Monthly Archives: September 2008

It's the End of the World as We Know It. Repeat as Necessary.

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And I still feel fine.

The latest brouhaha, of course is the LHC, which is supposed to destroy us all, but this is not the first time that science, some (quasi-) scientific phenomenon, or scientists, have supposedly threatened to pushed us into the abyss. Here’s a sampling of recent scenarios, ignoring the many-more-numerous armageddon/rapture predictions (there are some people who have predicted the end of the world numbering in double digits, and yet their credibility with their followers seems undiminished)

Leading up to its startup in 2000, amid all of the Y2k and Millennium hype, the relativistic heavy-ion collider (RHIC) was supposed to do almost exactly the same thing as the LHC: make baby black holes that would devour us.

In 2003, it was was feared (by some) that the Galileo probe, scheduled to crash into Jupiter, would initiate a fusion reaction, either igniting it like a star, or blowing it up in a massive explosion.

2003 was also to have brought Planet X close to earth, amid cataclysm, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

In 1999, the Cassini probe did a flyby of earth in a slingshot maneuver to send it to Saturn, and was going to be the death of us all (some especially egregious physics in that one)

1997 was to have the earth enter the “photon belt” which would cause electrical disruption and, paradoxically, several days of total darkness.

In March of 1982, it was the planetary “alignment,” when all nine of the planets (Pluto was still an evil conspirator back then) were within a sector of less than 100 degrees in the so-called “Jupiter Effect” that was supposed to cause earthquakes and other other disasters (I got a cool night of viewing out of this, since it was so easy to see Mars, Jupiter and Saturn)

yaddayaddayaddayaddayadda LEONARD BERNSTEIN

It's Not the LHC Black Holes That Will Destroy Us

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Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute Ready to Start “Squirrel Smasher”

Scientists currently rely on computer simulations to smash biological units, but simulations can only do so much, and without the visceral enjoyment of seeing two squirrels collide at thousands of miles an hour.

Malwin said there will be controls in place to prevent new undesirable species from forming. “Only species of the same type will be smashed together, so you don’t have to worry about the flying rat, or poisonous Chihuahua nightmare scenarios.”

Wait, what about nanoevolution happening during the collision, changing the theoretical subbiological particles? Madness, I tell you, madness. It’ll be the end of the world. Biologists should be aware of the particle physics maxim: that which is not forbidden is mandated. Poisonous Chihuahuas and antiChihuahuas are inevitable. (Flying rats already exist. They’re called pigeons)

via Pharyngula

If U Cn Rd Ths, U Cn Slve Crimes

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Txt Crimes, Sex Crimes And Murder: The Science Of Forensic Linguistics

Based on techniques that were first used to measure similarity between marine ecosystems, and then applied to the analysis of sexual crime, Dr Grant has now developed a method to quantify people’s style of text writing. His technique, which assigns a numeric measure of stylistic difference between any two texts, encourages the move from expert opinion based evidence to more methodologically rigorous and empirically tested techniques.

Suffering Fools

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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.