The best way to experience a restaurant, I have always felt, is by eating exactly what it wants to feed you. I do not want choices. I want the best thing. A restaurant might have five or ten best things, but it cannot have 45. There are many infuriating things about the world, but one of the more fixable is the sensation of acute regret from having ordered wrong. Why are there possibly wrong orders? Recently, I was at a fancy restaurant with great pastas and bad pizzas. So cut the pizzas!
A kitchen that focuses on its strengths turns out consistently excellent things, even if that results in fewer total things.
One of the first relational databases for biologists was Biota. Unfortunately, in its early stages of implementation, Biota did not yet have all the elements that my work on taxonomy, systematics, and behavior of katydids required. I decided to develop my own solution, and Mantis was born.
There is a fairly long list of data points, but having a database designed specifically to record them simplifies the record-keeping process tremendously.
Mantis has become an extension of my brain, and extra memory storage space that never forgets anything and thus, I am convinced, is a reason for major memory lapses on my part. Why should I make an effort to remember the author of that paper on the courtship behavior of Cyphoderris when I can quickly look it up?
Of course, I do not carry my laptop with me when out in the first at night, and if anything requires me to make a note I either record it as a voice message on the sound recorder (which I always carry with me), or make a note in a small, waterproof notebook.
Instant availability and portability of data make research in the field infinitely easier for scientists, but what is lost is the feeling of slow accumulation of knowledge and the physical evidence of one’s scientific prestige—the extensive shelves of important-looking volumes and journals.
There is no denying it, the era of paper is fading fast, and I can easily imagine a time when students will be perplexed by the strange, primitive implement known as the pencil. As far as I am concerned, this time cannot come soon enough.