… I had figured out a really elegant way to test an hypothesis, complete with two separate treatment groups and a control group. While the population under study was blog readers, I had come up with a reasonable plan to protect the human subjects, even mentally drafting the IRB short form.
I was very excited at how well it was all coming together. And then I woke up.
Which means I have no earthly recollection of either the hypothesis or the clever strategy for testing it.
Don’t you really hate it when that happens?
I sooooooooo hate it when that happens!
Once, after an all-nighter, I was sitting in my morning Differential Equations class, trying to take notes and not entirely staying awake.
At one point, I became convinced that the prof was talking about “Hamlet”. In fact, he’d just elucidated a difficult concept in DEs so amazingly elegantly that I wrote “e.g., Claudius” in my notes, knowing that that would be enough to remind me of this elegant understanding. Alas, a few minutes later I was more awake and had no idea what I had been thinking.
Long ago, in another (intellectual) lifetime, I was studying hard for a preliminary exam in algebraic geometry. I had nightmares featuring homologies and commutative diagrams. Even better, though, was my friend: He dreamed that there was a certain kind of group that you calculate for ordinary physical objects. If you calculated this group for a car, you would be able to enter the car without opening the door.
Sorry you lost that solution, but thanks for reminding me to point your Sprog to following paper on REM atonia, in response to last week’s questions about nocturnal activity and “tired nerves” on That Other Blog:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2579974/
Hope you’re well. Doing my semiannual RSS feed cleanup.
This spring I was lying in bed, and came up with the simplest, most elegant solution to a programming assignment I had been struggling with. I got up and immediately went to my computer, only to realize that, not only had I completely forgotten my solution, I didn’t have any homework!