you simple minded twat - it's inertia. There are lots of things that are already expressed in metric units. Things with relatively quick turnover, i.e. food and whatnot. Things with a bit longer lifespan have been slower to convert. Like cars. Albeit most cars on the road today will have all metric fasteners and so forth. Take a look at your lugs? Then there are things with a very long lifetime. Like your house. Imagine you had to replace a floor and the only dimensioned subflooring you could get was metric, while your floor joists were set otherwise? You would either have seams falling between joists, or you would have to rip and waste some portion of the subflooring.

This is hasn't been my experience. I've worked in a half dozen or so labs. Physics, chemistry, engineering - in academic labs, in a national lab, and have collaborated very closely with the research labs of an industry consortium of including 3M, Corning, P&G, and so forth. In every instance the older scientists direct the broad research goals, but have very little worthwhile input into the actual science. They haven't been all that creative or helpful. And the overall research goals are usually pretty obvious targets. From my experience, the life cycle of a scientists is they work hard when young and make a mark, then move up in the organisation structure until they are doing little more than managing a group of young scientists - and take credit for their work, of course.

I second that - you are full of it. People are going to look at what a PhD did. I've personally seen brokerage houses recruiting out of computational labs at the University of Chicago. They were looking at people doing computer simulations of large biological systems, among other things. They wanted people with experience in statistical mechanics and and computer modelling. I had a former colleague with a PhD in Physical Chemistry go through the application process for a Quant position. His experience was that the prospective employers took his computational and mathematical aptitude on faith, given his schooling, and were only interested in asking question about what he had taught himself about economic and investment models.

OK, whatever. It doesn't make any difference. But I'll rephrase ...

". But things definitely have changed. Asymmetric warfare being launched by an organization/movement (rather than directly by a state like, say, North Korea) doesn't fit the WWII, or Vietnam type molds"

And that's my point, and why your analogy to an American fighting for the German army doesn't work.

"Wrong. They did exactly that, in so many words, and with a large majority voting in favor."

No they didn't. Congress did not authorise force against AQ. Seriously. Show me where they did. You're are just flat wrong about that. The force they authorised was to deal with the people who brought about the 9/11 attacks. It isn't necessary to be a member of AQ to have done so, and likewise it isn't sufficient to be a member of AQ to be counted in that group.

". But things definitely have changed. Asymmetric warfare being launched by an organization/movement (rather than directly by a state like, say, North Korea) doesn't fit the WWII, or Vietnam type molds"

And that's my point, and why your analogy to an American turncoat fighting for the German army doesn't work.

That analogy doesn't work for two reasons. First, the US congress declared war against Germany. They haven't done as much against AQ or AQ affiliates. They have only authorised force against the 9/11 attack perpetrators, planners, and those providing material support to them. I think you have to go pretty far to get Awalaki into that bunch. Second, the guy who joins up with the German military would be killed in mutual battle as a course of military action. The two Americans that were killed were specifically targeted for assassination. In fact, Awalaki's lawyer was representing him in US courts in an effort to get and injunction against his pending assassination. They were on an assassination list.

I'm not arguing if or not his killing was the right thing to do. Just that your analogy doesn't work very well. For an analogy to work well, the two instances being compared have to have a lot of common points - certainly the most relevant points need to be the same. From what we know of Awalaki's actions, a number of Americans could have been likewise targeted for their residence and actions in Vietnam, and their agitation about that war here in the US. Even that would have been easier to justify. There was a typical army and a congress authorised force in Vietnam.

Actually, what the parent said is true. I watched sesame street as a child, and now watch it regularly with mine - as well as owning (and having watched in its entirety) a box set chronicling 40 years of episodes. The old cookie monster was a one dimensional cookie fanatic. The new cookie monster character is a lot more refined. When they do include him eating cookies there is always a caveat about what is and isn't healthy food, and how often to eat them. Which I like as a parent.

And that link is pretty weak. I could easily pick the same number of instances over the same time period and show exactly the opposite. And each bit on its own is thin. An ambiguous quote to the New Zealand Herald about dieting? Lame.

Buy a small chunk of something that looks like the big machines she will be using. As others have said, with that little money you aren't going to get legitimate computational resources. But she will certainly qualify - or already has - on some of the larger public machines. In my experience, it is really nice to have a small, i.e two or three nodes, cluster to test and benchmark code. You can look at things like parallel performance on a single node versus across nodes. If the code plays well with shared memory. Can the code reasonably mix shared and non-shared parallelization schemes. And so forth.

The low impact is because that argument is dumb. It is inconsequential that this group may have found a planet made of diamond. It received a lot of attention because people place a certain significance on diamond, and a diamond that large is particularly interesting. No other reason. Seriously, imagine if they had found a crystalline planet made of silicon or germanium.

Most people - including scientists, sadly - assume a scientific conclusion implies some public policy. That's the hang up. In its entirety.

"if I read unpaid internship, I read 'MUG'."

Which shows me that you don't read CVs. Why would anyone mention what they were paid for any particular job or contract? That's something that comes in after you've been made an offer and are negotiating compensation. People put down where they have worked and the things they did/learned.

This isn't a solution, it's a kludge. All the codes I've worked with have the ability to checkpoint, but in practice it's done infrequently because of the overhead. Increasing the checkpointing commensurate with number of nodes results in diminishing returns - which is antithetical to "massively parallel".

Frequent checkpoints would be onerous for billion atom systems.

What I don't quite get - and maybe someone can enlighten me - is how they keep 80K compute nodes going. Even with very reliable hardware, several of these nodes will fail each day. The massively parallel codes I work with (MD) can't deal with a compute node going out. Do other massively parallel codes have a way to deal with this sort of thing? This seems to be a big challenge for parallel computing. When you have a code and problem that can use several thousand nodes, hardware failure will be a daily occurrence. Incidentally, I've had the opportunity to use several thousand cpus in one go. Before New Mexico's Encanto was released for general use I was one of several people that had access to the machine. There really wasn't a problem running million or billion atom systems over several thousand cpus. But this was just brief benchmarking runs. Not data production.

Most people have it. And I'm guessing you do to. Despite all the lame - and transparent - machismo bluster.

I've killed, butchered, and cooked several animals. By far, the most difficult part is killing the animal. Especially when it doesn't go well. It can be pretty disturbing. All the rest is just gore. I wish more people had this attitude. I think fewer animals would live miserable lives and people would waste less.