"ONE OF Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled.
"No," Einstein answered. "Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?"
In fact, Einstein claimed never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes."
This reminded me of my high school AP Chemistry class. We had to memorize the first 100 elements in order by atomic number, along with their weight and family. Fast forward 12 years and I've since earned a Ph.D. in chemistry but I definitely couldn't list those elements--that's what a periodic chart of the elements is for. It also missed a bit on why the chart is organized is the way it is. Still, that class was taught by any standard a great teacher--but great teachers can still make mistakes sometimes.
Amid a bunch of other stuff, talkorigins has a nice photgraph of bones from the hindleg of a humpback whale, specifically a femur, tibia, tarsus, and metatarsal. This dolphin's rear fins will be similarly composed, and not at all like fish fins in skeletal structure. It'll be pretty cool to see how it compares to other known cetacean rear legs from both modern examples and the fossil record once they X-ray the fins.
Some quick googling turned up this page where you can buy a 1 pound tin of paddlefish (a relative of sturgeon) caviar for $553, or for you cheapskates 2 oz for $72. A second page has Caspian Sea sturgeon caviar for $600/lb, for a mix of Osetra and Sevruga eggs, or $1600/lb for Imperial Ossetra "Malossol" caviar. I don't pretend to know jack about caviar, I've never had any and never will (alergic to fish--tastes like itching), but it's insanely expensive. The reward for such high priced, apparently tasty eggs is that most species of sturgeon are critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable, according to the entry on almighty wikipedia, or you can look up sturgeon on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) website.
"They're not legal to mix. Nor are they as compact and effective as actual military weapons. The Iraqis aren't wasting their time making home-brewed concoctions like that; they've got real explosives."
If somebody's going to try and overthrow the government, they don't give a damn about legality. For the second part I wrote that an insurgency would knock off armories to obtain heavy weapons in quantity. Also in a revolution, the military and police aren't necessarily going to be the enemy in every case--that certainly is true of the situation in Iraq. Even without heavy weapons from the military, a car laden with a couple hundred pounds of fertilizer and fuel would be able to disable even a tank, or obliterate a HMMWV, which in an urban environment wouldn't be too hard to pull off.
"Anyway, who the hell cares about what ineffective popguns joe sixpack might have? Even in the most poverty-stricken 3rd world countries, rebel forces have no problems getting their hands on real military weapons. Why do so many people here fantasize that they could try using their Wal-Mart ordnance in a real war and have any chance to survive?
You're also missing out that we're not talking about a "real war." We're talking about a revolution/insurgency. That means, just like in Iraq, you don't go toe-to-toe with the military. You harrass them, attack isolated and vulnerable positions, patrols, convoys, and then slip away into the population. You don't need military weapons to do this, although before long you'll have them from taking out a few positions and patrols. Think about the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002 and how terrorized DC was, how many people were killed and injured, and how long it took for Malvo and Muhammad to be captured. Imagine that multiplied by a few thousand who are specifically targeting military, police, and government officials. Those kinds of attacks could be done by anyone with reasonable skill and with any kind of rifle.
What exactly is "legal" (ignoring a little thing called the Bill of Rights for a minute) varies from state to state. If you live in New Jersey, you have to go and be fingerprinted at the police station like a common criminal if you own so much as a pellet gun. Conversely in some other states (such as Vermont) you can own a machinegun, although restrictions vary from state to state. Many more states allow assault rifles. But even in the least free states, fertilizer and fuel is perfectly legal and go boom very nicely. A couple of bombs like that at some armories and you might see American revolutionaries/insurgents/terrorists/whatever armed with something similar to the Iraqi's IEDs. Of course one can't really see many Americans taking up arms against the government, especially since the ones who are the angriest right now are also the ones who've demanded that the government free them from their right to bear arms.
"The biggest improvement I got in shaving was when I stopped using shaving cream..."
Yeah me too. But then I also stopped shaving. It's been six years and I don't miss it a bit. A beard is also pretty forgiving; I only have to trim it about every three weeks.
"How many failures does it take before those providing the crap equipment are sued and forced to FIX the results of their incompetent designs and testing?"
The results ARE fixed. Oh. You meant fix the machines, not the elections. Nevermind.
Yup, that eeevil librul media. If you compare the media's treatment of Clinton over the Whitewater witch hunt or his getting a blowjob and lying to Congress about it, versus Bush and Enron, Katrina, the Iraq war fiasco, foreign relations in the crapper, the 2000 and 2004 election scandals, no WMDs in Iraq, Valerie Plame, no Iraq-9/11 connection, lowering taxes in the middle of *TWO* ground wars, just to name a few, you can't but help to notice Bush's scandals receive a lot less intense coverage and is much less critical. But then a a neocon isn't satisfied with the treatment of current events unless the media Gannons it.
We love dogs because they could kill us, but won't.
We love cats because they want to kill us, but can't.
Although for dogs that excludes pampered rat-beasts for the first part and poorly trained psychotic attack dogs for the second. The second statement though is good for all cats at all times.
"It seems to me like across rest of the world there is a pretty solid consensus amongst people and scientists alike that global warming is real, and that humans are responsible for it. In the US however, opinion seems to be divided, and it seems to be divided roughly along party lines."
Most of the world's nations that contribute to climatology are well to the left of the US, and they and our slightly less conservative party (Democrats) are in agreement about global warming. Reality has a well-known liberal bias, so there you go. It's pretty simple, really.
a Diebold fraud machine with, that's the real challenge. Yesterday's challenge was a toenail clipping and was successfully met in only 9.4 seconds. Today's challenge is...a loogie!
There currently are efforts underway to clone the wooly mammoth, which you can read about in the National Geographic
You can read about neanderthals from a number of different sites, wikipedia has a pretty decent page, as does talkorigins on hominid evolution in general. Reconstructing the neanderthal genome will be of great interest to science and medicine. Based on the morphology of the fossil remains and their location chronologically, evolution makes some very specific predictions about what that reconstructed genome should look like. It should be highly similar to modern H. sapiens sapiens, much more so than the couple of percent difference between our genome and chimps. If it isn't, then the theory of evolution has a very bad problem. There will not be any spin about it one way or another from the scientific community--just facts and reasonable interpretation. The neanderthal genome, if reconstructed, will also be informative on some issues such as whether or not they interbreed with H. sapiens sapiens, time of divergence with the same, and may also provide highly detailed information about their ability to speak and possibly higher brain function, which will likely be of medical interest.
No, what'll be more "histericcal" is how leading Intelligent Design pushers/Creationists will spin yet another blow to their superstition.
That's really unusual. In my experience as a tech and later a grad student (biochemistry-related) it's a fairly standard deal that grant money can't be used for purchase of computer hardware unless it is an extremely specific item. For instance, we had to purchase a PC to run a fluorimeter we bought, and the fluorimeter and the PC were on the same bill purchased from the same company. If your lab needs to purchase new PCs for routine stuff like spreadsheets and word processing, you usually can only get them through discretionary funds. That's why every lab I've worked in the PCs were ancient--the last lab I worked in the best routine-stuff computer was a single, six year old mac clone before upgrading with a pair of 800 MHz celerons, which are now the best but four years old. With only one exception, these labs were all well-funded. Of course, outside of the life sciences I couldn't tell you what people can do with grant money. It is true that you really want to spend the whole grant so you don't get less when it's up for renewal, though.
This is fully in keeping with New Jersey's pathological hatred of the Bill of Rights. If you want to own so much as a BB gun in New Jersey, you have to be fingerprinted like a common criminal at the police station first, in flagrant violation of the 2nd and 4th amendments. This is just a continuation of their assault on the 4th.
Maybe the next president can reward her patriotic actions by awarding her the Medal of Freedom. That might remove a little of the tarnish that the award has gotten from W's awarding it to the likes of George "Saddam's got WMD's--slam dunk case" Tenet and L. Paul "$9 billion lost in fraud on my watch in Iraq" Bremer. It'd be nice that the actions of an awardee actually represented what this country used to stand for.
It seems like you could call this a variation of geocaching. Or maybe an international (and IMO cool weirdness) version of the Geological Society of America's earthcaching, where the "unique geoscience feature" is the entire freakin' planet.
The Russians have sent Tu-95 bombers and their recon variants nosing around American airspace just like we send surveillance aircraft to say howdy to them and the Chinese. Unless there's an accident you probably won't hear about it. As late as 1999 Russia sent Tu-95's up to Alaska and also out to Iceland. Since those Tu-95's are more or less the counterpart of our B-52, that's quite a bit more threatening than an unarmed converted passenger airliner, although back in the Cold War sometimes the American and Soviet aircrews waved to each other.
The US aircraft alluded to was a US Navy EP-3E Aries II, a slow four-engined turboprop plane based on a passenger airliner. It's a surveillance aircraft, not a spy plane. It's out in the open, in international airspace (usually), and a modern military will immediately pick up on where it is and what it's doing. It's completely dependent on international treaties to not get shot down by whoever it's checking out. A SR-71 or U-2 on a secrete high-altitude flight over a hostile nation it isn't.
Yeah. I figure any society that's applying only half of its available brainpower to science and engineering is going to have its ass handed to it by the society that doesn't care about gender...providing the citizens of whichever gender are really going for it and not being held back by bullshit sexism. Thinking about my own area of biochemistry, if you go back fifty years ago you only find a small handfull of women. Fast forward to 1975, and there's a small, but visible, minority. Go ahead to now and it's about 30-40% of the grad students. I'm actually going to postdoc under a woman professor starting later this summer. I didn't specifically pick out a woman, I followed the research and she's doing great stuff--that's my real critera. She isn't one of the women pioneers, but she is that generation following them. There's still problems in the life sciences, a postdoc I worked with is now the only woman professor at a state university chemistry department, and that fact is always present on her mind. I don't have a problem with a lot of these affirmative action things just because they can help kick down the barriers and jump start things and are better for society in the long term, even though they may hurt me personally. In 30 years affirmative action measures will be completely unnecessary in the life sciences, and who knows with the way things are going we might have affirmative action measures encouraging men to go into biology 50 years from now.
When I was an undergrad majoring in Mechanical Engineering, there never were more than 2 women in a class of ~30 men, and usually the two women were from overseas. Yet in high school, about half of the class in AP calculus were women. Could a lot of the women in my high school AP calc class do Mechanical Engineering? Sure. Were they interested? Hell no. That self-selection is a big part of the equation, but there's still sexism--I knew one woman who was discouraged from taking calculus in highschool because women were allegedly inferior to men in math, or so said her misogynic coach/math teacher. I ultimately switched to biochemistry, and went on to grad school. About 30-40% of the grad students were women. That gender gap at least in some sciences, especially the life sciences, is shrinking. In some cases there's actually more women than men.
What's so bad about a cape? I knew a postdoc who liked to show up at work every once in a while wearing a cape. Two years ago he managed to beat out over a hundred other applicants to win a professorship at a good university. As for the rest of your post I haven't a clue, I've never worked in national labs as anything more than a site user. But science seems to be pretty tolerant about personal appearance. Hell my brother's a Ph.D. chemical engineer working for Shell and he's got a couple massive tattoos and about a dozen piercings and they don't care, although he does square it up a little for work.
As long as they don't mess with the cool white deer or muck up the Advanced Photon Source, maybe I'm myopic but I don't see how a management shakeup of Argonne would be a big deal to the wider scientific community. I've been to Argonne West a few times, and one of the things that I remember is thinking man was it dilapidated...except for APS. APS is fuckin' sweet for us x-ray crystallographers, IIRC the second hottest source of xrays in the solar system after the sun. Even get some exercise racing tricycles around the ring at 3am if it's your shift for data collection (the synchrotron ring's over 1 km in circumference, those suckers are necessary for the engineering staff). If a management shakeup results in the rest of Argonne doing as well as the APS, well, kick ass.
A modification I'd really like to see is one that removes a card at random from the Solitaire deck. Even better would be virus or malware whatever that will do this to existing installs without the user's knowledge, or at least not until they lose a few dozen games in a row but finally find themselves about to win but are missing the six of spades or something.
Rumsfeld: We're invading Iraq to take their oil...I mean, destroy their WMDs!
Shinseki: Okay, that'll take several hundred thousand men.
Rumsfeld: Nonsense! It'll take six Special Forces guys armed with bananas!
Shinseki: No, it'll take several hundred thousand men.
Rumsfeld: Who's the expert here soldier? You with your decades of hands-on military experience or me with my |337 Risk skillz?
Shinseki:...
Rumsfeld: Okay, just to make you feel better, we'll send Rambo as backup.
Shinseki: [shakes head in disbelief] Sir, Rambo is a fictional character.
Rumsfeld: YOU'RE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER!
Shinseki: Calm down, sir. After we beat the Iraqi Army, "Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers...would be required. We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground- force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this." Again, that's several hundred thousand pairs of boots on the ground!
Rumsfeld: Boots...why didn't you say so in the first place! Here's the plan: six heavily banana-laden Special Forces guys (backed by Rambo with a big, pointy knife) will fly in with cargo blimps and pummel Iraq with hundreds of thousands of brand new boots until they surrender their oil.
Shinski: There's so much wrong with that I don't even know where to begin.
Rumsfeld: Maybe you're right. Forget new boots, just get the boots from the Marines after they complete basic training. Nice and stinky--that'll show the Iranians!
Shinseki: You mean Iraqis.
Rumsfeld: Well, for now at least.
Shinseki: Exactly how many countries is this administration planning on invading? We don't have enough troops! Iraq alone will require several hundred thousand men!
Shinseki: What is your fascination with "several hundred thousand men?" Are you gay? I'll bet that's it. You just told me you're gay, so under "Don't ask, don't tell" you told, so you're fired!
Shinseki: [resists urge to strangle jabbering senile old fool]Sir, I don't know what world you live on, but it isn't the same one as the rest of us. Reality isn't subjective. Iraq will require several hundred thousand troops.
Rumsfeld: [pouts]Haven't you heard? We're all postmodernists in this administration. Reality is what we say it is, so if I say six soldiers armed with bananas (supported by Rambo and a big pointy knife) can successfully secure Iraq's vast oil wealth by dropping several hundred thousand pairs of stinky boots from cargo blimps, then by God that's what will happen or my name isn't Queen Elizabeth the Great!
Quote taken from wikipedia from exchange between Senator Levin and General Shinseki before the Senate Armed Forces Committee.
If you can fry an egg on a CPU, then it shouldn't be too hard to toast bread with your computer. A converted CD Rom drive aligned with the CPU might be made to accomodate a Pop-Tart...
Slashdot Mirror
"ONE OF Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled. "No," Einstein answered. "Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?" In fact, Einstein claimed never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes."
This reminded me of my high school AP Chemistry class. We had to memorize the first 100 elements in order by atomic number, along with their weight and family. Fast forward 12 years and I've since earned a Ph.D. in chemistry but I definitely couldn't list those elements--that's what a periodic chart of the elements is for. It also missed a bit on why the chart is organized is the way it is. Still, that class was taught by any standard a great teacher--but great teachers can still make mistakes sometimes.
Amid a bunch of other stuff, talkorigins has a nice photgraph of bones from the hindleg of a humpback whale, specifically a femur, tibia, tarsus, and metatarsal. This dolphin's rear fins will be similarly composed, and not at all like fish fins in skeletal structure. It'll be pretty cool to see how it compares to other known cetacean rear legs from both modern examples and the fossil record once they X-ray the fins.
Some quick googling turned up this page where you can buy a 1 pound tin of paddlefish (a relative of sturgeon) caviar for $553, or for you cheapskates 2 oz for $72. A second page has Caspian Sea sturgeon caviar for $600/lb, for a mix of Osetra and Sevruga eggs, or $1600/lb for Imperial Ossetra "Malossol" caviar. I don't pretend to know jack about caviar, I've never had any and never will (alergic to fish--tastes like itching), but it's insanely expensive. The reward for such high priced, apparently tasty eggs is that most species of sturgeon are critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable, according to the entry on almighty wikipedia, or you can look up sturgeon on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) website.
"They're not legal to mix. Nor are they as compact and effective as actual military weapons. The Iraqis aren't wasting their time making home-brewed concoctions like that; they've got real explosives."
If somebody's going to try and overthrow the government, they don't give a damn about legality. For the second part I wrote that an insurgency would knock off armories to obtain heavy weapons in quantity. Also in a revolution, the military and police aren't necessarily going to be the enemy in every case--that certainly is true of the situation in Iraq. Even without heavy weapons from the military, a car laden with a couple hundred pounds of fertilizer and fuel would be able to disable even a tank, or obliterate a HMMWV, which in an urban environment wouldn't be too hard to pull off.
"Anyway, who the hell cares about what ineffective popguns joe sixpack might have? Even in the most poverty-stricken 3rd world countries, rebel forces have no problems getting their hands on real military weapons. Why do so many people here fantasize that they could try using their Wal-Mart ordnance in a real war and have any chance to survive?
You're also missing out that we're not talking about a "real war." We're talking about a revolution/insurgency. That means, just like in Iraq, you don't go toe-to-toe with the military. You harrass them, attack isolated and vulnerable positions, patrols, convoys, and then slip away into the population. You don't need military weapons to do this, although before long you'll have them from taking out a few positions and patrols. Think about the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002 and how terrorized DC was, how many people were killed and injured, and how long it took for Malvo and Muhammad to be captured. Imagine that multiplied by a few thousand who are specifically targeting military, police, and government officials. Those kinds of attacks could be done by anyone with reasonable skill and with any kind of rifle.
What exactly is "legal" (ignoring a little thing called the Bill of Rights for a minute) varies from state to state. If you live in New Jersey, you have to go and be fingerprinted at the police station like a common criminal if you own so much as a pellet gun. Conversely in some other states (such as Vermont) you can own a machinegun, although restrictions vary from state to state. Many more states allow assault rifles. But even in the least free states, fertilizer and fuel is perfectly legal and go boom very nicely. A couple of bombs like that at some armories and you might see American revolutionaries/insurgents/terrorists/whatever armed with something similar to the Iraqi's IEDs. Of course one can't really see many Americans taking up arms against the government, especially since the ones who are the angriest right now are also the ones who've demanded that the government free them from their right to bear arms.
"The biggest improvement I got in shaving was when I stopped using shaving cream..."
Yeah me too. But then I also stopped shaving. It's been six years and I don't miss it a bit. A beard is also pretty forgiving; I only have to trim it about every three weeks.
"How many failures does it take before those providing the crap equipment are sued and forced to FIX the results of their incompetent designs and testing?"
The results ARE fixed. Oh. You meant fix the machines, not the elections. Nevermind.
Yup, that eeevil librul media. If you compare the media's treatment of Clinton over the Whitewater witch hunt or his getting a blowjob and lying to Congress about it, versus Bush and Enron, Katrina, the Iraq war fiasco, foreign relations in the crapper, the 2000 and 2004 election scandals, no WMDs in Iraq, Valerie Plame, no Iraq-9/11 connection, lowering taxes in the middle of *TWO* ground wars, just to name a few, you can't but help to notice Bush's scandals receive a lot less intense coverage and is much less critical. But then a a neocon isn't satisfied with the treatment of current events unless the media Gannons it.
We love dogs because they could kill us, but won't.
We love cats because they want to kill us, but can't.
Although for dogs that excludes pampered rat-beasts for the first part and poorly trained psychotic attack dogs for the second. The second statement though is good for all cats at all times.
"It seems to me like across rest of the world there is a pretty solid consensus amongst people and scientists alike that global warming is real, and that humans are responsible for it. In the US however, opinion seems to be divided, and it seems to be divided roughly along party lines."
Most of the world's nations that contribute to climatology are well to the left of the US, and they and our slightly less conservative party (Democrats) are in agreement about global warming. Reality has a well-known liberal bias, so there you go. It's pretty simple, really.
a Diebold fraud machine with, that's the real challenge. Yesterday's challenge was a toenail clipping and was successfully met in only 9.4 seconds. Today's challenge is...a loogie!
There currently are efforts underway to clone the wooly mammoth, which you can read about in the National Geographic
You can read about neanderthals from a number of different sites, wikipedia has a pretty decent page, as does talkorigins on hominid evolution in general. Reconstructing the neanderthal genome will be of great interest to science and medicine. Based on the morphology of the fossil remains and their location chronologically, evolution makes some very specific predictions about what that reconstructed genome should look like. It should be highly similar to modern H. sapiens sapiens, much more so than the couple of percent difference between our genome and chimps. If it isn't, then the theory of evolution has a very bad problem. There will not be any spin about it one way or another from the scientific community--just facts and reasonable interpretation. The neanderthal genome, if reconstructed, will also be informative on some issues such as whether or not they interbreed with H. sapiens sapiens, time of divergence with the same, and may also provide highly detailed information about their ability to speak and possibly higher brain function, which will likely be of medical interest.
No, what'll be more "histericcal" is how leading Intelligent Design pushers/Creationists will spin yet another blow to their superstition.
That's really unusual. In my experience as a tech and later a grad student (biochemistry-related) it's a fairly standard deal that grant money can't be used for purchase of computer hardware unless it is an extremely specific item. For instance, we had to purchase a PC to run a fluorimeter we bought, and the fluorimeter and the PC were on the same bill purchased from the same company. If your lab needs to purchase new PCs for routine stuff like spreadsheets and word processing, you usually can only get them through discretionary funds. That's why every lab I've worked in the PCs were ancient--the last lab I worked in the best routine-stuff computer was a single, six year old mac clone before upgrading with a pair of 800 MHz celerons, which are now the best but four years old. With only one exception, these labs were all well-funded. Of course, outside of the life sciences I couldn't tell you what people can do with grant money. It is true that you really want to spend the whole grant so you don't get less when it's up for renewal, though.
This is fully in keeping with New Jersey's pathological hatred of the Bill of Rights. If you want to own so much as a BB gun in New Jersey, you have to be fingerprinted like a common criminal at the police station first, in flagrant violation of the 2nd and 4th amendments. This is just a continuation of their assault on the 4th.
Maybe the next president can reward her patriotic actions by awarding her the Medal of Freedom. That might remove a little of the tarnish that the award has gotten from W's awarding it to the likes of George "Saddam's got WMD's--slam dunk case" Tenet and L. Paul "$9 billion lost in fraud on my watch in Iraq" Bremer. It'd be nice that the actions of an awardee actually represented what this country used to stand for.
It seems like you could call this a variation of geocaching. Or maybe an international (and IMO cool weirdness) version of the Geological Society of America's earthcaching, where the "unique geoscience feature" is the entire freakin' planet.
The Russians have sent Tu-95 bombers and their recon variants nosing around American airspace just like we send surveillance aircraft to say howdy to them and the Chinese. Unless there's an accident you probably won't hear about it. As late as 1999 Russia sent Tu-95's up to Alaska and also out to Iceland. Since those Tu-95's are more or less the counterpart of our B-52, that's quite a bit more threatening than an unarmed converted passenger airliner, although back in the Cold War sometimes the American and Soviet aircrews waved to each other.
The US aircraft alluded to was a US Navy EP-3E Aries II, a slow four-engined turboprop plane based on a passenger airliner. It's a surveillance aircraft, not a spy plane. It's out in the open, in international airspace (usually), and a modern military will immediately pick up on where it is and what it's doing. It's completely dependent on international treaties to not get shot down by whoever it's checking out. A SR-71 or U-2 on a secrete high-altitude flight over a hostile nation it isn't.
Yeah. I figure any society that's applying only half of its available brainpower to science and engineering is going to have its ass handed to it by the society that doesn't care about gender...providing the citizens of whichever gender are really going for it and not being held back by bullshit sexism. Thinking about my own area of biochemistry, if you go back fifty years ago you only find a small handfull of women. Fast forward to 1975, and there's a small, but visible, minority. Go ahead to now and it's about 30-40% of the grad students. I'm actually going to postdoc under a woman professor starting later this summer. I didn't specifically pick out a woman, I followed the research and she's doing great stuff--that's my real critera. She isn't one of the women pioneers, but she is that generation following them. There's still problems in the life sciences, a postdoc I worked with is now the only woman professor at a state university chemistry department, and that fact is always present on her mind. I don't have a problem with a lot of these affirmative action things just because they can help kick down the barriers and jump start things and are better for society in the long term, even though they may hurt me personally. In 30 years affirmative action measures will be completely unnecessary in the life sciences, and who knows with the way things are going we might have affirmative action measures encouraging men to go into biology 50 years from now.
When I was an undergrad majoring in Mechanical Engineering, there never were more than 2 women in a class of ~30 men, and usually the two women were from overseas. Yet in high school, about half of the class in AP calculus were women. Could a lot of the women in my high school AP calc class do Mechanical Engineering? Sure. Were they interested? Hell no. That self-selection is a big part of the equation, but there's still sexism--I knew one woman who was discouraged from taking calculus in highschool because women were allegedly inferior to men in math, or so said her misogynic coach/math teacher. I ultimately switched to biochemistry, and went on to grad school. About 30-40% of the grad students were women. That gender gap at least in some sciences, especially the life sciences, is shrinking. In some cases there's actually more women than men.
What's so bad about a cape? I knew a postdoc who liked to show up at work every once in a while wearing a cape. Two years ago he managed to beat out over a hundred other applicants to win a professorship at a good university. As for the rest of your post I haven't a clue, I've never worked in national labs as anything more than a site user. But science seems to be pretty tolerant about personal appearance. Hell my brother's a Ph.D. chemical engineer working for Shell and he's got a couple massive tattoos and about a dozen piercings and they don't care, although he does square it up a little for work.
As long as they don't mess with the cool white deer or muck up the Advanced Photon Source, maybe I'm myopic but I don't see how a management shakeup of Argonne would be a big deal to the wider scientific community. I've been to Argonne West a few times, and one of the things that I remember is thinking man was it dilapidated...except for APS. APS is fuckin' sweet for us x-ray crystallographers, IIRC the second hottest source of xrays in the solar system after the sun. Even get some exercise racing tricycles around the ring at 3am if it's your shift for data collection (the synchrotron ring's over 1 km in circumference, those suckers are necessary for the engineering staff). If a management shakeup results in the rest of Argonne doing as well as the APS, well, kick ass.
A modification I'd really like to see is one that removes a card at random from the Solitaire deck. Even better would be virus or malware whatever that will do this to existing installs without the user's knowledge, or at least not until they lose a few dozen games in a row but finally find themselves about to win but are missing the six of spades or something.
It's a little more like this:
...
Rumsfeld: We're invading Iraq to take their oil...I mean, destroy their WMDs!
Shinseki: Okay, that'll take several hundred thousand men.
Rumsfeld: Nonsense! It'll take six Special Forces guys armed with bananas!
Shinseki: No, it'll take several hundred thousand men.
Rumsfeld: Who's the expert here soldier? You with your decades of hands-on military experience or me with my |337 Risk skillz?
Shinseki:
Rumsfeld: Okay, just to make you feel better, we'll send Rambo as backup.
Shinseki: [shakes head in disbelief] Sir, Rambo is a fictional character.
Rumsfeld: YOU'RE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER!
Shinseki: Calm down, sir. After we beat the Iraqi Army, "Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers...would be required. We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground- force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this." Again, that's several hundred thousand pairs of boots on the ground!
Rumsfeld: Boots...why didn't you say so in the first place! Here's the plan: six heavily banana-laden Special Forces guys (backed by Rambo with a big, pointy knife) will fly in with cargo blimps and pummel Iraq with hundreds of thousands of brand new boots until they surrender their oil.
Shinski: There's so much wrong with that I don't even know where to begin.
Rumsfeld: Maybe you're right. Forget new boots, just get the boots from the Marines after they complete basic training. Nice and stinky--that'll show the Iranians!
Shinseki: You mean Iraqis.
Rumsfeld: Well, for now at least.
Shinseki: Exactly how many countries is this administration planning on invading? We don't have enough troops! Iraq alone will require several hundred thousand men!
Shinseki: What is your fascination with "several hundred thousand men?" Are you gay? I'll bet that's it. You just told me you're gay, so under "Don't ask, don't tell" you told, so you're fired!
Shinseki: [resists urge to strangle jabbering senile old fool]Sir, I don't know what world you live on, but it isn't the same one as the rest of us. Reality isn't subjective. Iraq will require several hundred thousand troops.
Rumsfeld: [pouts]Haven't you heard? We're all postmodernists in this administration. Reality is what we say it is, so if I say six soldiers armed with bananas (supported by Rambo and a big pointy knife) can successfully secure Iraq's vast oil wealth by dropping several hundred thousand pairs of stinky boots from cargo blimps, then by God that's what will happen or my name isn't Queen Elizabeth the Great!
Quote taken from wikipedia from exchange between Senator Levin and General Shinseki before the Senate Armed Forces Committee.
If you can fry an egg on a CPU, then it shouldn't be too hard to toast bread with your computer. A converted CD Rom drive aligned with the CPU might be made to accomodate a Pop-Tart...