Most researchers I know (being a reserarcher I know a few) can think of an experience like this.
IOWA CITY, IA—University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study’s final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment. According to researchers administrating the standard Y-maze test, the fucking bastard never even broke his stride during the first trial, always selecting the correct route while consistently avoiding blind dead-end alleys.
The worst flaw in most films about science is the way that important experiments always work on the first try. Lord, that would be a happy day in my lab. It cracks me up every time, though I guess it’s a reasonable trade-off against said movies being eighteen hours long.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Biggest reason I didn’t do a PhD: trying carefully prepared, expensive experiments fail completely.
It’s God’s way of telling you to dump the science stuff and get an MBA or a real estate license.
One of the reasons Mythbusters is occasionally great: they show the experiments failing pathetically. They then tweak the conditions, and try again.
Soylent Green
Was this in Daniel Faraday’s lab?
Rick Taylor
From the book, Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman (the autobiography of a famous Caltech physicist)
RSA
Nice article. When I was in grad school studying artificial intelligence, one of my professors, who’d done early work in an area called reinforcement learning, described his lab’s first, long-ago efforts to solve the so-called pole-balancing problem. You have a cart on a track, with a pole attached by its bottom to the cart (all in simulation). The system needs to learn how to push the cart back and forth so that the pole balances upright. The first experiment went well; the system learned how to balance the pole easily. In fact, too easily–no matter how the system’s parameters were changed, it was always able to balance the pole. Eventually they discovered that in their simulation, the gravitational force had the wrong sign. Essentially the cart was being simulated as traveling back and forth across the ceiling, with the pole falling into a vertical position all by itself.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Elitist bastard.
I would never trust a mouse like that. Running a maze should be hard work. I bet the other mice don’t trust that smug showoff rodent. He probably doesn’t even wear a Mickey Mouse lapel pin.
Delia
Yeah. All the other mice became bitter, turned to religion and guns, and started voting Republican.
Person of Choler
Is there any topic that commenters here won’t turn into snark about Republicans?
I used to think it was Bush Derangement Syndrome, but the symptoms of a more generalized condition may be presenting here.
Keep it up, I enjoy watching the pathology.
merl
I think they’re making fun of Sen Clinton, not Repukes. Pay attention, will you?
Repubs suck.
Sirkowski
I’m pretty sure that’s a rat in the picture.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
No, none whatsoever.
At teh Balloon Juice, we are performing an experimental verification of the Third Law of Snarkification, which states that in a closed thread the amount of snark and spoof always increases.
grumpy realist
“Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of temperature, humidity, and environment, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”
(One of Murphy’s Laws of Technology.)