Random Thoughts....

You just have to take into account how stupid the average person is and then realise that half of the people on the world are stupider than that.
 
I don't understand how reality shows last so many seasons, surely you must get bored after a while.

Because they are so cheap to produce. You don't need a team of writers, you don't need actors; hell, most of the time you don't even need sets!

I think of them as basically entertainment "union busting" - at least here in the States.
 
The person to my left is incompetent and I have been stuck with him at the counter for the past two weeks because the person who runs Subaru parts is on vacation until Friday, so instead of working next to my boss, I have him.

He is 65 years old and delivers parts most of the time; he is slow and gives the impression of either not knowing what he is doing, or just plain baffled that anyone working in this industry would know automatically. To be fair, I have noticed that lately I do not feel challenged at work, so maybe I am overqualified and he is average.

I would really like to get out of the automotive industry, study botany and horticulture and work in those related fields. Just a dream for now, because I am not a risk taker.
 
I hereby declare "Project Facepalm" a massive success ...

Promotions for everybody!
 
I would really like to get out of the automotive industry, study botany and horticulture and work in those related fields. Just a dream for now, because I am not a risk taker.

You should do it, Jay. You're 35 now - when would do it? When you're 60-something and looking forward to retirement? Life is too short to waste doing something you don't love doing.

And trust me on this: the longer you wait, the more difficult it will be.
 
I would really like to get out of the automotive industry, study botany and horticulture and work in those related fields. Just a dream for now, because I am not a risk taker.

*cough* http://www.mortonarb.org/open-positions.html *cough*

And failing that you could always start by volunteering to help our there on your days off........
 
The Amazing Race is pretty good for a reality show...The places those people go are breathtaking and I'd do it just for the experience itself.

Fox used to have a reality show only channel called "Fox Reality." The shows were decent but I especially loved "Solitary": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_(TV_series)#Premise

[video=youtube;g3-ENe-vFf8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3-ENe-vFf8[/video]
 
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wat
If you're working on a lab, and you mean what I think you mean by fake, then do NOT do that.

No no no no no no no no no. I would never be stupid enough to do that.

This is a legitimate test that he's requested me to do and I wasn't being specific when I mentioned it here. Btw, if you didn't see the 2nd post in response to my first one about being boned: Everything went better than expected and he was actually super happy.

Anyways, about fake data: What we're trying to do is look for a periodicity in our variability. So basically we want to see if a star's light is varying so that we can indirectly observe cloud features in it's atmosphere. We also want to know whether the cloud features are periodically variable, giving us a little bit more of a clue about the physics of these atmospheric processes.

However in order to test whether the lomb-scargle periodogram analysis is robust enough to measure these periods, we test it with "fake data". Aka we test the L-S periodogram procedure with a sine curve. Then we add gaussian noise to the sine curve. Then we shuffle the data around and see if it still detects a period. These tests will tell us what happens when we throw in real data that (while it's reduced) has noise in it with a period hidden away. And does it detect the period.

I would never ever ever ever EVER fake data in order to get a result.

i think he means an artificial test data set, to test a program or algorithm with.

^ Bingo! Someone got it :D
 
The person to my left is incompetent and I have been stuck with him at the counter for the past two weeks because the person who runs Subaru parts is on vacation until Friday, so instead of working next to my boss, I have him.

And here he is, blundering through a relatively simple query.

*EDIT* photo gone.
 
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The man across from me on the train today was as unshaved as I am, in need of a haircut just like me and was reading the very book that made me an avid reader of whatever Terry Pratchett happens to write.

Should I freak out?
 
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