Of course, this is all from my personal experience. There are some more lax army positions that the one I had and I'm sure that there are some hard-core Air Force jobs, but on average, the Air Force people had it so much better than we did.
Having served in both the Army as an infantryman and the Air Force as a medic, I'll address some of these points.
We in the Army had Billets (dorm like rooms). Air Force personnel had what looked like apartments.
Maybe things have changed since I got out of the AF -- it's been over a decade -- but at that time, single enlisted personnel all lived in dorm-style barracks. A little bigger and nicer than the Army ones, true.
Our Billets were subject to inspection at any time, 24/7. Air Force living quarters were more of less off limits to their NCO's and officers.
Again, maybe things have changed, but when I was in, any NCO or officer in your chain of command could walk into your room at any time. They usually didn't, or at least a lot less often than they did in the Army, but they certainly could.
We worked from 7:00am to whenever we were done, weekends were worked about 50% of the time. Air Force personnel worked from 9:00 to 5:00, with weekends off.
It depends on the type of job, and obviously the Army has a lot more field jobs than the AF does. But I don't think I ever worked a 9:00-5:00, M-F week in my entire AF career. 12-hour ER night shifts, night after night, were more the norm... and I can tell you, they wore me down just as much as being downrange in the Army ever did.
When we went to the field, we slept on our tanks.
Hey, at least you had something to sleep on besides the ground.;) The way you view the AF is pretty much the same way as an 11B views the rest of the Army.
Air Forcer personnel stayed in air conditioned tents or hotels(!!!).
True enough. Again, it depends on the demands of the job, but the AF does try to provide its people with better living conditions than the Army overall. I don't see a problem with it. When I was in Desert Storm, those of us at the ATH (Air Transportable Hospital, basically the AF equivalent of a MASH) were cleaner, better-fed, and better-rested by far than the MASH troops down the road -- and personally, I think it equipped us to better take care of our patients. The Army does a lot of miserable-for-the-sake-of-it that IMNSGDHO doesn't really contribute to the mission.
It seemed to me that those in the Chair Force had jobs. We were in the military.
Okay, here's the crux of it. Yes, living and working conditions in the AF are generally easier than in any of the other services. But you never forget (not if you're smart, you don't) that while you're in the AF, you are very much under orders. They tell you to do something, you do it. They tell you not to do something, you don't do it. And if you don't do something you should, or do something you shouldn't, they will by God make you pay. The power that can be brought to bear on the individual airman is just as terrifying (and is, in fact, exactly the same; it's the UCMJ for a reason) as that which can be brought to bear on the individual soldier.
Then there's always the hilarity that would ensue from an Anglo South African immigrant. Nothing like a white, British-accented person checking off the box "African-American" under race.
That's exactly my father's situation -- he's a white immigrant from South Africa and takes glee in calling himself African-American whenever that nomenclature comes up. Now, he's culturally very English (as opposed to Boer) so he's usually too quiet and polite to bring it up, but he's got some great stories from corporate "sensitivity training" classes and the like.
Think it through. First of all, when the satellite blows up in near-vacuum, most of the hydrazine will never get a chance to diffuse into the atmosphere at all; it will boil off into space. Next, as the fragments of satellite come down, they'll burn up themselves, so any hydrazine they're carrying with them will be exposed to just as much heat as it would if the satellite re-entered intact. (More, quite possibly, since there will be a higher ratio of surface area to volume.) Finally, hydrazine is such viciously reactive stuff that any quantities that survive the explosion and re-entry will happily combine with whatever is in the immediate environment -- the by-products may be toxic, I don't really know, but in any case the pollution will be much less severe than if the satellite came down in one piece.
There is a difference here though. The swiss have always been europeans, the Mexicans have never been americans. Before anyone declared independence in america, the europeans over there were called spaniards, brits, french, etc.
Except that "European" in that sense hasn't been around forever, either. From the fall of Rome all the way up to the 18th century, people in France, Spain, Switzerland, etc. were far more likely to think of themselves in terms of their country (or their ethnic group) than in terms of the continent as a whole. The modern concept of a European identity is a product of the Napoleonic era.
Re:"The Republican War on Science"?
on
Science Debate 2008
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When a political party takes consistently anti-science attitudes, there is no lack of objectivity in pointing that out.
it is of course evil for governments to oppress people just for speaking their minds
luckily for you, unless you are in iran or china, no one is going to do that
Right, because oppression is a magically constrained force that stops at national boundaries. It flies around the world looking for countries to land on, and says to itself, "Iran, China, those look like good places to settle... but not the USA, oh no! That's the Land Of The Free(tm)! I couldn't possibly establish myself there!"
Percentage point has actual meaning. In fact, the media is quite good in getting it wrong, i. e.: "Today the FED raised interest rates by 0.25 percent".
Except that raising and lowering interest rates in 0.25-percent increments is exactly what the Fed does. I.e., reporting it that way is not, in fact, wrong.
Oh, and "Fed" is an abbreviation, not an acronym, so "FED" is wrong.
Who cares what someone who packs his computer with toiletries thinks?
An awful lot of people make frequent overnight or two-day business trips, for which packing one carry-on bag, including both computer and toiletries, makes the most sense. Of course you don't pack them in the same compartment, but a good multi-compartment laptop case designed for the frequent flier will allow you safely pack everything. And yes, in that case the thickness of the laptop is the limiting factor for how much other stuff you can take.
Face it, when you have known criminals getting out on a technicality, it's not about justice or preventing further crime, it's about word games with the legal code.
"Out on a technicality," that cliche beloved of bad cop-show writers, in real life usually means that the cops or the DA committed a seriou violation of the Constitional rights of the accused. Yes, sometimes it means that a bad guy who everyone "knows" is guilty gets away with it. That's still better than the alternative, which is arbitrary "justice" in which innocent people can be thrown in prison -- or executed! -- on a whim. (And yes, that happens too, but it happens a lot less in countries like the US whose legal systems have lots of "technicalities" than it does in countries which don't... like, say, Iran, where "justice" tends to be swift, sure, and utterly capricious.) The reason is simple: government can be the worst criminal at all, far worse than any street thug or Mafioso. The people who set up our highly technical legal system knew this well, in many cases from personal experience.
They're all dumbed-down versions of the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, actually. It's a great read. Give it a shot, and don't be prejudiced by the various movie versions.
The fact that violence is sometimes necessary does not mean that it is always, or even usually, a useful solution. Little kids run around hitting people they don't like. Adults understand that violence is a last resort.
Jesus Christ, you don't get it, do you? IBM broke the law by wrongfully classifying these employees as exempt. They sued to force IBM to comply with the law. And now they're being punished for it. Tell me, when a cop arrests a criminal, should we throw the cop in jail?
I've heard of Open Access, but it hasn't exactly taken off yet. I look for papers on Pubmed quite often and almost every serious paper is in a pay-to-access journal.
This is simply not true. Really. The PLoS and BMC journals, in particular, are publishing just as much important research -- and, equally importantly, getting their articles cited just as much -- as traditional journals are. Nature and Science still tower over everybody else, of course, but below that level, open access publication is every bit as "serious" as traditional journal publication.
This varies by field, of course, and it may well be that no open access journals have made the "short list" in proteomics yet. In genomics, though, which is the subject of the story, I can guarantee you that many open access journals are quite prestigious.
PLoS ONE is indeed a peer-reviewed journal, and although it's not in the same tier as Nature, it's certainly a respectable publication. Not all major research is published in the Big Two, Nature and Science, you know; there simply isn't room.
The BoingBoing writeup is so irritatingly fragmentary it's hard to tell what it's even saying. Which is a good description of BoingBoing in general, actually.
Oh, backboard + collar is absolutely the preference. But I've had to, e.g., extract patients from vehicles with nothing but a c-collar on, because we just couldn't get a backboard in there. I'm guessing that's not a situation that occurs very often on the ski slopes.;)
Yes, the EPA is part of the executive branch. You didn't think they were legislative or judicial, did you?
The problem is not with whether or not the EPA has the right to use the executive branch's power of executive privilege; the problem is whether or not anyone, up to and including the President, has the right to claim "executive privilege" to avoid compliance with the law. The answer is, of course, that they don't. There's no such thing as "executive privilege" in the Constitution. It's completely made up. Unfortunately, the courts have been accepting that such a thing exists for decades, so now the precedent for this made-up power is set in stone.
It depends on the situation. If your manual doesn't explain that, then the organizations that wrote the manual need to write a better manual. (No disrespect to the groups you named, whose training has undeniably saved a lot of lives over the years.)
A person who is unconscious due to drowning, poisoning (including alcohol overdose), or unknown reasons that do not obviously result from trauma (probably some internal medical condition, cardiovascular or neurological) certainly should be should be placed in the recovery position. But a person who is unconscious due to trauma, such as a motor vehicle accident or a fall or a blow to the head, emphatically should not be moved without proper equipment -- at least a cervical collar, preferably c-collar and backboard -- used by trained medical personnel. It takes a fair amount of trauma to the brain to cause unconsciousness in an otherwise healthy person, and the chance that the trauma involved also caused some spinal injury is very, very high.
I'm speaking here as a former USAF medic and civilian EMT with ten years' experience in emergency response. If you don't believe me, ask any ER/Casualty doctor or nurse -- I guarantee you'll get the same answer.
Sounds like what they're talking about here is a gas giant formed by the collision of two smaller gas giants, so it wouldn't shed much light on the history of Earth and the Moon directly.
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Of course, this is all from my personal experience. There are some more lax army positions that the one I had and I'm sure that there are some hard-core Air Force jobs, but on average, the Air Force people had it so much better than we did.
... and I can tell you, they wore me down just as much as being downrange in the Army ever did.
;) The way you view the AF is pretty much the same way as an 11B views the rest of the Army.
Having served in both the Army as an infantryman and the Air Force as a medic, I'll address some of these points.
We in the Army had Billets (dorm like rooms). Air Force personnel had what looked like apartments.
Maybe things have changed since I got out of the AF -- it's been over a decade -- but at that time, single enlisted personnel all lived in dorm-style barracks. A little bigger and nicer than the Army ones, true.
Our Billets were subject to inspection at any time, 24/7. Air Force living quarters were more of less off limits to their NCO's and officers.
Again, maybe things have changed, but when I was in, any NCO or officer in your chain of command could walk into your room at any time. They usually didn't, or at least a lot less often than they did in the Army, but they certainly could.
We worked from 7:00am to whenever we were done, weekends were worked about 50% of the time. Air Force personnel worked from 9:00 to 5:00, with weekends off.
It depends on the type of job, and obviously the Army has a lot more field jobs than the AF does. But I don't think I ever worked a 9:00-5:00, M-F week in my entire AF career. 12-hour ER night shifts, night after night, were more the norm
When we went to the field, we slept on our tanks.
Hey, at least you had something to sleep on besides the ground.
Air Forcer personnel stayed in air conditioned tents or hotels(!!!).
True enough. Again, it depends on the demands of the job, but the AF does try to provide its people with better living conditions than the Army overall. I don't see a problem with it. When I was in Desert Storm, those of us at the ATH (Air Transportable Hospital, basically the AF equivalent of a MASH) were cleaner, better-fed, and better-rested by far than the MASH troops down the road -- and personally, I think it equipped us to better take care of our patients. The Army does a lot of miserable-for-the-sake-of-it that IMNSGDHO doesn't really contribute to the mission.
It seemed to me that those in the Chair Force had jobs. We were in the military.
Okay, here's the crux of it. Yes, living and working conditions in the AF are generally easier than in any of the other services. But you never forget (not if you're smart, you don't) that while you're in the AF, you are very much under orders. They tell you to do something, you do it. They tell you not to do something, you don't do it. And if you don't do something you should, or do something you shouldn't, they will by God make you pay. The power that can be brought to bear on the individual airman is just as terrifying (and is, in fact, exactly the same; it's the UCMJ for a reason) as that which can be brought to bear on the individual soldier.
Doubts get you killed.
If that were true, then every single soldier would have died in every single war, ever.
Then there's always the hilarity that would ensue from an Anglo South African immigrant. Nothing like a white, British-accented person checking off the box "African-American" under race.
That's exactly my father's situation -- he's a white immigrant from South Africa and takes glee in calling himself African-American whenever that nomenclature comes up. Now, he's culturally very English (as opposed to Boer) so he's usually too quiet and polite to bring it up, but he's got some great stories from corporate "sensitivity training" classes and the like.
Think it through. First of all, when the satellite blows up in near-vacuum, most of the hydrazine will never get a chance to diffuse into the atmosphere at all; it will boil off into space. Next, as the fragments of satellite come down, they'll burn up themselves, so any hydrazine they're carrying with them will be exposed to just as much heat as it would if the satellite re-entered intact. (More, quite possibly, since there will be a higher ratio of surface area to volume.) Finally, hydrazine is such viciously reactive stuff that any quantities that survive the explosion and re-entry will happily combine with whatever is in the immediate environment -- the by-products may be toxic, I don't really know, but in any case the pollution will be much less severe than if the satellite came down in one piece.
There is a difference here though. The swiss have always been europeans, the Mexicans have never been americans. Before anyone declared independence in america, the europeans over there were called spaniards, brits, french, etc.
Except that "European" in that sense hasn't been around forever, either. From the fall of Rome all the way up to the 18th century, people in France, Spain, Switzerland, etc. were far more likely to think of themselves in terms of their country (or their ethnic group) than in terms of the continent as a whole. The modern concept of a European identity is a product of the Napoleonic era.
When a political party takes consistently anti-science attitudes, there is no lack of objectivity in pointing that out.
And Vint Cerf agrees with him.
Can you point out a case where government was more efficient and accountable than a private entity?
GPP's example of Blackwater vs. the US military provides exactly that.
Thanks for that very informative essay.
it is of course evil for governments to oppress people just for speaking their minds
... but not the USA, oh no! That's the Land Of The Free(tm)! I couldn't possibly establish myself there!"
luckily for you, unless you are in iran or china, no one is going to do that
Right, because oppression is a magically constrained force that stops at national boundaries. It flies around the world looking for countries to land on, and says to itself, "Iran, China, those look like good places to settle
Percentage point has actual meaning. In fact, the media is quite good in getting it wrong, i. e.: "Today the FED raised interest rates by 0.25 percent".
Except that raising and lowering interest rates in 0.25-percent increments is exactly what the Fed does. I.e., reporting it that way is not, in fact, wrong.
Oh, and "Fed" is an abbreviation, not an acronym, so "FED" is wrong.
Who cares what someone who packs his computer with toiletries thinks?
An awful lot of people make frequent overnight or two-day business trips, for which packing one carry-on bag, including both computer and toiletries, makes the most sense. Of course you don't pack them in the same compartment, but a good multi-compartment laptop case designed for the frequent flier will allow you safely pack everything. And yes, in that case the thickness of the laptop is the limiting factor for how much other stuff you can take.
Face it, when you have known criminals getting out on a technicality, it's not about justice or preventing further crime, it's about word games with the legal code.
... like, say, Iran, where "justice" tends to be swift, sure, and utterly capricious.) The reason is simple: government can be the worst criminal at all, far worse than any street thug or Mafioso. The people who set up our highly technical legal system knew this well, in many cases from personal experience.
"Out on a technicality," that cliche beloved of bad cop-show writers, in real life usually means that the cops or the DA committed a seriou violation of the Constitional rights of the accused. Yes, sometimes it means that a bad guy who everyone "knows" is guilty gets away with it. That's still better than the alternative, which is arbitrary "justice" in which innocent people can be thrown in prison -- or executed! -- on a whim. (And yes, that happens too, but it happens a lot less in countries like the US whose legal systems have lots of "technicalities" than it does in countries which don't
They're all dumbed-down versions of the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, actually. It's a great read. Give it a shot, and don't be prejudiced by the various movie versions.
The fact that violence is sometimes necessary does not mean that it is always, or even usually, a useful solution. Little kids run around hitting people they don't like. Adults understand that violence is a last resort.
Jesus Christ, you don't get it, do you? IBM broke the law by wrongfully classifying these employees as exempt. They sued to force IBM to comply with the law. And now they're being punished for it. Tell me, when a cop arrests a criminal, should we throw the cop in jail?
I've heard of Open Access, but it hasn't exactly taken off yet. I look for papers on Pubmed quite often and almost every serious paper is in a pay-to-access journal.
This is simply not true. Really. The PLoS and BMC journals, in particular, are publishing just as much important research -- and, equally importantly, getting their articles cited just as much -- as traditional journals are. Nature and Science still tower over everybody else, of course, but below that level, open access publication is every bit as "serious" as traditional journal publication.
This varies by field, of course, and it may well be that no open access journals have made the "short list" in proteomics yet. In genomics, though, which is the subject of the story, I can guarantee you that many open access journals are quite prestigious.
PLoS ONE is indeed a peer-reviewed journal, and although it's not in the same tier as Nature, it's certainly a respectable publication. Not all major research is published in the Big Two, Nature and Science, you know; there simply isn't room.
... try the original Times article..
The BoingBoing writeup is so irritatingly fragmentary it's hard to tell what it's even saying. Which is a good description of BoingBoing in general, actually.
Oh, backboard + collar is absolutely the preference. But I've had to, e.g., extract patients from vehicles with nothing but a c-collar on, because we just couldn't get a backboard in there. I'm guessing that's not a situation that occurs very often on the ski slopes. ;)
Yes, the EPA is part of the executive branch. You didn't think they were legislative or judicial, did you?
The problem is not with whether or not the EPA has the right to use the executive branch's power of executive privilege; the problem is whether or not anyone, up to and including the President, has the right to claim "executive privilege" to avoid compliance with the law. The answer is, of course, that they don't. There's no such thing as "executive privilege" in the Constitution. It's completely made up. Unfortunately, the courts have been accepting that such a thing exists for decades, so now the precedent for this made-up power is set in stone.
"Medic" is a word with several different definitions. Under some definitions, he certainly is one. Three that I can think of off the top of my head:
1. Any person trained to render emergency medical care, such as an EMT or paramedic. (Chiefly American.) Probably derives from #2.
2. A soldier trained to render emergency medical care under combat conditions. (Chiefly American.)
3. A physician. (Chiefly British.)
Ah, language!
It depends on the situation. If your manual doesn't explain that, then the organizations that wrote the manual need to write a better manual. (No disrespect to the groups you named, whose training has undeniably saved a lot of lives over the years.)
A person who is unconscious due to drowning, poisoning (including alcohol overdose), or unknown reasons that do not obviously result from trauma (probably some internal medical condition, cardiovascular or neurological) certainly should be should be placed in the recovery position. But a person who is unconscious due to trauma, such as a motor vehicle accident or a fall or a blow to the head, emphatically should not be moved without proper equipment -- at least a cervical collar, preferably c-collar and backboard -- used by trained medical personnel. It takes a fair amount of trauma to the brain to cause unconsciousness in an otherwise healthy person, and the chance that the trauma involved also caused some spinal injury is very, very high.
I'm speaking here as a former USAF medic and civilian EMT with ten years' experience in emergency response. If you don't believe me, ask any ER/Casualty doctor or nurse -- I guarantee you'll get the same answer.
Sounds like what they're talking about here is a gas giant formed by the collision of two smaller gas giants, so it wouldn't shed much light on the history of Earth and the Moon directly.