<p>That is not demeaning at all. That was simply stating an obvious fact. Just because you chose to read it with a negative connotation does not make it demeaning. In fact, I think that makes YOU the one who is demeaning. Clearly, you had a negative opinion of the other poster in your mind while reading my post, and therefore you read it with a demeaning tone.</p>
<p>Being demeaning would be something like saying that you obviously have no ability to read sentences on the internet with proper inflection. I would suggest picking up an introductory language textbook.</p>
<p>There was nothing more demeaning in this thread than</p>
<p>
and</p>
<p>
Robbie didn’t make it clear that he will be an author of the resulting paper, and based solely on the contributions stated here, it doesn’t sound as if he will be. Everyone knows it’s appropriate to submit an abstract for a paper you are an author of.</p>
<p>Randombetch, you don’t understand, coming from the newest newb a mildly demeaning statement like that is almost a compliment. ;)</p>
<p>From Princeton FAQ thread:
Q: Does Princeton do likely letters? – some random post
A: Even if they did it would be a terrible mistake to be expecting one – newb</p>
<p>Newest newb, you are absolutely right though that a second person’s reaction to another’s statement shows a lot more about this second person than about the original person. I love how you immediately jump to the “obvious fact” that I have zero lab experience from what I wrote, since I think I merely said that PCR seems complicated, which was said as a response to the kind of comments made by platypodes and others that gel electrophoresis and other lab techniques are so easy that “anyone can do it” just by reading instructions, etc. As someone who has been working in a lab for the past three years and sometimes still can’t get the desirable results she wants from these kinds of lab procedures, I happen to not find them that easy at all and thought to point that out. Well, obviously no one got the point, and I’m probably just incompetent, (in fact I’ve never even done PCR before, horror!) but there’s no reason why Rtgrove shouldn’t mention his lab experience in his application just because they don’t seem “significant”.</p>
<p>As someone who has worked in labs for longer than you and has been published in Nature, let me remind you of one important fact.</p>
<p>Since you have so much lab experience you MUST know certainly that there is a very clear distinction between a procedure being easy to perform (such as is the case with PCR, plasmid prep, chromatography, running a computer program, whatever) and a procedure being consistently reliable.</p>
<p>The former has to do with being able to follow instructions, which honestly, at a high school level, should not be considered difficult.</p>
<p>The latter, however, has to do with the cutting edge of the field. You want to come up with a better method of DNA amplification than PCR? One that doesn’t have 1/10,000 error rate and is extremely sensitive to such conditions as primer design, AT richness, fragment length, temperature, mixing conditions and cycle number? THIS is what you are referring to when you say that it is hard sometimes to get the results you want. This is EXTREMELY different from a high school lab hand following some predetermined protocol - a very easy feat indeed, which is why they even let people like you (and yes, me as well) do these things in the first place.</p>
<p>Please also use paragraphs. Your posts make my eyes bleed purple kool-aid, and that’s not even considering the content in them.</p>
<p>Oh, so stating obvious facts is mutually exclusive from being demeaning? What about, “you’re a d-bag?”</p>
<p>What exactly was the purpose of making such a statement if it was so obvious? To make you feel all warm and fuzzy by letting others know that you’re so superior when it comes to scientific research, you can spot someone on the internet who knows less about it than you?</p>
<p>FYI, I didn’t even read xrCalico’s post before I read yours. I didn’t even know who he was. I had to go back and see what he said to deserve such an “obvious statement.”</p>
<p>Thanks for the (very inaccurate) analysis. I’m sure xrCalico feels real demeaned by what I said.</p>