Now that I’m finished reading lab notebooks, I want to share a couple of general observations. The first and most important one is this: the lab notebooks were generally good. Most of them were prepared well, used effectively in lab, and succeeded as records of scientific work. Keeping a good notebook may not seem like much of an achievement, but it took a fair amount of time for you to read all of my instructions, consult the examples in Padias, look up data on compounds, and so on, so you have deservedly earned my praise. Well done.
Of course, I also saw some gaps here and there, but only three deserve special comment (I promise to be brief).
(more…)