In real life, I'm in the process of studying for a degree in Physics. This involves regular laboratory sessions, some of which are computer based. These computer sessions will typically involve writing computer code to solve certain problems, and they can range from simple data entry to things that are supremely annoying. Today, I had a Special Relativity computer lab, which consisted of 8 young men taking it in turns to either shout loudly, swear, or place their heads in their hands out of sheer desperation. It's due to computers, which are wonderful things, but also somewhat temperamental. You can give them orders, but you have to do it in the right way and make sure that everything that you're doing is right, otherwise everything will go wrong.
It's a similar scenario that the Doctor faces in this story. He's offered the option of a computer but turns it down, preferring a pen and paper instead. Some of you who are reading this will think that this represents the Doctor being a Luddite, and rejecting technology in favour of the old ways of doing things, but in my mind, it made perfect sense. Because whilst computers can be useful, they can also be annoying, and there are also tiny subtelties that you can't always get when using a computer over working it out with pen and paper, like how the actual processes work so that you don't just know what the right answer is, but you also know how you got there and gained a greater appreciation of the science behind it.
I may have railed against the writer of this story for featuring some bad science a couple of days ago, but here it feels like one of the more accurate depictions of science that I've seen for a while.
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