I'm not so sure...I seem to recall that he somehow had an article published here a day or so after the announcement of his death (too lazy to look it up though). Also, I'm sure his articles will get duped at least a few dozen times in the next five years.

I think the concern is not so much "large enough to threaten all life" as "large enough to screw up modern civilization." Our energy/food distribution systems are, I suspect, a lot more fragile than ecosystems and such. Most life would survive strikes much larger than Apophis could make, but we probably wouldn't without being downgraded to hunter-gatherer status.

It behooves us to learn how to move these things around, and (unfortunately) you'll probably only convince the public to spend money on that if it's a real danger.

I suppose that's better than having a cynical Slashdot monkey set feces on stun.

My impression is that, even if you go back to grad school, you're still not going to be paid anywhere near what you'd get paid if you went and got a job in industry with that same masters or PhD. As long as our society expects bright people to suck it up if they want to teach, we're not going to get as many of them to teach as we'd like.

Of course, I still don't understand why we require teachers to have a bachelors or masters degree to teach grade school, or why schools need so damn many administrators and experts to "optimize" the teaching process.

In general, I don't like fear and ignorance. I think we'd be better off as a species if we worked harder to eliminate it.

But some days, like the days when I go looking for work, I really love the widespread fear and ignorance of math and computer science. These people will keep me in a job for the rest of my life as long as I don't mind cleaning up after those that like running with scissors.

<asshole>

You must be either one of the greatest geniuses of all time, or uninformed on the topic of neurological modeling. People doing real research generally tend not to waste their time trolling Slashdot to find insightful theories, so you might want to try to get it published in a journal instead.

What specific treatment, pray tell, would suffice as a "one algorithm fits all" approach to solving Navier-Stokes (let alone when mixed with extra behavior like crystal growth, chemical/thermal diffusion, etc.)? If it works, you should code it up, sell it, and make yourself rich.

The reason people "oversimplify" Navier-Stokes--by using reasonable assumptions in the context of the problem at hand--is because it often lets them determine analytically how the system will behave. If they *do* have to resort to numerics, making those assumptions greatly reduces the computing power required, so you don't need some high-powered (or highly customized) machine.

</asshole>

That sounds like good money to me. :) It's not enough to make me willing to take responsibility for things that could cost a client millions of dollars, but I could definitely do software development again for that kind of money.

However, you might be surprised how unsurprised I'd be concerning silly business decisions nowadays. ;)

Well, of course. But then the oil refinery is going to have risk-averse management willing to pay more for risk-averse software development, and I don't have the detail-oriented personality needed for that kind of analness. So I wouldn't be touching that code anyway. ;)

For what it's worth, if I worked in the class of business you're in, I'd not be looking to take responsibility for anything I didn't have to. They probably don't pay non-management people enough to warrant that level of concern in what comes out of your business unit.

You can always make sure you've got some legitimate reason to have done the refactoring/redesign. I got away with rewriting a section of code that the owner of the company had cordoned off with comments like "DO NOT TOUCH, YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS ANY FASTER" because I made it run about 10 times faster. (Honestly, how can you ignore that kind of comment if you like programming?)

I checked in a bug fix (with unrelated speed improvements included) that introduced another bug, but also dropped application CPU usage from 75-100% to under 10%. The owner was initially pissed, of course, but I fixed the bug I introduced in under an hour, and showed that it was still a lot faster in addition to working correctly, and in the end the only reprimand I got was, "well, don't do that again without asking."

For the next few years I kept replacing bad code if I had to touch it, and, no, I didn't always ask first. I was more careful about testing my changes and (since the standard development model at this place was "seat of your pants" anyway) I rarely had any issues because of it.

Refactoring bad code is only scary if you're afraid to take responsibility for the code you put out.

Warning: This message may contain cynicism that some people may find offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.

It seems like it takes an inordinate amount of effort to sell doing maintenance/cleanup to management types, and I don't know enough about psychology or the "business" mindset to understand why that is. Let us know if you figure out the secret to being a high-priced contractor while still having a conscience and some integrity. I suspect that the most essential component of success as a high-paid contractor is being able to oversell yourself. Being able to deliver on any of it is optional.

(Note: I'm just taking you at your word that you were that valuable...I've seen others (and, at times, I've done it myself) that looked at themselves that way, but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.)

I'm sure that in the early 20th century somebody was saying, "It's striking how few airplanes are sold to commercial companies," and going on to draw the conclusion that government spending on aircraft was a pork program. (And I'm sure there was some pure pork spending involved, but 100 years later, the overall effect of that kind of spending lets us use airplanes for things that would have been unthinkably expensive when people started spending money on them).

Today's supercomputer is the next decade's mid-range workstation. (Yes, I know, duh.)

I wonder if universities will ever figure out that teaching and doing research are orthogonal skill sets, and that they shouldn't assume good researchers will make (or even want to be) good professors. Maybe it's just too hard to get funding to pay somebody just to do research, or just to teach.

I remember reading an article (in National Geographic, I think) when I was a kid that stated geologists thought the horn of Africa would eventually be separated from the rest of the continent by this activity. I haven't been a kid in at least two decades.

While I wouldn't choose to do my scientific computing on Windows, I know some people do, and those Tesla cards (which are providing the bulk of the processing power) really don't care which OS you're running.

Wow, I never even thought about that (I was just going for the "what a stupid concept for a show" angle), but I don't doubt they hate it.

Actually, maybe these shows provide some value to society: if you find yourself in a conversation with a member of $GROUP_X, all you have to do is bring up the $POPCULTURE_DEPICTION_OF_X show, and just agree with the almost guaranteed strong negative reaction. Nothing breaks the ice like a topic you can both get angry about. ;)