Jobs which slow the economy by discouraging pleasure travel (and all of the nice tourist spending) and business travel (and the kinds of business deals and chance new acqaintances you only get in person). Travel is incredibly important to our economy, it is part of what makes a large country so strong. When people opt out of it, the ripple effects are amazing.
Exasperated is irritated. Exacerbated is made worse.
"The usual peevishness of the Grammar Nazi was exacerbated by viewing the internet, resulting in exasperation."
Sorry. I've been seeing this one on the rise lately from otherwise smart people, so I've started pointing it out. I don't pay attention to media, is there some show or public figure that is providing an incorrect example?
If you are running the dryer on natural gas, you need to think carefully about carbon monoxide before venting it indoors. Or set up a complicated heat exchange system.
The increased metabolic rate you speak does exist by the way, just not for the rest of the day, maximum for a half an hour or until you eat something. As long as you breathe heavily after a workout or feel your heart beating faster than usual, that's exactly that increased metabolic rate.
And in fact it goes further than that: the more you exercise & the more weight you lose, the more efficient your body becomes at doing maintenance tasks, and the less it burns during the rest of the day (the heart beats slower, your muscles are hauling less around when you walk, etc.). The math still works out in your favor if you exercise, especially since you'll eventually hit a tipping point where energy expenditure is more pleasant.
In some states, it doesn't matter much what the residents of a given school district are willing to pay. It all gets funneled into the state coffers, and distributed evenly amongst all districts. So the quality of local schools has little to do with how much the local taxpayers care about the schools.
I've worked and chatted extensively with a couple of female Chinese programmers, so this is at least an anecdote, not just stereotyping.
1. Aptitude does not play much of a role in career selection. The concept of figuring out what you're naturally good at (and then doing _that_ all day) was a revelation to my Chinese gal-pals. So there are probably lots of Asian women who are capable of programming, and better at something else, but go with the programming, while American women decide more often to pursue the thing they are best at.
2. They teach math better in Asia. They just do. The gap is getting worse -- if you would like to get hopping mad at school teachers, just look up "discovery math". So in Asia, fewer people of both genders are math-phobic, and more people of both genders are eligible to work in engineering-type careers. And a combination of this point and (1) gets you lots of programmers of both genders.
3. Immigration selection bias. So if you decide you want to leave China and move to a more democratic country, what's your ticket out? Engineering of some sort, because those companies will sponsor you.
There are crude, obnoxious shops in every industry. From what I've heard, telecom is much worse than programming in this respect. I am a female programmer, and my workplace has a reasonable mix of people (yes, it's slanted toward male and young -- but that is the biology that's best at visual thinking, working too many hours, and dealing with silly deadlines). If you make sure there are policies that reduce the on-call load and overall unpredictability of work hours, you'll get women and married guys. So you have code reviews; have a real process for moving code out the door; have a process for discovering process failures and fixing them; try to split work into chunks that aren't two full-time jobs per person, etc. And look at that! You've reduced your turnover (even in the young guys), reduced software failures, and increased creativity (partly because your people are awake, partly because of the variety of people). Maybe you're spending more, but it's probably actually worth it for the reduction in risk.
You do some culture-fit checking in the interviews. You don't hire the ones who come close to committing HR violations in the interviews. You have women and less-young men around, and this subtly reminds the young guys to not get bad habits (c'mon, they're reasonably bright, they're trainable, they grew up in an enlightened world, they _do_ know better).
I've had that problem since I was a little kid. Presence of audible speech -> speech parsing daemon stays awake -> brain stays conscious. And if there is talking during that shallow part of sleep that comes every 90 minutes or so, I will wake up and stay awake. So now I sleep with earplugs (the best I've found so far for comfort and noise blocking are a brand that comes only in bright pink).
Sadly, too few people remember anymore that poll taxes (or anything amounting to the same thing) are illegal in the US.
Unfortunately some of the people who have forgotten are those who pushed the conversion to all mail-in voting, with postage required by the voter. Sure, it's a small tax, but it's going up almost every year, will matter for some group of people, and is a speed-bump in the road to voting.
High population density. I doubt that standard composting toilets continue to be sufficient when your population moves into 4-story, close together apartment buildings.
Caffeine is definitely not psychosomatic for me. I got sleeping problems from a caffeinated soda one time when I was a kid, before I knew what it was supposed to do to me.
That depends. In the call center example, I would often much rather have a human to talk to, even if they occasionally make mistakes, because the phone tree frequently doesn't have quite what I'm looking for. The people answering phones need to be able to deal with some randomness, and the test can probably provide a large enough sample of pre-programmed randomness that it can do a decent job of filtering people. And really, a lot of it would probably just be checking for some basic scenarios. Can they handle an irate person? A sad person? Somebody who wants something impossible? A confused person? A situation that they should escalate? A computer system hiccup? A request that is four clicks deep in the interface? Information that the customer provides out of order? There are a number of these, but it's finite, and in many ways, it's a combination of intelligence test, patience test, and communication ability test.
And that yogurt doesn't just have corn starch. Also gelatin and pectin. You know they're doing something wrong when they need three thickeners (besides the microbes) to make the yogurt set up. After eating a brand that has full fat and uses fewer thickeners for a while, I can now tell that Yoplait is halfway to being Jello, and I don't like it at all.
The reason there isn't howling resistance to the theory of relativity amongst the general public is not that the general public does not understand relativity (they don't, but that doesn't matter). It's that politicians aren't proposing to turn the lives of the public upside-down because of some result of the theory of relativity.
Most people only really have loud reactions to things that affect their daily lives. The theory of Climate Change does that (not necessarily by even actually happening, but by causing laws to get passed that change people's lives).
Re:I'm all for keeping E85 if ...
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
·
· Score: 1
Wouldn't that be nice? Corn syrup just gets subsidies too. That's the only reason it's cheaper than cane sugar. If not for the subsidies, cane sugar would be the default.
1. Get some fossil fuel, somehow.
2. Use that fossil fuel as the exclusive energy source to go drill for more fossil fuel, and refine it.
3. Repeat.
4. Profit! You now have lots and lots of fossil fuel (at least until we run of out pockets of it in convenient locations in the Earth's crust).
1. Get some ethanol fuel, somehow.
2. Use that ethanol fuel as the exclusive energy source to farm and process more ethanol fuel.
3. Repeat.
4. Fail! You are now out of fuel, because the process to get more ethanol takes more energy than you get out. Every time you plant and harvest, your crop is smaller. This is despite the fact that the corn is taking on energy in the form of sunlight -- even more energy is poured into the process of tending, harvesting, and processing it. Researchers have been trying to find a plant where the equation works out the other way, and sugar cane in equatorial latitudes might even work out okay (only okay though, not incredible).
So yes, over the very long timescale, counting the energy put into making the crude oil, it all balances out. But the original source of energy (solar or solar + whatever-it-is-that-makes-crude-oil) is not really controlled by humans in the first place, we're just harvesting it in a physical form, and we have to weigh the energy cost of harvesting the various options.
Hope the bulbs don't die, hope the congresscritters get swapped out, hope the industry fails at making a lower-energy-consumption-but-otherwise-inferior replacement. 75W bulbs are going out of style in 2013, followed by 60W in 2014.
Part of the budget negotiations for a while involved cutting the funds for enforcing the ban. I don't know if that made it into the final draft or not. I hope so. My husband and I have stocked up on about 5 years worth of 100W bulbs, in the hopes that the political winds change by then.
Nike: the brand for people who would kill for shoes. I never have bought Nike and this helps ensure that I continue on that course. Oh well, wrong demographic, I suppose.
There / their / they're and your / you're errors cause my mental parser to derail much, much worse than "teh"-type spelling errors. I have to get to the point where the sentence completely falls apart, stop, back up, figure out which variant is required here, substitute it, start the sentence over again, and hope I make it through the detour without derailing again.
After the second time in a given piece of writing, I start wondering how much schooling the writer absorbed. After the third time, I am likely to decide that I don't care what they have to say.
I don't bother with seasonal vaccines, I know that hand sanitizer makes my skin dry and thus more susceptible to invasion by microbes, and aerosols bother most people around me. But I'm also mostly a read-only user of Slashdot, so my opinions don't factor in much.
Vaccines for one-time, airborn illnesses that kill lots of people and where we might erradicate the disease? Yes, everybody should get them.
Slashdot Mirror
Jobs which slow the economy by discouraging pleasure travel (and all of the nice tourist spending) and business travel (and the kinds of business deals and chance new acqaintances you only get in person). Travel is incredibly important to our economy, it is part of what makes a large country so strong. When people opt out of it, the ripple effects are amazing.
Eclipse is a crashing IDE simulator :)
Exasperated is irritated. Exacerbated is made worse.
"The usual peevishness of the Grammar Nazi was exacerbated by viewing the internet, resulting in exasperation."
Sorry. I've been seeing this one on the rise lately from otherwise smart people, so I've started pointing it out. I don't pay attention to media, is there some show or public figure that is providing an incorrect example?
If you are running the dryer on natural gas, you need to think carefully about carbon monoxide before venting it indoors. Or set up a complicated heat exchange system.
The increased metabolic rate you speak does exist by the way, just not for the rest of the day, maximum for a half an hour or until you eat something. As long as you breathe heavily after a workout or feel your heart beating faster than usual, that's exactly that increased metabolic rate.
And in fact it goes further than that: the more you exercise & the more weight you lose, the more efficient your body becomes at doing maintenance tasks, and the less it burns during the rest of the day (the heart beats slower, your muscles are hauling less around when you walk, etc.). The math still works out in your favor if you exercise, especially since you'll eventually hit a tipping point where energy expenditure is more pleasant.
In some states, it doesn't matter much what the residents of a given school district are willing to pay. It all gets funneled into the state coffers, and distributed evenly amongst all districts. So the quality of local schools has little to do with how much the local taxpayers care about the schools.
There are a few of things going on here:
I've worked and chatted extensively with a couple of female Chinese programmers, so this is at least an anecdote, not just stereotyping.
1. Aptitude does not play much of a role in career selection. The concept of figuring out what you're naturally good at (and then doing _that_ all day) was a revelation to my Chinese gal-pals. So there are probably lots of Asian women who are capable of programming, and better at something else, but go with the programming, while American women decide more often to pursue the thing they are best at.
2. They teach math better in Asia. They just do. The gap is getting worse -- if you would like to get hopping mad at school teachers, just look up "discovery math". So in Asia, fewer people of both genders are math-phobic, and more people of both genders are eligible to work in engineering-type careers. And a combination of this point and (1) gets you lots of programmers of both genders.
3. Immigration selection bias. So if you decide you want to leave China and move to a more democratic country, what's your ticket out? Engineering of some sort, because those companies will sponsor you.
There are crude, obnoxious shops in every industry. From what I've heard, telecom is much worse than programming in this respect. I am a female programmer, and my workplace has a reasonable mix of people (yes, it's slanted toward male and young -- but that is the biology that's best at visual thinking, working too many hours, and dealing with silly deadlines). If you make sure there are policies that reduce the on-call load and overall unpredictability of work hours, you'll get women and married guys. So you have code reviews; have a real process for moving code out the door; have a process for discovering process failures and fixing them; try to split work into chunks that aren't two full-time jobs per person, etc. And look at that! You've reduced your turnover (even in the young guys), reduced software failures, and increased creativity (partly because your people are awake, partly because of the variety of people). Maybe you're spending more, but it's probably actually worth it for the reduction in risk.
You do some culture-fit checking in the interviews. You don't hire the ones who come close to committing HR violations in the interviews. You have women and less-young men around, and this subtly reminds the young guys to not get bad habits (c'mon, they're reasonably bright, they're trainable, they grew up in an enlightened world, they _do_ know better).
. . . surgical help and no desire to stay alive for more than 12 hours . . .
There have been a number of stories about TSA getting very curious about fresh surgical scars.
Same here. I am convinced that it encourages our caffeine and sleep problems.
I've had that problem since I was a little kid. Presence of audible speech -> speech parsing daemon stays awake -> brain stays conscious. And if there is talking during that shallow part of sleep that comes every 90 minutes or so, I will wake up and stay awake. So now I sleep with earplugs (the best I've found so far for comfort and noise blocking are a brand that comes only in bright pink).
Sadly, too few people remember anymore that poll taxes (or anything amounting to the same thing) are illegal in the US.
Unfortunately some of the people who have forgotten are those who pushed the conversion to all mail-in voting, with postage required by the voter. Sure, it's a small tax, but it's going up almost every year, will matter for some group of people, and is a speed-bump in the road to voting.
High population density. I doubt that standard composting toilets continue to be sufficient when your population moves into 4-story, close together apartment buildings.
Caffeine is definitely not psychosomatic for me. I got sleeping problems from a caffeinated soda one time when I was a kid, before I knew what it was supposed to do to me.
That depends. In the call center example, I would often much rather have a human to talk to, even if they occasionally make mistakes, because the phone tree frequently doesn't have quite what I'm looking for. The people answering phones need to be able to deal with some randomness, and the test can probably provide a large enough sample of pre-programmed randomness that it can do a decent job of filtering people. And really, a lot of it would probably just be checking for some basic scenarios. Can they handle an irate person? A sad person? Somebody who wants something impossible? A confused person? A situation that they should escalate? A computer system hiccup? A request that is four clicks deep in the interface? Information that the customer provides out of order? There are a number of these, but it's finite, and in many ways, it's a combination of intelligence test, patience test, and communication ability test.
So this might actually produce emergent behavior? http://xkcd.com/350/
And that yogurt doesn't just have corn starch. Also gelatin and pectin. You know they're doing something wrong when they need three thickeners (besides the microbes) to make the yogurt set up. After eating a brand that has full fat and uses fewer thickeners for a while, I can now tell that Yoplait is halfway to being Jello, and I don't like it at all.
No.
The reason there isn't howling resistance to the theory of relativity amongst the general public is not that the general public does not understand relativity (they don't, but that doesn't matter). It's that politicians aren't proposing to turn the lives of the public upside-down because of some result of the theory of relativity.
Most people only really have loud reactions to things that affect their daily lives. The theory of Climate Change does that (not necessarily by even actually happening, but by causing laws to get passed that change people's lives).
Wouldn't that be nice? Corn syrup just gets subsidies too. That's the only reason it's cheaper than cane sugar. If not for the subsidies, cane sugar would be the default.
Sure. But look at it from this point of view:
1. Get some fossil fuel, somehow.
2. Use that fossil fuel as the exclusive energy source to go drill for more fossil fuel, and refine it.
3. Repeat.
4. Profit! You now have lots and lots of fossil fuel (at least until we run of out pockets of it in convenient locations in the Earth's crust).
1. Get some ethanol fuel, somehow.
2. Use that ethanol fuel as the exclusive energy source to farm and process more ethanol fuel.
3. Repeat.
4. Fail! You are now out of fuel, because the process to get more ethanol takes more energy than you get out. Every time you plant and harvest, your crop is smaller. This is despite the fact that the corn is taking on energy in the form of sunlight -- even more energy is poured into the process of tending, harvesting, and processing it. Researchers have been trying to find a plant where the equation works out the other way, and sugar cane in equatorial latitudes might even work out okay (only okay though, not incredible).
So yes, over the very long timescale, counting the energy put into making the crude oil, it all balances out. But the original source of energy (solar or solar + whatever-it-is-that-makes-crude-oil) is not really controlled by humans in the first place, we're just harvesting it in a physical form, and we have to weigh the energy cost of harvesting the various options.
Hope the bulbs don't die, hope the congresscritters get swapped out, hope the industry fails at making a lower-energy-consumption-but-otherwise-inferior replacement. 75W bulbs are going out of style in 2013, followed by 60W in 2014.
Part of the budget negotiations for a while involved cutting the funds for enforcing the ban. I don't know if that made it into the final draft or not. I hope so. My husband and I have stocked up on about 5 years worth of 100W bulbs, in the hopes that the political winds change by then.
I'll agree with the oven. I have seen LEDs inside new fridges though.
Nike: the brand for people who would kill for shoes. I never have bought Nike and this helps ensure that I continue on that course. Oh well, wrong demographic, I suppose.
There / their / they're and your / you're errors cause my mental parser to derail much, much worse than "teh"-type spelling errors. I have to get to the point where the sentence completely falls apart, stop, back up, figure out which variant is required here, substitute it, start the sentence over again, and hope I make it through the detour without derailing again.
After the second time in a given piece of writing, I start wondering how much schooling the writer absorbed. After the third time, I am likely to decide that I don't care what they have to say.
I don't bother with seasonal vaccines, I know that hand sanitizer makes my skin dry and thus more susceptible to invasion by microbes, and aerosols bother most people around me. But I'm also mostly a read-only user of Slashdot, so my opinions don't factor in much.
Vaccines for one-time, airborn illnesses that kill lots of people and where we might erradicate the disease? Yes, everybody should get them.