I haven't read Warren Farrell's books, so I'm not really qualified to comment, but who on/. ever let that stop them. A poster near the top pointed out that, in general, men have more upper body strength than women. This has a physiological basis, as men have more testosterone in their system than women, and testosterone is a great anabolic steroid. I'd bet a lot of those "unskilled" or "semi-skilled" blue-collar jobs below the glass floor focus more on tasks that require physical strenght and dexterity. Especially job like trashman, oil worker, miner, lumberjack, and farmer. So you would probably expect to see more men than women in the field, based on the fraction of each sex above some minimum strength. That is, instead of a 50/50 split, the "nominal" split should be something like 60/40 in favor of men. I imagine the problem is that the split is still like 95/5 in favor of men.
Something else to note: many of the dirty, hazardous jobs have the potential for exposure to a lot of nasty toxic chemicals and metals that build up in the body and have long-term carcinogenic and teratogenic effects. I would expect they have a reasonably linear effect on men's reproductive capability, with capability declining with increased exposure, but with minimal effect on the fetus/child. However, I would imagine they would have a much more significant impact on women's reproductive capabilities, and a much greater chance of harming the developing fetus/child; due to the child remaining in the woman's body and continuing to be exposed to the accumulated toxins.
I've used National Control Devices at work, and I have been very happy with their products and customer service. The have a number of different relay configurations, and support regular RS-232, serial-over-USB, ZigBee, serial-over-fiber, Wi-Fi, etc. Good stuff.
When was the last time you said to friend "Hey, that's a nice set of coconuts on that blond over there, I'd really like to put her over a couple of rocks and pound a hole in her with my tool"
versus
"Hey, that's a nice set of soybeans on that blond over there, I really like to soak her overnight in water and then give her a wet grinding."
Yeah, it really sucks, but there you go. I guess one way to justify it is that New York State has a population of around 19M people. Since each state gets two Senators, you can imagine Schumer counting as 9.5M complaints.
I remember when my Dad and I picked up our first bits at the store. We had a hatchback, so it was pretty easy to just slide them in sideways, but then we had to bungie-cord everything down so they wouldn't shift too much on the ride home. Darn kids today with their multi-gigabyte memory chips.
"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth . . . and kill!"
The Washington Post had an recent article about this technology being applied in the Washington, DC, area. Slashdot has also featuredarticles on similar technologies that use deep water from large lakes or the oceans themselves.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned Daniel Pinkwater yet. Some of his books have a good sci-fi flavor (though they tend to straddle that line between science fiction and fantasy). In particular I enjoyed Fat Men from Space, The Magic Moscow, and Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. See here for more information.
I'll also put in a vote for Tom Swift, particularly the 1950-1970 Tom Swift Jr series. The books are probably pretty dated by now, but I remember that they were a lot of fun to read when I was, I guess, in grades 3-5, and the science was pretty easy to digest. Kind of like how Indiana Jones is an archaeologist, who has these awesome adventures. I've not read the previous series. I tried one of the books of the third series (I think the title was Ark Two), but it struck me more as bad modern sci-fi than the older books, and I didn't read any of the others.
As far as the man himself, Tom Jr is generally protrayed as a regular 1950's teenager / young adult than as a bookish nerdy type. He's just got a really cool car and a spaceship that he built. The books also tend to show Tom using his inventions to help people out and make the world a better place. One caveat is that the Tom Swift Jr books were aimed at 1950's boys (since only boys did science in the 1950's), and may not hold the interest of modern girls; of course, your mileage and children may vary.
Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit... The cockpit...what is it? It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important right now.
You ever been in a cockpit before? I've never been up in a plane before. You ever seen a grown man naked?
I'm curious how this study would generalize from Great Britain (and other areas with extensive, heavily-used public transportation) to the United States, and from subways to busses. I'm in the U.S., and used to ride the bus to work. I noticed that many of the people on the bus were people who probably didn't have a car, or wouldn't be able to use one. These people appeared to be either too poor to afford to operate a car, or had some obvious mental disability that prevented them from operating one (admittedly this bus route went past the adult day-care center, so the rider population was skewed).
I became very guarded on the bus rides out of a desire to not interact with either of these groups. I didn't want to interact with the obviously mentally disabled because of their disability; yes, I'm a rat bastard, but I'm just not interested in a broken 20-minute conversation using poorly rendered monosyllabic words. I didn't want to interact with poor people because they may have also been disabled (and unable to hold a good job), or they might have been interested in initiating a spontanious unilateral redistribution of wealth.
So I can understand how people might be more paranoid on public transportation, as may mix many different parts of society, and some of those parts may not like the other parts. I've thought, since my experience, that a bus route with a high cost of ridership (say $5-$7 per ride), would have been much nicer, even with no improvements to bus vehicles, just due to the higher barrier of entry.
I'm out of practice in ass-packing so I could be misremembering, but I seem to recall that the weight of an assload varied with the contents. Kinda like how a bushel of wheat weighs differently than a bushel of oats. So you should check with one of the standard engineering references before specifying assloads.
Incidentally, a butt-load is around 126 American gallons.
I find that usually the slowest part of waiting in line at the local Super Wal-Mart is, well, waiting in line. They must have 30 lanes available for purchases, but rarely are a significant fraction of them open. I guess they have figured out the maximum wait-time people will tolerate, and have adjusted their staffing to meet this level. I think it would be excellent if all the lanes were open, but I could see that they could be in a situation where many cashiers are just waiting around to service customers.
Of course, the 1 second RFID package scan could alleviate this, but it does seem like a very technology-heavy solution to just hiring a few more people.
I agree that a "future war" setting would make a pretty neat summer blockbuster. The number of ways you could frame the start of the war, especially if you already planned to make a trilogy, would give a competent director a lot of latitude for being creative and exciting. I understand your "no romance, no politics" request. I'm not sure that level of restriction would be necessary, though you could certainly do an awesome movie without it (the romance and politics).
I think two of the keys would be, as I mentioned, a competent director (and a competent scriptwriter), and not making the movie too much like the Matrix trilogy. You would think a competent director and writer would be a necessity for any film, but because of the huge flexibility offered in making what would effectively be a war epic, you would need a director and writer who were competent enough to know what elements they wanted to focus on and what they would not be good at writing or directing. And not, to re-enforce your comment, lose sight of the fact that this would be a war epic and make some horrible 1950's ro-bot invasion B-grade romance movie (though some cybernetic bodice ripping might be... interesting).
I mention the Matrix trilogy simply because the Terminator series and the Matrix series have some similar elements (robots taking over the world) and wouldn't want to see the new movies just ripping off the Matrix stuff. I would rather they develop their own unique outlook and style, and it would be critical for the (competent) writer and director to not fall into the trap of copying the existing material.
Anyway, I think if we could get some good people on this, there would be an opportunity for some additional expansion of the franchise in a new direction. On the other hand, this could wind up being a giant flop if not-good people do the work.
You are right about the shitty customers, especially the ones who just tear into a box and leave it a complete mess. I feel bad when I see those boxes on the shelves, and think, "Well, there's another sale lost", 'cause who wants to buy the torn up box.
On the other hand, usually when I open a box in a store, it is because there isn't a floor display for that particular product, and I want to make sure I am getting exactly the right thing before I buy it. Or I may want to look at the manual and verify that the product is compatible with the equipment I already have. What would be great is if stores had signs that directed the customer on how to see a opened product or manual if there isn't one right by the product. It would be awesome if I could simply ask the employee directly, but with the rate of change of things, and the low quality of some of today's employees, I don't think they would be able to give me the answer, nor would I be able to trust them if I did.
I had been thinking about how much it sucks to go the landfill with my garbage, and how much it sucks to mow my lawn. I recycle a lot of stuff, but I still produce a lot of non-recyclable food and paper waste. I would compost, but I don't have anything I could do with the compost.
Cellulose, one of the primary components of grass and other plants, is a polymer of glucose, and can be converted back into glucose by the action of several natural enzymes (like the ones found in the bacteria in the guts of termites) and by concentrated sulfuric acid. Glucose, under the action of additonal enzymes, like those found in yeast, can be turned into ethanol. I did some research, and it turns out a company called Arkenol Fuels already has a factory that implements this process with sulfuric acid.
My thought was that it would be excellent to develope smaller, at-home version of this process. If it also used sulfuric acid (as opposed to the termite enzymes), you could probably put just about any cellulose-containing or food waste into the process, and get out fuel for an automobile.
The "something you have/something you know/something you are" paradigm for security is a good place to start (doubtlessly there are better forms overall, but the current state of security is so bad that most anything would be an improvement). However, whenever I hear this paradigm being being espoused, the thought that comes to my paranoid/gristly mind is that many of the something-you-ares that would be useful security measures are just something-you-haves that you have a lot tighter than an ID card. Of course, you are probably aware a lot sooner if someone steals you thumb than if they steal you badge or password. 'Course, if they tied you up first...
In any event, if you are building a something-you-have detector, it would be good to have it verify that the something you have is still attached to you, probably by measuring the presence of a pulse.
Another DVD you might want to check out is "Titus" featuring Anthony Hopkins. It is a version of "Titus Andronicus", with all the original wording, but set in a modernistic Roman empire. I wish my teacher had shown us this in high-school English.
This is off-topic, but I noticed the line "I guess being a small country means that you have to find interesting things to mention elsewhere..." can be parsed two different ways.:-)
William and Mary had this problem. The refurbished the student union, and one of the new additions was two FREE pinball machines. To many people, myself included, this was manna from heaven. But because people used the machines so much, they started failing at a ridiculous rate. Eventually, they started charging a quarter to play the games. I don't think this was to recoupe the repair costs, but to reduce the usage of the games to a point where they weren't breaking weekly.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't read Warren Farrell's books, so I'm not really qualified to comment, but who on /. ever let that stop them. A poster near the top pointed out that, in general, men have more upper body strength than women. This has a physiological basis, as men have more testosterone in their system than women, and testosterone is a great anabolic steroid. I'd bet a lot of those "unskilled" or "semi-skilled" blue-collar jobs below the glass floor focus more on tasks that require physical strenght and dexterity. Especially job like trashman, oil worker, miner, lumberjack, and farmer. So you would probably expect to see more men than women in the field, based on the fraction of each sex above some minimum strength. That is, instead of a 50/50 split, the "nominal" split should be something like 60/40 in favor of men. I imagine the problem is that the split is still like 95/5 in favor of men.
Something else to note: many of the dirty, hazardous jobs have the potential for exposure to a lot of nasty toxic chemicals and metals that build up in the body and have long-term carcinogenic and teratogenic effects. I would expect they have a reasonably linear effect on men's reproductive capability, with capability declining with increased exposure, but with minimal effect on the fetus/child. However, I would imagine they would have a much more significant impact on women's reproductive capabilities, and a much greater chance of harming the developing fetus/child; due to the child remaining in the woman's body and continuing to be exposed to the accumulated toxins.
I've used National Control Devices at work, and I have been very happy with their products and customer service. The have a number of different relay configurations, and support regular RS-232, serial-over-USB, ZigBee, serial-over-fiber, Wi-Fi, etc. Good stuff.
I don't know...
When was the last time you said to friend "Hey, that's a nice set of coconuts on that blond over there, I'd really like to put her over a couple of rocks and pound a hole in her with my tool"
versus
"Hey, that's a nice set of soybeans on that blond over there, I really like to soak her overnight in water and then give her a wet grinding."
Yeah, it really sucks, but there you go. I guess one way to justify it is that New York State has a population of around 19M people. Since each state gets two Senators, you can imagine Schumer counting as 9.5M complaints.
I remember when my Dad and I picked up our first bits at the store. We had a hatchback, so it was pretty easy to just slide them in sideways, but then we had to bungie-cord everything down so they wouldn't shift too much on the ride home. Darn kids today with their multi-gigabyte memory chips.
"The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth . . . and kill!"
The Washington Post had an recent article about this technology being applied in the Washington, DC, area. Slashdot has also featured articles on similar technologies that use deep water from large lakes or the oceans themselves.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dana_Carvey
I don't know if anyone has mentioned Daniel Pinkwater yet. Some of his books have a good sci-fi flavor (though they tend to straddle that line between science fiction and fantasy). In particular I enjoyed Fat Men from Space, The Magic Moscow, and Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. See here for more information.
As far as the man himself, Tom Jr is generally protrayed as a regular 1950's teenager / young adult than as a bookish nerdy type. He's just got a really cool car and a spaceship that he built. The books also tend to show Tom using his inventions to help people out and make the world a better place. One caveat is that the Tom Swift Jr books were aimed at 1950's boys (since only boys did science in the 1950's), and may not hold the interest of modern girls; of course, your mileage and children may vary.
Obligatory quotations:
Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit...
The cockpit...what is it?
It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important right now.
You ever been in a cockpit before?
I've never been up in a plane before.
You ever seen a grown man naked?
I'm curious how this study would generalize from Great Britain (and other areas with extensive, heavily-used public transportation) to the United States, and from subways to busses. I'm in the U.S., and used to ride the bus to work. I noticed that many of the people on the bus were people who probably didn't have a car, or wouldn't be able to use one. These people appeared to be either too poor to afford to operate a car, or had some obvious mental disability that prevented them from operating one (admittedly this bus route went past the adult day-care center, so the rider population was skewed).
I became very guarded on the bus rides out of a desire to not interact with either of these groups. I didn't want to interact with the obviously mentally disabled because of their disability; yes, I'm a rat bastard, but I'm just not interested in a broken 20-minute conversation using poorly rendered monosyllabic words. I didn't want to interact with poor people because they may have also been disabled (and unable to hold a good job), or they might have been interested in initiating a spontanious unilateral redistribution of wealth.
So I can understand how people might be more paranoid on public transportation, as may mix many different parts of society, and some of those parts may not like the other parts. I've thought, since my experience, that a bus route with a high cost of ridership (say $5-$7 per ride), would have been much nicer, even with no improvements to bus vehicles, just due to the higher barrier of entry.
I'm out of practice in ass-packing so I could be misremembering, but I seem to recall that the weight of an assload varied with the contents. Kinda like how a bushel of wheat weighs differently than a bushel of oats. So you should check with one of the standard engineering references before specifying assloads.
Incidentally, a butt-load is around 126 American gallons.
I find that usually the slowest part of waiting in line at the local Super Wal-Mart is, well, waiting in line. They must have 30 lanes available for purchases, but rarely are a significant fraction of them open. I guess they have figured out the maximum wait-time people will tolerate, and have adjusted their staffing to meet this level. I think it would be excellent if all the lanes were open, but I could see that they could be in a situation where many cashiers are just waiting around to service customers.
Of course, the 1 second RFID package scan could alleviate this, but it does seem like a very technology-heavy solution to just hiring a few more people.
I agree that a "future war" setting would make a pretty neat summer blockbuster. The number of ways you could frame the start of the war, especially if you already planned to make a trilogy, would give a competent director a lot of latitude for being creative and exciting. I understand your "no romance, no politics" request. I'm not sure that level of restriction would be necessary, though you could certainly do an awesome movie without it (the romance and politics).
I think two of the keys would be, as I mentioned, a competent director (and a competent scriptwriter), and not making the movie too much like the Matrix trilogy. You would think a competent director and writer would be a necessity for any film, but because of the huge flexibility offered in making what would effectively be a war epic, you would need a director and writer who were competent enough to know what elements they wanted to focus on and what they would not be good at writing or directing. And not, to re-enforce your comment, lose sight of the fact that this would be a war epic and make some horrible 1950's ro-bot invasion B-grade romance movie (though some cybernetic bodice ripping might be... interesting).
I mention the Matrix trilogy simply because the Terminator series and the Matrix series have some similar elements (robots taking over the world) and wouldn't want to see the new movies just ripping off the Matrix stuff. I would rather they develop their own unique outlook and style, and it would be critical for the (competent) writer and director to not fall into the trap of copying the existing material.
Anyway, I think if we could get some good people on this, there would be an opportunity for some additional expansion of the franchise in a new direction. On the other hand, this could wind up being a giant flop if not-good people do the work.
You are right about the shitty customers, especially the ones who just tear into a box and leave it a complete mess. I feel bad when I see those boxes on the shelves, and think, "Well, there's another sale lost", 'cause who wants to buy the torn up box.
On the other hand, usually when I open a box in a store, it is because there isn't a floor display for that particular product, and I want to make sure I am getting exactly the right thing before I buy it. Or I may want to look at the manual and verify that the product is compatible with the equipment I already have. What would be great is if stores had signs that directed the customer on how to see a opened product or manual if there isn't one right by the product. It would be awesome if I could simply ask the employee directly, but with the rate of change of things, and the low quality of some of today's employees, I don't think they would be able to give me the answer, nor would I be able to trust them if I did.
Let it not be said that MtG taught us nothing.
HULK SMASH PUNY COMET
I had been thinking about how much it sucks to go the landfill with my garbage, and how much it sucks to mow my lawn. I recycle a lot of stuff, but I still produce a lot of non-recyclable food and paper waste. I would compost, but I don't have anything I could do with the compost.
Cellulose, one of the primary components of grass and other plants, is a polymer of glucose, and can be converted back into glucose by the action of several natural enzymes (like the ones found in the bacteria in the guts of termites) and by concentrated sulfuric acid. Glucose, under the action of additonal enzymes, like those found in yeast, can be turned into ethanol. I did some research, and it turns out a company called Arkenol Fuels already has a factory that implements this process with sulfuric acid.
My thought was that it would be excellent to develope smaller, at-home version of this process. If it also used sulfuric acid (as opposed to the termite enzymes), you could probably put just about any cellulose-containing or food waste into the process, and get out fuel for an automobile.
The "something you have/something you know/something you are" paradigm for security is a good place to start (doubtlessly there are better forms overall, but the current state of security is so bad that most anything would be an improvement). However, whenever I hear this paradigm being being espoused, the thought that comes to my paranoid/gristly mind is that many of the something-you-ares that would be useful security measures are just something-you-haves that you have a lot tighter than an ID card. Of course, you are probably aware a lot sooner if someone steals you thumb than if they steal you badge or password. 'Course, if they tied you up first...
In any event, if you are building a something-you-have detector, it would be good to have it verify that the something you have is still attached to you, probably by measuring the presence of a pulse.
Also consider the difference between Polish and polish in English. The first is a nationality, the second is something you rub on wood.
Another DVD you might want to check out is "Titus" featuring Anthony Hopkins. It is a version of "Titus Andronicus", with all the original wording, but set in a modernistic Roman empire. I wish my teacher had shown us this in high-school English.
This is off-topic, but I noticed the line "I guess being a small country means that you have to find interesting things to mention elsewhere..." can be parsed two different ways. :-)
Hmm, now we'll finally be rid of all those pesky migratory birds and be able to build our microwave beam power satellites in peace.
William and Mary had this problem. The refurbished the student union, and one of the new additions was two FREE pinball machines. To many people, myself included, this was manna from heaven. But because people used the machines so much, they started failing at a ridiculous rate. Eventually, they started charging a quarter to play the games. I don't think this was to recoupe the repair costs, but to reduce the usage of the games to a point where they weren't breaking weekly.