[Noisebridge-discuss] Another DIYbio thread!

[Andy Isaacson]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 10:48:13AM -0700, William Heath wrote:
> We have followed the proper protocols to collaborate and are being
> excellent to you all.

No you haven't, at least not in my experience.  You (William
specifically, not the rest of the DIYbio folks who have in fact been
excellent) routinely ask very busy people extremely basic questions
repeatedly until they answer your questions just to get you to stop
bothering them.  You then proceed to continue to pester anyone who will
talk to you until they give up out of exasperation.  You show no signs
of learning from these interactions, and show no signs of applying the
teaching you've extracted to anything with an actual result.  You have
barged into spaces where others were active on multiple occasions and
disrupted their activities.  You routinely send plantive-sounding and
frantic-sounding emails implying that a terrible outcome will ensue if
you don't get your way.  And now you've appropriated space that others
have put blood, sweat, and tears into building for your own
poorly-explained and overly-ambitious-to-present-achievements plans.
Whenever anyone attempts to talk to you about your misbehavior, you
claim that you're being misunderstood, that you "are not good at social
skills", and throw a tantrum like poorly socialized child until people
stop questioning you and let you continue as you please.

We have 6 year olds as proto-members who are better behaved than you.

>  We are being very careful.

I might be willing to believe that if it were coming from someone who
had any semblance of a history of being careful.  Other members of the
diybio community have shown relevant levels of concern for fellow
Noisebridgers.  Meredith had credible plans to build a fume hood and
storage facility before she ended up in Europe unexpectedly.  Praveen
has put serious effort into documenting actual procedures and actual
progress without using the grandiose language you've repeatedly used.
Marnia has put effort into organizing the DIYbio meetings.  They all
show signs of being careful.  You do not.

> Please be excellent to diybio, we need this excellence.

Kindly stop attempting to use our rhetoric against us.  Excellence is
something *you*, in particular, need to contemplate and practice if
you'd like to continue being involved with Noisebridge.

> Synthetic
> biology is the future, know this, love this, be this.

What you've done so far is hardly synthetic biology.  As far as I've
been able to ascertain, so far you've ordered some cultures and tools
from one of the standard lab suppliers and performed a few basic lab
experiments, so you're up to the third week of Biology 101 Lab.
Congratulations.  Wake me up when you've gotten past the undergraduate
curriculum.

-andy