Steve O'Shea said:
You're doing fine; I was just giving you a hard time (most people write bethnic instead - yours was an interesting departure from the norm). Just be grateful that I don't delve into computer science; my wife has long-since given up on me, trying to teach me something other than word processing (she teaches computing somethingorother); I don't trust anything that I cannot dissect or cannot feed, and computers are at the top of that list!
Not to worry, I don't mind being given a hard time occasionally... and benthic is actually a word I ostensibly actually know. I do, however, have great respect for the amount of encyclopedic knowledge that biologists and chemists need to keep in mind... that was really the biggest thing that kept me from doing bio as a double major.
For what it's worth, I also feel your pain about computers; I'm somewhat ashamed of the computer professionals in acadamia and industry both, since they've managed to screw up implementations enough that the amount of crap you need to learn to feel comfortable is ridiculous, and of course goes out of date quickly. And unlike biology or chemistry, the crap you need to learn to use computers tends to be completely arbitrary, and not interesting from a standpoint of understanding any big picture. (Although I guess they do "re-write the book" in a lot of biology fields every couple of years...)
For me, a lot of the fun (and useful) stuff is in cross-disciplinary work, anyway, so I enjoy learning enough to talk about marine biology (or neuroscience, or orbital dynamics, or whatever) to talk intelligently with "real scientists," so that I can do work where I can collaborate with an assortment of people and can understand the problems computers could help them solve, and leverage my understanding on the computer end to get them the results they want in their specialty area-- I see way to many computer weenies who try to fit problems into their limited scope rather than try to really understand the goals and concerns of the people they're writing software for...
).
