Engineers hurt my brain

We have a grad student in my group who's background is in engineering. This isn't a bad thing by any means, that kind of diversity can only help a research group. But sometimes he just does things that are strange enough that trying to understand them hurts my brain.

Take right now for example. He has just finished meticulously tearing every page out of a brand new 160 page, lab notebook. Not only that, but he then proceeded to use a three-hole punch to obviously put three holes in each page. And now, though I can't confirm this because I am trying to subtle in writing about him while he's seated nearby, I would swear that he's going through writing in new numbers over the old ones.

My only question to this is why?

Ok, I think I found an answer, it seems that he collects all his lab book pages in a three ring binder, hence the three hole punch (yes, my deductive logic is fascinating). I should probably point out to those of you not in the sciences that have a lab notebook consisting of lose pages is a big no-no! There is a whole realm of recording protocols that are required in the sciences. Now ff this notebook were to be found in a pharmaceutical company by the FDA, the whole place would be shut down and probably lose their license. It's all about integrity of record keeping. Removable pages with hand written numbers just doesn't fit that very well. But what do you expect he's an engineer; seriously, for me this is a valid excuse for any range of fucked up behaviour.

Anyway, this might be the last that you hear from me for a while. I'm flying out to visit Deirdre today and I won't be back here until the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. But keep an eye on the site just the same, I may get a chance to post something while I'm out there.