6 January 2009 part II

Best Jobs? Check out the list. Yes, “mathematician” is ranked number 1, and yes, some of my friends associated that with me.

But you know what? I am nothing of the sort; true I do have a few publications but these are, at best, minor contributions to the subject and whereas a few appear in mathematical databases and literature indexes, none of them are important.

What I do mostly is teach, or attempt to teach, college mathematics to folks who either lack the interest, ability or maturity to handle it.

Ever see a college football game? Have you ever seen the players score a touchdown and then selfishly dive over the end zone line when it means an automatic 15 yard penalty? Well, a large numerical minority of students that I have to teach have that level of maturity.

But, at least I am not breathing coal dust or..as one commenter to the linked article says:

I’m lucky enough to work in an environment found more-or-less near the top of the list, and spent my college days in a recurring summer job where I did a fair amount of roofing, along with rough carpentry and other aspects of home construction. Really puts things in perspective. I put a roof on a 4500 sq. ft. house once in the blistering heat of early August, and there’s nothing quite like hauling two 80 lb. bundles of shingles up a 40′ ladder when it’s 90 def. F out. Over and over. Follow that with baking above them as you try to nail them in place before they melt in your hands, leaving you covered with grit and tar. And did I mention bituthene? The evil that is bituthene? They don’t call it “bitch-a-thene” for nothing. I hate to make references to tar babies, but that’s exactly what I looked like after wrestling with a huge roll of that one hot, humid day. [...]

My paramedic teacher was clearly a hard-core adrenaline junkie, though there can be very little excitement to the job much of the time. In fact, in my three months, the most “exciting” thing I ever encountered was an old lady immobilized in her bathroom with a prolapsed rectum. I worked a rural area. Which was fine, because the stories I heard about car wrecks made me atheistically pray for boredom.

Science: an article about a pink iguana from the Invisible Pink Unicorn:

On his groundbreaking voyage, Charles Darwin never had knowledge of all the species on the Galapagos islands. For starters, he missed a rare, endanger iguana. But had he known about this creature, it would only have strengthened his theory of species divergence:

Pink iguanas unknown to Charles Darwin during his visits to the Galapagos islands may provide evidence of species divergence far earlier than the English naturalist’s famous finches, researchers said Monday.

The findings also for the first time describe the black-striped reptiles — first seen in 1986 and only a few more times since — as a new species, said Gabriele Gentile of the University Tor Vergata in Rome, who led the study.

They also add to understanding of the evolution of species on the remote islands, which remain much as they were millions of years ago and which inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Many of its species are found nowhere else.

[...]

I wonder what creationists think of the Galapagos island. They must figure that they were used as God’s creation laboratory back in the Garden of Eden days.

Social: Free Speech

An airline passenger forced to cover his T-shirt because it displayed Arabic script has been awarded 240,000 dollars in compensation, campaigners said Monday.

Raed Jarrar received the pay out on Friday from two US Transportation Security Authority officials and from JetBlue Airways following the August 2006 incident at New York’s JFK Airport, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced.

“The outcome of this case is a victory for free speech and a blow to the discriminatory practice of racial profiling,” said Aden Fine, a lawyer with ACLU.

Jarrar, a US resident, was apprehended as he waited to board a JetBlue flight from New York to Oakland, California, and told to remove his shirt, which had written on it in Arabic: “We will not be silent.”

He was told other passengers felt uncomfortable because an Arabic-inscribed T-shirt in an airport was like “wearing a T-shirt at a bank stating, I am a robber,’” the ACLU said.

Jarrar eventually agreed to cover his shirt with another provided by JetBlue. He was allowed aboard but his seat was changed from the front to the back of the aircraft.

Last week, nine Muslims, including three children, were ordered off a domestic US flight after passengers heard what they believed were suspicious remarks about security.

Although the passengers, eight of them US citizens, were cleared by the FBI, they were reportedly still barred from the AirTran flight.

Hmmm, I wonder if I could report that I didn’t feel comfortable with someone wearing a Christian t-shirt on a plane? Personally, I am tempted to get a shirt that has Maxwell’s equation (written in differential forms, of course) with the logo: And God said: …..and there was light.

Hat tip to the Legal Satyricon.

Middle East
From Rootless Cosmopolitan:

It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page. (Never a good idea, of course, because as I’ve previously noted, when it comes to Israel and related fear-mongering, there simply is no hysteria deemed unworthy of the Times op ed page.)

Morris, a manic fellow at the best of times prone to intellectual mood swings — having laid bare the ethnic cleansing that created modern Israel, Morris then didn’t as much recant as complain that the problem was that Ben Gurion hadn’t finished the job. And since the 2000 debacle at Camp David, of course, he’s been a de facto editorial writer for Ehud Barak, the failed former Prime Minister nicknamed “Mr. Zig-Zag” while in office because of his inconsistency — and who, of course, is the author of the current operation in Gaza.

Barak, never shy about spewing utter rubbish when his audience is American and prone to be taken in by demagoguery, last weekend offered the priceless suggestion to Fox News that “expecting Israel to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda.” Presumably it would not occur to Fox’s anchors to ask why, then, had Barak maintained just such a cease-fire for the past six months? And why had he been seeking its renewal?

And from a Norwegian doctor:

(hat tip to the last two items from 3-quarks daily)