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Worst Jobs In Science
FortKnox writes "Popular science has the worst jobs in science. Some are silly, some are sick, some make you angry, and some just flat-out suck." And some of them sound fun :)
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Hope there's not too much "hands-on" experience involved with that.....the scientific method could really start to be a "pain in the ass..."
Barnyard Masturbator doesnt seem like that bad of a job. Im sure it wouldnt be alot of fun, but I can think of worse things then getting a elephant off. Running windows for one, thats not really a science, more of an art.
+-+-+-The folowing statement is true. The previous statement is false.-+-+-+
the worst job would not be the one doing the disecting, but the one being disected. It would suck having yur ass poked and prodded at by some sharp knife, all the while being pinned to some table and not being able to move.
And you thought YOUR job sucked...
So what did they do with Mr. Ed?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"They're grown by the thousands just for the purpose of dying in nasty ways."
Does PETA have a hissy-fit, or are they not cute and fuzzy enough to garner their attention?
Here's the printable page.
Hee hee, barnyard masturbator...
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Actually, the humans have it much worse than the monkeys ever did. From the article:
"Thagard also had the distinction of being the first person ever to clean out animal cages in orbit, on the Spacelab 3 in 1985. Engineers promised him that the cages would be at negative pressure, so none of the weightless waste of 24 rats and 2 squirrel monkeys would escape. But when Thagard opened the cages, air rushed outward, leading to a frantic floating-feces chase scene."
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
It's no longer slashdotted, but here's the complete list. 1. Flatus Odor Judge (smelling real fart samples) 2. Dysentery Stool-Sample Analyzer (studying diarrhea) 3. Barnyard Masturbator (go figure) 4. Brazil Mosquito Researcher 5. Hot-Zone Superintendent (ebola and anthrax outbreaks) 6. Isolation Chamber Tester 7. Fistula Feeder (why not call him a feces specialist?) 8. Prison Rape Researcher 9. Carcass Cleaner 10. Postdoc (anything you do after getting a PHD) 11. Metric System Advocate 12. Corpse-Flower Grower (it's a stench, not a smell) 13. Endanged Species Ecologist 14. Astronaut 15. Fish Counter 16. US Stem Cell Researcher 17. Planetary Protection Officer (prevents microbes from travelling from Earth to the solar system) 18. Fusion Researcher
I have a M.Sc. I'm under 30, with no family yet. I see lots of my elders, with ~4-5 years more post-grad education and subsequent lab experience than me, making THE SAME $$ THAT I DO. Now, while this isn't a problem for ME, it's really bad for them. Post-doc'ing has devolved from a training ground for future tenure-track academics to being slave labor with a possible carrot dangled years in your future. There is less tenure-track hiring these days due to budgetary constraints, and a glut of existing faculty who are not very close to retirement. so the odds of any one of these hardworking, bitter and impoverished post-docs "finishing their training" are pretty small. But in the meantime, hey, there's lots of work to be done, for somebody else's research program, for a tech's salary (but not a tech's 9-5 hours: most post-docs keep grad student hours and are around much more than 40 h/week!). So what if your spouse has to work in another city doing THEIR post-doc, so what if you can't afford a car? Boy, that Ph.D. sure paid off!
Freedom: "I won't!"
What about the dude who smells people's armpits to test deodorant? I know it's overdone, but it's surely not overrated...
Need I say more?
I had a friend who worked at Plimoth Plantation in the animal husbandry program. He was actually an actor, and had played Governor Bradford for quite awhile, but was bored with it, and wanted to try something different.
So his first day in the new job comes and goes, and I call him to see how it went.
"Not so good", he says.
Why not? I ask.
"I had to draw the bull today" he tells me with loathing. Draw the bull? WTF? What's so bad about that? And what does art have to do with animal husbandry/
Not "draw" he tells me.... Draw the bull... you know...
There's a moral somewhere to that story, something about choosing between Governor and stroking off a large animal, but I'm not quite seeing it.
Maybe Gray Davis can enlighten me.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
Isn't it cute that Barney the purple dinosaur doubles as "psychological torture" and mimes as "inspires hatred"? It's just so, counter-counter-culture.
But what the hell is depicted in the "physical torture" icon?
And does anyone know if there's a drug with the nickname "William"? The article's author would probably like to know.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
Every hamster has his day!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
5. iMac mouse designer
One of the more serious issues about prison rape is the racial component. Prison gangs are almost entirely racial--usually Black or Hispanic. They do not protect their own from each other a great deal, but they do protect fellow gang members from outsiders. This leaves the White and Asian jail populations who tend to be less likely to form gangs at the highest risk of being targeted for rape.
It is very hard to find any serious discussion of this side of the problem--not to mention any discussion of the problem at all. Jared Taylor is one of the few writers courageous enough to detail the racial side to prison rape: http://www.amren.com/hardtime.htm
I would rather pick a writer more mainstream than Jared Taylor to quote on this issue. Taylor is an advocate of a white ethnic consciousness to be modeled after the ethnic consciousnesses of other minorities. He feels that this is an important counterbalance to maintain equal rights in our democratic political system. That makes Jared Taylor a racist in a lot of people's books. On the other hand, he is the only writer I know of who writes about this sort of thing, so I think it is important to at least give him a chance to say his peace. And, distressingly to me, his proposal of racial separation at prisons is probably a good idea. Prisoners are not, and will never beb tolerant members of our society. Even if we can eliminate racism from our communities, we will never be able to do so from our prisons. And the prison environment is certainly not the kind to foster increased understanding of other races. As a protective matter for all prisoners, Taylor may be right.
When I was in high school I worked in the Clorox R&D center in Pleasanton, CA. Clorox makes (among other things) bleach, Hidden Valley Ranch (hint: it doesn't start out white) and Fresh Step kitty litter.
I was in AP Chemistry at the time, and I had a friend whose mother worked at Clorox. I volunteered to work there as part of a work study program for credit.
Of course, the only way to test and improve kitty litter is to test it with actual kitty byproducts. Both solid and liquid. I can fondly remember the days of placing stir bars in liters of cat urine to mix them up, then pipette-ing samples to coat the litter.
And, of course, there was only one way to test its effectiveness--lean in and take a hearty whiff. Yes, of kitty poo, as well. The labs' job was to come up with combinations of surfactactants and clays that would, ideally, eliminate the smell altogether, or at least replace it with a pleasant smell. We even had "a professional nose" who would come in and sniff the samples, assigning each sample with descriptions like "kiwi" or "slight fruity scent".
To be quite honest, however, it was pretty fascinating. Not smelling cat feces, of course. But when you think about it, it's one of the few products that must satisfy the sensitivities of two species, including the sense of smell, as well as the cat's sense of touch. It must absorb odor as well as liquid; clump, and surround the kitty waste; and not disintegrate into too mush dust. Oh, and it also has to be biodegradable.
I was sold.
I signed up for a (paid) internship during the summer and made big money. And I always washed my hands before dinner.
In Soviet Russia, cosmonauts dreamed about becoming Slashdotters!
Not that GNAA crapflood shit.
Bravo, my friend, maybe you will start the comeback of old-school trolls.
PETA---People for the Eating of Tasty Animals...Right?
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I dont' know, about four hours ago we had a Proff that was telling us about her research into some random gene (nhlh2 or something) and how the Grads got to watch the resulatant mice Knockout and Wild Type mice sit around and either have or not have sex for two hours.
On top of that they were genetically engineering the poor mice to have low energy levels and small genitals, forever making them the fat and unattractive ones (the mice).
A mate of mine was studying Agriculture Science at University, and for whatever reason they were involved in the collection of pig sperm. So here's my mate, on his haunches holding a container of sorts (I believe the animal is riding a man-made pig's rear), and just before the pig lets the cheese fly, a fellow student knocks the container to the ground. The pig lets rip with what he termed "a staggering amount of spunk" all over his face. My memory is hazy as to this guy's post-blow relationship with the fellow prankster.
It was definitely a "make you sick" job.
John
Not that he's all that bad or anything, I just don't know of any other Jobses in CS (so he would also win the "Best CS Jobs" award).
"As for the hours, yeah. Science is hard dude, what were you expecting? So I guess you need to ask yourself why you are interested?"
Well, personally, grad school taught me that working long hours is usually pointless (as the evening wears on you become less productive) and that to be honest, I'm not the sort of person who gets serious jollies from being in the lab. I can enjoy the work but only if it's balanced with time to socialize, rest and relax. Otherwise it becomes a grim grind, bitter and joyless. I've seen too many post-docs in the lab all weekend when they had a spouse and kids they should have been with.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I work in a diagnostics lab that deals with enteric parasites for one of its mainstay products. The in-house testing is done with fecal samples that are from known positive or negative individuals. The samples must be homogenized in a diluent before they are used with the kit. It is one person's unfortunate job to request, and process the samples into a 2 litre specimen master lot. It involves asking our in-house negative patient to crap in a collection container and bring it back to the lab, then taking said sample and placing it in a laboratory mixer (industrial blender) with the diluent, then filtering that mess into a 2L bottle. I'm just glad I work in the isolation lab, where I don't have to smell it.
"England's Student Magazine [Note: site is dead] has a article each week telling students about different jobs, so that readers can get an idea about what different jobs are like. The most recently has to be in the running for the Worst Job Ever award. [Article #213] Zoo worker Mohd. Binatang bin Goncang of Singagore certainly wins the "Worst Job in Singapore", for his job as a Zoo Sperm Bank worker. The Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS), which runs the Singapore Zoo, has set up a bank of sperm and animal tissue in order to help preserve endangered species. And someone has to collect the samples. Daily."
But thanks to the magic of the internet we have these reprints
One, Two
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
While your points are correct, I find that many (including myself) really enjoyed their postdoc experiences. It is alot like graduate school without the deadlines. It is up to you to succeed. There is no pressure, at least in my experience, generally my only drive to get up in the morning is imposed by me. BTW - I think it is clear that this was written by someone bitter about being a postdoc, because the other items on the list are (mostly) bogus.
-Sean
I'm glad someone brought up the crybabyish attitude that write-up displayed. Why is it so hard to understand that Bush only limited stem-cell research that the government funds? Private research institutes can research any new stem-cell line they want to. As long as they don't live off tax money, they are in no way restricted in the source of their research.
Stop whining, and find some rich Democrat who hates Bush, and ask for a grant. They should be more than happy to give their personal money, just to spite him. In fact it should be far easier to get private funding, as long as you ask the right people, like Barbara Streisand and Alec Baldwin. They ought to give you any money you ask for, since they hate Bush so much.
I'll get off my soapbox now. Thank you.
you mean I can get PAID for that?!!
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Jared Taylor is the worst type of racist.
He doesn't present extreme views like the Nazis. Just the "thoughtful" and "intellectual" separation of races, all for a good cause.
Slashdotters, don't buy into this, just look at Jared's articles at amren.com for more info on this joker. In no time you'll see what this intolerant bastard is all about.
Should we separate men and women because of sexual harassment at the office? Should we separate the young and elderly due to age discrimination?
Choice quote from Jared...
From http://www.commonsenseclub.com/jaredint.html. Don't take my word for it, check it out.
Jared may be writing about a serious topic, but that does not make him any less of the absolute loser that he is. Prison rape is a terrible, terrible crime that shouldn't happen to anyone other than bigots like Jared Taylor. They, on the other hand, should be passed around the cell block like a peace pipes.
That is all.
Expecially when you consider just how many experiments they have to run on us, those devious little rodents...
I'm currently in a genetics class at college and most of us in the class would have to agree that these are definitely not cute or fuzzy enough to garner any bleeding heart attention. After staring at these flies through microscopes for hours checking mutations, even my vegetarian friends were dumping them in the quik-kill with some certain gusto.
The persons who tested out preparation A, B, C, D, E, F and G
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gravity is a myth, earth sucks
Another important job listed in there that will eventually lead to savings of billions per annum is the metric system advocate. However, I do not consider that a science job, it is a political job to comply with international agreements. It may take another 100 years to convert the US, but it will happen and the savings will be huge.
My wife has had a somewhat poor job in science, too. She worked for her Ph.D. by killing rats (by injecting cold salt water to their hearts and chopping their heads off), and sliced their brains to 400 um slices, inserted some rather toxic neuromodulators and measured the responses of the brain slices for long hours. Once her Ph.D. was getting completed, his boss left the university to work in the medical industry, and the research unit was finished -- and she never got her degree, just spent several years killing rats in rather obnoxious way and working with poisoneous chemicals.
-- Imperial units must die --
5. Student who will be looking for a job in a couple of years
Back in the early days of the US space program, when rockets ran on Hydrazine, there was a poor fellow who's job was to go up to the rocket, stick his head in a vent port and sniff to see if any of this horribly Hyrdrazine was leaking. If not, the launch proceded. If it was leaking, he was _that_ close to dying.
But there's even worse: how would you like to be the poor sap who has to go pull the dead crew out of a malfuntioning nuclear reactor that has already exploded and thrown fatal amounts of radiation. Somebody's got to get the bodies out.
Oh yeah, sign me up.
That's got to be one of the most gruesome ways to die I've ever heard of... impaled to the ceiling by reactor control rods and irradiated. Hopefully he died quickly.
I knew someone who had to ice a rabbit every day with a steel bar. Couldn't use drugs because they interferred with the tissue tests. She had to whack it, then disect it, then perform 12 hours of tests. This was all in a dark room as well (light also interferred with the tests.)
A funny story from those days: We had her sac (a common term used in animal research, short for sacrifice) a rabbit for us to eat (I worked in a nearby lab and we had an extra one that we would have had to kill anyway.) A few years earlier, some people in a nearby lab had done the same thing. Only thing is, they use sodium pentabarbitol to kill the rabbit. They cooked it up in a nice stew and ate it at a table in their back yard. Not long after eating, everyone passed out. Apparently, the sodium pentabarb didn't break down during cooking as they assumed it would. Lessoned learned, we killed our rabbit without drugs.
...I nearly died laughing when I saw the icon next to job # 8. The juxtaposition of Barney with that job....well, check it out for yourself here.
We got to chatting about bad jobs at work a few years ago. There were some doozies (orderly at an asylum, cleaning out cement trucks), but the most memorable was beheading rats.
One of my coworkers, when he was in college, worker for a research project in the biology department (I believe that was the department). They were doing research on rats. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I seem to recall that it involved cutting part of some organ out, exposing them to potential carcinogens, waiting a while for the organ to regrow, then examining the organ for cancer.
The highlight was killing the rats for the final examination. Apparently there was a little rat guillotine. My coworkers said that the first few rats were easy, but after that the rats started smelling the blood and would panic.
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7-11 (new comp sci grad job)
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
i agree with you... that's why i got out and went to med school instead. now i earn almost as much as a plumber (per hour). Residency sucked big time though. i got paid less than minimum wage to get yelled at everyday.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Notice that it is only the male animals who receive the stimulation.
It's a sexist world out there.
Golly. Makes you wonder why there isn't a device that can make meat cold, so it lasts longer.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Friedrich Miescher, extracting DNA from pus-soaked surgical bandages in 1868.
Australian Researcher Barry Marshall, drinking Helicobacter Pylori infected gastric fluids from an ulcer patient to prove the hypothesis that said bacterium was the source of stomach ulcers instead of stress.
Those are two researchers that got famous for what they were doing, countless others remain unsung hereoes that have not made their way into the books of science history.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
I like the icons they made up for this story. Maybe Slashdot could use some of them with their permission? At least seven icons would qualify for any SCO-related story:
- "Inspires reflexive ridicule"
- "Psychological torture"
- "Risk of physical violence"
- "Futility"
- "Inspires hatred"
- "Political quagmire"
"Olfactory overload", "Involves digestive product" and "Zzzzzzzzzzzz" are also worthy of consideration in my opinion.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
A vet student friend of mine told me that at her university, some tasks are assigned by gender. The girls job is to maturbate the bulls. The guys get to castrate pigs. It's not without a sense of humor..
Alex
Heisenberg may have been here
Don't you think that has a certaing ring to it as a band name?
Anyway, we already have such a device. Here in Minnesota, it's called "outside". But our thermostat isn't very well regulated, and the regulator we do have is tied to a 24 hour cycle, causing the temperatures to swing wildly. Carcasses eventually spoil under these conditions.
There are no government-meat-locker-vans, standing by the woods just waiting to take away the freshly decapitated heads of deer. The DNR doesn't have walk-in freezers available to hold the thousands of heads they need to autopsy. And even if they thought about it in these times of budget crises, why would they? Onerous refrigeration requirements, outlandish electrical bills, all just to make my friend's job a little less disgusting?
John
I like the little icons that they use to categorize the jobs in the story. I think that we should adopt a standard of using those icons on our resume job listings. Then the interviewer can see at a glance that your last job involved futility and psychological torture.
As for an actual (albeit non-science) job, I had a friend that worked for a legal firm specializing in class action cases. He was their mailroom/photocopy clerk, and had to make admissable copies of all the evidence used for a court case. One case involved a sanitary napkin manufacturer, and his job involved making photocopies of used maxi-pads (sealed in plastic bags, but still gross) to be submitted as court evidence.
I'm going AC on this one ;)
I used to work in the MIS department of London International Group (now Seaton Scholl) who make all sorts of rubber products, including Durex condoms.
It was one MAN's job to taste the flavoured condoms from the production lines every 30 minutes.
He seemed a bit worried that a 2:1 from Cambridge in Biology only got him this far. Still, you have to laugh.
>They're grown by the thousands just for the purpose of dying in nasty ways.
In a superhero universe, a fraction of those fruit flies would spontaneously manifest super powers and escape!
"Escape, Flame-Fly, go! And someday be strong enough to rescue my 45th generation!"
(ref: "Elementals", "Planetary", and "DC Invasion" all used this gimmick to make new supes)
A.
6. Slashdot Meta-Moderator
[ridicule icon] [futility icon]
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Yeah, but anybody answering phones at Verisign is already used to being called a cow-felching pig masturbator for eight hours a day.
Dammit, we made the list!
IUTBAFR (I Used to be a Fusion Researcher), and frankly, I never felt it was even close to the worst job in science. But I always worried about becoming a Richard Post. You see, fusion research is full of old-timers who've been working on it since Project Sherwood days, who have always been thinking "just a few more years and we'll have it". I suppose it's kind of like being a Red Sox fan. When they started work on Fusion for Peace in the 50's, it was 20-30 years away. When I started working on fusion in 1995 it was 20-30 years away. Now its 2003 and it's 20-30 years away...
A little bit of info about Richard Post. He was the primary proponent of "open" systems, basically magnetic cylinders which were either very long, had magnetic "mirrors" or had some sort of electromagnetic "endcap". It was a rival to the Tokamak method of plasma containment. A few were built, but the vast majority of the magnetic confinement money and attention went to Tokamaks. Whether it should have is a matter of debate. Basically, Richard Post spent much of his career trying to get research funds for a design which was not the favorite. There was still enough money for a decent research program, and the research basically showed that the mirrors (which were easy to do) caused too many problems (hence the term "mirror instability"), and nobody ever came up with a good enough endcap. Last I heard, Post was doing some work on flywheel technology.
I put in my tour of duty. Maybe sometime I will go back to working on fusion, but I'd like to get ~something~ done before then. I fear not accomplishing anything with my life.
FYI, my personal opinion (warning: rant) is that the primary reason fusion is such a slow business is that it takes years to simulate a design, raise money for it, build it, then test it and see how it performs. Imagine how long it would have taken to create the airplane if you had to spend 20 years every time you went back to the drawing board. I feel that as long as bigger = better in fusion, sustainable fusion will never happen. If you have to build it that big to make it work, the design is wrong.
One in ten inmates in the survey had been the victim of a sexual assault, many repeatedly.
Yeah, those pot pushers and tax evaders had it coming. Give'em what they deserve. </sarcasm>
BTW, someone recently had an "insightful" comment about the eye-for-an-eye reasonable punishment as described in the bible. Doesn't the prison system violate this idea of proportionality?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Hours on end of executing mice.
At least that's easier than having to figure out how to jerk off the mice!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
You now have not only a semen sample, you've got the happiest male mouse in the lab and, if you're sick enough, the grossest palm-sized squirt gun in history.
You're welcome.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***