(Not a question).. but whenever this topic shows up I'm always going back to reading it. It's more a detective story in a world where body swapping with memory retention is possible. Quite good, cheesy, gory sci-fi. Disturbingly thought out torture (torture, bodyswap, rinse repeat).
But the meths! the meths! What great characters. The ultra-rich that have been around forever, have all the money, all the power, and never die. Begs an interesting question, how likely is this to be for the 'average' human vs. the 'ultra-rich', and how tightly controlled? Is this even a good idea (overpopulation, strain on the planet, etc). What impacts does it have for violent crimes (murder, etc)?
God I love my used bookstore up the road. Great staff and amazing turnover. I pop in twice a week on the way home and I'm shocked at the new stock they always have. Five-six different people work there and I know who to ask if I'm looking for a cheesy space opera, a deep thinker, or something light to make me funny.
Chapters/Barnes & noble/ etc can bite my ass. A good relationship with a bunch of used bookstore nuts is where it's at. I ran into William Gibson at this place once.
Re:Stop the anti-people ideology and you'll succee
on
Blog Action Day
·
· Score: 1
Ugh. Riddled with spelling errors. That's what I get for being sick as a dog and not having my morning coffee. You get the idea though.
Re:Stop the anti-people ideology and you'll succee
on
Blog Action Day
·
· Score: 1
The problem with the recycling is that many places run it at a loss. Do you know what happens to your recycling after it gets picked up from the curb? fyi, I'm aenvironmental engineer but the recycling loop has been awhile:
Cans and cardboard is a no brainer. But what about the plasic?
In the town I lived in (Kingston, ON) they collected all sorts of plastics. The problem is, however, separating the different plastics. There are systems that sort of work (near IR, etc) but they are finicky because the structure of the various plastics is very similar. E.g. Polypropylene (-CHCH3-CH2-) vs. Polyethylene (-CH2-CH2-). Sad fact is most recycling is hand sorted. Different plastics can't be recycled together, compounded by the fact that some things contain different plastics (a pop bottle is a different plastic (PETE I believe) than the cap). And when it's all said and done the recycling center bins most of it anyways --they can't sell it as it's cheaper to make a new batch of plastics from scratch than to recycle the oldstuff.
You don't want this stuff going into your landfills either. Landfills are damn expensive to engineer properly with today's regulations (at least in Canada) and sufferes from not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Plastics can take up a serious amount of volume in these places, lessening the working life of the landfill, and ultimately costing tax payers money.
Look into the recycling process from start-to-finish in your town someday, you'd probably be surprised at how much of the stuff that even goes to the recycling center isn't recycled. Where is the city going to get the money if they are already paying to a) pick-up b) sort c) attempt to sell with various degrees of success d) pay for disposal in municipal landfill (with the hidden cost of filling up the landfill more rapidly than traditional municipal solid waste?).
I remember early - mid nineties when I used to draw ascii (newschool, though I dabbled a bit in the oldschool too) for various groups / BBS in the 905/416/519 region (southern ontario and parts of quebec), that there used to be a different system instead of smileys. Smileys were frowned upon. Instead the system revolved around:
(g) - grin
(bg) - big grin
(vbg) - very big grin
I wonder if it was just a local thing, or if anyone else used to use that too.
My favorite professors at university eschewed the use of most technology besides using powerpoint as a glorified slide projector --which was a bonus over the one guy who DID use a slide projector. He was 93 though and taught an amazing class in air photo analysis though, so I can't really blame him for being old fashioned.
The other professors class was typically 25-30 slides of case history images. No words. You wrote like a madman and annotated photos with a zillion arrows. Proper notes were made off those later at home to make them legible down the road. I don't think I got as much out of any other class as that one. I run into him at conferences all the time and always thank him.
Note-taking is a giant skill that seems to be disappearing. I've recently gotten into bits of teaching and I'm shocked at the note-taking and memory skills of the average 2nd year university student.
All you need is a pad of a paper (graph paper is nice) and at least 1 pen. If you have more than one color it's a bonus, but not a necessity.
I'm mostly a geotechnical engineer but I dabble in the odd subsurface contamination project (mainly on the design side, not the remediation sign). It's a shame your post is only modded 1.
No one pirates books because anyone who actually enjoys reading a good book detests reading it on a screen. E-books? Screw 'em, I can't take em out in the sun on the beach, on the bus to work, forget them at a restaurant, without worrying about some finicky expensive e-book reader.
You would think that you could enter the school as an art history major and then take engineering courses but good luck. Both the school I went to as an undergrad for my engineering degree, and my current university that I'm doing a graduate degree in engineering, doesn't allow this. The faculty of applied science will not typically let anyone not in the faculty of applied science take an engineering course.
Also, an engineering degree is fairly regimented. My first two years I had a set course schedule --no choice. By then end, I was allowed to choose '3' technical electives (engineering courses). That was the extent of my choices as an engineering student. Picking up all the engineering courses as electives (enough to satisfy the engineering accreditation board) as an art student doing electives, even if it was possible, would be very difficult --as I typically had 6-8 courses a semester (and one ugly term with 9) and would take a long time if I was doing it on the side of another degree. The accreditation boards are also rather strict and there is a large difference between "someone who has dabbled in a few engineering courses" and someone is accredited and allowed to be registered as an engineer-in-training upon graduation. Most fields (civil, mining, geological, mechanical, etc) won't touch you unless you have that accreditation. I have no experience in the software engineering / computer engineering side, but what I said certainly holds true in my neck of the woods.
A woman in my department is doing a M.Sc (not a M.A.Sc like me) through the geology / geological engineering department and the Civil Engineering department will not allow her to do any of the soil mechanics or other classes they offer.
This was done in Ontario as well at Queen's. Bt the problem there is different. Engineering, commerce, and law are all deregulated programs. This means the government can't say they aren't allowed to jack tuition cost by say 30% a year --not that this happened though my tuition was $2k more when I finished compared to when I started.
I use to go to tuition information / forecasting presentations put on by the Dean. Basically, they are only allowed to increase tuition for arts and science programs by a limited percentage (set by the government). Often times many programs run in the red, in that they cost more to teach than the students are bringing in, in fees. To make up for this, they offload the stuff in the red into the programs that are deregulated where they can charge more to make up some of the difference.
Essentially, while I was slaving away in wave mechanics and vector calculus, I was paying for some ass-hat to have 14 hours a week of class doing film studies.
Being a geological engineer working in the mining industry...
the public doesn't have a clue, I agree.
Having done a bit of work in landfills and subsurface contamination, again, people have no clue.
Nice to know there's someone else out there.
On a flight back from Australia last year I got really, really bored. There was some primitive eletronic games available (breakout, chess, etc).
I went for chess as I thought hey, why not, I know how to play chess and used to play it once in awhile. Selected Easy.
Got my ass handed to me 3 times in a row before I gave up and just drank enough hooch to pass out for the rest of the flight. Score 1 Qantas Easy Mode In-Flight Chess.
You bring up some good points. You also bring up some things I don't agree with. Why can't you go out with friends / church potlucks / watch the game w/ your friends etc. No one's forcing you to chow down at those events. Sure, it's a temptation to get a plate of wings, but life's full of temptation. Willpower. I routinely give up drinking (partly for my job as I do a lot of remote work with a native population, living in 'dry' areas where booze is prohibited). Sometimes I just lay off the hooch when I rotate back to the world and still go to the bar / beach / concert / patio / etc with friends. Temptation is there. I'm trying to kick a coffee habbit in the workplace and I'd be lying if I said easy access to good free coffee wasn't a huge temptation.
Also, if you're doing ANYTHING for the sake of others you gotta re-evaluate your goals here. Losing weight! Great. Getting miffed you family members / friends aren't congratulating you at every turn? Tough. You're not the center of the universe. Buy a fucking mirror if you need all that attention. Nothing is going to last in the long-term if you're doing it for other people. I certinaly don't expect a pat on the back every time I go to the gym.
If you take some minimal time and emmerse yourself in cookings, learn a bit on how to handle a knife, basic techniques, try out a lot of recipes, etc. You can be known in your circle of friends as someone who "knows how to cook" and "makes decent food", regardless of how much butter/sweet sweet bacon fat/etc goes into your food. It's about cooking *tasty* things, not necessarily fatty things. It's not actually that hard. Spend a few dollars extra on fresh, in-season vegetables, instead of canned. Invest in a few quality spices (or grow you're own on your windowsill for pennies), vinegars, oils, etc. Try a lot of recipes and experiment. Food blogs are an excellent source for this. Take a little time to cook real food, look back at some old things you hate --I hated those purple beets growing up, but they grow these absoletly phenomenal golden beets around my parts that are mild and sweet and taste great simply roasted in an oven --no oil/butter, no salt, no pepper.
Hell learning how to make a few simple salad dressings that don't suck has vastly increased my vegetable in-take. Learning a few dynamite salads and playing with them as things come in and out of season has been great. It's gotten to the point where I actually get cravings for salad --something a country boy growing up in cattle country never thought would happen.
Case-in-point, a recent food gathering I had (I cook the food, some friends bring the wine) I had a simple salad of fresh ingredients (good asparagus, green beans, simple home-made croutons, and some quick marinated cherry tomatoes in cinnamon, some good quality sherry vinegar, and a splash of olive oil) totally steal the show from my ultra-fat main course (a pan-fried(in oil) honey-mustard chicken schnitzel in a *butter*-caper sauce). I've never had someone turn down the healthy options that I cook as "nasty health-food" because there are ways to do it right.
And since when do people turn down the lean option you presented? A good BBQ'd steak for my kingdom! who turns that down for some nasty chicken-fried steak --you hang out with some ****ed up people.
Depends on what you want to do at the end. Some professions require a rather rigorous degree that is held to standards. Try becoming a civil engineer without a degree. It's just not going to happen. I suppose you COULD technically do it on your own but they would, at some point, require you to take some competency exams and I don't think they would be all that easy. Particularly in fields such as mine where textbooks do not really exist that cover the material. It's up to the professors experience and some key fundamental papers. Not such an easy thing to do. You would also have a damn difficult time getting a job. Maybe we are snobs, but getting hauled up in court (common in geological engineering) and stating that someone doing engineering works is not an engineer --well you'd be up shit creek.
I recently got sucked into adding it after I moved away from university and started working on the other end of the country. It's handy to keep in touch with old university friends. Hell, I tracked down the odd person from HS I used to hang out with and sometimes they pass through vancouver and we end up catching pints.
Probably 60-70 people on the friends list. Of which I regularly see maybe 15. Sometimes see another 20 and the rest barely ever see. I treat it as a really fancy version of IRC that just happens to be handy for people giving me random books to read and good events in my town (a few 'friends' on the list exist only to trade upcoming shows and bands, which is handy).
I tend to add most people as a friend if they happen to track me down.
Most engineers never need calculus either, but we still take an awful lot. Why use does a geological engineer have for vector calculus? You'd be surprised where it shows up sometimes.
But you need to know it to understand what's going on behind the scenes in various "standard" equations, modeling programs, etc., so you don't blindly follow what's laid down in a textbook. Most of the great engineers I know in industry and research (pretty closely connected in my industry actually) are also damn sharp at math.
I grew up in rural Ontario. I do remember getting sent out to get my old man a pack of smokes from time to time starting around when I was 9-10. I lived in a small community where everyone know everyone and the local grocery store guy didn't bat an eye. Hell, the guy would even do it on credit. Did I ever even think about cheating my old man? No, there would be consequences. I was given a level of trust, and that level of trust granted me certain freedoms that would be taken away if I abused it (late curfews, access to fun things like dirtbikes, etc). The parents way they dealt with alcohol growing up worked out good too. It didn't matter if I partied on weekends or increasingly during the week as HS ended, as long as I kept a job and got good marks. If either of those slipped, well, they came down on me. It worked, I busted my ass so I could party. Still enjoying the benefits of that instilled work ethic into my Master's now.
I work with LiDAR data, satellite imagery, and terrestrial photogrammetry. Depending on what he's working with, there are a large variety of ways he can be looking at this. Subtracting one image from the other isn't always all that useful sometimes. Overlaying and making something transparent is often the easiest way to see the change between two things. Hell, I don't even get that luxury sometimes working with air photos and a stereoscope. I gotta look at one, switch the images and look at another. Still. It works. Subtracting the two things might just leave a few floating pixels in a DEM +/- whatever errors are in the underlying DEM creation. If he's even using a DEM.
Sad thing is your brain is a hell of a lot more efficent and recognizing changes in complicated images than a computer. Point me to a computer that can do an interpretive photo application such as geomorphology / air photo analysis. Doesn't really exist, best is some filters that can pull out linear features and planes and what not --which isn't all that useful unless you're doing structural geology.
Hey! I am an engineer. I resent that. I weighed more back when I was 17 as I was living out of mom and dad's fridge, had time to exercise, worked a good hard labour job to get cash for school. Enter school, up goes beer intake, stress, down goes physical activity, sleep per day, and my man hands disappeared into slim calculator punching nerd hands. It was kind of sad. Now that my undergrad is nice and over I'm going about fixing the ravishes an engineering degree does to you --hitting the gym, jogging, sleeping properly as I'm not up till 3am finishing assignments, etc.
So-called Geo-engineering, bah. Could they at least find a better word to use, possibly something more astrophysics/planetary sciences. I only take offense as I am a geological engineer and we typically do entirely different work related to stability in rock/soil, earth embankments and dams, foundations, subsurface contamination, and geophysical sensing techniques. Go steal a different descriptor.
Wow. I worked for a short time for a Geological Engineering consulting firm in the field. By the hour work, 84 hours / week, remote location, high stress work, plus additional work needed when problems arose (quite frequently). Was good pay, and remote field work isn't that bad in month young stints --especially when you're a young guy and it's all money in your pocket to pay off debt.
Worked for four months, then went to school to get a M.a.s.c. Last week, I got a cheque in the mail for $1500 for a christmas bonus. Well, they just went pretty high on my list of places to apply to when I finish my Master's (in the same field). I couldn't believe a company would do that for just a short-timer like me.
Could be the fact that my industry is booming (geological engineering / mining) though.
Likewise,
I do geo/mining engineering work and it's pretty fragmented across the board. You see SOME autocad, but often a large amount of niche / specifically tailored mining 2D and 3D CAD instead (vulcan, datamine studio, minecad, surpac..)
There is a market for these things that I am in. In the mining industry, the geologists and the engineers have the option between a PDA or some sort of rugged tablet pc to do data entry on in the field. It's so clumsy that most places just use paper instead and input it later. The geologists at the mine I used to work at had this weird in-between PDA and laptop sized (I can't remember the name) running some custom software that they used to log all the drillcore. It seemed to work very well and the engineers wanted to see if they could use them for underground inspections and basic 2D CAD.
Slashdot Mirror
(Not a question).. but whenever this topic shows up I'm always going back to reading it. It's more a detective story in a world where body swapping with memory retention is possible. Quite good, cheesy, gory sci-fi. Disturbingly thought out torture (torture, bodyswap, rinse repeat).
But the meths! the meths! What great characters. The ultra-rich that have been around forever, have all the money, all the power, and never die. Begs an interesting question, how likely is this to be for the 'average' human vs. the 'ultra-rich', and how tightly controlled? Is this even a good idea (overpopulation, strain on the planet, etc). What impacts does it have for violent crimes (murder, etc)?
Just thoughts to the general slashdot folks..
God I love my used bookstore up the road. Great staff and amazing turnover. I pop in twice a week on the way home and I'm shocked at the new stock they always have. Five-six different people work there and I know who to ask if I'm looking for a cheesy space opera, a deep thinker, or something light to make me funny.
Chapters/Barnes & noble/ etc can bite my ass. A good relationship with a bunch of used bookstore nuts is where it's at. I ran into William Gibson at this place once.
Ugh. Riddled with spelling errors. That's what I get for being sick as a dog and not having my morning coffee. You get the idea though.
The problem with the recycling is that many places run it at a loss. Do you know what happens to your recycling after it gets picked up from the curb? fyi, I'm aenvironmental engineer but the recycling loop has been awhile:
Cans and cardboard is a no brainer. But what about the plasic?
In the town I lived in (Kingston, ON) they collected all sorts of plastics. The problem is, however, separating the different plastics. There are systems that sort of work (near IR, etc) but they are finicky because the structure of the various plastics is very similar. E.g. Polypropylene (-CHCH3-CH2-) vs. Polyethylene (-CH2-CH2-). Sad fact is most recycling is hand sorted. Different plastics can't be recycled together, compounded by the fact that some things contain different plastics (a pop bottle is a different plastic (PETE I believe) than the cap). And when it's all said and done the recycling center bins most of it anyways --they can't sell it as it's cheaper to make a new batch of plastics from scratch than to recycle the oldstuff.
You don't want this stuff going into your landfills either. Landfills are damn expensive to engineer properly with today's regulations (at least in Canada) and sufferes from not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Plastics can take up a serious amount of volume in these places, lessening the working life of the landfill, and ultimately costing tax payers money.
Look into the recycling process from start-to-finish in your town someday, you'd probably be surprised at how much of the stuff that even goes to the recycling center isn't recycled. Where is the city going to get the money if they are already paying to a) pick-up b) sort c) attempt to sell with various degrees of success d) pay for disposal in municipal landfill (with the hidden cost of filling up the landfill more rapidly than traditional municipal solid waste?).
Cheers.
I remember early - mid nineties when I used to draw ascii (newschool, though I dabbled a bit in the oldschool too) for various groups / BBS in the 905/416/519 region (southern ontario and parts of quebec), that there used to be a different system instead of smileys. Smileys were frowned upon. Instead the system revolved around:
(g) - grin
(bg) - big grin
(vbg) - very big grin
I wonder if it was just a local thing, or if anyone else used to use that too.
My favorite professors at university eschewed the use of most technology besides using powerpoint as a glorified slide projector --which was a bonus over the one guy who DID use a slide projector. He was 93 though and taught an amazing class in air photo analysis though, so I can't really blame him for being old fashioned.
The other professors class was typically 25-30 slides of case history images. No words. You wrote like a madman and annotated photos with a zillion arrows. Proper notes were made off those later at home to make them legible down the road. I don't think I got as much out of any other class as that one. I run into him at conferences all the time and always thank him.
Note-taking is a giant skill that seems to be disappearing. I've recently gotten into bits of teaching and I'm shocked at the note-taking and memory skills of the average 2nd year university student.
All you need is a pad of a paper (graph paper is nice) and at least 1 pen. If you have more than one color it's a bonus, but not a necessity.
Oh how I wish I had mod points.
I'm mostly a geotechnical engineer but I dabble in the odd subsurface contamination project (mainly on the design side, not the remediation sign). It's a shame your post is only modded 1.
$15k to dig up soil? Ha. Not a chance.
No one pirates books because anyone who actually enjoys reading a good book detests reading it on a screen. E-books? Screw 'em, I can't take em out in the sun on the beach, on the bus to work, forget them at a restaurant, without worrying about some finicky expensive e-book reader.
Pirated books? Bring on the dead-trees.
You would think that you could enter the school as an art history major and then take engineering courses but good luck. Both the school I went to as an undergrad for my engineering degree, and my current university that I'm doing a graduate degree in engineering, doesn't allow this. The faculty of applied science will not typically let anyone not in the faculty of applied science take an engineering course. Also, an engineering degree is fairly regimented. My first two years I had a set course schedule --no choice. By then end, I was allowed to choose '3' technical electives (engineering courses). That was the extent of my choices as an engineering student. Picking up all the engineering courses as electives (enough to satisfy the engineering accreditation board) as an art student doing electives, even if it was possible, would be very difficult --as I typically had 6-8 courses a semester (and one ugly term with 9) and would take a long time if I was doing it on the side of another degree. The accreditation boards are also rather strict and there is a large difference between "someone who has dabbled in a few engineering courses" and someone is accredited and allowed to be registered as an engineer-in-training upon graduation. Most fields (civil, mining, geological, mechanical, etc) won't touch you unless you have that accreditation. I have no experience in the software engineering / computer engineering side, but what I said certainly holds true in my neck of the woods. A woman in my department is doing a M.Sc (not a M.A.Sc like me) through the geology / geological engineering department and the Civil Engineering department will not allow her to do any of the soil mechanics or other classes they offer.
This was done in Ontario as well at Queen's. Bt the problem there is different. Engineering, commerce, and law are all deregulated programs. This means the government can't say they aren't allowed to jack tuition cost by say 30% a year --not that this happened though my tuition was $2k more when I finished compared to when I started. I use to go to tuition information / forecasting presentations put on by the Dean. Basically, they are only allowed to increase tuition for arts and science programs by a limited percentage (set by the government). Often times many programs run in the red, in that they cost more to teach than the students are bringing in, in fees. To make up for this, they offload the stuff in the red into the programs that are deregulated where they can charge more to make up some of the difference. Essentially, while I was slaving away in wave mechanics and vector calculus, I was paying for some ass-hat to have 14 hours a week of class doing film studies.
Being a geological engineer working in the mining industry... the public doesn't have a clue, I agree. Having done a bit of work in landfills and subsurface contamination, again, people have no clue. Nice to know there's someone else out there.
Is this so different from the flash portion of a flash grenade / flashbang? Technically they have a "blinding" component.
On a flight back from Australia last year I got really, really bored. There was some primitive eletronic games available (breakout, chess, etc). I went for chess as I thought hey, why not, I know how to play chess and used to play it once in awhile. Selected Easy. Got my ass handed to me 3 times in a row before I gave up and just drank enough hooch to pass out for the rest of the flight. Score 1 Qantas Easy Mode In-Flight Chess.
You bring up some good points. You also bring up some things I don't agree with. Why can't you go out with friends / church potlucks / watch the game w/ your friends etc. No one's forcing you to chow down at those events. Sure, it's a temptation to get a plate of wings, but life's full of temptation. Willpower. I routinely give up drinking (partly for my job as I do a lot of remote work with a native population, living in 'dry' areas where booze is prohibited). Sometimes I just lay off the hooch when I rotate back to the world and still go to the bar / beach / concert / patio / etc with friends. Temptation is there. I'm trying to kick a coffee habbit in the workplace and I'd be lying if I said easy access to good free coffee wasn't a huge temptation. Also, if you're doing ANYTHING for the sake of others you gotta re-evaluate your goals here. Losing weight! Great. Getting miffed you family members / friends aren't congratulating you at every turn? Tough. You're not the center of the universe. Buy a fucking mirror if you need all that attention. Nothing is going to last in the long-term if you're doing it for other people. I certinaly don't expect a pat on the back every time I go to the gym.
Depends on the food.
If you take some minimal time and emmerse yourself in cookings, learn a bit on how to handle a knife, basic techniques, try out a lot of recipes, etc. You can be known in your circle of friends as someone who "knows how to cook" and "makes decent food", regardless of how much butter/sweet sweet bacon fat/etc goes into your food. It's about cooking *tasty* things, not necessarily fatty things. It's not actually that hard. Spend a few dollars extra on fresh, in-season vegetables, instead of canned. Invest in a few quality spices (or grow you're own on your windowsill for pennies), vinegars, oils, etc. Try a lot of recipes and experiment. Food blogs are an excellent source for this. Take a little time to cook real food, look back at some old things you hate --I hated those purple beets growing up, but they grow these absoletly phenomenal golden beets around my parts that are mild and sweet and taste great simply roasted in an oven --no oil/butter, no salt, no pepper.
Hell learning how to make a few simple salad dressings that don't suck has vastly increased my vegetable in-take. Learning a few dynamite salads and playing with them as things come in and out of season has been great. It's gotten to the point where I actually get cravings for salad --something a country boy growing up in cattle country never thought would happen.
Case-in-point, a recent food gathering I had (I cook the food, some friends bring the wine) I had a simple salad of fresh ingredients (good asparagus, green beans, simple home-made croutons, and some quick marinated cherry tomatoes in cinnamon, some good quality sherry vinegar, and a splash of olive oil) totally steal the show from my ultra-fat main course (a pan-fried(in oil) honey-mustard chicken schnitzel in a *butter*-caper sauce). I've never had someone turn down the healthy options that I cook as "nasty health-food" because there are ways to do it right.
And since when do people turn down the lean option you presented? A good BBQ'd steak for my kingdom! who turns that down for some nasty chicken-fried steak --you hang out with some ****ed up people.
Depends on what you want to do at the end. Some professions require a rather rigorous degree that is held to standards. Try becoming a civil engineer without a degree. It's just not going to happen. I suppose you COULD technically do it on your own but they would, at some point, require you to take some competency exams and I don't think they would be all that easy. Particularly in fields such as mine where textbooks do not really exist that cover the material. It's up to the professors experience and some key fundamental papers. Not such an easy thing to do. You would also have a damn difficult time getting a job. Maybe we are snobs, but getting hauled up in court (common in geological engineering) and stating that someone doing engineering works is not an engineer --well you'd be up shit creek.
I recently got sucked into adding it after I moved away from university and started working on the other end of the country. It's handy to keep in touch with old university friends. Hell, I tracked down the odd person from HS I used to hang out with and sometimes they pass through vancouver and we end up catching pints.
Probably 60-70 people on the friends list. Of which I regularly see maybe 15. Sometimes see another 20 and the rest barely ever see. I treat it as a really fancy version of IRC that just happens to be handy for people giving me random books to read and good events in my town (a few 'friends' on the list exist only to trade upcoming shows and bands, which is handy).
I tend to add most people as a friend if they happen to track me down.
Insecure? Hardly. Just fucking crazy? Doubtful.
Most engineers never need calculus either, but we still take an awful lot. Why use does a geological engineer have for vector calculus? You'd be surprised where it shows up sometimes. But you need to know it to understand what's going on behind the scenes in various "standard" equations, modeling programs, etc., so you don't blindly follow what's laid down in a textbook. Most of the great engineers I know in industry and research (pretty closely connected in my industry actually) are also damn sharp at math.
I grew up in rural Ontario. I do remember getting sent out to get my old man a pack of smokes from time to time starting around when I was 9-10. I lived in a small community where everyone know everyone and the local grocery store guy didn't bat an eye. Hell, the guy would even do it on credit. Did I ever even think about cheating my old man? No, there would be consequences. I was given a level of trust, and that level of trust granted me certain freedoms that would be taken away if I abused it (late curfews, access to fun things like dirtbikes, etc). The parents way they dealt with alcohol growing up worked out good too. It didn't matter if I partied on weekends or increasingly during the week as HS ended, as long as I kept a job and got good marks. If either of those slipped, well, they came down on me. It worked, I busted my ass so I could party. Still enjoying the benefits of that instilled work ethic into my Master's now.
Uhm.
I work with LiDAR data, satellite imagery, and terrestrial photogrammetry. Depending on what he's working with, there are a large variety of ways he can be looking at this. Subtracting one image from the other isn't always all that useful sometimes. Overlaying and making something transparent is often the easiest way to see the change between two things. Hell, I don't even get that luxury sometimes working with air photos and a stereoscope. I gotta look at one, switch the images and look at another. Still. It works. Subtracting the two things might just leave a few floating pixels in a DEM +/- whatever errors are in the underlying DEM creation. If he's even using a DEM.
Sad thing is your brain is a hell of a lot more efficent and recognizing changes in complicated images than a computer. Point me to a computer that can do an interpretive photo application such as geomorphology / air photo analysis. Doesn't really exist, best is some filters that can pull out linear features and planes and what not --which isn't all that useful unless you're doing structural geology.
Hey! I am an engineer. I resent that. I weighed more back when I was 17 as I was living out of mom and dad's fridge, had time to exercise, worked a good hard labour job to get cash for school. Enter school, up goes beer intake, stress, down goes physical activity, sleep per day, and my man hands disappeared into slim calculator punching nerd hands. It was kind of sad. Now that my undergrad is nice and over I'm going about fixing the ravishes an engineering degree does to you --hitting the gym, jogging, sleeping properly as I'm not up till 3am finishing assignments, etc.
Cheers.
So-called Geo-engineering, bah. Could they at least find a better word to use, possibly something more astrophysics/planetary sciences. I only take offense as I am a geological engineer and we typically do entirely different work related to stability in rock/soil, earth embankments and dams, foundations, subsurface contamination, and geophysical sensing techniques. Go steal a different descriptor.
Wow. I worked for a short time for a Geological Engineering consulting firm in the field. By the hour work, 84 hours / week, remote location, high stress work, plus additional work needed when problems arose (quite frequently). Was good pay, and remote field work isn't that bad in month young stints --especially when you're a young guy and it's all money in your pocket to pay off debt. Worked for four months, then went to school to get a M.a.s.c. Last week, I got a cheque in the mail for $1500 for a christmas bonus. Well, they just went pretty high on my list of places to apply to when I finish my Master's (in the same field). I couldn't believe a company would do that for just a short-timer like me. Could be the fact that my industry is booming (geological engineering / mining) though.
Likewise, I do geo/mining engineering work and it's pretty fragmented across the board. You see SOME autocad, but often a large amount of niche / specifically tailored mining 2D and 3D CAD instead (vulcan, datamine studio, minecad, surpac..)
There is a market for these things that I am in. In the mining industry, the geologists and the engineers have the option between a PDA or some sort of rugged tablet pc to do data entry on in the field. It's so clumsy that most places just use paper instead and input it later. The geologists at the mine I used to work at had this weird in-between PDA and laptop sized (I can't remember the name) running some custom software that they used to log all the drillcore. It seemed to work very well and the engineers wanted to see if they could use them for underground inspections and basic 2D CAD.