If grad school has at best a questionable return, how could a postdoc - indentured servitude, slavery - be any better an idea?
In plain English, it's cheap labor. As I understand it, once upon a time in America, somebody reasonably good who got their Ph.D. could move to a faculty position fairly quickly. Not tenured at first of course, but likely tenure track. When we started getting more Ph.D.'s than we needed, they invented the post-doc. String 'em along, get lots of cheap labor, and every once in a while give somebody a faculty position so the rest could dream. But hey, everybody knows we've got a STEM shortage, right?
Back in the 80's the NSF pushed for a big increase in student visas. They noted that it would probably push down the salaries of Ph.D.'s, though I'm sure that wasn't a motivation.
Speaking from my experience in the physical sciences:
Postdocs are not cheap labor, at least by academic standards. Funding schemes vary, but grad students are often free, meaning you only have to dig up money for consumables/materials/etc. Those that aren't free are relatively cheap, again, depending on the system, some can have their salaries (and tuition) paid by being teaching assistants. If you want them to spend more time in the lab, you can pay their (paltry) salaries. They also have scholarships available.
Hiring a postdoc means hiring a "real" employee on a temporary contract. Most universities have fixed pay scales or guidelines, but that is the gross salary for the postdoc. The overhead for a postdoc is comparatively enormous because you have to pay for insurance, pensions, employer tax contributions, etc. In exchange you get someone with a PhD devoting 100% of their effort to your research. They aren't making six figures because their goal is to publish papers, which is best done in an academic lab. Also, the low pay acts as an incentive for them to move on... at least, in theory. Usually, though, if they stay on long enough they become "senior research assistants" or whatever, and move up the pay scale.
Also, it's not like academic pay scales are that great for anyone. Assistant professors make considerably less than their industry counterparts and work considerably more. The traditional ways to make money in academia are to be famous enough that other universities want to poach you and companies will pay you for consulting or to found a spinoff. The rest are stuck with standard pay scales. It's the coaches and administrators that pull down the big bucks. If you're curious, the state of California publishes the salaries of all UC professors.
Keep in mind that most/all of the costs for hiring postdocs are funded from an increasingly small pool of grant money. We're not talking about private companies, we're talking about a professor trying to keep cash flowing into the lab by competing for grants, which means publishing papers, which is best accomplished by postdocs, and so on.
I think--but I'm not at all sure--that the modern postdoc is closer to what we used to call an assistant professor. In the "old" system (which is still in place in much of Europe) assistant professors were literally assistants to a full professor. They would work in a lab for years until the full professor retired, at which point one would be promoted (via associate professor). An assistant professor in that capacity functions just like a modern postdoc. We now use the term assistant professor to mean "tenure-track professor," which is basically a postdoc that has five years to prove themselves capable or be fired (and of course takes on much more responsibility).
BTW I think the entire system is broken, but taking a principled stand will destroy your career. A professor who pays their postdocs 100k a year is at a competitive disadvantage and is likely to miss out on funding as a result. A postdoc who holds out for 100k a year will never be hired. What disturbs/saddens me is the seemingly endless supply of postdocs willing to work
In the U.S. we've been using High Fructose Corn Syrup as our sweetener for a couple decades now. Why import something natural when you can synthesize something much worse locally?
Tragically that is the result of political decisions ranging from Cold War era corn subsidies to trying to undermine the sugar cane industries in countries that we don't like. At one point there was simply too much corn being grown to consume, so industries started looking for other things to do with it. They have done some amazingly clever things, but also things like HFCS and ethanol. Eventually the food industry basically broke food into its constituent parts: fat, salt, and sugar. Fat from (hydrogenated) vegetable oil and sugar from refined corn. Toss in some texture from modified soy, maybe a bit of wheat, sprinkle salt on it and add some circus grade meat so you can put "beef" on the box--poof, Hot Pockets.
...so in a way, it's the government that made us fat.
youre body doesnt "decide" to poop out calories. who the hell taught you biology?
Food moves through the intestine at roughly a constant rate. If it takes more time to absorb calories than it does to make it to the colon, then those calories don't make it into your bloodstream. That is why liquid calories are so dangerous; they are very efficiently absorbed and don't contain the fiber, etc. necessary to feel full.
If I might add to your spot-on assertions: There was a documentary on obesity called The Weight of the Nation that quite clearly explains the differences in basal metabolic rates between two people.
Two women of the same size and weight are sitting at a table drinking tea (or whatever). One consumes 2000 calories a day as she always has and has never had a weight problem. The other struggled with weight her whole life and eventually dieted to get down to her current weight. She consumes 1300 calories a day to maintain that weight. The difference is in their base metabolic needs; the naturally thin woman is less calorie efficient than the dieting woman. Thus, if they eat the same amount of food--2000 calories a day--one women will keep her same weight, while the other will start gaining. That is also the core of the "yo-yo diet" problem.
There are all kinds of other examples, such as Native American populations that have lived off of fish and basic agriculture for centuries becoming obese and struggling with diabetes and heart disease because they gained access to McDonald's, while the near-by white populations remained unchanged.
I think that people confuse the fact that a calorie deficit will necessarily lead to weight loss with a linear relationship between food intake and metabolized calories when in reality everyone's ability to metabolize food into calories is different.
Really. So you think it is chemically the same as glucose? The difference is that sucrose provides half sucrose half fructose. The fructose gets metabolized in an entirely different way to the glucose.
The two main issues are that fructose by itself provides energy in such a way that it does not make the body feel "full", and that unlike the normal sugar we would expect (sucrose) we get no glucose from using it as an alternative.
Normal consumption of fructose in a natural setting also would include fibre which helps signal the body about satiation. This has been a major contributing factor in the whole "processed foods" vs "weight gain" issue. HCFS is a major component of most of the processed products that we rely on for our bulk energy needs. Really, do take a look at the lecture. The biochemistry component on how fructose gets metabolized in the liver is very interesting.
Most of what you said is spot-on, but fructose is not really metabolized differently than glucose. Both are six-carbon sugars and fructose is immediately rearranged to glucose enzymatically. But, again, not disagreeing with the rest of what you said--it makes a huge difference how we consume sugars and what they are consumed in combination with.
lol
fructose is just a disaccharide, its technically a more complex carb chain than glucose (monosaccharide). do you mean high fructose corn syrup? you're sort of right. typically what you see is HFCS55 which is 55% fructose and 41% glucose. to put it in perspective, granulated sugar is 50/50 fructose/glucose. so HFCS is only marginally more fructose than regular sugar, so you're wrong. but you're also right, because sugar, hfcs and all the other high glycemic carbs are what's really causing this problem.
Sucrose is cleaved into fructose and glucose by enzymes in the saliva, but there is also an odd glitch in our metabolic pathways that tends to divert energy derived from free fructose directly into fat storage instead of converting it all to glucose. One theory is that since fruits ripen during the warm months and fruits often contain an abundance of fructose, that it once served as a trigger to start storing fat for Winter, but who knows. The problem boils down to more calories in than out, but it can make a difference how those calories are consumed.
Solar has reached grid parity in Eurozone countries. The only way nuclear could undercut it now is if the entire continent stopped installing solar and diverted all their resources into nuke plants.
It seems like every person that breaths the same air as me at a conference, stumbles across my website, applies for a job, etc., tries to add me to their LinkedIn network. I get a zillion emails with "Someone you don't know and don't want to know wants to add you to their LinkedIn something something." And people keep setting up these groups for former members/employees of stuff, which just dilutes the pool of useful contacts further. LinkedIn is useful for keeping track of former colleagues (because we all move around a lot), and I do occasionally get non-spam from people finding me on LinkedIn, but the SNR is ridiculous.
If there's one thing that really annoys me on people from US, it's talking about Europeans. There's no such thing (no matter how much the European Union denies that). Europe is a geographical group of ~50 countries that are very (very very) different in all aspects. Did you know that Azerbaijan, Belarus or Georgia are European countries? (I have nothing against those countries, I'm just trying to explain that assuming all countries are like France, UK or Germany is pretty much nonsense). It's like talking about Americans when actually talking about people from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Canada because thay all live on continents with "America" in the name.
As an American living in Europe, I could not agree more with that statement. In fact, one of the bigger unifying forces seems to be disdain for the European Union and making fun of the French. (BTW Israel is also an associated country of the EU and I doubt anyone is thinking of Israelis when they say "European.") The idea that a Brit has more in common with a Finn than a collection of treaties their respective governments signed is just wrong. However, this was a difficult concept for me, as an American, to wrap my head around simply because countries here are so tiny (and have such long histories)... they're the size of states, they all belong to a big "union," therefore EU = US is an easy shorthand. It is really difficult to see things from the other side of the Atlantic until you spend a few years here because European countries don't export their culture (e.g., TV and movies) the same way as the US.
I'm not an armchair engineer, but I am a real scientist. And while I have never seen anything at this scale, I have read a lot of proposals. This one did not set off my general bullshit alarm.
I really, really like that Musk has everyone talking about the Hyperloop and the ancillary discussions of public transportation in general, but there are a couple of details that are glossed over in the big, long document. One is the acceleration/braking by linear induction motors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.
The second is holding a vacuum, ~0.001 Atm., through the whole tube. Has that ever been demonstrated on such a large scale? He shows some metrics from commercial pumps, but then seems to assume that they will scale constantly with volume... how many pumps? Spaced how? What sort of maintenance requirements? How long to pump down the shunts at stations where modules are loaded/unloaded? Vacuum is non-trivial at commercial scales. Perhaps this sort of thing is commonplace and I have just never seen it (and I have seen vacuum chambers that would accommodate a pickup truck). But it felt to me like he was making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to work with vacuum at those scales.
Those are both issues that can be demonstrated/prototyped, but it is as naive to say that the proposal was anything more than a whitepaper as it is to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
I don't think that is entirely true. The magnetic strip in my PIN card failed and it stopped working on other bank's ATMs. It continues to work fine with my bank's ATMs and in chip readers at retailers... But thanks for reminding me that I have to replace it before I go to the US : )
I haven't paid for TV in years. I just pirate everything that I can't find on Netflix. Not because I don't want to pay for something, or because I'm some kind of cheap ass looking to save a few bucks. I simply don't like paying $100+ a month to watch a few TV shows a week, which of course are laden with commercials. Unfortunately, this will always be an underground "war" until either the knowledge on how to safely pirate shows is commonplace, or there becomes actual competition in cable providers.
I'm content with things the way they are now, however. I watch what I want, when I want, and how I want, for either free or cheap. The ball is in their court now.
I pay for cable, but just don't watch it--I pirate everything instead and the since the fastest tier comes bundled with phone and TV, I pay for them too.
I just hate commercials so very much. Those jingles and catch phrases, the branding... it pollutes my brain and I resent it. (I will pollute my brain how I want to, thank you very much.) I am bothered by the fact that I remember commercials from my childhood so vividly. I still remember when a Hostess commercial ran twice in a row when I was six... with that dancing humanoid cupcake in the park telling me how delicious it was.
Once I got a VCR, I would record TV shows on VHS and watch them immediately after so that I could fast-forward through the commercials, but someone who likes uploading things to usenet now takes care of that for me.
I'm sure I belong to a tiny fraction of crazy people, but there are plenty of reasons to pirate besides saving money.
Being a good person is something that will always be good for you.
Demonstrably not true. And giving two weeks notice or not giving two weeks notice does not determine whether you are a good person or not. There are circumstances where not giving any notice is perfectly appropriate and justified. The reverse is sometimes true as well. If someone is treating me badly then I am going to leave. It's MY life and I'm not going to waste it trying to martyr myself proving how much better I am than someone I don't respect.
Being an asshole because you can not see any immediate ramifications of your poor decision does not make it a good one.
Cute (though false) way to frame the issue but first you need to prove that not giving two weeks notice somehow will prove to be a "poor decision". It might but since none of us can see the future with perfect clarity you're going to have a pretty hard case to make. Furthermore you'll have to prove how quitting immediately makes someone an "asshole". They might be one but that typically is established LONG before they leave their job.
Are you a parent? Because once you have kids, decisions can come back to bite you in the ass years later in ways that were not at all obvious at the time. I realize we are talking about the workplace, and understand your point, but being a good person and not an asshole is the first step towards raising kids who are good people and not assholes... sometimes I think children are the origin of parables and generalities about "doing the right thing" and "being a good person" even when you have nothing to gain. All that nonsense about setting a good example can easily follow you home from work.
Several of my organic chemistry courses were taught this way. Since there was no practical way of taking notes digitally at the time (which may still be the case?), we were forced to perfectly transcribe the structures into our notes. I still have most of those notes and can still draw near-perfect benzene rings... and am still picky about pens.
Could this spell the doom to future global releases, since the evidence is people just pirate them anyways?
Probably, but I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat: "The demise of broadcast TV and push-media in general." Now tell me what I've won!
I had no idea it was airing where I live, but why would I care when the "pirated" version is waiting for me to queue it up at my earliest convenience on myriad devices. (So is the Netflix version, but I use a region-unblocker for Netflix--is that still "piracy?")
As to european cities... the US operates on a completely different scale and density. Most major european cities are closer together then they are in the US. Which is why passenger rail makes less sense here.
To be clear, I meant flying between any two European cities works basically how it would if American cities connected mass transit to their airports in a meaningful way. Passenger rail in Europe is usually more expensive and slower than flying except, obviously, over distances too short to fly.
Having lived in both the Bay Area and LA and commuted between them frequently, it was almost always less hassle to drive than to fly. Sure the flight itself was short, but the traffic getting to/from the airports, parking, car rental, standing in long lines, being fondled by a stranger in a uniform, etc. was no match for the tedium of sitting behind the wheel for five hours or so. Making air travel anything less than the dehumanizing punishment that it is now may be impossible, given the inertia of the entrenched interests, but I-5 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Traveling between pretty much any two European cities (of reasonable size), where you have efficient mass-transit on both ends and no TSA, is basically what you propose for California, and it would be truly amazing... but as you point out, it would require building a mass transit system and linking it to the airport. And if BART and the LA Subway are any indication, that is a pipe dream for a fantasy world where politicians aren't corrupt assholes.
Much like Africa sort of skipped over landlines and went right to mobile, maybe California can pioneer a new form of medium-distance travel that is--and I think this is the most compelling argument Musk makes--sustainable. If this thing can really be powered entirely by solar panels on the tubes, then it could be a nice alternative to (medium-distance) air travel, which is currently the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation.
Well, you say that, but do have any evidence to back up that claim? (And editorials from Fox News or Cato do not count as evidence.) Also, why does it matter how someone dies from a gun? They're still dead. And it's a hell of a lot harder to kill someone accidentally with a knife than a gun.
Defensive homicides? You mean like when family members accidentally shoot each other because the think someone is breaking into the house? Those are still homicides, right? Defensive homicides are also a crime, by they way, except in extraordinary circumstances or in places with incredibly well thought out "stand your ground" laws. Or is there a rash of people staving off murders by shooting the would-be murder that I just didn't encounter living in the US for 30 years?
Now, watch this: The rate of firearm-related deaths per capita [wikipedia.org] is 10.23 in the US and 0.25 in the UK. The only countries (of the 75 listed) with higher rates than the US are: Panama, Mexico, Columbia, South Africa, Brazil, Swaziland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica. Interestingly, the country with the lowest rate, Japan, has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world [google.com]. Of course, I'm not suggesting a causal relationship, but I will point out that the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence.
Kinda hard to have gun-related deaths in societies that actively ban guns, you know. Got any stats on non-gun-related violent deaths in those countries? The numbers would probably surprise you as people tend to use weapons of opportunity.
Sure, here you go. (Hint: its still a factor of four or five higher, depending on if you include Eastern Europe.) And yes, in fact, it's impossible to have gun violence without guns, which is why they should be licensed and registered and people should have to have background checks and pass competency tests to own them.
Firearm deaths are irrelevant. Total homocides are what matters.
I completely agree. And the homicide rate is still higher in the US by a factor of four than Northern, Southern, and Western Europe. All those "Europe is super-violent" statistics include Eastern Europe. If we lump Central America in with the US, the homicide rates jumps to five times that of all of Europe combined.
If you ban guns but more people are killed with knives. It doesn't matter if your firearm deaths went down.
The US also has a much larger homicide rate by guns than almost the enture rest of the world. Are you arguing that if guns were regulated rationally in the US that all of the gun homicides would be replaced by non-gun homicides? Or that they would somehow increase? (No one is arguing for total prohibition here--just sensible regulations.)
Second, we have a gang problem fueld by a misguided drug war.
Misguided is putting it mildly.
Third, we have a very different legal system, one that has a habit of re-releasing violent criminals time and again. 85% of crime is done by the same criminals....
Recidivism is a problem the world over. However, the high statistic in the US is largely an artifact of the ridiculous drug laws; i.e., someone gets busted for possession, serves jail time, and then later robs a 7/11, poof--recidivism. (Thus wonderful policies like the California Three Strikes Law that lead to the Supreme Court ruling their prisons cruel and unusual punishment.)
I see, your basic argument is that it matters how people are killed with guns (that link actually breaks it out into intentional, suicide, accidental, and unknown BTW). The biggest difference between gun deaths and other forms of death is that the former is incredibly simple to prevent. Sure, you can tell people not to drive cars--that way they will never die in a traffic accident--but cars are much more useful to many more people than guns.
And I hope you realize that "gun control people" aren't a monolithic group of gun prohibitionists. I'm a hunter who owns many guns, has been shooting all my life (even competitively when I was younger). I just don't agree that any idiot that wants any kind of gun should be able to go out and buy as many as they want. Like cars--which are also lethal weapons when used improperly--I think guns should be licensed and registered and that gun owners should have to prove competency. Stupid people, the mentally ill, violent criminals, and children are good examples of people who should not be allowed to own firearms of any sort.
Nope. Although I am trolling in the sense that I'm curious to see how people rationalize their fervent belief that the world will come to end if any gun regulations are passed, I was shot at on several occasions. As I said, usually by idiots shooting downhill or without a clear field of view, sometimes by the crazy guy that shot at everything that crossed his property line, and on occasion by drunk rednecks. I should qualify by saying that lived in the middle of nowhere. No local police or city utilities (other than power) or paved roads or anything like that. Our neighbor used to train his dogs by shooting skeet off his back porch and we could barely hear it. I used to practice by shooting small tree branches and G.I Joe action figures with my scoped Ruger.22 semi-auto and walking cans with a.44 mag revolver (but that was an occasional treat because the cartridges were so expensive) which is insanely fun. My uncle was actually shot by his own uncle while out deer hunting, but they were bow hunting, so it "only" left a silver-dollar-sized hole in his calf.
Interestingly, I live in Europe and have yet to be killed by the roaming death-squads that are apparently rampant here. However, when I lived in the US I was shot at multiple times. Usually because some idiot was shooting downhill or mistook me getting off the school bus for a dear and only occasionally by our local lunatic that sat on his back porch shooting at anything that moved. Oh, and once or twice because I was "a damn hippie," but fortunately they were too drunk to hit the broad side of a barn.
But my point was about the lose definition of the word "fact." As in, according to Slashdot it is a well-known fact that Europe is a violent anarchist paradise and that the lack of guns here just breeds more tire iron and cricket bat assaults... usually against the elderly, who cower in fear, wishing they had the liberty to own a gun with which they could keep the kids off of their lawn.
You are too stuck in the MS fanboy idea of Windows, Excel, Word etc. and their market share making them 'Industry Standards'.
I run into this problem frequently. Windows is a zombie where I work because no one knows that there are alternatives. There is no official policy, yet the whole place has turned into a Microsoft shop for no reason. Apple seems completely uninterested in competing in the business world and so it goes, Microsoft claiming huge "market share" simply because it is familiar and fairly well supported/integrated at many places of employment. I chose to use OS X and Linux at work because I do a lot of work with command-line tools and Mac-only vector drawing programs. (And let's face it, farting around on Slashdot.)
What kills me is that, when I refuse to use our stupid Oracle calendar system because the native OS X client is several years out of date and buggy, and syncing it with my phone is harder than a shuttle launch, the zombies all chant "switch to a PC." (Where PC means our in-house Windows XP installation.) Their argument isn't that it is better, but that it has "more market share for a reason" and that it is "the industry standard" and "why do you have to be different anyway?" Arrrrgh.
I think you had the Cold War and 9/11 making people willing to give up rights to protect their government from attack, and plastic guns aren't something that even most gun enthusiasts relate to. Now the government is trying to take away the guns people own and prevent them from buying them as part of the Democrat road map to a total prohibition, and it's now or never for the frog to jump out of the boiling pot.
I'm not going to touch the baseless assertion that somehow we are on the precipice of complete gun prohibition despite there being more guns in circulation now than ever before. However, the Number One argument against any and all forms of gun regulation is that people may need to take up arms against their own government. What does it matter if gun enthusiasts relate to plastic or metal or ceramic guns--isn't the point supposed to be about protecting the unfettered access to firearms by the public? It makes no sense to me that high-capacity magazines and assault weapons (which I will define as weapons designed for use against humans) are sacred cows, but that banning any guns manufactured using certain materials or in certain shapes is just ducky.
As for airplanes, I think most people recognize them as a private vehicles, rather than public places, and thus not free zones. There is more cognitive dissonance with the "guns are bad" people on this issue, since they love seeing men with "military grade" assault weapons at airports, and enthusiastically support air marshals armed with "automatic pistols" with "high-capacity" magazines
I'm not sure to whom you are referring, but I know of no one that likes seeing assault weapons anywhere but on TV and the firing range. Nor do I know of anyone who specifically wants air marshals armed with automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines (or who even goes into that level of detail.) Train stations and airports in France are full of soldiers walking around with automatic weapons--supposedly to "send a message to would-be terrorists"--and it makes me feel nervous and oppressed. And what kind of message does that send to my son? Ditto for the militarized police at the airports in Chile. "Excuse me officer, nice machine gun, do you know where the cab stand is?" Also, why draw a distinction between private vehicles and private movie theaters? I constantly hear the argument that, if only more people had been armed, <insert mass murder> could have been avoided. What else is exempt from that argument besides air travel? Sporting events perhaps, like the 1996 Olympics? What about marathons?
Slashdot Mirror
If grad school has at best a questionable return, how could a postdoc - indentured servitude, slavery - be any better an idea?
In plain English, it's cheap labor. As I understand it, once upon a time in America, somebody reasonably good who got their Ph.D. could move to a faculty position fairly quickly. Not tenured at first of course, but likely tenure track. When we started getting more Ph.D.'s than we needed, they invented the post-doc. String 'em along, get lots of cheap labor, and every once in a while give somebody a faculty position so the rest could dream. But hey, everybody knows we've got a STEM shortage, right?
Back in the 80's the NSF pushed for a big increase in student visas. They noted that it would probably push down the salaries of Ph.D.'s, though I'm sure that wasn't a motivation.
Speaking from my experience in the physical sciences:
Postdocs are not cheap labor, at least by academic standards. Funding schemes vary, but grad students are often free, meaning you only have to dig up money for consumables/materials/etc. Those that aren't free are relatively cheap, again, depending on the system, some can have their salaries (and tuition) paid by being teaching assistants. If you want them to spend more time in the lab, you can pay their (paltry) salaries. They also have scholarships available.
Hiring a postdoc means hiring a "real" employee on a temporary contract. Most universities have fixed pay scales or guidelines, but that is the gross salary for the postdoc. The overhead for a postdoc is comparatively enormous because you have to pay for insurance, pensions, employer tax contributions, etc. In exchange you get someone with a PhD devoting 100% of their effort to your research. They aren't making six figures because their goal is to publish papers, which is best done in an academic lab. Also, the low pay acts as an incentive for them to move on... at least, in theory. Usually, though, if they stay on long enough they become "senior research assistants" or whatever, and move up the pay scale.
Also, it's not like academic pay scales are that great for anyone. Assistant professors make considerably less than their industry counterparts and work considerably more. The traditional ways to make money in academia are to be famous enough that other universities want to poach you and companies will pay you for consulting or to found a spinoff. The rest are stuck with standard pay scales. It's the coaches and administrators that pull down the big bucks. If you're curious, the state of California publishes the salaries of all UC professors.
Keep in mind that most/all of the costs for hiring postdocs are funded from an increasingly small pool of grant money. We're not talking about private companies, we're talking about a professor trying to keep cash flowing into the lab by competing for grants, which means publishing papers, which is best accomplished by postdocs, and so on.
I think--but I'm not at all sure--that the modern postdoc is closer to what we used to call an assistant professor. In the "old" system (which is still in place in much of Europe) assistant professors were literally assistants to a full professor. They would work in a lab for years until the full professor retired, at which point one would be promoted (via associate professor). An assistant professor in that capacity functions just like a modern postdoc. We now use the term assistant professor to mean "tenure-track professor," which is basically a postdoc that has five years to prove themselves capable or be fired (and of course takes on much more responsibility).
BTW I think the entire system is broken, but taking a principled stand will destroy your career. A professor who pays their postdocs 100k a year is at a competitive disadvantage and is likely to miss out on funding as a result. A postdoc who holds out for 100k a year will never be hired. What disturbs/saddens me is the seemingly endless supply of postdocs willing to work
You must be outside the U.S.
In the U.S. we've been using High Fructose Corn Syrup as our sweetener for a couple decades now. Why import something natural when you can synthesize something much worse locally?
Tragically that is the result of political decisions ranging from Cold War era corn subsidies to trying to undermine the sugar cane industries in countries that we don't like. At one point there was simply too much corn being grown to consume, so industries started looking for other things to do with it. They have done some amazingly clever things, but also things like HFCS and ethanol. Eventually the food industry basically broke food into its constituent parts: fat, salt, and sugar. Fat from (hydrogenated) vegetable oil and sugar from refined corn. Toss in some texture from modified soy, maybe a bit of wheat, sprinkle salt on it and add some circus grade meat so you can put "beef" on the box--poof, Hot Pockets.
...so in a way, it's the government that made us fat.
youre body doesnt "decide" to poop out calories. who the hell taught you biology?
Food moves through the intestine at roughly a constant rate. If it takes more time to absorb calories than it does to make it to the colon, then those calories don't make it into your bloodstream. That is why liquid calories are so dangerous; they are very efficiently absorbed and don't contain the fiber, etc. necessary to feel full.
If I might add to your spot-on assertions: There was a documentary on obesity called The Weight of the Nation that quite clearly explains the differences in basal metabolic rates between two people.
Two women of the same size and weight are sitting at a table drinking tea (or whatever). One consumes 2000 calories a day as she always has and has never had a weight problem. The other struggled with weight her whole life and eventually dieted to get down to her current weight. She consumes 1300 calories a day to maintain that weight. The difference is in their base metabolic needs; the naturally thin woman is less calorie efficient than the dieting woman. Thus, if they eat the same amount of food--2000 calories a day--one women will keep her same weight, while the other will start gaining. That is also the core of the "yo-yo diet" problem.
There are all kinds of other examples, such as Native American populations that have lived off of fish and basic agriculture for centuries becoming obese and struggling with diabetes and heart disease because they gained access to McDonald's, while the near-by white populations remained unchanged.
I think that people confuse the fact that a calorie deficit will necessarily lead to weight loss with a linear relationship between food intake and metabolized calories when in reality everyone's ability to metabolize food into calories is different.
Really. So you think it is chemically the same as glucose? The difference is that sucrose provides half sucrose half fructose. The fructose gets metabolized in an entirely different way to the glucose.
The two main issues are that fructose by itself provides energy in such a way that it does not make the body feel "full", and that unlike the normal sugar we would expect (sucrose) we get no glucose from using it as an alternative.
Normal consumption of fructose in a natural setting also would include fibre which helps signal the body about satiation. This has been a major contributing factor in the whole "processed foods" vs "weight gain" issue. HCFS is a major component of most of the processed products that we rely on for our bulk energy needs. Really, do take a look at the lecture. The biochemistry component on how fructose gets metabolized in the liver is very interesting.
Most of what you said is spot-on, but fructose is not really metabolized differently than glucose. Both are six-carbon sugars and fructose is immediately rearranged to glucose enzymatically. But, again, not disagreeing with the rest of what you said--it makes a huge difference how we consume sugars and what they are consumed in combination with.
lol fructose is just a disaccharide, its technically a more complex carb chain than glucose (monosaccharide). do you mean high fructose corn syrup? you're sort of right. typically what you see is HFCS55 which is 55% fructose and 41% glucose. to put it in perspective, granulated sugar is 50/50 fructose/glucose. so HFCS is only marginally more fructose than regular sugar, so you're wrong. but you're also right, because sugar, hfcs and all the other high glycemic carbs are what's really causing this problem.
Sucrose is cleaved into fructose and glucose by enzymes in the saliva, but there is also an odd glitch in our metabolic pathways that tends to divert energy derived from free fructose directly into fat storage instead of converting it all to glucose. One theory is that since fruits ripen during the warm months and fruits often contain an abundance of fructose, that it once served as a trigger to start storing fat for Winter, but who knows. The problem boils down to more calories in than out, but it can make a difference how those calories are consumed.
i am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh
i prefer the prieces of nuclear power.
Solar has reached grid parity in Eurozone countries. The only way nuclear could undercut it now is if the entire continent stopped installing solar and diverted all their resources into nuke plants.
It seems like every person that breaths the same air as me at a conference, stumbles across my website, applies for a job, etc., tries to add me to their LinkedIn network. I get a zillion emails with "Someone you don't know and don't want to know wants to add you to their LinkedIn something something." And people keep setting up these groups for former members/employees of stuff, which just dilutes the pool of useful contacts further. LinkedIn is useful for keeping track of former colleagues (because we all move around a lot), and I do occasionally get non-spam from people finding me on LinkedIn, but the SNR is ridiculous.
If there's one thing that really annoys me on people from US, it's talking about Europeans. There's no such thing (no matter how much the European Union denies that). Europe is a geographical group of ~50 countries that are very (very very) different in all aspects. Did you know that Azerbaijan, Belarus or Georgia are European countries? (I have nothing against those countries, I'm just trying to explain that assuming all countries are like France, UK or Germany is pretty much nonsense). It's like talking about Americans when actually talking about people from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Canada because thay all live on continents with "America" in the name.
As an American living in Europe, I could not agree more with that statement. In fact, one of the bigger unifying forces seems to be disdain for the European Union and making fun of the French. (BTW Israel is also an associated country of the EU and I doubt anyone is thinking of Israelis when they say "European.") The idea that a Brit has more in common with a Finn than a collection of treaties their respective governments signed is just wrong. However, this was a difficult concept for me, as an American, to wrap my head around simply because countries here are so tiny (and have such long histories)... they're the size of states, they all belong to a big "union," therefore EU = US is an easy shorthand. It is really difficult to see things from the other side of the Atlantic until you spend a few years here because European countries don't export their culture (e.g., TV and movies) the same way as the US.
I'm not an armchair engineer, but I am a real scientist. And while I have never seen anything at this scale, I have read a lot of proposals. This one did not set off my general bullshit alarm.
I really, really like that Musk has everyone talking about the Hyperloop and the ancillary discussions of public transportation in general, but there are a couple of details that are glossed over in the big, long document. One is the acceleration/braking by linear induction motors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to jump from idea that they already work in rotary engines and that MVA inverters are already commercialized (in mining equipment and trains) to the conclusion that they therefore will work in the linear configuration shown in the document. The wording there was sneaky.
The second is holding a vacuum, ~0.001 Atm., through the whole tube. Has that ever been demonstrated on such a large scale? He shows some metrics from commercial pumps, but then seems to assume that they will scale constantly with volume... how many pumps? Spaced how? What sort of maintenance requirements? How long to pump down the shunts at stations where modules are loaded/unloaded? Vacuum is non-trivial at commercial scales. Perhaps this sort of thing is commonplace and I have just never seen it (and I have seen vacuum chambers that would accommodate a pickup truck). But it felt to me like he was making a lot of assumptions about how easy it is to work with vacuum at those scales.
Those are both issues that can be demonstrated/prototyped, but it is as naive to say that the proposal was anything more than a whitepaper as it is to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
I don't think that is entirely true. The magnetic strip in my PIN card failed and it stopped working on other bank's ATMs. It continues to work fine with my bank's ATMs and in chip readers at retailers... But thanks for reminding me that I have to replace it before I go to the US : )
I haven't paid for TV in years. I just pirate everything that I can't find on Netflix. Not because I don't want to pay for something, or because I'm some kind of cheap ass looking to save a few bucks. I simply don't like paying $100+ a month to watch a few TV shows a week, which of course are laden with commercials. Unfortunately, this will always be an underground "war" until either the knowledge on how to safely pirate shows is commonplace, or there becomes actual competition in cable providers.
I'm content with things the way they are now, however. I watch what I want, when I want, and how I want, for either free or cheap. The ball is in their court now.
I pay for cable, but just don't watch it--I pirate everything instead and the since the fastest tier comes bundled with phone and TV, I pay for them too.
I just hate commercials so very much. Those jingles and catch phrases, the branding... it pollutes my brain and I resent it. (I will pollute my brain how I want to, thank you very much.) I am bothered by the fact that I remember commercials from my childhood so vividly. I still remember when a Hostess commercial ran twice in a row when I was six... with that dancing humanoid cupcake in the park telling me how delicious it was.
Once I got a VCR, I would record TV shows on VHS and watch them immediately after so that I could fast-forward through the commercials, but someone who likes uploading things to usenet now takes care of that for me.
I'm sure I belong to a tiny fraction of crazy people, but there are plenty of reasons to pirate besides saving money.
Being a good person is something that will always be good for you.
Demonstrably not true. And giving two weeks notice or not giving two weeks notice does not determine whether you are a good person or not. There are circumstances where not giving any notice is perfectly appropriate and justified. The reverse is sometimes true as well. If someone is treating me badly then I am going to leave. It's MY life and I'm not going to waste it trying to martyr myself proving how much better I am than someone I don't respect.
Being an asshole because you can not see any immediate ramifications of your poor decision does not make it a good one.
Cute (though false) way to frame the issue but first you need to prove that not giving two weeks notice somehow will prove to be a "poor decision". It might but since none of us can see the future with perfect clarity you're going to have a pretty hard case to make. Furthermore you'll have to prove how quitting immediately makes someone an "asshole". They might be one but that typically is established LONG before they leave their job.
Are you a parent? Because once you have kids, decisions can come back to bite you in the ass years later in ways that were not at all obvious at the time. I realize we are talking about the workplace, and understand your point, but being a good person and not an asshole is the first step towards raising kids who are good people and not assholes... sometimes I think children are the origin of parables and generalities about "doing the right thing" and "being a good person" even when you have nothing to gain. All that nonsense about setting a good example can easily follow you home from work.
Several of my organic chemistry courses were taught this way. Since there was no practical way of taking notes digitally at the time (which may still be the case?), we were forced to perfectly transcribe the structures into our notes. I still have most of those notes and can still draw near-perfect benzene rings... and am still picky about pens.
Could this spell the doom to future global releases, since the evidence is people just pirate them anyways?
Probably, but I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat: "The demise of broadcast TV and push-media in general." Now tell me what I've won!
I had no idea it was airing where I live, but why would I care when the "pirated" version is waiting for me to queue it up at my earliest convenience on myriad devices. (So is the Netflix version, but I use a region-unblocker for Netflix--is that still "piracy?")
As to european cities... the US operates on a completely different scale and density. Most major european cities are closer together then they are in the US. Which is why passenger rail makes less sense here.
To be clear, I meant flying between any two European cities works basically how it would if American cities connected mass transit to their airports in a meaningful way. Passenger rail in Europe is usually more expensive and slower than flying except, obviously, over distances too short to fly.
Having lived in both the Bay Area and LA and commuted between them frequently, it was almost always less hassle to drive than to fly. Sure the flight itself was short, but the traffic getting to/from the airports, parking, car rental, standing in long lines, being fondled by a stranger in a uniform, etc. was no match for the tedium of sitting behind the wheel for five hours or so. Making air travel anything less than the dehumanizing punishment that it is now may be impossible, given the inertia of the entrenched interests, but I-5 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Traveling between pretty much any two European cities (of reasonable size), where you have efficient mass-transit on both ends and no TSA, is basically what you propose for California, and it would be truly amazing... but as you point out, it would require building a mass transit system and linking it to the airport. And if BART and the LA Subway are any indication, that is a pipe dream for a fantasy world where politicians aren't corrupt assholes.
Much like Africa sort of skipped over landlines and went right to mobile, maybe California can pioneer a new form of medium-distance travel that is--and I think this is the most compelling argument Musk makes--sustainable. If this thing can really be powered entirely by solar panels on the tubes, then it could be a nice alternative to (medium-distance) air travel, which is currently the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation.
Well, you say that, but do have any evidence to back up that claim? (And editorials from Fox News or Cato do not count as evidence.) Also, why does it matter how someone dies from a gun? They're still dead. And it's a hell of a lot harder to kill someone accidentally with a knife than a gun.
Defensive homicides? You mean like when family members accidentally shoot each other because the think someone is breaking into the house? Those are still homicides, right? Defensive homicides are also a crime, by they way, except in extraordinary circumstances or in places with incredibly well thought out "stand your ground" laws. Or is there a rash of people staving off murders by shooting the would-be murder that I just didn't encounter living in the US for 30 years?
Now, watch this: The rate of firearm-related deaths per capita [wikipedia.org] is 10.23 in the US and 0.25 in the UK. The only countries (of the 75 listed) with higher rates than the US are: Panama, Mexico, Columbia, South Africa, Brazil, Swaziland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica. Interestingly, the country with the lowest rate, Japan, has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world [google.com]. Of course, I'm not suggesting a causal relationship, but I will point out that the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence.
Kinda hard to have gun-related deaths in societies that actively ban guns, you know. Got any stats on non-gun-related violent deaths in those countries? The numbers would probably surprise you as people tend to use weapons of opportunity.
Sure, here you go. (Hint: its still a factor of four or five higher, depending on if you include Eastern Europe.) And yes, in fact, it's impossible to have gun violence without guns, which is why they should be licensed and registered and people should have to have background checks and pass competency tests to own them.
Firearm deaths are irrelevant. Total homocides are what matters.
I completely agree. And the homicide rate is still higher in the US by a factor of four than Northern, Southern, and Western Europe. All those "Europe is super-violent" statistics include Eastern Europe. If we lump Central America in with the US, the homicide rates jumps to five times that of all of Europe combined.
If you ban guns but more people are killed with knives. It doesn't matter if your firearm deaths went down.
The US also has a much larger homicide rate by guns than almost the enture rest of the world. Are you arguing that if guns were regulated rationally in the US that all of the gun homicides would be replaced by non-gun homicides? Or that they would somehow increase? (No one is arguing for total prohibition here--just sensible regulations.)
Second, we have a gang problem fueld by a misguided drug war.
Misguided is putting it mildly.
Third, we have a very different legal system, one that has a habit of re-releasing violent criminals time and again. 85% of crime is done by the same criminals....
Recidivism is a problem the world over. However, the high statistic in the US is largely an artifact of the ridiculous drug laws; i.e., someone gets busted for possession, serves jail time, and then later robs a 7/11, poof--recidivism. (Thus wonderful policies like the California Three Strikes Law that lead to the Supreme Court ruling their prisons cruel and unusual punishment.)
I see, your basic argument is that it matters how people are killed with guns (that link actually breaks it out into intentional, suicide, accidental, and unknown BTW). The biggest difference between gun deaths and other forms of death is that the former is incredibly simple to prevent. Sure, you can tell people not to drive cars--that way they will never die in a traffic accident--but cars are much more useful to many more people than guns.
And I hope you realize that "gun control people" aren't a monolithic group of gun prohibitionists. I'm a hunter who owns many guns, has been shooting all my life (even competitively when I was younger). I just don't agree that any idiot that wants any kind of gun should be able to go out and buy as many as they want. Like cars--which are also lethal weapons when used improperly--I think guns should be licensed and registered and that gun owners should have to prove competency. Stupid people, the mentally ill, violent criminals, and children are good examples of people who should not be allowed to own firearms of any sort.
Nope. Although I am trolling in the sense that I'm curious to see how people rationalize their fervent belief that the world will come to end if any gun regulations are passed, I was shot at on several occasions. As I said, usually by idiots shooting downhill or without a clear field of view, sometimes by the crazy guy that shot at everything that crossed his property line, and on occasion by drunk rednecks. I should qualify by saying that lived in the middle of nowhere. No local police or city utilities (other than power) or paved roads or anything like that. Our neighbor used to train his dogs by shooting skeet off his back porch and we could barely hear it. I used to practice by shooting small tree branches and G.I Joe action figures with my scoped Ruger .22 semi-auto and walking cans with a .44 mag revolver (but that was an occasional treat because the cartridges were so expensive) which is insanely fun. My uncle was actually shot by his own uncle while out deer hunting, but they were bow hunting, so it "only" left a silver-dollar-sized hole in his calf.
Interestingly, I live in Europe and have yet to be killed by the roaming death-squads that are apparently rampant here. However, when I lived in the US I was shot at multiple times. Usually because some idiot was shooting downhill or mistook me getting off the school bus for a dear and only occasionally by our local lunatic that sat on his back porch shooting at anything that moved. Oh, and once or twice because I was "a damn hippie," but fortunately they were too drunk to hit the broad side of a barn.
But my point was about the lose definition of the word "fact." As in, according to Slashdot it is a well-known fact that Europe is a violent anarchist paradise and that the lack of guns here just breeds more tire iron and cricket bat assaults... usually against the elderly, who cower in fear, wishing they had the liberty to own a gun with which they could keep the kids off of their lawn.
You are too stuck in the MS fanboy idea of Windows, Excel, Word etc. and their market share making them 'Industry Standards'.
I run into this problem frequently. Windows is a zombie where I work because no one knows that there are alternatives. There is no official policy, yet the whole place has turned into a Microsoft shop for no reason. Apple seems completely uninterested in competing in the business world and so it goes, Microsoft claiming huge "market share" simply because it is familiar and fairly well supported/integrated at many places of employment. I chose to use OS X and Linux at work because I do a lot of work with command-line tools and Mac-only vector drawing programs. (And let's face it, farting around on Slashdot.)
What kills me is that, when I refuse to use our stupid Oracle calendar system because the native OS X client is several years out of date and buggy, and syncing it with my phone is harder than a shuttle launch, the zombies all chant "switch to a PC." (Where PC means our in-house Windows XP installation.) Their argument isn't that it is better, but that it has "more market share for a reason" and that it is "the industry standard" and "why do you have to be different anyway?" Arrrrgh.
I think you had the Cold War and 9/11 making people willing to give up rights to protect their government from attack, and plastic guns aren't something that even most gun enthusiasts relate to. Now the government is trying to take away the guns people own and prevent them from buying them as part of the Democrat road map to a total prohibition, and it's now or never for the frog to jump out of the boiling pot.
I'm not going to touch the baseless assertion that somehow we are on the precipice of complete gun prohibition despite there being more guns in circulation now than ever before. However, the Number One argument against any and all forms of gun regulation is that people may need to take up arms against their own government. What does it matter if gun enthusiasts relate to plastic or metal or ceramic guns--isn't the point supposed to be about protecting the unfettered access to firearms by the public? It makes no sense to me that high-capacity magazines and assault weapons (which I will define as weapons designed for use against humans) are sacred cows, but that banning any guns manufactured using certain materials or in certain shapes is just ducky.
As for airplanes, I think most people recognize them as a private vehicles, rather than public places, and thus not free zones. There is more cognitive dissonance with the "guns are bad" people on this issue, since they love seeing men with "military grade" assault weapons at airports, and enthusiastically support air marshals armed with "automatic pistols" with "high-capacity" magazines
I'm not sure to whom you are referring, but I know of no one that likes seeing assault weapons anywhere but on TV and the firing range. Nor do I know of anyone who specifically wants air marshals armed with automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines (or who even goes into that level of detail.) Train stations and airports in France are full of soldiers walking around with automatic weapons--supposedly to "send a message to would-be terrorists"--and it makes me feel nervous and oppressed. And what kind of message does that send to my son? Ditto for the militarized police at the airports in Chile. "Excuse me officer, nice machine gun, do you know where the cab stand is?" Also, why draw a distinction between private vehicles and private movie theaters? I constantly hear the argument that, if only more people had been armed, <insert mass murder> could have been avoided. What else is exempt from that argument besides air travel? Sporting events perhaps, like the 1996 Olympics? What about marathons?