That's actually not what's at stake. That's the central error in the HoL's reasoning. It's not about "fixing" something they did wrong: yes, they humiliated and persecuted a man not guilty of violating any law a civilized society would enforce. However, the fact is that the official policy of the government has been, and indeed still is, that his contributions are illegitimate, and that rather than being one of Britain's dearest national treasures, he was a criminal and a deviant. The pardon is not about making right something about the past, but making right something which is wrong about the present.
Turing needs to be pardoned so that the British government can affirm that it does not consider its old judgments valid. It will not cause us to "pretend it never happened," any more than the Catholic church's pardoning of Galileo caused us to forget his mistreatment. No one is going to look up Alan Turing in a textbook, see he was pardoned, and go "oh, well that's that then" and forget the barbarism of his time. And to act like upholding Turing's guilt will remind the government to always reflect on the errors of the past, as if it were some sort of cross they were nobly bearing, is egregiously deceptive and a little nauseating.
Perhaps the most trenchant point people have made is that, by the logic that Alan Turing should be pardoned, all persons convicted of gross indecency for the practice of homosexuality should be pardoned. That is indeed correct. However, Turing is a fine place to start. If Amy fucking Winehouse can smoke crack on camera, and have the government twiddle its thumbs and look skyward, we can forgive someone who may be considered by no small stretch one of the architects of the modern world a little "indecency."
The actual acoustic energy used in this technique is pretty low. 15 MPa is about the pressure you'd expect a very full lecture bottle to be at, and probably something you wouldn't think twice about were you to feel a jet of it against your skin. I've had 2000 psi lines fail near me, and while it hurts your ears like a bitch, it isn't even enough to puncture them. The article says it gives seismometer readings equivalent to a.5 intensity earthquake. A quick look at a seismic activity map will reveal that these happen *literally* all the time. If these airguns were enough to cause, or even influence seismic activitoty, we'd be in danger every time someone dropped a full gas cylinder (not to mention rocket launches should cause massive quakes across the globe).
While measuring something indeed influences it, there are fundamental energetic limits below which this influence is negligible (i.e., shining light on a truck to measure it's position. I believe these air guns fall into this category
Books are the betr example of this. Booksellers have been acknowledging this for years! The only way they make money is if someone can't find the book used. If they find it used, they buy it from a *used* bookseller. No one whines. No one claims that libraries are "piracy." No one says that if people don't stop lending and reselling books, they will go bankrupt. In fact, I am sure no bookseller has EVER raised this as a legitimate complaint.
No, what these guys are sad about is the fact that video games used to be a novelty. Moreover, they were something where no apparatus existed to reuse them. People were forced to buy new copies of a game because they didn't exist in libraries, saves were locked to the cartridge, and video stores didn't get games until a good while after their release. Games were thought of as shiny, physical "toys," and a new toy is always better than an old toy (the primary audience for video games being children), and so they could rest easy knowing that someone would always opt to buy the new thing. And now they're pouting because they just realized they are selling information, rather than a physical commodity, and are going to have to start living like booksellers, instead of like fatass millionaires. (No, no one who makes money off this decision is in severe need of it)
(As far as the disparity between book production costs and game production costs...books don't sell nearly as well as games. Apples and oranges)
Again, it's inconceivable to me how a species capable of crossing vast, interstellar distances would have a population problem. We have a population problem now, and we're still centuries, if not millenia away from the possibility of interstellar travel. By the time we can travel to another planet, we will have had to address this issue in another way, either by terraforming technology (and related engineering projects) or by efficient social engineering. I suppose it is conceivable that a species focuses solely on aerospace, to the exclusion of the advances in medicine or social policy which have caused us to proliferate, but then if there is anything universal to life it would be its tendency to proliferate. I suppose it is also possible for a species to live in a solar system with mostly earthlike planets, and to not even conceive of terraforming until they already have incredible aerospace capability. But if there were such a star, it is undoubtedly an insignificant rarity.
The difference between space and our planet is that space is unimaginably vast: if there were some problem here, by the time you made the journey to another planet in order to fix that problem, either the problem would have been fixed by some other means, or it would have destroyed your society! I'd hazard that any alien peoples whose lifetimes were on the order of interstellar travel times would hardly be using the eyeblink blips of other people's radio age transmissions to decide where to go they would just visit. The colonization of America was not predicated on the existence of native people: rather it was conducted in spite of them. Unless you know a way of screening our planet from environmental assays, we might as well bet on the slim that they'll go easy on us if we prove we know math.
Wow, way to misrepresent Carl Sagan in a way deeply offensive to the ideals he stood for. If you listened to the WHOLE episode (and indeed, read the numerous articles, talks and books he was responsible for on the subject) you would know that the intent of that statement was that it is extremely unlikely that two species that come in contact would have anything that both were interested in, but that one had an abundance and the other a paucity of. He was also writing that in the context of the Cold War, during which the worst of all possible worlds was two equally powerful superpowers engaged in an intractable war.
In the highly unlikely event we were to come into contact with some species that both a) has the ability to travel at or near the speed of light (probably faster) and b) is in desperate need of some resource we possess, it is even more unlikely that they are simply waiting hundreds of years for some signal from a particularly loud race to start warming up the battleships: they probably have ways of finding us.
The problem with the jungle/colonization analog of alien contact is that space is not an ecosystem. While science fiction is full of species like the Zerg and the Borg and Tyranids and Xenomorphs that work by subsuming or preying on other species, but surely you must realize how staggeringly unlikely that is. The argument is always that we could never conceive of what's out there: if that's true, how can there be other species who not only have conceived of what's out there, but evolved specifically to take unique advantage of it? This is all besides the point that it is unlikely that FTL travel is even a physical possibility, let alone a feasible transport method for a species of conquerors or predators.
I'm not sure exactly why Mr. Winkler thinks computer security is a waste of computer talent, but that solving social media programming puzzles is not. While I'm not enough of an expert to see how algorithmic programming challenges relate to security, it seems to me that probing existing security systems (which, as far as I know, is an accepted and common practice, from which a lot of good can be derived) is more directly important than what is essentially a competitive Project Euler. However, it is understandable that, being a former security professional, Winkler might be the sort of person who believes the proliferation of security penetration techniques and training leads to the proliferation of security penetration itself, and advocates children getting rough on the playground rather than near the power station. In short, he wants an environment where the only people with the knowledge to disable systems are the architects of that system itself: if the door is locked, you should leave it alone. Given that he is advocating for a competition sponsored by Facebook, who has a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that their information structures are impenetrable monoliths, I'd say this is likely. His aversion to security testing is more a product of his old-guard nervousness about the volatility of information than to any real insight into why security testing is bad for computing as a whole.
Hacker/cracker/whitehat/blackhat wankery aside, security is an important aspect of computer networking, and it's important that the risks to a network be a part of programming as a whole. If it's confined to the domain of locksmiths and lockpickers, then information becomes easily monopolizable, and that way lies ruin.
Dammit, I keep misremembering my science history. If only there was some kind of large database of this kind of information that I could interface with remotely
Heat was actually believed to be a substance, until the middle of the 19th century.
True, it is a fairly subtle concept. I am much more concerned about the lay confusion between temperature and heat than between light and heat. However, it should be fairly well reinforced that light does not interact with something unless it interacts: windows heat up less than asphalt in the presence of energetic radiation in the optical regime.
Seeing as the positive aspects (applications, reasons why this is a good thing, even the basics of the theory of photonics) are included in the first five sentences of TFA (which I will refrain from pasting here, out of respect), I'm not sure how my post could be assigned even that bare step above. If you are looking for a laypersons description of the optics theory behind the device design, I can assure you by it's very nature, such an explanation does not exist. If you are looking for a more metaphysical explanation of why faster computers are a truly POSITIVE thing (computer's degrade social fabric, you know) then I'm afraid I can't help you, but can tell you this is probably not the right venue to look for those answers.
Yes, but controlling how much light goes through a device is...um...super easy. Like caveman easy.
Actually, I'm not an expert on photonics, the analogue of voltage could be wavelength, in which case upconversion can provide the same function. There's a lot of fluff on the Purdue site but this is actually a fairly interesting device and the research isn't bad.
That would be Science for you. This is a scientific paper, not an AmSci survey piece. TFA was a piece of science journalism, so they probably haven't had time to fully compress the actual paper
Yes, but we're talking about economics. What's best for a business is not necessarily what's best for the economy that business is part of, unless of course you are some kind of Austrian nutjob.
I had assumed it was clear that I was speaking about the economic soundness of this as a national industry. While indeed, if you are a retail giant, this may aid domestic, consumer driven economy. However, it does not make sense to turn your country into a Walmart, since cheap exports only help you if it helps you undercut your "competition" (I guess... Finland?). While it's very nice for Apple that they can make and sell so many iPads, I doubt it's much comfort to China. And given Apple's profit margin on their devices (which is f**king astronomical) I sincerely doubt a hike in electronics components is going to seriously affect volume as opposed to profits. No, the only people directly making money of this arrangement are the manufacturers themselves: their laborers and their countries are seeing precious little of the magic of high throughput
Infrared light is not heat. I don't know where people got this idea. It is light. When it is absorbed, it may cause certain molecules to gain heat energy, but it is still light. This is a device which absorbs or scatters when you shine light on one side of it, and transmits when you shine light on the other side of it. I assume when heat energy is generated within the device, it diffuses isotropically from the point of matter-light interaction throughout the material until a definite temperature is reached, as thermodynamics predicts. If you believe that materials with different absorption cross sections at different spatial orientations allow you to violate the second law of thermodynamics, then you hardly need to construct something so elaborate: a board painted two different colors on either side should suffice. Lasers themselves, whose cavities emit a lot more in one direction than in the other (and which generate a good deal of heat in their lasing medium in a largely homogeneous fashion, but let's not get bogged down in reality) should constitute a huge violation. You should let everyone in the physics community know, as this seems like a fairly large oversight in our model of reality/sarcasm
If you're going to go around with a name like physburn, please ensure you understand what you're talking about
I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that "98% accuracy" referred to a confidence interval, i.e. if you and another person are 98% percent identical in the buttocks region, someone else might be able to start you car, since if the car reads a 98% match, it will start.
More worrying is what happens when you lose weight. If you lose 10% of your body weight over a period of a few months, you're stuck.
the sheer scale of the whole manufacturing industry more than makes up for that
Err, I assume you're saying this in a Machiavellian, free market pirate sort of way (i.e., worth it for the manufacturing contractors), since volume production is a really crooked way to make money. Workers operating on razor thin profit margins don't make any more in a volume based system unless they multiply their workload. It also does a piss poor job of ensuring the economic security of a region in the normal way: wages are spread so thinly that they can hardly be entered back into the economy except in the form of food purchases. Sure, the numbers work out, but the Walmart business model is only good for the Waltons: no one else.
He wasn't being contrary. He was originally making a point about how it would be risky to send a manned mission to mars banking on the presence of liquid water as a source of jet propellant. Somersault saw the words "risk my life" and thought "HA! You're not risking YOUR life, you pansy, chunkity assed nerd! The astronauts are, and they'll bet their life on any long shot, no matter how suicidal it might be: they strap rockets directly to their asses and say to hell with procedure, let's do this! Those boys are heroes! Semper fi! Aughghhhhh!" or something else similarly ripe for parody, and FTWinston responded with a fairly calm, if slightly broad and a little hot, rebuttal, reinforcing his initial point that, basic risk aside, we must take every precaution with the lives of astronauts before we send them on any mission, particularly one as ambitious as a manned Mars mission. Somersaults comment may have been idle, but was flippant in a way which degrades the dialogue.
What has actually happened, is that someone suggested the possibility of maybe having astronauts wear seatbelts, then everyone started acting like he punched a veteran.
The confusion still persists. The word "amateur" is pretty universally accepted as describing a person who practices a pursuit as a hobby, rather than a profession. Is this word coined by the article? No. It would be like an article on Joe Biden beginning "The 'Vice-President' of the 'United States' Joe Biden etc."
It's funny, the traditional wisdom on that front is that the five or so years you spend getting a PhD constitutes a huge loss, and that you should be busy scrambling up the corporate ladder to a six figure job by the time you're 25. However, with the dismal job outlook for new grads lately, the "slow start" for PhDs is now largely average, though others don't receive a degree for their pains.
I think what Anon was trying to say is that the PhD is not a vocational degree. It's actually sad how little people understand that. True, there are positions which require vocational experience, and employers will fill those positions banking on PhD applicants previous experience. However, the PhD is more than learning a set of specific skills: it is an experience which teaches a broad range of specific cognitive behaviors, many of which are extremely useful to many disciplines, not just the one on the degree. A PhD must by default be disciplined, skilled in problem solving, an excellent written communicator, and have modest experience giving presentations. STEM PhD's have to have experience with math up through linear algebra, possibly with partial differential equations, and often quite a bit more than that. They are able to think critically, organize projects, work in groups, solve problems, and moreover their degree now indicates that they have *expert level* capability in those skills. True, a pharmaceutical company isn't going to hire a philosophy major to fill a position requiring the experience of a PhD in biochemistry, but the facts are that industrial positions for specific PhD's are fairly few and far between: a lot of companies are just looking for PhD's in general. That would be the only explanation for Anon's English major friend, who I sincerely doubt was hired in the firm's "English department" before clawing his way over to financial analysis. That bloke was likely hired for his degree, and the aptitude it promises.
Oh and yeah: Ivy League tag means nothing for a PhD unless the program is well known, like chemistry or physics at Berkeley, or computer science at UIUC. Your adviser will be a much more important name than your school.
Slashdot Mirror
How much they paying you, hoss?
That's actually not what's at stake. That's the central error in the HoL's reasoning. It's not about "fixing" something they did wrong: yes, they humiliated and persecuted a man not guilty of violating any law a civilized society would enforce. However, the fact is that the official policy of the government has been, and indeed still is, that his contributions are illegitimate, and that rather than being one of Britain's dearest national treasures, he was a criminal and a deviant. The pardon is not about making right something about the past, but making right something which is wrong about the present.
Turing needs to be pardoned so that the British government can affirm that it does not consider its old judgments valid. It will not cause us to "pretend it never happened," any more than the Catholic church's pardoning of Galileo caused us to forget his mistreatment. No one is going to look up Alan Turing in a textbook, see he was pardoned, and go "oh, well that's that then" and forget the barbarism of his time. And to act like upholding Turing's guilt will remind the government to always reflect on the errors of the past, as if it were some sort of cross they were nobly bearing, is egregiously deceptive and a little nauseating.
Perhaps the most trenchant point people have made is that, by the logic that Alan Turing should be pardoned, all persons convicted of gross indecency for the practice of homosexuality should be pardoned. That is indeed correct. However, Turing is a fine place to start. If Amy fucking Winehouse can smoke crack on camera, and have the government twiddle its thumbs and look skyward, we can forgive someone who may be considered by no small stretch one of the architects of the modern world a little "indecency."
The actual acoustic energy used in this technique is pretty low. 15 MPa is about the pressure you'd expect a very full lecture bottle to be at, and probably something you wouldn't think twice about were you to feel a jet of it against your skin. I've had 2000 psi lines fail near me, and while it hurts your ears like a bitch, it isn't even enough to puncture them. The article says it gives seismometer readings equivalent to a .5 intensity earthquake. A quick look at a seismic activity map will reveal that these happen *literally* all the time. If these airguns were enough to cause, or even influence seismic activitoty, we'd be in danger every time someone dropped a full gas cylinder (not to mention rocket launches should cause massive quakes across the globe).
While measuring something indeed influences it, there are fundamental energetic limits below which this influence is negligible (i.e., shining light on a truck to measure it's position. I believe these air guns fall into this category
Books are the betr example of this. Booksellers have been acknowledging this for years! The only way they make money is if someone can't find the book used. If they find it used, they buy it from a *used* bookseller. No one whines. No one claims that libraries are "piracy." No one says that if people don't stop lending and reselling books, they will go bankrupt. In fact, I am sure no bookseller has EVER raised this as a legitimate complaint.
No, what these guys are sad about is the fact that video games used to be a novelty. Moreover, they were something where no apparatus existed to reuse them. People were forced to buy new copies of a game because they didn't exist in libraries, saves were locked to the cartridge, and video stores didn't get games until a good while after their release. Games were thought of as shiny, physical "toys," and a new toy is always better than an old toy (the primary audience for video games being children), and so they could rest easy knowing that someone would always opt to buy the new thing. And now they're pouting because they just realized they are selling information, rather than a physical commodity, and are going to have to start living like booksellers, instead of like fatass millionaires. (No, no one who makes money off this decision is in severe need of it)
(As far as the disparity between book production costs and game production costs...books don't sell nearly as well as games. Apples and oranges)
Again, it's inconceivable to me how a species capable of crossing vast, interstellar distances would have a population problem. We have a population problem now, and we're still centuries, if not millenia away from the possibility of interstellar travel. By the time we can travel to another planet, we will have had to address this issue in another way, either by terraforming technology (and related engineering projects) or by efficient social engineering. I suppose it is conceivable that a species focuses solely on aerospace, to the exclusion of the advances in medicine or social policy which have caused us to proliferate, but then if there is anything universal to life it would be its tendency to proliferate. I suppose it is also possible for a species to live in a solar system with mostly earthlike planets, and to not even conceive of terraforming until they already have incredible aerospace capability. But if there were such a star, it is undoubtedly an insignificant rarity.
The difference between space and our planet is that space is unimaginably vast: if there were some problem here, by the time you made the journey to another planet in order to fix that problem, either the problem would have been fixed by some other means, or it would have destroyed your society! I'd hazard that any alien peoples whose lifetimes were on the order of interstellar travel times would hardly be using the eyeblink blips of other people's radio age transmissions to decide where to go they would just visit. The colonization of America was not predicated on the existence of native people: rather it was conducted in spite of them. Unless you know a way of screening our planet from environmental assays, we might as well bet on the slim that they'll go easy on us if we prove we know math.
Wow, way to misrepresent Carl Sagan in a way deeply offensive to the ideals he stood for. If you listened to the WHOLE episode (and indeed, read the numerous articles, talks and books he was responsible for on the subject) you would know that the intent of that statement was that it is extremely unlikely that two species that come in contact would have anything that both were interested in, but that one had an abundance and the other a paucity of. He was also writing that in the context of the Cold War, during which the worst of all possible worlds was two equally powerful superpowers engaged in an intractable war.
In the highly unlikely event we were to come into contact with some species that both a) has the ability to travel at or near the speed of light (probably faster) and b) is in desperate need of some resource we possess, it is even more unlikely that they are simply waiting hundreds of years for some signal from a particularly loud race to start warming up the battleships: they probably have ways of finding us.
The problem with the jungle/colonization analog of alien contact is that space is not an ecosystem. While science fiction is full of species like the Zerg and the Borg and Tyranids and Xenomorphs that work by subsuming or preying on other species, but surely you must realize how staggeringly unlikely that is. The argument is always that we could never conceive of what's out there: if that's true, how can there be other species who not only have conceived of what's out there, but evolved specifically to take unique advantage of it? This is all besides the point that it is unlikely that FTL travel is even a physical possibility, let alone a feasible transport method for a species of conquerors or predators.
I'm not sure exactly why Mr. Winkler thinks computer security is a waste of computer talent, but that solving social media programming puzzles is not. While I'm not enough of an expert to see how algorithmic programming challenges relate to security, it seems to me that probing existing security systems (which, as far as I know, is an accepted and common practice, from which a lot of good can be derived) is more directly important than what is essentially a competitive Project Euler. However, it is understandable that, being a former security professional, Winkler might be the sort of person who believes the proliferation of security penetration techniques and training leads to the proliferation of security penetration itself, and advocates children getting rough on the playground rather than near the power station. In short, he wants an environment where the only people with the knowledge to disable systems are the architects of that system itself: if the door is locked, you should leave it alone. Given that he is advocating for a competition sponsored by Facebook, who has a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that their information structures are impenetrable monoliths, I'd say this is likely. His aversion to security testing is more a product of his old-guard nervousness about the volatility of information than to any real insight into why security testing is bad for computing as a whole.
Hacker/cracker/whitehat/blackhat wankery aside, security is an important aspect of computer networking, and it's important that the risks to a network be a part of programming as a whole. If it's confined to the domain of locksmiths and lockpickers, then information becomes easily monopolizable, and that way lies ruin.
Dammit, I keep misremembering my science history. If only there was some kind of large database of this kind of information that I could interface with remotely
but isn't half that challenge the construction of a diode? Once you have the diode, it's as simple as fluorescence, no? At least, in princple.
Heat was actually believed to be a substance, until the middle of the 19th century.
True, it is a fairly subtle concept. I am much more concerned about the lay confusion between temperature and heat than between light and heat. However, it should be fairly well reinforced that light does not interact with something unless it interacts: windows heat up less than asphalt in the presence of energetic radiation in the optical regime.
Seeing as the positive aspects (applications, reasons why this is a good thing, even the basics of the theory of photonics) are included in the first five sentences of TFA (which I will refrain from pasting here, out of respect), I'm not sure how my post could be assigned even that bare step above. If you are looking for a laypersons description of the optics theory behind the device design, I can assure you by it's very nature, such an explanation does not exist. If you are looking for a more metaphysical explanation of why faster computers are a truly POSITIVE thing (computer's degrade social fabric, you know) then I'm afraid I can't help you, but can tell you this is probably not the right venue to look for those answers.
Actually, I'm not an expert on photonics, the analogue of voltage could be wavelength, in which case upconversion can provide the same function. There's a lot of fluff on the Purdue site but this is actually a fairly interesting device and the research isn't bad.
That would be Science for you. This is a scientific paper, not an AmSci survey piece. TFA was a piece of science journalism, so they probably haven't had time to fully compress the actual paper
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate
All those degrees in looking things up online finally paid off. You're welcome, citizen!
Yes, but we're talking about economics. What's best for a business is not necessarily what's best for the economy that business is part of, unless of course you are some kind of Austrian nutjob.
I had assumed it was clear that I was speaking about the economic soundness of this as a national industry. While indeed, if you are a retail giant, this may aid domestic, consumer driven economy. However, it does not make sense to turn your country into a Walmart, since cheap exports only help you if it helps you undercut your "competition" (I guess... Finland?). While it's very nice for Apple that they can make and sell so many iPads, I doubt it's much comfort to China. And given Apple's profit margin on their devices (which is f**king astronomical) I sincerely doubt a hike in electronics components is going to seriously affect volume as opposed to profits. No, the only people directly making money of this arrangement are the manufacturers themselves: their laborers and their countries are seeing precious little of the magic of high throughput
Infrared light is not heat. I don't know where people got this idea. It is light. When it is absorbed, it may cause certain molecules to gain heat energy, but it is still light. This is a device which absorbs or scatters when you shine light on one side of it, and transmits when you shine light on the other side of it. I assume when heat energy is generated within the device, it diffuses isotropically from the point of matter-light interaction throughout the material until a definite temperature is reached, as thermodynamics predicts. If you believe that materials with different absorption cross sections at different spatial orientations allow you to violate the second law of thermodynamics, then you hardly need to construct something so elaborate: a board painted two different colors on either side should suffice. Lasers themselves, whose cavities emit a lot more in one direction than in the other (and which generate a good deal of heat in their lasing medium in a largely homogeneous fashion, but let's not get bogged down in reality) should constitute a huge violation. You should let everyone in the physics community know, as this seems like a fairly large oversight in our model of reality /sarcasm
If you're going to go around with a name like physburn, please ensure you understand what you're talking about
I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that "98% accuracy" referred to a confidence interval, i.e. if you and another person are 98% percent identical in the buttocks region, someone else might be able to start you car, since if the car reads a 98% match, it will start.
More worrying is what happens when you lose weight. If you lose 10% of your body weight over a period of a few months, you're stuck.
the sheer scale of the whole manufacturing industry more than makes up for that
Err, I assume you're saying this in a Machiavellian, free market pirate sort of way (i.e., worth it for the manufacturing contractors), since volume production is a really crooked way to make money. Workers operating on razor thin profit margins don't make any more in a volume based system unless they multiply their workload. It also does a piss poor job of ensuring the economic security of a region in the normal way: wages are spread so thinly that they can hardly be entered back into the economy except in the form of food purchases. Sure, the numbers work out, but the Walmart business model is only good for the Waltons: no one else.
He wasn't being contrary. He was originally making a point about how it would be risky to send a manned mission to mars banking on the presence of liquid water as a source of jet propellant. Somersault saw the words "risk my life" and thought "HA! You're not risking YOUR life, you pansy, chunkity assed nerd! The astronauts are, and they'll bet their life on any long shot, no matter how suicidal it might be: they strap rockets directly to their asses and say to hell with procedure, let's do this! Those boys are heroes! Semper fi! Aughghhhhh!" or something else similarly ripe for parody, and FTWinston responded with a fairly calm, if slightly broad and a little hot, rebuttal, reinforcing his initial point that, basic risk aside, we must take every precaution with the lives of astronauts before we send them on any mission, particularly one as ambitious as a manned Mars mission. Somersaults comment may have been idle, but was flippant in a way which degrades the dialogue.
What has actually happened, is that someone suggested the possibility of maybe having astronauts wear seatbelts, then everyone started acting like he punched a veteran.
It's "Sought," though I've probably just had that brainwashed into me by one of those 'Terran' papers.
Those quotations are justified in BOTH uses.
The confusion still persists. The word "amateur" is pretty universally accepted as describing a person who practices a pursuit as a hobby, rather than a profession. Is this word coined by the article? No. It would be like an article on Joe Biden beginning "The 'Vice-President' of the 'United States' Joe Biden etc."
It's funny, the traditional wisdom on that front is that the five or so years you spend getting a PhD constitutes a huge loss, and that you should be busy scrambling up the corporate ladder to a six figure job by the time you're 25. However, with the dismal job outlook for new grads lately, the "slow start" for PhDs is now largely average, though others don't receive a degree for their pains.
I think what Anon was trying to say is that the PhD is not a vocational degree. It's actually sad how little people understand that. True, there are positions which require vocational experience, and employers will fill those positions banking on PhD applicants previous experience. However, the PhD is more than learning a set of specific skills: it is an experience which teaches a broad range of specific cognitive behaviors, many of which are extremely useful to many disciplines, not just the one on the degree. A PhD must by default be disciplined, skilled in problem solving, an excellent written communicator, and have modest experience giving presentations. STEM PhD's have to have experience with math up through linear algebra, possibly with partial differential equations, and often quite a bit more than that. They are able to think critically, organize projects, work in groups, solve problems, and moreover their degree now indicates that they have *expert level* capability in those skills. True, a pharmaceutical company isn't going to hire a philosophy major to fill a position requiring the experience of a PhD in biochemistry, but the facts are that industrial positions for specific PhD's are fairly few and far between: a lot of companies are just looking for PhD's in general. That would be the only explanation for Anon's English major friend, who I sincerely doubt was hired in the firm's "English department" before clawing his way over to financial analysis. That bloke was likely hired for his degree, and the aptitude it promises.
Oh and yeah: Ivy League tag means nothing for a PhD unless the program is well known, like chemistry or physics at Berkeley, or computer science at UIUC. Your adviser will be a much more important name than your school.