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One crucial piece of knowledge I'm missing involves a particular algorithm needed to canonically order a SMILES string -- a simple text representation of a chemical compound. I have written a Perl module that can spit out SMILES strings given a chemical structure, but it orders the result in a random fashion that, while technically correct, is not very useful when comparing compounds based on their SMILES strings, since a given compound can produce many correct and equivalent SMILES notations. There exists a standard, canonical ordering for SMILES, but after much Googling all I could find was a reference to an article in a 1989 computational chemistry journal. The article apparently details the algorithm, but since it wasn't on the Web, I thought I was out of luck.
It took some time before I realized: wait a sec. Journals? Those are in university libraries. I work at a university. And I eat lunch at the cafeteria underneath its library! Boy, did that get me going. Finally, a legitimate reason to visit the HMS library! It's true that I've been meaning to acquaint myself with the place, but I've never given myself the time to do so. Now I have sufficient reason to go there on a weekend, for I am on a quest for troof!!
I've decided to go tomorrow, though; the library closes early on Saturday, and I don't want to feel rushed. Still. This is the sort of thing I get all nuts about.
When I was in college maybe my favorite place in the world was the UMaine library, which, I suspect, was disproportionately huge and wonderful for such a little college. It had several weirdly-shaped, low-ceilinged rooms in its middle floors where all the journals where stored, and they had old wooden desks with individual lamps installed in each. Quite often I'd go there to be alone, and sit at a desk for a while, feeling the weight of all that hard and insulating information on all sides.
