The Worst Jobs in Science: The Sequel

flyingtoaster writes "For the second year in a row, Popular Science published their annual countdown of the worst jobs in science. This year's list includes Anal-Wart Researcher, Iraqi Archaeologist and Landfill Monitor. And you think your job's bad?" We also linked to last year's list.

Comments

Last year's list

[quizwedge]

The link mentioned in the previous slashdot article no longer works. Compliments of the WayBackMachine

Re:Consequences of Bush's Iraq War

[cold fjord]

Things are a litte more complex than that little blurb in the article suggests. Saddam's interest in archaeology tended to be self-serving, such has when Saddam rebuilt Babylon:

In 1982, Saddam's workers began reconstructing Babylon's most imposing building, the 600-room palace of King Nebuchadnezzar II. Archaeologists were horrified. Many said that to rebuild on top of ancient artifacts does not preserve history, but disfigures it. The original bricks, which rise two or three feet from the ground, bear ancient inscriptions praising Nebuchadnezzar. Above these, Saddam Hussein's workers laid more than 60-million sand-colored bricks inscribed with the words, "In the era of Saddam Hussein, protector of Iraq, who rebuilt civilization and rebuilt Babylon." The new bricks began to crack after only ten years.

The problems in Iraq aren't new. Many of the problems in Iraq date back to at least Saddams invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War.

Prior to the Persian Gulf War, archaeologists working in Iraq were forced to close down excavations when Iraq's August invasion of Kuwait made the situation to dangerous to continue....

And following the war, looting of archaeological sites increased dramatically as Iraq's impoverished citizens used sometimes desperate means to make money in light of the economic sanctions placed on Iraq by the western world.

Saddam's military made a practice of stationing military units by antiquities to protect them from attack. There are many recorded instances, including these gems:

...In early February 1991, for example, Saddam parked MiG fighter jets at a Babylonian ziggurat at Ur to deter coalition forces from disabling them during the Gulf War. By Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire, he built air bases and weapons factories. According to archaeological scholars from the University of Chicago, an 80-foot mound containing many ruins of ancient Nineveh also housed an oil storage tank. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used the site for anti-aircraft batteries because it was the most elevated spot in the area....

In contrast, at the height of the bombing campaign the Pentagon produced aerial photographs of the Al-Basrah mosque. They showed clearly that the Iraqis had destroyed the mosque for propaganda purposes. While coalition forces had bombed a target some 100 yards away, leaving the mosque unscathed, Iraqi engineers sliced off the dome in the hope of duping journalists that the U.S. had been responsible for the destruction.

The desecrations of burial grounds in Iraq aren't anything new. They happened to burial groundsafter the first Gulf War too.

The looting of the museums was also overstated as well.

FWIW: In Afghanistan, the Taliban was destroying priceless cultural artifiacts as being anti-Islamic. The US intervention in Afghanistan stopped that, and the new government is committed to preserving such artifacts.