Call me a nerd if you like, but I need to ask this:

Do you know how to write? Writing a journal article isn't just "Check out this cool thing I worked on." You need to do a review of lit., provide a rationale for your work (i.e. show the gap in the research or failings of other algorithms which make your work necessary/useful), explain your work, show your results, and conclude with some manner of discussion of further work to be completed, holes in your design, implications, etc. Like 40 pages, double-spaced.

It's not something you just whip out when you're done. It sounds to me like you've looked at some other people's work and jumped straight to fiddling. This is fine, and honestly, most research at least starts that way. The paper is where you are going to legitimatize it by showing that you did your homework and you're not just some guy who did some fiddling--even if that's what you are!

So, on the one hand, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from getting into Science, except for maybe a lack of understanding of the genre and the expectations of the reviewers. All peer-reviewed journals do blind reviews, so the fact that you're just some dude will just knock their socks on their asses if they accept your paper.

In short, if you've never done this kind of writing before, you'll need someone to help you get the hang of it and proof it for you.

Just a word of warning, though: Since you didn't already start with a review of lit, and went straight for the fun stuff, you might end up finding that your idea isn't good or necessary when you're doing the research you were supposed to do at the beginning (probably before the project got so big and complex that you thought, "I wonder if there's a paper in this?"). That's a bummer. It's happened to me. Just don't be too crestfallen if you find something like that.

Good luck and I hope you pull it off!

Thank you. I hate the Iraq war, but I, too, didn't see anything wrong in that video.

That might be the difference between nerds and normals. When I do medical research, mostly I figure out what it's not. If it's still bugging me, I go in and say, "Here are the symptoms, but I read that it could be something or could be nothing, so I decided to get it checked out." When he says "it's nothing," I say, "Thanks! I feel better now."

I think part of the problem is that people often have a hard time fathoming how much more someone can know about something than they. I'm a college prof, so I think I've gotten used to feeling stupid--I know a lot more about my field than Joe Sixpack, but I can give you a 2-page list of people I know or know of who know more than me. And then there are the profs in other departments. Even the least-experienced ones know more about their fields than I ever, ever will.

I respect experts. I understand that mistakes happen, but they have a much better chance of knowing that I do.

I once had an anxiety attack, but I didn't know why. I was worried that there was something wrong with my heart, since there are heart problems in my family. After being checked out, my doctor very carefully and with a clear sense of dread, said, "I think the problem might have been... Mental." He watched my face for my reaction. I said, "So it's all in my head?" "I think so." "Thank god. I can control that."

We both felt relieved. Me, because my heart was fine. Him, because I didn't take offense at being told that I had just freaked out.

I've been using Readability for over a year in Firefox to do the same thing. Any long reading that I have to do online gets the Readability treatment. This project has been around for a long time, and no one complained about it "trying to force an e-book style interface on the web." They just said it made things easier to read.

I don't see how this is an "arms race." Most web pages are unreadable. That is the fault of the designers. The text is too small for a high-resolution display, and it is too cluttered. There are sites out there that have ads and remain readable, but they are a tiny minority.

Bravo to Apple for making the web something you can read!

This is exactly how you handle this kind of thing.

The last time it happened to me (I was leading a small team who was asked to do more and more--and then kept getting flak for things falling through the cracks), I had my folks document--conservatively--how much time was being spent on tasks. It was a simple case of the management just plain not knowing how many intermediary steps there were between "do this" and "it's done."

I brought this material to a private meeting with my boss, explained our situation earnestly, and provided documentation of what we were doing. I made it very clear that we actually agreed that much of this stuff needed to get done, but that there physically wasn't enough man power or time to do it. I told him that some of my best people were looking to leave, and explained how much we--the company--would suffer if we let that happen. I then just basically said "Something's got to give. We need to take one of these projects and re-assign it or we need to be pulled off something, or we need more hands." I didn't bring money up at all, because money doesn't even mean anything when you physically cannot complete the tasks in front of you.

Anyway, it went well. He very honestly didn't know what was going on, and appreciated that I approached it from a "we have a problem, and here are some ideas on fixing it" standpoint, not a "this is bullshit and you fucking suck" standpoint (although that was the standpoint we often had amongst ourselves.).

If that doesn't work, if the response is "Well, buddy, I'm sorry, but that's life in the big city with the big boys in the big company, and this stuff has to get done" then remember that "this stuff" is not "your stuff." You're an employee. The owners need this stuff done; you need money. That's all. You have no relationship with "this stuff."

I agree that you should never threaten your employer. These are people, and even when they're incompetent, they're just normal folks. You pull a dick move and they aren't going to like it. You're shooting yourself in the foot. You might get the raise, but it also might be the last one you ever get. Being liked/respected by your organizational superiors makes things a lot easier in life. Don't be a dick. Be a team player.

There are a lot of cities with it in the name, and it's not a very hard character.

Personally, I prefer kanji whenever there is one, because you know that is a word with semantic content, whereas usually hiragana is something I can skim over because it's just grammatical. Here's how I read:

1. Skim text for katakana, read that (it's usually English loanwords, so I can get my schema set)
2. Go back through and scan the kanji (even if I don't know the words, I often know the meanings of the characters and can use this information compared to the general schema acquired through the loanwords to work out the basic meaning of the document)
3. Finally go through and read it, complete with all the particles, etc. (But I only do this if I really, really need to understand this document--most of the time I quit after 1 or 2).

Even arcane kanji save me time, because they represent meaning, not sound, so I don't have to "read" them so much as just look at them.

My wife (Japanese) gets angry at me because my mails are always full of archaic kanji. People think this is because I'm really good at Japanese, but actually it's that I kinda suck and like them to break the document up and let me clearly see word boundaries, since no one over in this part of the world ever discovered the power of spaces between words. ;-)

--Which they had imported from India. Nice try.

I'm a member of the campus set (faculty--English department, even), and I find very little to quarrel with in your post.

I think a lot of the politically-correct stuff is drifting away as the Boomers retire and/or die. Those people were so sheltered as children, as their parents tried to make a perfect world for them so they could forget about the horrors of the decades before, that they just plain can't get it into their heads that, although no one is perfect, the generations before them were not evil. They were doing the best they could.

People in rich countries are so spoiled. They don't understand that none of this bounty was here before people made it. They don't realize how exceptional it is to have this many people working together to build something great for all of us. Our ancestors have done a fine job; they deserve our respect. Mistakes they made are just that: mistakes. They are something to learn from; that is all.

Finally, I just want to say that a prime example of their success is the entire Western US, which has become breadbasket to the world. Do you know what was there before the European settlers? Dry grass and tiny bands of people scratching out a living by picking berries and running entire herds of buffalo off of cliffs so they could eat one or two (oftentimes causing the stampede by burning the prairie.). What our ancestors brought was better. It was better. It was better. It was better. It helps more people. It is better.

There's nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade.

Yes, they just aren't as good. Period.

That being said, I will only use Keynote for presentations now, and for just dashing off a quick document, Pages is fast, typesets nicely, and handles styles properly (Word is a mess; OO.o is better, but I'd still prefer the style pane to show a preview of the style).

That was a pretty good comment, and I agree.

Yes, I think CP should not be produced. But I can't wrap my head around why its possession, at the very least, can constitute a crime. I mean, it's a picture of a crime, not a crime itself.

Here's the conclusion I came to after believing the Slashdot line about printer ink: Yes, the manufacturer makes the best ink. The difference is astounding. It doesn't run; it doesn't clog. It's worth the money.

And here's a little tidbit from a different source:

I once interviewed with a company that made rubber. Yes, rubber. Any kind of rubber whatzit. I walked in thinking "what am I doing here?" and walked out thinking "rubber is fucking cool!" I didn't get the job, though.

But I digress.

One of this company's clients was HP. This company's materials scientists worked closely with HP on the R&D of the rubber bumpers and stoppers used in HP inkjet printers. They had to design a rubber that could be molded properly, etc., and not be corroded away by the ink. The guy interviewing me got quite excited when he was talking about this project. Evidently, all the parts--especially rubber--that will be in contact with the ink have to be developed alongside it because many inks ate through rubber, given enough use. So it was an added hurdle in the design process, and one the guy was very proud of getting over. And it was he who ended it with, "And that's why we don't refill our cartridges around here--we know that other stuff will slowly eat away the stoppers we designed."

So if you want to believe that everything is a lie and everyone is out to get you, fine. But it's not true. There's no question the ink is marked way up to cover the loss on the printers. But that doesn't mean that all inks were created equal.