Yet Another Sign of the Apocalypse

One of the most sacred rules of grad-studentdom is that you don't give the other students a hard time during their defenses.

That rule was broken on Friday.

I think that if the student had just been an obnoxious twit, people would have laid off on her. Giving a presentation that was an insult to every single student in its lack of clarity, scope, and scientific merit, however, made things rough on her.

I think every student had something that bothered them most; I personally was bugged most by how she thought that when you combine two measurements "don't you just add the errors?"[1]

Really, if I wrote more the post would go rapidly downhill.

[1] For the people who aren't in math/physics, the right answer was "take the square root of the sum of the squares of the errors."