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Originally Posted by Vonsgardens
I may be abrasive, I may be direct, that is who I am. I try to keep it underwraps here, but periodically I can't help myself.
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Forgive me, but I just don’t think ‘that is who I am’ is a good reason for treating people with discourtesy. It’s fine amongst people who know you; friends and family and so-on, but new people coming here will have no reason to know that is who you are and just as little reason to accept being on the sharp end of it.
We have to realise this is a public forum when we post, we could be talking to anybody. I think a youngster, new to the art and all bouncing with enthusiasm, but less able (or willing) to defend him or herself would have been badly discouraged by such responses from senior practitioners of the art. I just don’t think it’s a good introduction for them, or an effective way of promoting bonsai in general.
That being said, I do take your point and I do appreciate that at times you may not be able to help it. We all have foibles and flaws (it’s fair for me to assume that my own must be just as apparent).
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I just can't help it when someone pulls out an obscure (to everyone but the author or someone in his/her subdiscipline)and in this case, not easily found, wrong year, reference to add the weight of intellectual superiority to the conversation.
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Presenting in-text citations is just a habit. It stems from the fact that most of the forums in which I participate are science forums and most of the writing I do is academic. It is standard form for supporting an argument and its purpose is to add the weight of
evidence, not ‘intellectual superiority’, and should only be taken as such. The wrong year, as I said, was a typo (6 & 7 being next to each other) for which I have already apologised.
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Al brings up a point- show us your trees. We might be a bit sensitive- we have had a great promulgator of bandwidth who in the end had no trees. Show us your trees, we need soneone else with your yeasr of experience to be posting quality trees.
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Well, if you have had bad experiences in the past, I can understand your reservations. As I said in my previous post, I have nothing in my new collection that qualifies as a ‘quality tree’, although, as I said, we are working on it (for the most part, I’m currently at the trunk-development stage). But if it’s just evidence that I
have trees you’re asking for, then I’m happy to oblige. The caveat is that my ownership (or otherwise) of trees and their current state or quality is irrelevant to anything I have said in this thread. Is that acceptable?
I shall take some pictures of the handkerchief sized patch of mud I euphemistically call ‘my garden’ later today. Can you tell me how I can post these pictures? I can’t seem to find out how the thumbnail feature works.
PS. As for ‘soft science’, the term is a colloquial one more often used derisively and as a pejorative (so you can understand why I might be sensitive to it?). Science is a
method (neither ‘hard’ nor ‘soft’) and where the method is applied appropriately (i.e. the process of hypothesis testing based on quantitative analyses of reproducible experimental data producing reliable results), it is just science. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding coming from a lack of familiarity with current research areas in psychology?
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(Glider, London was very, very nice today. Would have been a good day to cancel class and play hookie, at least for a while, I had to work.)
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Yes, it was a really good day (yesterday). Unfortunately I had to sit a conferment board so I was left looking at the sunshine over a pile of papers through an office window *sigh*.