worse than computers

My brother used to have a cartoon that said “to err is human, but to really screw up requires a computer” (at least that’s how I think it went). Computers have a reputation of crashing at the worse possible times, e.g. after several hours of important work. I’m learning that cold rooms are a bit like this. I’ll elaborate a bit. Cold rooms aren’t usually “rooms” per se, but more like oversized refrigerators; often they’re big enough to walk into. If everything worked like it should, the temperature should be easily adjustable and constant. Right now, I’m trying to do an experiment that requires some animals to be kept at a constant temperature of 10 C…not too demanding for a room that should be able to get much colder. Two days into the 2 week long experiment the temp in the “cold room” had shot up to 20. Wonderful. The fans responsible for moderating the temperature had iced up and stopped working, so I had to stop the experiment and allow everything to defrost. After the ice melted, the room seemed to be working better, so I was confident about trying the experiment again. But again, after a couple days at 10 degrees the fans started to ice up. Malfunctions like this always seem to happen when you are trying to do an important experiment, and they are responsible for substantial stress. These problems have forced me to totally redesign my experiments on the fly, which is not very easy to do. When experimental design is rushed, something might be overlooked resulting in some disastrous mistake that undermines all you’re trying to accomplish. Fear of wasting time, energy, and opportunities is giving me plenty of reason to be stressed. Technology is great; I often need cold rooms for in my work. But I think I’ll hesitate to design another experiment that requires the use of cold rooms…just for my own well-being.

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