Behold the power of good lab notebook practice!

I was just able to help out my postdoc by pulling an old Bell Labs notebook from 11.5 years ago off my bookshelf and showing him a schematic of an electrical measurement technique. This is an object lesson in why it is a good idea to keep a clear, complete lab notebook! I try very hard to impress upon undergrad and graduate students alike that it's critically important to keep good notes, even (perhaps especially) in these days of electronic data acquisition and analysis. I've never once looked back and regretted how much time I spent writing things down, or how much paper I used - good record keeping has saved my bacon (and lots of time) on multiple occasions. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, students come in to the university (at the undergrad or grad levels) and seem determined to write as little as possible down using as few sheets of paper as they can manage. Somewhere along the way (before grad school, though my thesis advisor was outstanding about this), it got pounded into my brain: if you didn't document it, you didn't do it. Perhaps we should make a facebook-like or twitter-like application that would sucker student researchers into obsessively updating their work status....