Slashdot Mirror

The decay chain of U-238 includes many isotopes which give off beta and gamma radiation. Most of that energy is given off via alpha particles. But it's not true that a sheet of paper or your dead skin cells will block all if it.

That said, this was uranium ore, which is typically only about 0.1% uranium. Uranium and its decay products have a radioactivity of 12,356 Bq (decays per second) per gram, so you'd expect ore to be about 12.4 Bq per gram.

In contrast, potassium chloride is commonly used as a salt substitute in low-sodium salt products. It's about 0.0118% naturally-occurring K-40, which is radioactive (beta radiation even). That gives potassium a radioactivity of about 0.032 Bq/mg = 32 Bq per gram

So the exposure visitors got from these buckets of uranium ore was probably less than you get walking past the water softener bags in the supermarket. In fact, looking at the table on page 2 of the potassium chloride link, you'd expect baked potatoes, milk, orange juice, bananas, hamburgers, and roast chicken to be more radioactive (gram per gram) than these buckets of uranium ore.

Well, you are such a fool to criticize others when it's you who is wrong.
THere isn't one kind of pumice. In new mexico there are large deposites of uncommon pumice which is used in the fabic industry.
Since 1987, the use of pumice as an abrasive has increased rapidly because of the demand in the laundry industry to produce faded denim fabrics. New Mexico pumice is well positioned to serve the El Paso area which consumes 750,000 lb/month in the pro- duction of designer jeans; however, more than 50% of the pumice utilized in El Paso is currently imported from foreign sources.

https://geoinfo.nmt.edu/public...

They also closed the local post office. So there must have been evidence of something being shipped to the observatory.

It may have been physical evidence, or it may have been some kind of intelligence gathered.

I remember one incident when I-25 was shut down because of a shipment of radioactive rebar from Juarez.

A lot of the press coverage back then was focused on the environmental concerns. I was an undergrad at New Mexico Tech at the time. All of us science and engineering geeks immediately started thinking about the fact that the government must have had detectors for radiation installed at the borders, or along the path the truck traveled. I know that sound pretty standard to most people in the post 9/11 world, but back in the 1980's secret radiation detectors and surveillance were things that only 'evil empire' communist governments did. The good ole' US of A would never have secret detectors deployed in America! How naive we were.

Who knows what the evidence is in this case causing the shutdown, but the post office closing as well does point to something being shipped there.

BTW, many of you have probably heard of New Mexico Tech from either the VLA or, more likely, from watching Mythbusters. If you are a first responder who took a terrorist or bomb training course, it may have been at NMT. NMT was a great place to go to school. I could not imagine going to one of those universities most people go to where students are either partying or in class. We were either in class, building stuff, or blowing stuff up. Blowing it up in the name of research, of course!

They also closed the local post office. So there must have been evidence of something being shipped to the observatory.

It may have been physical evidence, or it may have been some kind of intelligence gathered.

I remember one incident when I-25 was shut down because of a shipment of radioactive rebar from Juarez.

A lot of the press coverage back then was focused on the environmental concerns. I was an undergrad at New Mexico Tech at the time. All of us science and engineering geeks immediately started thinking about the fact that the government must have had detectors for radiation installed at the borders, or along the path the truck traveled. I know that sound pretty standard to most people in the post 9/11 world, but back in the 1980's secret radiation detectors and surveillance were things that only 'evil empire' communist governments did. The good ole' US of A would never have secret detectors deployed in America! How naive we were.

Who knows what the evidence is in this case causing the shutdown, but the post office closing as well does point to something being shipped there.

BTW, many of you have probably heard of New Mexico Tech from either the VLA or, more likely, from watching Mythbusters. If you are a first responder who took a terrorist or bomb training course, it may have been at NMT. NMT was a great place to go to school. I could not imagine going to one of those universities most people go to where students are either partying or in class. We were either in class, building stuff, or blowing stuff up. Blowing it up in the name of research, of course!

They also closed the local post office. So there must have been evidence of something being shipped to the observatory.

It may have been physical evidence, or it may have been some kind of intelligence gathered.

I remember one incident when I-25 was shut down because of a shipment of radioactive rebar from Juarez.

A lot of the press coverage back then was focused on the environmental concerns. I was an undergrad at New Mexico Tech at the time. All of us science and engineering geeks immediately started thinking about the fact that the government must have had detectors for radiation installed at the borders, or along the path the truck traveled. I know that sound pretty standard to most people in the post 9/11 world, but back in the 1980's secret radiation detectors and surveillance were things that only 'evil empire' communist governments did. The good ole' US of A would never have secret detectors deployed in America! How naive we were.

Who knows what the evidence is in this case causing the shutdown, but the post office closing as well does point to something being shipped there.

BTW, many of you have probably heard of New Mexico Tech from either the VLA or, more likely, from watching Mythbusters. If you are a first responder who took a terrorist or bomb training course, it may have been at NMT. NMT was a great place to go to school. I could not imagine going to one of those universities most people go to where students are either partying or in class. We were either in class, building stuff, or blowing stuff up. Blowing it up in the name of research, of course!

They also closed the local post office. So there must have been evidence of something being shipped to the observatory.

It may have been physical evidence, or it may have been some kind of intelligence gathered.

I remember one incident when I-25 was shut down because of a shipment of radioactive rebar from Juarez.

A lot of the press coverage back then was focused on the environmental concerns. I was an undergrad at New Mexico Tech at the time. All of us science and engineering geeks immediately started thinking about the fact that the government must have had detectors for radiation installed at the borders, or along the path the truck traveled. I know that sound pretty standard to most people in the post 9/11 world, but back in the 1980's secret radiation detectors and surveillance were things that only 'evil empire' communist governments did. The good ole' US of A would never have secret detectors deployed in America! How naive we were.

Who knows what the evidence is in this case causing the shutdown, but the post office closing as well does point to something being shipped there.

BTW, many of you have probably heard of New Mexico Tech from either the VLA or, more likely, from watching Mythbusters. If you are a first responder who took a terrorist or bomb training course, it may have been at NMT. NMT was a great place to go to school. I could not imagine going to one of those universities most people go to where students are either partying or in class. We were either in class, building stuff, or blowing stuff up. Blowing it up in the name of research, of course!

No, you should never disclose your salary history to any prospective future employer.

Employers will ask this question for one reason and one reason only, to find the lowest possible offer you'd be willing to accept if they decide they want to offer you a position. Many people in this thread that are representing the employers perspective have said that they need this information in order to determine if a candidate's expectations are in line with their budget. Well, that can easily be achieved by either the employer being up front with the salary range on offer, or by asking the candidate not for their actual previous salaries but for their expected salary. That's a whole different question and one which you as a candidate should be prepared to answer (although ideally, you'll avoid giving a direct answer to this question also - see below). Of course, if you do give an answer here, you should still respond with a range rather than a specific number to allow that all important wiggle room within negotiations if you get far enough into the application process.

Too many employers here seem to be expecting the candidate to do half of their job for them - i.e. to divulge information that is detrimental to the candidate and helps the employer make a hiring decision (especially in the negative direction - i.e. helping the employer to discount the candidate rather than offering reasons to hire).

Here's some very useful tips I've picked up over the years for answering the "What is your current salary?" question without actually divulging the salary information the employer so desperately seeks. Also, some great answers to the "What salary are you seeking?" question, too. For this, use the Noel Smith-Wenkle method which avoids giving a direct answer and naming a number - something that will instantly give the other party the upper hand in any salary negotiation.

So, when asked "What is your current salary?", answers are:
- "I'm seeking a salary in the range of $x to $y" (i.e. the Politician's answer - you answer a different question that what was asked).
- “My current employer does not allow me to discuss the terms of my employment”
- “This position is not exactly the same as my current job, so let’s discuss what my responsibilities would be here and then determine a fair salary for this job.”
or finally, for really pushy interviewers:
- “I’m happy to help you evaluate what I’d be worth to your business based upon my skills, experience and the value that I can add to your organisation, but my current salary is personal and confidential, just as the salaries of your own employees are.”

And the aforementioned Noel Smith-Wenkle method in a nutshell is that when asked "What salary are you seeking?" you give three answers for the number of times they repeat the question, or try to pin you down to mention a figure:

1st answer: "I am much more interested in doing (type of work) here at (name of company) than I am in the size of the initial offer."
2nd answer: "I will consider any reasonable offer."
3rd (and subsequent) answers: "You are in a much better position to know how much I'm worth to you than I am."

No, you should never disclose your salary history to any prospective future employer.

Employers will ask this question for one reason and one reason only, to find the lowest possible offer you'd be willing to accept if they decide they want to offer you a position. Many people in this thread that are representing the employers perspective have said that they need this information in order to determine if a candidate's expectations are in line with their budget. Well, that can easily be achieved by either the employer being up front with the salary range on offer, or by asking the candidate not for their actual previous salaries but for their expected salary. That's a whole different question and one which you as a candidate should be prepared to answer (although ideally, you'll avoid giving a direct answer to this question also - see below). Of course, if you do give an answer here, you should still respond with a range rather than a specific number to allow that all important wiggle room within negotiations if you get far enough into the application process.

Too many employers here seem to be expecting the candidate to do half of their job for them - i.e. to divulge information that is detrimental to the candidate and helps the employer make a hiring decision (especially in the negative direction - i.e. helping the employer to discount the candidate rather than offering reasons to hire).

Here's some very useful tips I've picked up over the years for answering the "What is your current salary?" question without actually divulging the salary information the employer so desperately seeks. Also, some great answers to the "What salary are you seeking?" question, too. For this, use the Noel Smith-Wenkle method which avoids giving a direct answer and naming a number - something that will instantly give the other party the upper hand in any salary negotiation.

So, when asked "What is your current salary?", answers are:
- "I'm seeking a salary in the range of $x to $y" (i.e. the Politician's answer - you answer a different question that what was asked).
- “My current employer does not allow me to discuss the terms of my employment”
- “This position is not exactly the same as my current job, so let’s discuss what my responsibilities would be here and then determine a fair salary for this job.”
or finally, for really pushy interviewers:
- “I’m happy to help you evaluate what I’d be worth to your business based upon my skills, experience and the value that I can add to your organisation, but my current salary is personal and confidential, just as the salaries of your own employees are.”

And the aforementioned Noel Smith-Wenkle method in a nutshell is that when asked "What salary are you seeking?" you give three answers for the number of times they repeat the question, or try to pin you down to mention a figure:

1st answer: "I am much more interested in doing (type of work) here at (name of company) than I am in the size of the initial offer."
2nd answer: "I will consider any reasonable offer."
3rd (and subsequent) answers: "You are in a much better position to know how much I'm worth to you than I am."

This is an especially worthless leak because the documents dealing with the thing that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were already declassified back in the mid 1990's.

My freshman physics teacher, and undergraduate college advisor, worked on project mogul. He was part of the team that built the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947. I learned college physics from one of the beings that built the craft that crashed in Roswell and started a UFO 'craze'! (He was a human being, but that is still a being.) New Mexico Tech was an amazing school. Professors like Charlie Moore, Sterling Colgate, and Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt's brother) made it a pretty exciting place.

I don't really understand the purpose of the 'leak' unless it is to show that some people who work with Hillary Clinton have some pretty wacky beliefs. Has anyone been paying attention to politics for the last few decades? This is not startling in any way. Finding evidence of a rational person, without wacky beliefs, involved in politics would be a world shattering revelation.

This is an especially worthless leak because the documents dealing with the thing that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were already declassified back in the mid 1990's.

My freshman physics teacher, and undergraduate college advisor, worked on project mogul. He was part of the team that built the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947. I learned college physics from one of the beings that built the craft that crashed in Roswell and started a UFO 'craze'! (He was a human being, but that is still a being.) New Mexico Tech was an amazing school. Professors like Charlie Moore, Sterling Colgate, and Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt's brother) made it a pretty exciting place.

I don't really understand the purpose of the 'leak' unless it is to show that some people who work with Hillary Clinton have some pretty wacky beliefs. Has anyone been paying attention to politics for the last few decades? This is not startling in any way. Finding evidence of a rational person, without wacky beliefs, involved in politics would be a world shattering revelation.

This is an especially worthless leak because the documents dealing with the thing that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were already declassified back in the mid 1990's.

My freshman physics teacher, and undergraduate college advisor, worked on project mogul. He was part of the team that built the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947. I learned college physics from one of the beings that built the craft that crashed in Roswell and started a UFO 'craze'! (He was a human being, but that is still a being.) New Mexico Tech was an amazing school. Professors like Charlie Moore, Sterling Colgate, and Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt's brother) made it a pretty exciting place.

I don't really understand the purpose of the 'leak' unless it is to show that some people who work with Hillary Clinton have some pretty wacky beliefs. Has anyone been paying attention to politics for the last few decades? This is not startling in any way. Finding evidence of a rational person, without wacky beliefs, involved in politics would be a world shattering revelation.

This is an especially worthless leak because the documents dealing with the thing that crashed in Roswell in 1947 were already declassified back in the mid 1990's.

My freshman physics teacher, and undergraduate college advisor, worked on project mogul. He was part of the team that built the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947. I learned college physics from one of the beings that built the craft that crashed in Roswell and started a UFO 'craze'! (He was a human being, but that is still a being.) New Mexico Tech was an amazing school. Professors like Charlie Moore, Sterling Colgate, and Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt's brother) made it a pretty exciting place.

I don't really understand the purpose of the 'leak' unless it is to show that some people who work with Hillary Clinton have some pretty wacky beliefs. Has anyone been paying attention to politics for the last few decades? This is not startling in any way. Finding evidence of a rational person, without wacky beliefs, involved in politics would be a world shattering revelation.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...

http://disciplinedminds.tripod...

From the last:
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
      In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
      The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
      Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Great dynamic analysis of engineering social systems! For ways around this via skunkworks development, see William L. Livingston's writings, like "Have Fun At Work":
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...

From a review:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.
This is the message of William L. Livingston, a mechanical engineer with over 100 patents and decades of industrial experience. Several books and a newsletter detail his disturbing but important worldview. ...
``Have Fun at Work'' (1988, ISBN 0-937063-05-3, $24.95) is the basic work. ...
The book sketches a different social structure that is better equipped to cope with complexity: the Skunkworks. The term comes from a legendary aircraft development shop that produced the U-2 and Blackbird aircraft. In general, a Skunkworks is a small (3--5) team of battle-hardened, generalist engineers equipped with the latest in software tools for simulating the behavior of all the involved systems (mechanical, electrical, software, and social).
On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there.
Livingston's more recent work, ``Friends in High Places'' (1990, ISBN 0-937063-06-1, $28.50), spends less time discussing organizational pathologies and more time discussing the Skunkworks procedure. It is a somewhat more positive, less bitter work than ``Have Fun at Work.''"

I also think free and open source collaborations via "stigmergy" are another way around this, where people collaborate by adding to a shared digital artifact.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Stigm...
"3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy. "

Even at IBM Research, technologies like the Jikes Java compiler only got picked up by other groups because they were made open source. Otherwise the organizational barriers within a big organization like IBM would be too strong to use the tools. That was something mentioned somewhere by one of the authors as the biggest surprise of open sourcing Jikes, that other IBMers suddenly were using it.
http://jikes.sourceforge.net/

By contrast, back aound the same time Jikes went open source, I desperately wanted to try IBM's embedded Smalltalk (acquired from OTI) in a research project at IBM instead of using VxWorks for the portable IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a handheld speech recognizer and TTS system as a coprocesser to a Palm Pilot, a forerunner in a way to Siri and Google Voice). That other group said I would need to come up with about US$200,000+ worth of funding to their team before they would make their code available for use even just inside IBM, claiming they would have to dedicate a support person to it. Sadly, that was not feasible; I was only a contractor, and this was my own idea because I loved Smalltalk. So that technology did not get used at all in that project. Too bad for that group, because the then IBM chairman Lou Gerstner asked for one of the devices for his office to show people -- and wouldn't it have been nice for that IBM group if their technology had been used instead of or in addition to VxWorks?

If IBM/OTI Embedded Small

Do I know some people in NM who are going to love this! And the fact that theyr'e next door to the NM firefighters' training academy ain't gonna hurt, either.

Colemak is limited by being stuck with Qwerty conventions.

Dvorak considers the transitions between left and right hand, as well as the row and finger for each symbol.

Sticking the most recent book from Gutenberg ("The King of the Mountains") through a script which counts hand transitions, I get this:
Qwerty: 159876 transitions
Colemak: 170978 transitions
Dvorak: 199143 transitions

10MB of Linux kernel source (my Perl script is too slow for more...)
Qwerty: 4081041 transitions
Colemak: 4412425 transitions
Dvorak: 4776202 transitions

(See the scan with the inverted characters here: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo/parkinson.html -- I wrote a script to do this: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4966987 )

No joke. Look at the below picture--the pinky is so under-utilized in QWERTY it looks looks like it has been cut off in the diagram!
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo/fig4.jpg

But really, probably any decently-designed keyboard layout spreads the workload relatively evenly across the fingers. Dvorak does use the pinky and ring fingers quite a bit though, as a result of its design to favor the right hand. I have switched from QWERTY to Dvorak back in early December, and am currently learning Colemak as a second layout... I haven't used Colemak enough to come to a personal opinion on its finger usage, but from what I read it's pretty well evenly split between the fingers.

Maybe you could go to the CarpalX site and download the program, try setting it up to minimize the use of those fingers and run it yourself to see what it generates. The pre-made fully-optimized CarpalX layouts would probably be of little use, because they were not designed to avoid those fingers at all costs... they were made with the idea of having eight fully-functional fingers, while only slightly reducing the load on those fingers due to their natural weakness.

Check out this tool to get a nice overview of the hand, finger, row, etc. usage and other stats that might be useful:
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

It has been tested. They dropped loads of fertiliser [in the Southern Ocean, the rate, limiting nutrient was iron] in the ocean and quantified the algae growth and carbon capture. IIRC the problem was that in order to capture enough carbon to make a significant difference there just isn't enough iron.

Here's one link to get you started: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~oliver/Nature_News_SOFeX_2002.pdf

And of course WIkipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

Interestingly, I first heard about this in an undergrad geology course. If you want to know more about the history of the Earth's climate, and how we _know_ the effects of atmospheric CO2, I'd highly recommend an introduction to Earth Systems. I assume most undergrad geology programs offer something similar.

Hopefully that will mean we get more myth busting in our backyard.

If you are into paleontology or geology you might want to look at the Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, New Mexico. There are many exposed strata in the area, and Ghost Ranch has a small museum and tour of the ranch, which, not surprisingly, is largely focused not on science but on the art of Georgia O'keeffe.

And don't forget Spaceport America. I have not been, but they evendtly have weekend tours for a not so nominal fee.\

Also, if you are going by the Gulf Coast, don't forget Johnson Space center. The visitor center is kind of lame, to be kind, but the tour is good. Make sure to get off the bus and see the rocket.

And, of course, unlike arizona, you can travel without papers and not be subject to random police inspections. Ha Ha. It is a joke.

http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053
http://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0937063061

From a review:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
"Have fun at work (Engineering Empowerment) It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system. This is the message of William L. Livingston, a mechanical engineer with over 100 patents and decades of industrial experience. ... This book discusses chronic patterns of organizational malfunction that I have observed personally many times while working for computer firms (4 years at Hewlett-Packard and 6 years at Tandem, among others). Man is not well-adapted for solving complex problems, he argues. Our brains and bodies and, to a large extent, our social systems evolved for the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Faced with truly complex problems, our managers generally fall back on instinct. This can produce legendary debacles like the original baggage handling system at Denver International. The book sketches a different social structure that is better equipped to cope with complexity: the Skunkworks. The term comes from a legendary aircraft development shop that produced the U-2 and Blackbird aircraft. In general, a Skunkworks is a small (3--5) team of battle-hardened, generalist engineers equipped with the latest in software tools for simulating the behavior of all the involved systems (mechanical, electrical, software, and social). On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there. "

The tangential links there are rotted, but try also in general:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010401000446/http://www.thefrontend.org/
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020550/http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm

There was a rather large field campaign called The Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study (STEPS) to study electrification done around the year 2000 that involved the use of polarimetric weather radar to observe electrified storms, in conjunction with the New Mexico Tech Lightning Monitoring Array (LMA).

One of the nice things about polarimetric radar is the ability to measure the aggregate orientation of particles, including ice crystals. When scanning active electrified storms, the radars observed polarimetric signatures indicating increased vertical orientation of particles aloft (ice crystals), which then suddenly snapped back to roughly random orientation. This event corresponded well with measurements from the LMA. In other words, they could, using radar, predict lightning strikes. I love science!

Some schools are especially good for blowing up stuff. Look at New Mexico Tech in Socorro NM. They have Explosives Camp.

Some schools are especially good for blowing up stuff. Look at New Mexico Tech in Socorro NM. They have Explosives Camp.

"No, I think you'll find what's "hard" is actually making things that other people talk or dream about :-)"

True, but that is also hard to do when most of the social resources to do that are diverted into "me, too" redundant competition, paperwork related to that like patents, or, alternatively, military arms races.

I would have been happy to work on the details of all sorts of neat socially-useful devices. (I've ended up do mostly software because it was cheaper to do that as a small independent compared to stuff like robotic hardware or things requiring lab chemistry.)

Essentially, there is little support for fundamental or basic civilian research anymore, including at places like IBM Research. The few slots to do that are intensely fought for these days, meaning the best social infighters tend to get them (not saying some of them are not good scientists, too).

So, what is really hard is actually making things with essentially no budget while also having to do something else so you can get ration units to pay your bills and also trying to be a nice person. :-)

Still, the scale of our society is so big that fundamental stuff happens anyway here and there. But it is such a lie compared to the picture I was painted in the 1970s when I was in school. Part of the reason:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://disciplinedminds.com/

That's one reason much better fundamental science will flourish with something like a "basic income".

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I just made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
      http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

Also indirectly related to life in big organziations:
"Smile or Die"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
"Have Fun at Work"
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system. ... On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there."

New Mexico Tech

For those of you who use Emacs, you can use M-x spook when composing email

(Or you can use it with twitter)

Example: terrorist Ft. Meade strategic supercomputer $400 million in gold bullion quiche Honduras BATF colonel Treasury domestic disruption SEAL Team 6 class struggle smuggle

I don't pretend to any knowledge on the subject, but wouldn't the Yellowstone Caldera be the picture perfect place for the development of geothermal energy?

Or central New Mexico (the Socorro Seismic Anomaly), where there's another honking huge magma chamber. Or pretty near anywhere in the Cascades, or any of Arizona's volcanic fields, or anywhere near Pacific subduction zone, or ...

"There is no confusion here. Those things are support infrastructure that greatly improve the outcome of human work. A "boss" directs the labor to greater result for some useful purpose."

In theory. In practice, the chain of command from a boss on up ensures that resources will be directed to the chain of command, even if the means doing things less efficiently. Anything on management in the real world suggests that compensation of managers is based on how many people they manage. This can lead to vast inefficiencies in any bureaucracy. But the organizations persist because their success is more dependent on things like market position, a concentration of capital, market barriers to entry, and state-granted monopolies than innovation or efficiency.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html

From the last: "This book discusses chronic patterns of organizational malfunction that I have observed personally many times while working for computer firms (4 years at Hewlett-Packard and 6 years at Tandem, among others). "

"A currency system is a very effective means to simplify trade."

As Jane Jacobs suggests, city economies work best when they have their own local currencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

And before the alliance some suggest of the feudal aristocracy with some of the new factory owners,
http://rushkoff.com/
the direct market economy, based on IOUs, even without currency, worked quite well:
http://www.digitalcoin.info/The_Essence_of_Money.html

"A state with police is more infrastructure that supports various economic activities and trade that simply couldn't occur in its absence (such as maintaining a large business or borrowing money)."

As above, neither large businesses or borrowing money are really needed for most people to have a happy life, or for us to have a very productive economy.

"Property rights and enforceable contracts are self-explanatory, allowing for a variety of activities and agreements that would not be possible in their absence."

Sure. Except that what about external costs, both positive and negative?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
What about the question of who gets natural resources or fiat dollars first? What about the costs to society of private property claimed in ideas or digital goods that can be easily duplicated? Those are the sort of questions an emphasis on property rights may miss. And that's why, say, taxes and other cost will go down if everyone got a free luxury electric care and single payer health care:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care

"Rich/poor divides are one of the few things that have always been around and hasn't changed significantly either in its existence or in mechanisms for addressing the imbalance, such as cultural mores, that have the rich in part supporting the poor. Many primitive cultures have rich and poor as well along with some sort of way for the rich to support the poor (eg, gift economies)."

Can you provide examples? If you look at the matriarchal Iroquois, whose constitution provided a model for our own, they had communal land ownership and a mostly egalitarian society. Da

... would have compared more than those few mainstream input methods. Particularly interesting: Dvorak keyboards and Tikinotes, Swype and MessageEase for the iPhone.

- If you are asked during the interview how much you are expecting to make at the new position, a correct answer is "I earn $XXXX at my current job and I am certain you will be fair, but I would like to lean more about the company".

How much you're currently making at some other place is really none of their business. Putting out a number early on in the process like that is a terrible way to negotiate. If you're looking to make substantially more money at your next job then you're never going to get it if you reveal your current salary. At best your offer will be slightly above whatever number you put out, especially if they had a higher number in mind from the start. As you attempt to negotiate, your previous salary will become like a rotting albatross around your neck.

You were close though, the right way to do it is to say "I'm more interested in doing XXX at YYY than I a in the size of the initial offer." If they persist you can say "I'll consider any reasonable offer." If they are really persistent you can say "You are in a much better position to know how much I'm worth to you than I am."

This all comes from the Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method

What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?

Actually, the CalTech prof who's most prominently featured in the article makes his book available in PDF and MS Word format. He has the link to the Word file labeled "Source Code," so he obviously groks the open-source concept and is trying to do something similar. Of course Word is a proprietary format, but it's a proprietary format with pretty darn good OSS support.

Quite a few free textbooks do come with latex source code. Examples: [1], [2], [3], [4].

A group at New Mexico Tech was working on a similar experiment using a cylindrical chamber filled with liquid sodium and a way to introduce turbulence to create magnetic fields. This was started over ten years ago. Their group page is a bit out of date, though.

A group at New Mexico Tech was working on a similar experiment using a cylindrical chamber filled with liquid sodium and a way to introduce turbulence to create magnetic fields. This was started over ten years ago. Their group page is a bit out of date, though.

People who support public schools are out there urging people to vote "yes" on education bonds all the time (and yes that example does state clearly what the added taxes will be).

New array? I worked on this project in 99-00 and it was several years old then. I think "new" here just corresponds to awareness in the minds of the public. Papers derived from this research have been around ten years, at least. The results are, however, quite impressive. It's possible to plot, in time, the path a lightning bolt takes through a cloud. Airplanes are also quite easy to spot on their graphs. A quick look on their research page might make for interesting reading: Langmuir Labs.

In addition to quirky physics videos (seventh one down on the list) we do thrown and pirate flag relocation, have the blow shit up, cheapest tuition / worst food, and wicked rock climbing routes.

We also have girls^H^H^H^H^H a girl.

(PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE come to our school if you are a girl. Naked Sam (per video) is usually kept indoors.)

Hi, I am not the parent but in case you find it useful...

Here are two links from a cool, smart (and gorgeous :D) kernel hacker, Val Henson:

      http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/review/choosing.pdf
      Choosing and tuning Linux file systems

      http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/fs_slides.pdf
      A (very) brief history of UNIX file systems for the average computer layperson. Includes the super cool file system feature chart showing which file systems have which features.

Cheers,

Hi, I am not the parent but in case you find it useful...

Here are two links from a cool, smart (and gorgeous :D) kernel hacker, Val Henson:

      http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/review/choosing.pdf
      Choosing and tuning Linux file systems

      http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/fs_slides.pdf
      A (very) brief history of UNIX file systems for the average computer layperson. Includes the super cool file system feature chart showing which file systems have which features.

Cheers,

Here's one: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/

Yes, but it's also a great way for one guy to gain all the "Intellectual Property" of the company he worked for. This is an old argument, but it's worth considering. There are hidden costs associated with a Single Point of Failure. How long and how much when someone offers the one-man show a better deal? Can you salvage anything once your star programmer has left? How about security? Is $80k/yr. enough to prevent the one guy who has access to the code base from doing anything malicious, like leaving a back-door or selling the code to a competitor? Does your business stop running when he calls in sick?

Likewise, the population of people trained to be a one-man Project-Manager-Kickass-Developer-CSR-Tech-Writer all rolled into one is dwindling; it's a profession that emerged when business computing emerged. Now universities and technical colleges concentrate on a team approach. I've witnessed first-hand how this approach is better for business, even though it's easily the 500% more expensive than you mention.

The CHAOS Report, though rapidly falling out-of-date, shows the height of the star developer, and look at how many software projects failed. Many of the reasons are not directly related to the developer's effort or talent, but overall this method of developing software has a terrible tendency to avoid showing it's work (sort of like a math test where you don't show your work and get no partial credit because you just put down the wrong answer). What I've experienced with the team approach is that a software project is much more robust. A developer who wants to negotiate a higher salary by withholding his talent has much less leverage, since the technical writer and architect have been working in a parallel stream producing UML diagrams of use cases, packaging, flowcharts, etc. What this means is that you can wave goodbye to the opportunistic developer, because he is no longer the sole source of knowledge about how the software works. Another developer will read and understand the supporting documenation and will be trained on the new project in days instead of weeks or months.

This approach definitely pays off on the larger projects, where it is (or at least was) common for a company to go through 5 or more consultants to do the same project. Usually those consultants would duplicate his predecessor's work to no small extent due to the lack of any documentation or diagrams which would show the new developer what part of the old project was useful. Most importantly, at least to an executive, no one person on your team can turn around and deliver your corporate secrets in their entirety to another company.

Finally, the elitism that comes from being the guy is impossible to deal with. Business people have almost no recourse to an unethical developer who consistently holds a project hostage or bills for hours he didn't work. It is to the overall advantage to the business community to remove themselves from under that guy's thumb, as it will set an example that other businesses will follow. There's nothing wrong with working in a software team. If you were the guy (I was until I burned out), then you'll find your job is a lot easier once you figure out how to get along with everyone else. If you weren't, then the field of software development is now open to you as more roles appear that require more creative thinking and less ubertechie skills. You as the developer shouldn't worry about it; the business community is clearly willing to pay for the extra resources. In your example, there actually is a cost savings: about $40k/yr. by my reckoning (the difference between a 40k/yr and 20k/yr) provided the off-shore developers can earn their keep. And, I'd wager that there's a good 90% chance that the project will be completed in the first pass as opposed to numbers that resemble the CHAOS report.

Then enjoy your life...
http://www.geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/scholle/graphics/ tourist/CalStreet.jpg

eventually the universe will crumble. Either from the big crunch or reduction to nothing from continual expansion.

Asimov's take on the subject: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question. htm is one excellent short story...

Here's Asimov's take on that idea

The Last Question
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question. htm

I wasn't suggesting that you are abstaining from being employed. The process of getting actually getting hired is a game (See Negotiation theory, or the Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method), just like dating and developing other more complex social interactions.

In poker, bluffing and withholding information can be a key part of a successful strategy; what I am referring to is equivalent in job interviewing. Life is a superset of many games, and getting hired does require tactics.

You're misusing the term "heat death." Heat death does not refer to the destruction of the earth by the sun, it refers to there no longer being useable energy in the universe due to the continued process of entropy. The death of the sun will of course happen long, long, long before the universe becomes so entropic that everything is homogenous and no meaningful sources of energy will be left. The death of the sun is potentially escapable, either by pulling the earth out of the way or (more practically) colonizing other stars. The heat death of the universe however is, as far as we currently know, inescapable.

For a dramatized explanation of this distinction please see Asimov's The Last Question.

It was actually a short story by Isaac Asimov titled "The Last Question" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

You can also read it online: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question. htm

I'd hit it.