I really, really, cannot trust NYP to give me accurate information. I hoped that the first few times I complained about this, that they were simply anomalies, random occurrences that were overlooked due to a natural amount of human negligence. I looked at is as bad luck, because, you know, it might have been. Maybe the people who created the lecture notes and such were just tired, and the editors were just bad at English(not that this is excusable in any way).
Okay so fine. During the quiz they state completely wrong things. In the lectures, they make up entirely non-existent facts and give them to us! WHAT. Okay, so maybe they're just outdated. Fine, that would be fine, completely fine, if they would bloody listen to me when I tell them! But what? Noooo, instead, they attribute their complete incompetence to ambiguity of information! So I say, why not explain the ambiguity? And then they make a completely unrelated and unhelpful remark, snubbing me, shutting me off. Ignoring my complaints.
And now what? I've encountered "ambiguity" number seven or so. Titration curves. The image presented to me in the chemistry lab manual, issued by NYP, is entirely different from ALL of the ones that I have found on the net. And guess what? ALL of the ones on the net are the SAME. Tells you something, doesn't it?
And I have to answer a question about it! How nice! First, they gave me a wrong graph, and asked me a question. At that point of time, I was completely unaware of how wrong the graph was. Also, given that the question was sort of new to me, they suggested that I looked it up on the web. And so I DID. And then I found that the entire dicking thing was wrong, making it pretty damn difficult to answer the question.
And so I've been trying to decide what to do. Use their botched up information, or the information I find elsewhere? Normally, I'd choose the latter, but this counts into my grade. Which is seriously the most screwed up thing, ever.
There is no way, absolutely no way, that all of these huge, massive errors, were simply in here because of normal human mistakes. No one(that matters) makes this many errors. These people are supposed to be scientists, FFS.
This would not peeve me so much, if I had any form of consolation. Someone tell me that my batch was just so damn unlucky that we got material from all the wrong people. Someone show me, that there is a way that a bloody school can fall into this level of incompetence. I would not care about all of the errors so far, if they were not going to affect me. But they are.
There is a reason for ambiguity. It's that people do not want to know things. They just accept everything given to them. Once in a while, someone decides that he want to know more, and does this really easy thing called cross referencing. And so, he discovers that there are differences! A normal, good, efficient organisation would listen to this dude, and conduct their own investigations.
And, you know, maybe update the goddamn textbook.
I know, not everything is known yet. But why is it so damn hard to add "Some scientists believe..." in front of ambiguous statements? Why is it so damn hard to add "However, some disagree with this..." so that an alternative hypothesis can be introduced? There's a reason that we invented the words "theory", "postulate", and "speculation".
This is utter bullshit. Seriously.
Oh, and someone tell me, when does methyl red turn pink or colourless?
Rgghh. I hate this. I hate them, and their pitiful excuses. They should really stop saying "You can't trust everything on the web". They should bloody go online and have a look around. I believe that real scientists use the internet, to publish texts and the like. You would think that some of them would have a look at Wikipedia, and out of that some of them, notice errors and correct them? And also, Wikipedia puts heavy emphasis on things like citations? You can't just make up anything and put it up there, unless there are supporting sources elsewhere.
So, for general information to be wrong on Wikipedia, you would need to go through a number of things. Firstly, you would need other sources to be wrong. As in, four out of five prominent, reliable sources, to be wrong. For this to even happen, you need entire intellectual bodies, universities, research centres, to have made the same mistakes, in order to have uniformly wrong information. Because only when the sources agree with each other, can they normally be thought of as "correct". So, after this, a person would use his natural logic and use information from these wrong sources to create the entry. After some time, it is really more likely that other organisations will perform their procedures correctly, and thus prove that the wikipedia entry is in fact, wrong. So then someone, now enlightened, will fix the entry.
It's not fail-proof, but honestly, you would think that general, simple things would be correct. It's not like we're discussing a Wikipedia entry that attempts to explain a mathematical proof. This is biology. Biology is concrete. Either it's there, or it's not. You don't worry about wave properties of matter when you look at an enzyme. Biology is applied chemistry, and chemistry is applied physics. There is an entire science separating biology from quantum mechanics.
So people should really stop saying "you can't trust the internet". Before the internet, did people say "You can't trust the library", and even before that "Don't trust anything"?
This is detrimental and an impediment to the growth and locomotion of knowledge. This very attitude is killing the quest for knowledge. Eventually, the human race is going to wallow around saying "could be." instead of "yes" or "no".
And if that time comes during my lifetime, I really wouldn't mind killing a lot of people. At all.
-Joe