instructions unclear; got tumour stuck in revolving door

(For anyone actually wondering, 95.45% is actually the percentage of data expected to fall within two standard deviations of the mean in a Gaussian distribution. Five standard deviations is much, much more stringent—and not really standard outside of particle physics. As we all know, most amateur scientists have the knowledge and ingenuity to discover novel quantum interactions and particles on a regular basis, and merely lack the necessary funding to access synchrotrons to test their theories.)

I really don't think his intention was to discredit amateur science by linking to the search results of "proof that amateur science sucks."

Well, it's sort of complicated.

On one hand—it's probably worth pointing out that the American punitive system is absolutely insane, and the mildness of this should not be taken as evidence of a defective process simply because it doesn't follow suit. Indeed, there are some fairly involved legal and philosophical reasons as to why the punishments aren't more extreme. Here is a paper on it. (I haven't read all of it, but it seems sensible enough from the first few pages.) One of the key points is that a lot of money goes down the toilet on dead ends and genuine errors anyway; another is that scientific misconduct isn't actually illegal, so the power of funding bodies to defend themselves is somewhat limited. In the end, the top priority is still getting them out of science.

It's not. After this no one will touch him; his career as a researcher is over. For professors, three years of no federal grants is generally enough to kill the entire lab, and a three-year lapse in publishing is enough to kill any career on its own, with the possible exception of the most hard-boiled tenure.

Somewhat irrelevant trivia: in Toronto there is a moving company called "El Cheapo." Their motto is "Don't be a shmoe call EL CHEAPO" (replete with missing comma.) Ecce!

That is the definition of uncool.

Yeah, that's strictly the domain of the Orthografiejugend.

Now that is one fine story.

Closest I ever got (and a long, shallow distance from you, to be sure) was helping some friends with the Altair we got in '78, I think it was. That spring we got a surplus teletype from the college and bread-boarded an interface so's we could do I/O with the paper punch tape. Still, fun - except for the part about getting the teletype down the basement stairs.

I'd like to have some of the stuff from GEnie - there was some good discussion, some stuff that would now be Internet or computer history as told by the people who were there. Ditto a few things from CompuServe and Delphi. Not to mention the files libes for use with an old OS or two running in emulators (there are a few apps, for instance, for which I've found no modern examples with the same capability - or ease of use for that capability.)

Your last paragraph: amen. Lot of good info now lost - or at the least not readily found. A newer example, maybe, is that pages, information, even whole sites went missing after 9/11. Items in public domain, gone. At least, to my casual searching, looking for some things I'd read and wanted to get back to.

The whole preservation idea gets weird; why preserve old Victorian romances, for instance. Maybe somebody finds use for them for a thesis. Who knows? Is it worth hanging on to... how much? And what? How do we predict what a mind yet unborn will find of interest or use? I'm guessing that with increasing storage density, better search and data mining, a lot will get saved; and yet, as with every generation, a lot will be lost. Do we need to know how to make button-hook shoes? In a hundred years will we need to know how to change a spark plug? But yeah, that weird face you made at that frat party will live on....

cheers

Possibly there are a lot of other problems.

Any good old science fiction?