Dumb questions….

Once upon a time, one of my duties was to help out in a weekly class where the basic principles of pharmacology were demonstrated to medical students. In pairs, the future doctors performed a simple experiment not dissimilar to those performed by pioneers in the field a century or so previously, whereby a dose-response curve to a particular compound was constructed. Crucial to such experiments was (and still is) the preparation of a series of dilutions of the compound in question. Naturally each dilution vial must be distinctly labelled with a marker pen to avoid confusion. One week, I noticed that one pair of students seemed to be having trouble getting started. When I offered to help, one of the students asked, “How do I get the top off my marker pen?”

As some of you will be aware, I have been much exercised recently in trying to deal with scrapers: people who copy others’ blog posts and use them as hooks to their own battalions of dodgy websites. There is an established process to deal with these copyright infringements which, although relatively simple, is nonetheless fiddly, and must be followed accurately. In trying to understand the process, I’ve asked questions on various forums; questions which, to those familiar with these things, must be irritatingly familiar. Some people have responded with patient advice which they must have provided to others dozens of times before; others have been dismissively ratty. The assumption sometimes seems to be that with all the information available online, one must be an idiot not to be able to work the process out via a few searches.

I am sure there are plenty of nuclear physicists unable to boil an egg; brain surgeons who don’t know when to prune their fruit bushes; and rocket scientists who scratch their heads when their cars malfunction. (Many poets notoriously can’t even drive….but that’s another story….) Similarly, there are plenty of smart people out there who are at sea with one or more aspects of computing, even though they use the wretched machines daily. But getting answers to computer-related queries can be a fraught business. Those experienced in this field often seem disproportionately patronising. And yet, from discussing scraping on this blog and Michele’s, it’s become clear that even people who are knowledgeable about certain aspects of computing can be in the dark on DMCA notices and how to serve them. No-one is an expert in every field. Even smart people can ask apparently dumb questions.