I had no idea getting dressed was so mentally taxing to some people.

The president, I can understand (he's always in the public eye) but the others? Whatever, dudes, you have/had more money than God, if you want to wear the same clothes every day, knock yourself out, but don't give me this bullshit about expending energy on deciding what socks to put on in the morning.

I was in Boulder, Colorado for a while a couple years back. Those bumper stickers are everywhere. Then again, it's easy to proclaim platitudes when you are wealthy enough to be able to afford to live in Boulder.

One day out of the corner of my eye I saw, not "COEXIST", but "CRAPFEST". Every time I see one of those dopey bumper stickers, I think, CRAPFEST. Which is kind of what organized religions really are, a big, giant crapfest.

First of all, WTF does this have to do with tech? This is one of the most inappropriate stories for a News for Nerds site.

But, since we're all nerds, we do our homework, right?

Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about this issue should, at the very least, read the fact finder's report:

http://www.ctunet.com/blog/text/FactFinderCOMPLETE.pdf

Yes, it's 80 pages long and still requires a fair amount of context.

I am so sick and tired of idiots blathering on about (a) lazy selfish goddammed overpaid teachers or (b) without unions we'd all be working 752 days a week in sweatshops.

I'm in a union, been down this road before, it sucked ass. I still have a love/hate relationship with unions. But unlike binary data, things in the real world are rarely black and white.

Wait, I'm an idiot. He specifically says he doesn't have a degree. Stupid small font. Carry on.

Andrew C. Oliver is a professional cat herder who moonlights as a software consultant. He started programming when he was 8 and cut his teeth on GW Basic, BASICA, and dBase III+. He is most known for founding the POI project, which is now hosted at Apache. He also was one of the early developers at JBoss before it merged with Red Hat. He is a former board member and current helper at the Open Source Initiative. He is president and founder of Open Software Integrators, a professional services firm with offices in Durham, N.C., and Chicago, Ill.

And he has a degree in computer science.

They should have used self-sealing stem bolts, they don't have this problem.

No. Fucking. Way.

When I first read about their CS department going away, I wondered immediately if there is more to the story than meets the eye. At my university we have a hugely dysfunctional CS department - many faculty blatantly abuse their tenure. They just got their MS program cut, in fact, but nobody's complaining because everyone knows it was a lousy program due to lousy faculty. I have to wonder if there are reasons for dismantling the program that go far beyond budgetary issues. If it were a healthy department I doubt it would be on the chopping block in the first place. But, I speculate.

Getting rid of a department doesn't mean you get rid of all the courses being taught, nor does it mean you even get rid of the degree. I suspect many if not most faculty will be absorbed into other departments if they do end up deleting the department. For instance, many CS faculty could end up in engineering or math.

All I'm saying is these situations are generally more complex than they appear on the surface. Yes, public universities are in bad shape these days, but one thing I've noticed having watched this happen around me is that situations like this really bring to light some of the existing problems that were there all along but were manageable until the axe came down.

fraud is rampant and that people honestly trying to do science are less likely to be recognized and obtain tenure

Dr. Weatherman PhD here. The above is mostly rubbish amplified by the media and those philosophers in Insane Clown Posse.

The first thing you need to realize is that all universities are different, and the requirements for obtaining tenure vary dramatically from place to place. I would presume for condensed matter physics you're not going to be at a small liberal arts college, teaching a heavy load to undergraduates, but you will be seeking out a research intensive (call them R1) university where you will, if you are lucky, interview well and get an offer with a nice startup package so you can begin to build your research program. While I am tenured at a school which tries to be both undergrad focused and research focused (the best - or worst - of both worlds) I have a pretty good feeling for what the R1 schools require. While it still varies from place to place, your national and international reputation in the field will be a major factor in determining tenure, as well as your ability to land grants and publish (the latter tends to help the former).

If I were you, I'd be asking myself the following questions: Am I willing to work 60-80 hours a week for 7 years at (comparitively speaking) low pay doing what is necessary to obtain tenure? And doing basically the same things afterwards (maybe at a slightly less vigorous clip) to obtain promotion etc.? What aspects of academia interest you the most - research? Teaching? Service? Are you willing to post-doc for a few years while putting your resume out there and interviewing? Would you settle for a non-faculty position at a research lab?The job market - in general - is pretty bad right now in academia in the US. I don't know specifically about your specific field of interest, but there are generally a lot more applicants than open positions, and in many cases, retirements are not being filled with new searches at state funded schools whose state funding has been shrinking every year. If I were you, I'd go for it and get the PhD if it's what you love to do. As much as I bitch about the job to my colleagues I consider myself to be a lucky bastard to have such a cool job where I get to do nifty science (for me, on supercomputers) and do everything I can to get those around eager weather nerd undergrads onto their own career path, whether it be grad school, the private sector, or, god help me, TV. So anyway I say go for it if you really really love learning new things and want to never stop trying to answer questions about the world around you. For me, that's mostly what it's all about.

I live in Lower Asscrack (small midwestern city) on a 1/4 acre lot and my wife and I have been composting for years. We rake the leaves and use them as mulch for the flowerbeds and garden, and compost vegetables etc. which is raked into the soil in the spring. We aren't serious about gardening but it's really no big deal and it's kind of neat to see a hundred pounds of vegetable matter/plants etc. turn into nice rich black peaty compost. After doing this for about 10 years we have some excellent soil as the leaves from years ago have turned into topsoil by now.

I lived in Boulder, CO for a while recently. There are like 5 recycle buckets. But you figure it out. For those people who are moaning about having to figure out what recyclables go where: EABOD and STFU you whiny vaginas. Such a small inconvenience clearly will not ruin you busy important lives.

Neat, but for any job that isn't embarrassingly parallel, communication latency and speed will kill you when your nodes are spread across continents. If you're not doing any communication, well then groovy. Usually these large core servers are only 'earning their keep' when you're taking advantage of very fast interconnect hardware and doing things that can't be done by just a bunch of CPUs.

Does the UK/Europe have federally funded, shared computational resources for researchers? In the US we have what used to be called the Teragrid (now XSEDE) which is a network of supercomputers that are available for researchers. You have to write a proposal for machine time, but they're not all that difficult to get. The main disadvantage is that you have to submit your jobs via a queueing system, so your jobs usually don't start right away (having your own hardware does have its advantages) but the big shared resources have their advantages - you don't have to worry about maintenance, they usually have reliable archival resources, and every X years they usually replace the hardware with something faster.

I have lived on the eastern side of the central timezone and the western side of the eastern timezone. I prefer the latter, because it means that it stays light later (on the clock), regardless of what time of the year it is. My dad lives in Maine, a stone's throw from the Atlantic time zone and it's quite a different experience for us even though we're both in the Eastern time zone. In the early summer twilight occurs at his house at 4:30 AM - yuck.

If you are an earlybird and want light early, it's best to be on the eastern side of your time zone. If you like your daylight in the evening, pick the western side. And if you want persistent albeit rather dim sunlight in the summer, move to Nome.

I stopped reading after the author said three times in the first page that science was "proving" this or that. Unless you are a mathematician, you are not proving anything. So I can't really take this guy too seriously.

The scientific process is basically about experimenting/analyzing/hypothesizing/ruminating. Good scientists are overwhelming conservative in their conclusions because good scientists understand "the box" within which they are working.

The fact that early studies are overturned with new analysis is exactly what makes the scientific process so powerful. When new studies call into question the results of earlier studies it is called progress. If a new study shows that a previous study used questionable statistical approaches, then future reviewers can cite this new knowledge to keep new studies from using these flawed approaches. The scientific process and the peer-review process is certainly not perfect, but I have yet to hear from its detractors of a better alternative.

I don't recall anything during the billions of years prior to being born. I suspect after I die it will be similar. Just nothing, and no consciousness to experience it.

Being alive is really quite a trip and a rare gift. I plan on making the best of it. Life is for the living.