Re: Experts Worry That Public May Not Trust Science

Cliff Lundberg (cliff@noe.com)
Sat, 18 Sep 1999 16:20:25 -0700

Biochmborg@aol.com wrote:
>I have not yet received Cliff's post that you are responding to here, but I
>should point out that Cliff had sent me a private response to a public post
>of mine. Thinking that he preferred to finish the discussion in private, I
>sent him a private post in response, one that I did not want to make public.
>Now I see he has posted a public response to my private post. I consider
>that extremely rude of him and I am deeply offended. There is no excuse for
>that kind of behavior, no matter how peeved he might have felt over his
>perception of the tone of my response.

I apologize for the mistake, but not too abjectly, as the interchange was
plainly just the usual sort of stuff we were putting on the list. And I have no
problem with the tone of things. E-mail is a narrow medium through which
the least bit of irony can seem terribly icy. I'm sure I would enjoy conversing
in person with any of the thoughtful people on this list.

I have complained before about the peculiarity of this list, that the messages
do not come with a header that says reply-to: evolution@calvin.edu, which
would be the conventional configuration for a mailing list. As it is, one must
always manually type in the list address; if you simply respond, the message
goes only to the author, where one would normally expect it to go to the list.
In some cases it might be well to put 'OFF-LIST response' or some such in
the subject line, if one is switching to private mode in mid-thread.

Apologies again.

--Cliff Lundberg  ~  San Francisco  ~  cliff@noe.com