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Worst Jobs in Science: Year Three
mmoyer writes "Popular Science just published their annual rankings of the worst jobs in science. Highlights of this year's list include a human lab rat, orangutan pee collector, and, surprisingly, a NASA ballerina. Think your science job belongs on the list? You can nominate your job as well. Slashdot also covered the worst jobs in science in 2004 and in 2003."
Ha! Great story.
A few years back, I knew a fellow (he had the unfortunate name of Willie Williams) who'd been involved in the re-introduction of pergrine falcons to the canyon lands of south texas. The problem was that the birds wouldn't breed in captivity. The answer: artificial insemination.
This dude's job was to collect the sperm from the male falcons. He'd go in to their enclosures wearing a special hat with a very-anatomically-correct model of a female falcon on it.
Additionally, if you don't have the say to fail a release that has critical and known errors, it is time to find a job with a company that actually knows what they are doing.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
don't forget to bring up..
:)
the appendix, no known use
wisdom teeth (evolution in progress, the number of teeth people have is slowly declining as the jaw gets shorter and we also eat more processed (cooked) food).
While on teeth: vestigial canines. No real use in humans also in decline.
While on the topic of vestigial: male nipples. No known use.
If you look around you will find a host of things that also fit the bill for coming back at ID loonies. Evidence for what I like to call, 'Doofus Design'. Sure there is 'designer', but that designer is a real doofus
every time they run this thing, it takes me back to this crap job I had years ago entering data from documentation in huge class action court cases into searchable databases for teams of attorneys. Lab results from animal fertility experiments crossed my desk and I must have looked at the phrase a dozen times before it occured to me what it meant to extract semen from dogs via "digital manipulation."
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Radiocarbon dating and fossils, I suppose they thought it contradicted the bible. Continental Drift? Who would dispute that?
Being as most creatures don't come with light-emitting organs as standard equipment, this speculation falls short of an explanation.
Ah, so being able to see the shadow of a predator wouldn't be advantageous? Or, inversely, the shadow of prey?
Although, frankly, the more likely explanation is that the organism wasn't trying to avoid a predator, it was trying to increase its energy intake by moving toward the light (or, in the case of a predator, move to an area that's more likely to have prey because of the light). We know cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years and they can do this.
No, just narrower. A disadvantage, like tunnel vision.
Um, no. Being able to refine your visual capabilities is generally an advantage. The previous mutation just said "light/dark". Now you can say "light/dark in THAT direction". You don't think that's an advantage?
Oh, and tunnel vision isn't necessarily a disadvantage. In humans it literally focuses your vision on the threat at hand (and yes, I've had it before). In other animals, such as birds of prey, it's an evolutionary advantage that allows them to concentrate on finding and killing prey.
Surely you must be trolling....
Only if the predator has a FRICKIN LASER BEAM on its head! Being as most creatures don't come with light-emitting organs as standard equipment, this speculation falls short of an explanation. Maybe there were large populations of electroluminescent bacteria a hojillion years ago.
Iguanas have a rudimentery third eye on the top of their head. It can sense changes to light and not much else. It's also known as parietal eye. This is pretty basic stuff. Didn't you pay attention in biology/anatomy. I guess not since you believe in ID and creationism.
One of my friends does this job with cows. She once shared with me the story of the time she got back from lunch and was shoulder-deep before she realized she'd forgotten to put back on her glove. That was one shirt she never wore again...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
If so, I'd like an example-- because I've never heard of a creature with a deep, light-sensitive pit in its body.
Don't know about light sensisive, but pit vipers have heat sensitive pits. (Heat being another form of electromagnetic energy...) These pits tell the snake about direction and intensity of a heat source.
This guy agrees, claiming that the light-sensitive patch genes are pretty conserved.
However, this crowd seems to think that although opsins are remarkably well-conserved across different phyla, the controlling genes that the abovementioned people were obsessed by control many other gene families, besides eye development, so it's still possible that there are different complete eye evolution families.
They talk a bit about fish and squid eyes: I didn't know that squids and octopi have inverted (compared to mammals) retinal structures. They must be *very* good at low-light conditions.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Informative?! WTF!
Well, gravity probably isn't a myth but is what we think that causes gravity a myth?