The baked bean index and other economic indicators
Many more in the included links.
This does not include* any mention of the vendor gift index; Tuesday’s Lab Snacks included mini Lorna Dunes. They were tasty. (He who opens the package gets first choice). And it was a partial order, so possibly more to come.
*UPDATE: Now it does. I’ve been linked to by Kottke!
Uncertain Principles: Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing
No matter how carefully you set up your analogy, somebody will come along and interpret it in the most stupidly literal way possible, find some tiny point where it fails to correspond perfectly with the actual topic of discussion, and decide that this disagreement is an utterly devastating counter-argument to whatever point you were trying to make.
…
This is incredibly frustrating, because argument by analogy is a tool with a long and distinguished history among intelligent people debating topics in good faith.
Arguing in good faith on the internet has disappeared like a rabbit down its hole.
Aw, crap.
Monty Python Reuniting for 1 Wild Night in New York
Best of all is the reunion itself, which brings together the five surviving Pythonites (Graham Chapman died in 1989) for the premiere of Almost the Truth. Following the Oct. 15 screening of the documentary at Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin will take questions from the audience and no doubt bend them into wicked, black-humored pretzels.
In Venn diagram format.
Outsmarting the Facebook Lobster Trap: Three Worries, One Guideline, Seven Principles
Facebook is basically designed like a lobster trap with your friends as bait
I am on facebook. I find I don’t use it a lot.
Chad over at Uncertain Principles has been doing a great series of interviews about career paths other than academia, in The Project for Non-Academic Science.
One of the difficulties with trying to broaden the usual definition of scientists is that there’s not a lot of press for non-academic science. Academic culture is so strongly focused on academic careers that people don’t hear a lot about careers outside the usual Ph.D-postdoc-tenure-track-job track. Which helps feed the stress and angst regarding the job market.
There is a listing of interviews with more to come.
I didn’t see a point in volunteering, since I have my own (albeit smaller) platform, and I’ve already given a career path summary this hits most of the main points in those interviews. A few details that are missing are about how I got my current job and how someone else would go about getting a similar job. I got it through informal networking — I already had met my current boss because atomic physics is a small, and therefore incestuous, community, and I got an email that was forwarded a few times advertising the position. I had already responded to an earlier advertisement for a position, which was later withdrawn due to funding issues, but used that to finagle a visit to the Observatory after a conference in DC. So when a job opened up for real, I was essentially “pre-interviewed” for it, and since I had the requisite background in laser trapping, I jumped on to the short list immediately. Since there really aren’t academic programs that do timekeeping, the prep work is all in the atomic physics for atomic clock R&D.
If I were going to do a full interview, I would interview myself like William Hurt did in The Big Chill
So you went to Oregon State University to enter the doctoral program in physics. And you just had to finish that dissertation.
I didn’t have to. I’m not hung up on this completion thing.
Then you had several jobs, all of which you quit.
What are you getting at? They’re called postdocs. I was evolving. I’m still evolving.
But your real claim to fame came as a cartoonist in Physics Today
I wouldn’t call it fame, exactly. I was a few cartoons, and I may have had a small, deeply disturbed following.
What are you doing now? Or I should say, what have you evolved into now?
Oh, I’m in research.
What are you researching?
Umm, an atomic device.
What kind of atomic device?
I … don’t … have to answer that.
Sorry, gotta go.
Just answer that last question! (muffled struggle, fade out)
(That’s a line from William Steig’s wonderful book, CDB!)
I’ve been busy. I’m off to a family reunion soon and have been getting things prepared for my trip. Since I wanted to have something in the queue for when I am away from the internet, I’ve been hoarding posts. A few are ready to go, and a few just need a little polishing (yes, I often polish, even if it doesn’t look like it). Things shouldn’t go completely dark, and I should have some more video to add to the pile of unprocessed files, since I think my nieces and cousins (and perhaps the older relatives, too) will want to investigate the wonderful world of slow-motion.
If anyone is missing the recently-late Billy Mays … you can either tune into cable and wait 5 minutes, or go here:
5 Strangest Products Pitched by Billy Mays
(I am not lamenting his loss any more than the other ~150,000 people that die every day)
Pixar grants girl’s dying wish to see ‘Up’
From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.
After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.
Pardon me, I seem to have a condensation problem on the interior of my ocular assistance apparatus [sniff].
Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time
As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels.
The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they’ve accomplished. If it’s a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity with the tasks. But when you get a large group together, which has diverse tasks and goals, there is impending disaster. Bad meetings I’ve attended often involve people discussing details that nobody else at the table understands or possibly cares about — the sort of thing that should happen one-on-one or in a small group, as everyone else sits there, trying not to fall asleep.