As energy prices soar and consumers turn to the Sun for their power, opportunistic thieves are cashing in on the new market by dismantling and reselling solar panels.
“I wouldn’t say it’s pervasive, but it’s going on,” California Solar Energy Industries Association executive director Sue Kateley told the Contra Costa Times in August. According to UK paper the Guardian a rash of thefts in California has led one wag to coin the term ‘grand theft solar’
Think Geek is an evil website, the way they separate me from my disposable income.
Crimp-connectors, pop-rivets and magnets. Somewhat pose-able. Pedantic man notes that they aren’t technically toys in the office unless perhaps if the door is open, since they sit/stand on the door and door jamb. But they do occasionally distract the odd passer-by (which describes a fair fraction of them) into putting them into new poses.
So I ran across a version of the conversation that most physicists have had over on the Shores of the Dirac Sea (and it’s a new blog, so welcome to the blogohedron!)
The other thing that has happened is that I’ve had many conversations in airplanes where I have realized that people in general do not have a clue as to what physics is all about and why it is so important for humanity. The conversations go like this:
Passenger- Nice to meet you.
DB- Nice to meet you too.
Passenger-So what do you do?
DB-I’m a physicist.
And then the person who is staring at me, if he does not decide that he is too scared, gives me one of the following lines:
1. I see. So what is that good for?
2. So you’re good at sports?
3. That was my worst subject in high school.
4. I never understood physics
5. You must be a genius.
6. I wanted to be a physicist, but I became an engineer instead.
1 is at least addressable with some blurb about basic science being important. And I get to tack on how I sorta help make GPS work.
2 has never come up. Especially if I’m playing sports. (Oh, I used to play hoops and was able to set a pretty mean pick and occasionally get off the ground for a rebound, or pretend to play football or volleyball, but good? Nah.)
The combination of 3 & 4 I’ve heard (not necessarily on airplanes) is “Oh, I hated that when I took it in high school/college” which really takes the starch out of my sails, especially because they start inching (centimetering?) away from you, as if they expected you to start teaching them physics again at any second, like the Monty Python encyclopedia salesman sketch
Burgler!
If I let you in you’ll teach me physics.
No, ma’am, I just want to ransack the flat.
Alright (opens door)
Mind you, I don’t know if you’ve considered the advantages of being able to solve the ballistic pendulum problem on your own.
Anyway, what’s up with the “I hated physics” response? I generally don’t denigrate anyone else’s profession when I first meet them. Well, unless they’re a lawyer.
5 is a toughie. I don’t know how to respond to “You must be smart/a genius!”
Options:
“And handsome, too.” But they don’t know me, and might not appreciate my sense of humor.
“Why yes. Yes, I am. I am incredibly smart.” As with the previous answer, it comes off as arrogant if they miss the signs that it’s humor. But if you go the opposite direction with “No, not really” it could be even worse, because if you’re not really smart and still understand physics, where are they in the grand scheme of things? It’s a lose-lose situation. And they still have that student-in-the-headlights look of someone afraid I’ll start lecturing. No, I think you have to thank them for the compliment and quickly change the subject.
6 — I’ve never met an engineer who told me that. Several of them confided that they didn’t understand why they needed to take physics, which scares the socks off me. I have to refrain from asking that subset if they worked on the Tacoma Narrows bridge.
Interactive singles map of the US. There are sliders so you can narrow the age range, and choose your span. It does not adjust for singles in relationships. No, it doesn’t go under 18, you perverts.
[T]he only two places with a surplus of women in the 20-29 age bracket are New Orleans, LA and Springfield, MA? Lynchburg, VA pops up, too, if you lower the minimum required population.
… and see if anyone solves it.
The blackboard of anonymous questions
There are blackboards in the common room of my department. They don’t see much use.
We were joking at tea today that people ought to write problems they want solved or questions they have on the blackboard, and other people could write the answers. Surely this has been tried somewhere. How did it work?
Assistant to Assistant Professor
I hope people don’t call me elitist when I claim that most people with high school education could easily do administrative assistant job. Primarily all they have to do is keep track of paperwork – like travel reimbursements, schedules, purchase orders, that kind of stuff. It’s not that complicated, but it’s not a good position for chronic procrastinators or disorganized people. And yet they do lose things, or forget about what they have been asked to do on regular basis – it’s almost as if the ONLY people hired into these positions are disorganized procrastinators.
I’ve survived four departmental administrative assistants in the 10 years I’ve been in my current job. Three have been pretty good, and one was hopeless. (There are other support staff, too, though there are times where they are support in name only). I remember trying to train hopeless to keep track of purchases in our database, with the idea that I would do less purchasing and more physics. Everything was set up — all of the codes and categories — so all that was required was data entry and the paperwork. The computer for the data was in hopeless’s office, but we had a program that would allow others to access the computer, and you would see the actual screen in real time. More than once I logged on while hopeless was doing some data entry, and some part of the entry would be wrong — some typo so that the program didn’t recognize some piece of data. There would be a popup that asked “XXX is not in the system. Would you like to set it up?” And I’d watch, in horror, as the cursor moved to “YES” and was then clicked. It got to be like yelling at the TV screen during a bad movie (or football), only instead of “Pick up the gun, you idiot!” (or “Throw it out of bounds! Not to the other team!”) it was “No! No! Click NO! Auuugh!”
I’d eventually go back and fix the bad entries, and learned to just not watch the horror as it unfolded. Turns out that not much of my time was saved, when all was said and done.
JaneDoh, in the comments, adds
[W]hen I worked in a govt lab, I did as much of my own paperwork as possible, including travel arrangements, travel reimbursement, entering orders into the computer system, and sending important faxes. I didn’t trust our admin with ANYTHING.
The government (or at least my little corner of it) has moved away from the model of having someone arrange travel and do reimbursements. It’s done online these days, so you have to do it yourself. Our current departmental assistant is so overworked as it is that I do all this other “important” stuff myself anyway. It’s not a lack of competence that would delay these things getting done, it’s the huge stack of other work that also has to be done.
As far as the sentiment that anyone with a high school education can do this, I don’t know — I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. There’s all this empirical data (anecdotal though it may be, it does establish that these people exist). And were I to transform myself into Pedantic Man, I would point out that anyone with a college degree possesses a high school education — they just have more. Incoherent Ponderer, presumably, has the requisite education, but went on and obtained advanced degrees. So are we counting everyone who graduates high school? Because it’s a tough sell to get that potential future PhD to want to be an office assistant. Or anyone else who aspires to another job, for the challenge, pay or whatever else they happen to desire in their employment.
What is really being requested here is someone who has a high school education, is capable of more — they have the intelligence, maturity, drive, etc. — but for some reason never moved on and up, and yet are fulfilled doing a job that we’re all complaining about but don’t want to do ourselves. Somehow I don’t think there’s a huge pool of these job candidates out there. I think we’re stuck with the reality that the more competent a person is, generally, the higher they will rise. And as long as office assistants are not valued (market-wise) particularly highly, we’re stuck with what we can get. If you have a good one, consider yourself lucky.
From Futility Closet
Since the ratio of kilometers to miles is very close to the Golden Ratio, consecutive terms later in the Fibonacci series (once you get to 3) are approximate conversions of those distances.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …
3 miles is 5 km, 5 miles is 8 km, etc.
This knowledge, along with some bubble gum and a paper clip, should be sufficient to thwart the bad guys in at least three ways. Get on with it!
Papercraft toys.
Most of the Cubeecraft designs have interchangable parts! Do you think the Rocketeer should be wearing Master Chiefs helmet instead? Go for it. Do you think Mr.Stay Puft should trade in his kerchief for a suit? Switch out his body for Mr.Dtoids!
via Neatorama
Last week I was vacationing in Bills’ country — it’s tough being a Dolphins fan these days, but especially so within an hour or so of Buffalo — getting my fix of hot wings (not hard to find pretty much anywhere these days) and Beef on ‘Weck (still a local phenomenon), which required me to travel through Pennsylvania.
Eleven freaking “work areas” on the way up. Similar on the way back, with some changes to the route, though I didn’t bother to count. Not one of them was “active” and no workers to be seen, though to be fair it was on the weekend, but I’ve seen this during the week on other trips. Ugh. Is “Under Construction” the new state motto?
Anyway, if anyone in the DC area is lonely for this, the stretch of Rt 50 just east of Glebe Rd. in northern Virginia has been a work area since early July, and Friday is just the second day I’ve seen workers there.