In the interest of open, civil dialogue, I'm posting this publicly.
Retired1: I'll admit that the thought crossed my mind that you are subtly trolling us, since your account is relatively new. However, after exchanging a few PMs with you, and seeing your other helpful posts, I'll take your word that you are 'old school' and not fully aware of many current communication trends. Thus I apologize that my initial response to your query about the rinse step was a sarcastic one (since I assumed you were trying to insert some humor into the discussion and I was attempting to build upon that).
'Rinse and repeat' is a common idiom in the English language (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinse_and_repeat), that according to Google Ngram (
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?co ... moothing=3) has seen an exponential rise in usage in the English corpus since about the mid 1990's (about the time I graduated from high school). Thus I can understand that someone older than I am might not be familiar with it's common usage or meaning (which in almost all cases has nothing to do with 'rinsing' and rather just repeating a series of steps over and over again several times).
That said, the majority of the members of this board are Generation Z (or the Net Generation)'. Those of us who are older (Generation X or Baby Boomers) need to be somewhat cognizant of the cultural gap we have with the youngsters who have been 'plugged in' to computers and the net since their birth. While I am fully aware of the challenges and misunderstanding that often occur due to the difficulty of communicating nuances and tone via text only communication such as on this website, if we are too rigid or formal in our communications, we risk dissuading SO participants from our common goal of inspiring them to pursue careers in the STEM fields. Science Olympiad can be sometimes viewed by outsiders as too nerdy and boring, when in reality it is a lot of fun and the majority of the people associated with it have very collegial, outgoing personalities, which don't suddenly get shut off just because we are interacting virtually.
The TL;DR conclusion I'd like to emphasize (
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TL;DR):
My reason for posting on SciOly.org is to help and promote SO, primarily with the students competing in it, but also with coaches, parents, event supervisors, etc. As such I generally try to communicate in friendly, casual forms in order to facilitate connections with others. I would hope that other members would do likewise, and understand that occasionally there will be misunderstanding and non-formal interactions.
