to feel irrational hatred everytime someone refers to a bacterium as a virus?

[WidowWadman]

Might be just the hormones, but it makes me want to scream.

Sometimes it feels like the most high-tech thing in our lab is the book we use as a weight for Southern blotting.

surgeonsmate Doesn't contagious mean that it is passed on from person to person, while infectious just means it's caused by a pathogen? So all contagious diseases would be infectious, but not the other way round?

I'm not a doctor or scientist, though, just overly fond of semantics, so I might be wrong.

I think contagious refers to something that is passed only from person to person (or possible animal to person?) whereas infectious means it can be caught from the infective agent in isolation.

Very happy to be corrected though!

Oh The unbalanced centrifuges!!!!!

The crap pippetting

The lack of control samples

huggly it's shamefull how the dihydrogen monoxide thing has been hushed up

I tell you all in confidence, someone once tried to get me to drink some dihydrogen monoxide.
I had an awful experience last December with it in solid form
I shall say no more in case I get a super injunction slapped on me

A bacteria and "chemical free" Drive me nuts also.

YABU to feel irrational hatred. This hatred is entirely rational.

Media bad science hates:

1. When they enlarge a CCTV picture over and over while the computer goes beep and suddenly they see the face of the perp - instead of a pixel.

2. The ape men hiding from dinosaurs in Nick Sharrat's Dinosaur book, and any other instance of ape men and dinos (HG Wells excepted)

3. Everyone in hospital being put on a drip straight away (and don't get me started on all mothers labouring on their backs while having push shouted at them by the entire cast of friends)

4. people moaning about weather forecasts being wrong

5. Just about any health story (thank the flying spaghetti monster for Radio 4's More or Less)

the absolute best of all is when someone starts moaning about how shameful it is that 50% of British school children have a below average reading age/above average waistline etc.

I am a geeky scientist and a pedant! (not a boffin though, not a fan of boffin) I love dihydrogen monoxide!

I hate "organic food"
I'd love to see inorganic food. ALL my food is carbon based.....

It's not the idea behind it that is so wrong. It's the name.....

And mass versus weight.
Last time the person on the deli counter asked me what weight I wanted, I said 4.5 Newtons. She did not get it.....

And batteries vs. cells......

And every lab in the country apparently has conical flasks full of coloured water lying around if you believe the television.

(I admit it, I'm a physics pedant teacher)

"O the unbalanced centrifuge" sounds like a great start to a poem...any volunteers?

Hoober, you sound like you might be a cytogeneticist?

O the unbalenced centrifuge
It fills me full of woe
It wobbled off the lab bench
and landed on my toe

. Very good ratspeaker!

unbalanced
unbalanced

aaargh the dihydrogen monoxide is getting to me

Donki - not exactly, but I used to work in close proximity to some, and I can just about karyotype if the chromosomes are nice.

Love the centrifuge poem

O the unbalanced centrifuge
its really rather crap
it broke all my test tubes
then landed in my lap

A related whinge

I hate certain government departments who insist that everyone should achieve 5 A*-C grades at GCSE on the one hand, and then complain that the exams must be getting easier because more people are passing them....

I wish they would make their minds up

4.5 newtons - ha ha ha! I don't think I'm brave enough to go and ask for a particular mass of mince at the butchers though. They'd just give me the scrag end.

We can complain, but isn't one of life's joys sitting in front of the telly pointing out bad science? Me and my pal almost wet ourselves when we went to see "The Core" - our boyfriends at the time thought we'd gone mad. (unobtanium anyone?)

Anyone else notice that the dilithium crystals on the starship enterprise are carried in SIGG bottles?

I'm off to have a glass of dihydrogen monoxide and go to bed.

O! Th'unbalanced centrifuge,
Thy wild and deafening shaking,
Threatens my samples to deluge,
Under my bench I take refuge,
Experiments forsaking.

< applause applause>

to hoober you should be the next gonnagle

I am rubbish at sciences.

But even I know the difference between viruses and bacterium (thanks DS).

The rest of this thread has been a fascinating read though, thank you clever people for confusing me further teaching me something new.

Hello fellow scientists! Just wanted to say I agree with you all. These are the things that irk me too. Ignorance of science and maths beyond the basics can be forgiven in the general public I think, not everyone knows or is interested in everything, but it ought to be unacceptable in the media. I think the problem is that your general media types do not have a good science background so will not pick up any errors until it is too late (I'd like to hope the science consultant/journalist would get it right in the first place, but perhaps that is optimistic too?).

Anyone else seeing the media mentioned and thinking agar?

I'm certainly more gonnagle than Burns! But thank you

I have to say, I winced at the thought of even the smallest benchtop centrifuge landing on my toe

Media...mmm...I love the smell of melting LB-agar in the morning...

Yay! Great thread. All of the above.

Plus I get irrationallly irritated when media commentators talk about astronomy and have no idea of the difference between interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic.

Oh yes to all of these...

"The data indicates that...." ARGH. No, data indicate. There's more than one of them.

And why can't the media/telly shows ever understand the difference between accuracy and precision?