Joke or not, there is something in the "modern" environment that's making autism worse. Yeah, sure, it's always been around and was mostly un-noticed before, but it's getting noticed now because the severity is ratcheting up - fast.
They once analyzed all the constituents of coffee (hundreds) and found that a quarter or so of them are carcinogenic. So we all should be pretty much dead by now.
Something I found interesting working with a radiotherapy doc (PhD style) was that you have cancer cells. I have cancer cells. Everybody has cancer cells, all the time. It's only a concern when they get out of hand.
The other thing I found interesting was when one of his ex grad students (who had done a thesis on dose measurement, involving lots of close proximity to radiotherapy machines) died at age 24 of a rare and unexplained form of blood borne cancer.
this is why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Authorisation_and_Restriction_of_ChemicalsREACH is so important. from wikipedia : "There were 100,106 chemicals in use in the EU in 1981, when the last survey was performed. Of these only 3,000 have been tested and over 800 are known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction." So, only 3% of chemicals in use by man have been tested for environmental and health safety.
And, of those tested, over 1/4 are dangerous. Of the remaining 97,106 registered chemicals, how many problems are lurking there?
Chemicals are nothing new, the natural environment is full of chemicals from plants, bacterial waste, poisonous animals, etc. that we need to be wary of, but if we're getting creative making new ones, it would be nice if we had some idea what we're getting into - the natural ones have mostly been there since the dawn of our species, we've had plenty of generations to learn about or evolve to be able to deal with them.
The ATC decision is based on several things, such as the fact that pilots (by definition) do a lot of traveling, and the real-time safety aspects.
If you had a mission critical piece of software coded with Swahili names and constructs, you could, theoretically, still qualify it for use. But the real question would be: why would you go there in the first place?
Concur - the foreign language code I have encountered (maybe 0.01% of all code I've seen) has been almost entirely French.
I'm sure it's entirely attitude based, it can't be that they are unable to learn English, or that they don't value input from English colleagues, but then again.....
"Whatever you learn in school will be mostly useless in the workplace, and what you learn in the workplace will likely be useless within 5 years"
Well, my friend, you aim too low. Math is never useless or obsolete, nor are algorithms, data structures etc. Technology is irrelevant and is learned "by the way" if you get all of the above. Feel kind of sorry for the job you might have..
You know, you are right - I do just assume that math, data structures and algorithms are a given knowledge base when someone applies for a job in programming. All too often, they are sorely lacking.
I sort of picked those things up on my own before they were presented in school, so I never really gave school credit for teaching them, and looking at the graduating class, most people who didn't know algorithms when they came in, still didn't know algorithms when they left, regardless of their GPA.
"Old doctors and old lawyers are like old wines. Old engineers are like old fish fillets."
There probably is some outright age-ism out there...
The one time I ran into this kind of ageism was when a CEO had screwed up, big time, and he was looking for scapegoats. The easy target was the 64 year old engineer "well, he didn't deliver the product fast enough, we missed last year's sales cycle" yadda, yadda, yadda. He had me hire a young guy to "help him out", which turned into replacing him after a few months. The young guy was good, as good as we could hope for, but not as productive as the 64 year old. The (ironically) funny part was when they both quit on the same day, after a particularly immature outburst from said CEO.
Anyway, he was playing to the stereotype of the old guy not being hardworking enough, or in touch with the latest technology, or any number of similar stereotypes. He was orchestrating theater for the investors to make himself look good. It wasn't convincing to us at all, but maybe it kept a lawsuit off his back, who knows?
Day to day, in a good environment, these prejudices don't matter. When the going gets rough, stereotypes can come out against you - regardless of whether they are true for you or not.
The degree is important to get your interview, but what really matters on the ground is whether or not you can pick stuff up and learn it for yourself.
Training classes, etc. are all well and good, but if you can't get up to speed on a new technology without a lot of help from teachers, coworkers, etc., then you have earned the label "old dog, no new tricks."
If you can jump into a technology you don't know and get up to speed relatively quickly without undue stress on your home life, then IT can be a good field for you, whether you're 15, 25, 35, or 55. If you can't, I'd suggest looking into another field for work. Whatever you learn in school will be mostly useless in the workplace, and what you learn in the workplace will likely be useless within 5 years. IT is a constantly moving target, like tax law. Sure, you can be a basic accountant and not stress too much about the new stuff, but if you're going to be someone who gets promoted to higher levels (and doesn't get cut at the next layoff round), you need to be better than that.
Speaking very cynically here, of course you are right about the earth naturally cycling, another ice age coming, etc.
But - homo sapiens has redefined "the natural order" - we only live a short time and we want to see what we want to see, within our lifetime. I don't want to see my children eaten by panthers, fortunately (or not, depending on your perspective) men from my grandfathers' time more or less eliminated the panther threat to humans around my home. They almost eliminated the alligator threat around the time I was born, alligators are making a comeback, we have a human death every couple of years (on average) now attributable to alligator attack. I'd call that acceptable losses (vs the millions of us who live here), unless it was my child who got eaten.
I live in Florida, as does most of my family - we are obviously a little biased against the whole "let the sea rise 20 or 30 feet" thing. There's an almost unimaginable amount of investment around the world in buildings and infrastructure located less than 20 feet above sea level. It only makes sense to try to control the sea level to protect that investment. We control the animals and plants (that we see), why not the climate too?
So, back to the cynical perspective, in order to control the climate, we need to control emission of CO2 (or so the popular media says), which, conveniently, means taking control of fossil fuel burning. Now, if we (the developed western countries) can do this on a worldwide basis, we can maintain our technological lead and control over the affairs of the planet. What's not to like? Gain control of the climate, maintain control of the geo-political situation, preserve investments in coastal regions, it's all good.
Never mind that we don't really know what we're doing and have little actual control over what most people do most of the time anyway. "Climate control", or the attempt to move in that direction, serves lots of short term interests. I predict that attempts to control the climate will continue for a long time to come, even after the first several spectacular failures.
Personally, I'm with Stephen Hawking in thinking that we should be devoting 0.25% of GDP (about double what we currently are) to getting off this rock and making viable settlements elsewhere.
Take a look at your subdivision - from orbit. Compare it to the farmland, now compare the farmland to the undeveloped lands... If you plant 10 trees in your 1/4 acre suburban lot, you're done, that's all the space you have. It's a good start, but hardly a significant impact. Even if we managed to cover all of the dry land with trees (which is impossible over the vast rocky areas, deserts and ice fields), that still leaves 2/3 of the planet unchanged.
From the results of the experiment, apparently it won't work as a means to sequester carbon.
However, what if we can use this to improve the productivity of the ocean in general? Might the increased amount of biomass serve to improve fisheries? I.e., if there's more food all the way up the food chain, can't we eat more fish? It's a hungry planet and many fisheries have been depleted....
--PeterM
I'd rather be fertilizing the oceans with treated sewage and land runoff - iron powder gets expensive after a while.
Exactly. The CO2 is still locked up in an animal somewhere in the food chain, rather than the atmosphere. I guess they were looking for the perfect result of the CO2 just magically ceasing to be a problem. Most of those smaller lifeforms will end up as shit on the seabed anyway, what's the problem ?
As I understand the chemistry, the solar energy that is used to convert the CO2 to other forms (say, sugar, and similar things) is re-released by the animals when they expend energy and exhale what? CO2.
"Personally, I think that more experiments like this will show that most if not all carbon storage strategies do not work."
So why aren't we, personally, planting 10 trees each year? Isn't that a carbon storage strategy, with free oxygen and built-in cooling?
Do you own de-forested land? By all means, if you do, please take advantage of the many free "plant a tree" programs available around the world... don't stop at 10 a year, you should easily be able to plant 100 or more in a day, if you have the land.
Meanwhile, the 99% of the population that doesn't own land suitable for growing additional trees will have to find something else to do.
Considering how much the police and the courts blindly trust all the data coming from forensic laboratories, she would be well and truly fucked.
I hope that's only true on TV (about blindly trusting the data) - sure, she'll have 2 years vacation from her job while the thing gets settled in court, but even a public defender should be able to get her lost wages compensation and a new job in return for being so messed around by the system.
I saw no potentially deadly situations caused by people with high IQ. The smart people on occation whined about illogical orders, but they always understood when not to "fuck around", i.e. during live fire.
The people writing the rules (banning high IQ) are also the people who give the orders. I'd really like to nuke 'em from orbit and start over, but when they've sunk to that level maybe it's just time to leave town.
The police actively don't hire people that are too smart. Which scares the shit out of me.
Anti-discrimination laws don't cover intelligence. If this guy really were bright, he'd realize that he doesn't want to be part of an organization that screens out high IQ scores.
A CEO that will go out into the factory and make some ice cream is exactly what Ben and Jerry needed.
I firmly believe it's what the world needs... but there are many mechanisms in place that reward ruthlessness over doing the right thing for your employees / coworkers / neighbors / environment / etc. If those could be systematically erased, we would be making real progress.
The people who are "intrinsically motivated" to do "whatever it takes" to be a top performer in the global economic landscape are generally "intrinsically motivated" by the one thing that measures performance in that arena: money.
It is a rare person who loves making money at all costs, just so other people can have it.
I am reminded of Doctorow's whuffie - it might work in a world where all basic needs are met regardless of whether or not you contribute. When people need the money for food, shelter, etc., I think human nature isn't quite up to the task of fair ratings among peers.
Slashdot Mirror
Joke or not, there is something in the "modern" environment that's making autism worse. Yeah, sure, it's always been around and was mostly un-noticed before, but it's getting noticed now because the severity is ratcheting up - fast.
They once analyzed all the constituents of coffee (hundreds) and found that a quarter or so of them are carcinogenic. So we all should be pretty much dead by now.
Something I found interesting working with a radiotherapy doc (PhD style) was that you have cancer cells. I have cancer cells. Everybody has cancer cells, all the time. It's only a concern when they get out of hand.
The other thing I found interesting was when one of his ex grad students (who had done a thesis on dose measurement, involving lots of close proximity to radiotherapy machines) died at age 24 of a rare and unexplained form of blood borne cancer.
this is why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Authorisation_and_Restriction_of_ChemicalsREACH is so important. from wikipedia : "There were 100,106 chemicals in use in the EU in 1981, when the last survey was performed. Of these only 3,000 have been tested and over 800 are known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic to reproduction." So, only 3% of chemicals in use by man have been tested for environmental and health safety.
And, of those tested, over 1/4 are dangerous. Of the remaining 97,106 registered chemicals, how many problems are lurking there?
Chemicals are nothing new, the natural environment is full of chemicals from plants, bacterial waste, poisonous animals, etc. that we need to be wary of, but if we're getting creative making new ones, it would be nice if we had some idea what we're getting into - the natural ones have mostly been there since the dawn of our species, we've had plenty of generations to learn about or evolve to be able to deal with them.
The ATC decision is based on several things, such as the fact that pilots (by definition) do a lot of traveling, and the real-time safety aspects.
If you had a mission critical piece of software coded with Swahili names and constructs, you could, theoretically, still qualify it for use. But the real question would be: why would you go there in the first place?
Concur - the foreign language code I have encountered (maybe 0.01% of all code I've seen) has been almost entirely French.
I'm sure it's entirely attitude based, it can't be that they are unable to learn English, or that they don't value input from English colleagues, but then again.....
We just got a 9' eee for work, in black it looks plenty manly, especially when you have to peck type with one finger ;-P
Seriously, have you considered a bumper sticker to the effect of "I keep my BIG IRON in the bedroom."
"Whatever you learn in school will be mostly useless in the workplace, and what you learn in the workplace will likely be useless within 5 years" Well, my friend, you aim too low. Math is never useless or obsolete, nor are algorithms, data structures etc. Technology is irrelevant and is learned "by the way" if you get all of the above. Feel kind of sorry for the job you might have..
You know, you are right - I do just assume that math, data structures and algorithms are a given knowledge base when someone applies for a job in programming. All too often, they are sorely lacking.
I sort of picked those things up on my own before they were presented in school, so I never really gave school credit for teaching them, and looking at the graduating class, most people who didn't know algorithms when they came in, still didn't know algorithms when they left, regardless of their GPA.
My father made this observation:
"Old doctors and old lawyers are like old wines. Old engineers are like old fish fillets."
There probably is some outright age-ism out there...
The one time I ran into this kind of ageism was when a CEO had screwed up, big time, and he was looking for scapegoats. The easy target was the 64 year old engineer "well, he didn't deliver the product fast enough, we missed last year's sales cycle" yadda, yadda, yadda. He had me hire a young guy to "help him out", which turned into replacing him after a few months. The young guy was good, as good as we could hope for, but not as productive as the 64 year old. The (ironically) funny part was when they both quit on the same day, after a particularly immature outburst from said CEO.
Anyway, he was playing to the stereotype of the old guy not being hardworking enough, or in touch with the latest technology, or any number of similar stereotypes. He was orchestrating theater for the investors to make himself look good. It wasn't convincing to us at all, but maybe it kept a lawsuit off his back, who knows?
Day to day, in a good environment, these prejudices don't matter. When the going gets rough, stereotypes can come out against you - regardless of whether they are true for you or not.
The degree is important to get your interview, but what really matters on the ground is whether or not you can pick stuff up and learn it for yourself.
Training classes, etc. are all well and good, but if you can't get up to speed on a new technology without a lot of help from teachers, coworkers, etc., then you have earned the label "old dog, no new tricks."
If you can jump into a technology you don't know and get up to speed relatively quickly without undue stress on your home life, then IT can be a good field for you, whether you're 15, 25, 35, or 55. If you can't, I'd suggest looking into another field for work. Whatever you learn in school will be mostly useless in the workplace, and what you learn in the workplace will likely be useless within 5 years. IT is a constantly moving target, like tax law. Sure, you can be a basic accountant and not stress too much about the new stuff, but if you're going to be someone who gets promoted to higher levels (and doesn't get cut at the next layoff round), you need to be better than that.
Speaking very cynically here, of course you are right about the earth naturally cycling, another ice age coming, etc.
But - homo sapiens has redefined "the natural order" - we only live a short time and we want to see what we want to see, within our lifetime. I don't want to see my children eaten by panthers, fortunately (or not, depending on your perspective) men from my grandfathers' time more or less eliminated the panther threat to humans around my home. They almost eliminated the alligator threat around the time I was born, alligators are making a comeback, we have a human death every couple of years (on average) now attributable to alligator attack. I'd call that acceptable losses (vs the millions of us who live here), unless it was my child who got eaten.
I live in Florida, as does most of my family - we are obviously a little biased against the whole "let the sea rise 20 or 30 feet" thing. There's an almost unimaginable amount of investment around the world in buildings and infrastructure located less than 20 feet above sea level. It only makes sense to try to control the sea level to protect that investment. We control the animals and plants (that we see), why not the climate too?
So, back to the cynical perspective, in order to control the climate, we need to control emission of CO2 (or so the popular media says), which, conveniently, means taking control of fossil fuel burning. Now, if we (the developed western countries) can do this on a worldwide basis, we can maintain our technological lead and control over the affairs of the planet. What's not to like? Gain control of the climate, maintain control of the geo-political situation, preserve investments in coastal regions, it's all good.
Never mind that we don't really know what we're doing and have little actual control over what most people do most of the time anyway. "Climate control", or the attempt to move in that direction, serves lots of short term interests. I predict that attempts to control the climate will continue for a long time to come, even after the first several spectacular failures.
Personally, I'm with Stephen Hawking in thinking that we should be devoting 0.25% of GDP (about double what we currently are) to getting off this rock and making viable settlements elsewhere.
Take a look at your subdivision - from orbit. Compare it to the farmland, now compare the farmland to the undeveloped lands... If you plant 10 trees in your 1/4 acre suburban lot, you're done, that's all the space you have. It's a good start, but hardly a significant impact. Even if we managed to cover all of the dry land with trees (which is impossible over the vast rocky areas, deserts and ice fields), that still leaves 2/3 of the planet unchanged.
From the results of the experiment, apparently it won't work as a means to sequester carbon.
However, what if we can use this to improve the productivity of the ocean in general? Might the increased amount of biomass serve to improve fisheries? I.e., if there's more food all the way up the food chain, can't we eat more fish? It's a hungry planet and many fisheries have been depleted....
--PeterM
I'd rather be fertilizing the oceans with treated sewage and land runoff - iron powder gets expensive after a while.
Why are well-fed whales a bad thing?
If you look at the cost of feeding the whales, vs their current commercial value (0, except in the whaling nations), it's a losing game.
more food than the food chain could absorb
They haven't been paying attention to what happens in the polar seas every summer, then, have they?
Exactly. The CO2 is still locked up in an animal somewhere in the food chain, rather than the atmosphere. I guess they were looking for the perfect result of the CO2 just magically ceasing to be a problem. Most of those smaller lifeforms will end up as shit on the seabed anyway, what's the problem ?
As I understand the chemistry, the solar energy that is used to convert the CO2 to other forms (say, sugar, and similar things) is re-released by the animals when they expend energy and exhale what? CO2.
"Personally, I think that more experiments like this will show that most if not all carbon storage strategies do not work."
So why aren't we, personally, planting 10 trees each year? Isn't that a carbon storage strategy, with free oxygen and built-in cooling?
Do you own de-forested land? By all means, if you do, please take advantage of the many free "plant a tree" programs available around the world... don't stop at 10 a year, you should easily be able to plant 100 or more in a day, if you have the land.
Meanwhile, the 99% of the population that doesn't own land suitable for growing additional trees will have to find something else to do.
If he was really smart, he would figure out that getting some questions wrong on the test would actually get him hired.
Too late now - his secret is out!
and what if he got those questions right by luck???
Considering how much the police and the courts blindly trust all the data coming from forensic laboratories, she would be well and truly fucked.
I hope that's only true on TV (about blindly trusting the data) - sure, she'll have 2 years vacation from her job while the thing gets settled in court, but even a public defender should be able to get her lost wages compensation and a new job in return for being so messed around by the system.
I saw no potentially deadly situations caused by people with high IQ. The smart people on occation whined about illogical orders, but they always understood when not to "fuck around", i.e. during live fire.
The people writing the rules (banning high IQ) are also the people who give the orders. I'd really like to nuke 'em from orbit and start over, but when they've sunk to that level maybe it's just time to leave town.
The police actively don't hire people that are too smart. Which scares the shit out of me.
Anti-discrimination laws don't cover intelligence. If this guy really were bright, he'd realize that he doesn't want to be part of an organization that screens out high IQ scores.
I'm a little disturbed that this woman is leaving so much DNA on what is supposed to be a sterile product!
A CEO that will go out into the factory and make some ice cream is exactly what Ben and Jerry needed.
I firmly believe it's what the world needs... but there are many mechanisms in place that reward ruthlessness over doing the right thing for your employees / coworkers / neighbors / environment / etc. If those could be systematically erased, we would be making real progress.
The people who are "intrinsically motivated" to do "whatever it takes" to be a top performer in the global economic landscape are generally "intrinsically motivated" by the one thing that measures performance in that arena: money.
It is a rare person who loves making money at all costs, just so other people can have it.
I am reminded of Doctorow's whuffie - it might work in a world where all basic needs are met regardless of whether or not you contribute. When people need the money for food, shelter, etc., I think human nature isn't quite up to the task of fair ratings among peers.
...copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.
Unless you sell flash memory.