Happy Nevada Day

Wow, I can't believe there exists a holiday that federal employees don't get off. I'll make sure to rally my government employee lobby about that. And to top it off, it was a Friday and I had to work. I'm not feeling the lazy government worker vibe I dreamt of in grad school. I'll do my best to keep the dream alive.

Today Popular Science presented in 3rd Annual Worst Jobs in Science list. There were the typical nauseating jobs such as Orangutan-Pee Collector but I was fairly surprised to find volcanologist at number 3. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it or are at least thoroughly disgusted.

The last week or so I've been teaching me a programming language for statistics (It's called R, which makes searching for any tips on google a truly pointless excercise). There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but you may be asking yourselves, why on earth are you learning a programming language just for statistics when I could just go buy a stats package and save yourself countless hours (I did set aside $1500 for software this year) and for that matter tax payer dollars. Well, here's the catch. My money doesn't show until sometime between February and April. I can buy a few trinkets here and there but I'm not allowed to make any big purchases until then. So either I can sit at my desk and twidle my thumbs for several months, or I can spent teaching myself R (which I need to point out, is free as in freedom and as in beer). Both of these things are fairly inefficient but I think you can see why I went with the latter. The whole upshot of it is that I'm getting pretty good at R to the point that I may not need to buy a $1000 pre-canned stats packge. But since I earmarked money for that, I need to spend it.... Anyway, I'm learning a lot about how the government deals with money.

In anycase, if you're looking for a way to waste a little time, you may want to check out this Egyptian-oriented flash game put out by the BBC.