September 16, 2003

WC
Sounds like Gen. Clark is going to run. Hmmm. He and Howard would make a really powerful ticket...
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Job
So it suddenly seems that the decision to leave science for the shady world of commercial software was a good one. This in light of Popular Science's article describing the worst jobs in science. The jobs are rated with regard to futility, risk of disease, and whether they inspire reflexive ridicule. Consider the job description for "Brazilian mosquito researcher":

He need focus only on his legs to keep him busy: Whenever a mosquito chooses a drumstick dinner, the researcher draws it into a mouth tube (!) and then expels it into a container. Veteran researcher Helge Zieler used to put himself on the menu twice a week. On his best evening, he caught 500 Anopheles in 3 hours. Meanwhile, of course, the skeeters feasted on his entire corpus-a grand total of about 3,000 bites, or an average of 17 per minute for 180 minutes on end. "It's not so bad," he says, explaining that his personal response to mosquito bites is an immediate itch that goes away naturally in a few minutes. Except when his response is to contract malaria. Despite taking prophylactic chloroquine, Zieler developed a case that took him two years to shake.

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