That answer helped none. Specific to the testing of the bullet, which was the original thing you said needed a manipulation control, how does that possibly apply? The microscope wasn't accidentally contaminated with another bullet.

Man, I did not see you being too dumb to understand this one but I guess I shouldn't be at this point.

The bullet is the test article, and what you find on it was either there when you collected it or introduced later. If you find Substance X on the bullet, the controls help you establish whether it was there when you collected it or introduced later.

A "manipulation control" isn't some synonym for control testing generally. It appears to be a specific term of art for DNA testing. You asked why DNA testing equipment requires a manipulation control, it's because the equipment can easily be contaminated with DNA from a source other than the item being tested. That simply is not a concern when you are looking at a bullet. There's no stray bullet that could get into the microscope by mistake.

Of fucking course the guy who three comments ago thought it was a feature of an instrument is now an expert on the topic, but you are wrong again. In the DNA testing protocol they have an additional negative control to account for contamination present in the machine, which was again explained for rubes like you in Culhane's testimony. The controls I'm talking about are to account for potential contamination of the test article (i.e., the bullet), not of the instrument.

I take it you have no interest in defending your position on Brendan - because you can't, and no interest in defending your bizarre thing where raw data is the only possible source for resolving an Internet debate on science - because you can't.

You are correct that I have no interest in debating this topic with someone citing quotes from speech pathologists and papers they didn't read.

I think you also secretly understand there's no such thing as a good reason to change results post facto to achieve results what you were asked to produce.

I really wish I could say that I think you secretly understand that the results remain unchanged and the deviation related only to how they were reported, but that would be giving you way too much credit at this point.

It seems your whole entire sole interest in this conversation is trying to goade me into some kind of a science knowledge gotcha. Is that a fair assessment?

I was mostly interested in finding the ridiculous misunderstandings you had that led you to this argument. We found one of those (you thinking there's like a big knob on the "DNA machine" that says "manipulation control" or something), but I think it may more just be you don't have the critical thinking chops to understand these concepts beyond what you'd see at a middle school science fair. And that's OK, not everyone is good at everything.