about snobbery on this forum... it initally really turned me off with many peoples' describing their new bikes (many '03 and '04) with fancy named parts and the like... while I am still burning the midnight oil to pay off a cheap 80's used single speed....
... but I gotta think that perhaps if I had fancy campy parts or what not, i'd like to boast and brag just a little.... and this isn't such a bad place for that, so ... now i understand.

if you want an insular group... try "professional" mathematicians. I've only been studying math at Chicago for 3 years now, but there aren't big enough aleph-numbers to count how many times my profs have made jokes about "amateur mathematicians." They always like to laugh about how often they're written to by 'amateurs' with claims about solving this or that theorem. It really pisses me off how greatly they *like* to disregard non-academic peoples' attempts at mathematics. Inside the community, this has grown in past years into nation-wide struggles by mathematics educators to even be considered in the same group as hardcore college professor types (who would prefer the teachers be called as such, and not "real" mathematicians). I for one, don't think I'll go into mathematics further than college, but I don't like the idea that this means if I ever want to do math again later in life I'll be so highly looked down upon as to be laughed at for trying.