@McKinneyTexas: It's not clear to me how expensive upgrading to best practices would be. Certainly, upgrading to better practices- probably a better description than "best practices" of what I have in mind- shouldn't be prohibitively expensive. I'm thinking in terms of making sure that every home has some kind of storm shelter available. It could be a basement, a backyard shelter, or even a community shelter, which probably makes more sense in places like trailer parks. My impression is that a minimal shelter- one that's designed to save your life but without much in the way of comfort- costs at most a few thousand dollars. Amortized over the life of a building, that's not an unreasonable expectation. Here in California, you can get a lot of bang for your buck by concentrating on the most essential features for earthquake safety. The big ones seem to be foundation bolting, automatic gas shutoff valves, restraining hot water heaters, and attaching all gas appliances with flexible lines rather than rigid ones. Doing all those things should cost less than $5K for a typical single family home and will substantially increase your chance of getting through an earthquake with yourself and your home intact. More extensive and expensive retrofits are not universally required. Reinforcing of unreinforced masonry buildings is required in most places, but it was a fairly big deal when San Francisco mandated retrofits to soft story apartment buildings.

@McKinneyTexas It's not obvious what you can do beyond making the best current practices universal. It simply isn't practical to try to build most structures to withstand EF-5 tornadoes. Outside of a few critical buildings like hospitals, the best we can reasonably do is to protect lives and rebuild when the storm is over. That probably means requiring good, adequately sized storm shelters in every building, providing warnings to give people time to get into their shelter, and making sure everyone- including governments- has enough insurance to pay for rebuilding.

I'd think that an engineering organization, at least, would be focused on engineering ability, not gender. Sure, but how much are you going to learn about their engineering ability in a one day interview? In my experience, you learn a lot more about somebody's ability from their CV than you'll get from an interview. The interview is most helpful to give both sides a chance to see things that don't show up on paper, and any attempt to use it to test their ability is wasting time that might better be spent meeting and talking to people.

@Malcolm Leader: I think there's a simple explanation for the "first or last" effect. When you see something worth photographing, there's something that draws you to it and makes you want to take the picture. Your first picture is usually an attempt to capture the thing that draws you in, so it often has the most emotional resonance. After that, you start adjusting, trying to see if you can somehow improve on the initial vision. If you can't, the subsequent pictures will decline in quality and the first will be the best. If you can, you'll keep getting better and better until you have it right, at which point you'll quit, so the last picture will be the best. The obvious exception is when the thing you're photographing is dynamic. It could be a person, animal, or event that's constantly changing, or it could be a static scene where it's only the light that's changing, but in either case it's as much a matter of changes in the thing you're photographing as changes in your vision. You have to wait for the subject to reach its optimum, but since you can never be sure when that will be, you wind up taking pictures before and after the peak.

@Eric Rose: Saint Ansel had a 6 year streak where most, if not all, of his famous photos were made. That's a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, he produced a lot of great work in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but he produced plenty of iconic pictures before (Monolith, The Face of Half Dome; The Golden Gate before the Bridge) and after (Moon and Half Dome; Arches, North Court, Mission San Xavier del Bac) his best period. And there's a big reason he was so much more productive during that short time than he was outside it: for most of his career he couldn't sell enough artistic prints to earn a living. Until close to the end of his career, he had to spend most of his time on commercial jobs to pay the bills. It was only in the few years when he was working on Guggenheim grants or doing photography for the National Park Service that he was able to devote the majority of his time to the kind of work he's most famous for. And he must have done something worthy of note before that time to earn those Guggenheim grants and the job photographing the National Parks.

@hairshirthedonist: This isn't entirely unprecedented. ISTR there's some history of this kind of thing happening in Japan; the Shogun would "retire" to become the power behind the throne rather than the nominal ruler. I'm not necessarily saying that's what's going to happen here- Benedict says he's not planning on doing that- but it's at least as plausible a conspiracy theory as him being forced out. @fiddlergrrl: The past two Popes may have appointed all of the Cardinals who will be voting in the election, but there are still limits. Those men have still been shaped by their individual backgrounds and experiences, which means there will in practice be a range of opinions within the College of Cardinals. In particular, I expect the Cardinals who have been out in the dioceses dealing with the Church's scandals are going to have some very different opinions from the ones who have been back in the Vatican running the bureaucracy. I can easily imagine a factional fight between those two parties, and a win by the diocesan party might well reject the John Paul II/Benedict XVI approach to dealing the the scandals.

If you want to impute sinister motives to the resignation, it seems more plausible to question how much of an influence he's going to be as Pope Emeritus. It seems to me that having a Pope Emeritus who many of the Cardinals are indebted to is inherently a challenge to the independence of both the election of the new Pope and the actions of the new Pope after the elections. If anyone would be capable of pushing an otherwise unpopular choice for the new Pontiff, I'd think it would be a recently retired one who many members of the College of Cardinals owe favors. Similarly, if he manages to influence the election, the new Pope will be both somebody who probably agrees with him and will be indebted to him, which should give him a lot of influence. If his goal is to protect his legacy and prevent backsliding on his chosen initiatives, he might well be better off retiring while he still has the moxie to ensure a sympathetic successor than clinging to power as long as possible.

I think another way of stating Brett's point is that the AG may have a conflict of interest in defending certain laws, and initiatives are especially likely to create that kind of conflict of interest. If and when the AG faces a conflict of interest over an initiative, it makes more sense to let the people who put it on the ballot defend it than to try to manage the AG's conflict of interest. IIRC, California has a fairly well established precedent of allowing this exact approach. And while I'm not especially fond of my state's love for direct democracy- I think the initiative process is deeply flawed- I think this specific solution to this specific problem is a good and reasonable one.

@sapient: They just don't want to be held to those standards before their competitors are. What they really want is to have their competitors held to those standards but be able to violate them themselves. That way they get a reasonably clean environment and a competitive advantage. That's why you still have problems with violations even when the regulations are reasonably even across a whole industry.

@scott kirkpatrick: I haven't done it myself, but my understanding is that printing-out-paper is somewhat similar to these chloride papers chemically (it also uses chloride) but the process is different. The key difference is that printing-out actually produces a visible image without needing a separate development step; you can see the image as you print. That makes the image self-masking. IOW, the partially printed image blocks some of the light from going deeper into the paper, so longer and longer exposures have less and less effect on the darkest parts of the print. Self-masking makes it possible to print the full range from negatives with very wide density ranges while maintaining detail. [POP was also intended for temporary viewing. Since exposure to light causes the paper to darken without development, continued exposure to light will ruin the image. The image can be "arrested" at the desired state of density by gold-toning. The images typically have a strong drab reddish cast. The paper is extremely slow, much slower than developing-out contact printing paper, and requires a number of minutes of exposure to sunlight or strong UV. The only photographer I know of who used gold-toned POP for finished work was Linda Connor of the San Francisco Art Institute. When I heard her speak in the '80s she was already concerned about the imminent disappearance of printing-out papers, which I assume are long gone (but I don't know that for a fact). However, I believe it's possible for photographers to coat their own, which may be what Linda does now. --Mike ADDENDUM: I see Arne Croelle has addressed the question in more detail, with better information--see his comment below. --M.]

@keru: I want 2013 to be the year of B&W sensor What I'd like to see is a monochrome sensor that's designed for exposure range. Instead of just leaving off the filter array, put on one that uses neutral density filters instead of colors. A simple implementation would be a checkerboard array with "white" squares unfiltered and "black" squares with a strong ND filter. It would cost you some resolution and increase shadow noise a bit, but you'd gain highlight range roughly equal to the density of the ND filters. That seems like a worthwhile price to pay for a big extension of exposure range. @Andreas: a camera with an EVF can never be that DMD, because the moment I see the action is the exact moment past that action. That depends on the sophistication of the camera. If it has a fast reading sensor and a lot of memory, you could have it buffer several frames and grab one from before you pushed the shutter: effectively negative shutter lag. Or you could store the few frames before and after the shutter push, so you can choose the best one later. That sounds like just the thing for capturing the decisive moment.

@hairshirthedonist: It's a top of the line mass spectrometer with accessories. I'd love to have one at work, but given that they cost as much as a fancy house in a nice neighborhood, it seems a bit much to expect for Christmas.

I would love a bottle of really good single malt Scotch, especially one of the ones that's aged longer than the standard age for the distillery. 15 year old Laphroiag would be superb. Oh, and the James Bond BluRay box set. Anything beyond that is either outside of a normal price range for a Christmas gift (e.g. Nikon 14-24/2.8) or completely outside the realm of reason (Orbitrap Elite with a good nanoflow UHPLC system).

@Countme-in: I could raise the question too of why oh why do some women yearn for the right to engage in war combat like their bedicked colleagues, but life is confusing. I assume that a lot of it is a desire for equal recognition. Like it or not, serving in combat has served as an important point of advancement for many minority groups. Denying women the opportunity to serve in combat denies them that avenue to advance the social standing of all women. And the individual women who want to serve in combat may be interested in personal advancement within the military, which tends to favor veterans with combat records. Keeping women out of combat will effectively keep them from making it to the top of the military, while allowing them into combat will open up those top jobs.

@bobbyp: IOW, sports are replacing religion as the opiate of the masses.

@Turbulence: If we're talking about a division 3 school, then sure. I was thinking more about high school, which Chomsky referenced in his quote. I think that's about the level in sports where there starts to be an emphasis on sports as a spectacle for anyone beyond the families of the participants. I'd even say that it's the level where the kind of thing Chomsky is talking about is the most significant. Children are forced to attend school, and in many secondary schools they're coerced into being fans of the school team through things like pep rallies*. Primary schools don't usually make such a big deal about sports, and colleges are both voluntary and varied, so students who don't care about sports can choose a school that doesn't emphasize them. Professional sports fandom is voluntary, even if, as some posters have pointed out above, financial support of the local team isn't. In terms of popularity, I wouldn't count football out. It's still the biggest sport in terms of revenue, and I see no evidence that questions about the damage it does to players are having much effect on its popularity. I fully expect football to finesse the issue in much the same way they've avoided most of the serious fallout from PED abuse that rightly should have come their way. They'll pretend to take the issue seriously, institute some rule changes to try to mitigate the most obvious parts of the problem, and declare that the problem is now solved. The media, which love football revenue, will happily repeat their claims that everything is fine and ignore future complaints about traumatic brain injury no matter how much evidence surfaces. *My impression from talking to my parents is that the coercive aspect of school sports fandom may have been at its peak in the post-War years when Chomsky was in school. Some of the stories they've told me sure sound like the kind of thing that would discourage an interest in sports in anyone who wasn't already excited about it.

I think it's important to distinguish between sports as a participant and as an audience. Participating in sports is not only valuable as a form of exercise; it can also be a valuable part of the educational mission of schools. Team sports are obviously a way of teaching kids about the importance of cooperation and teamwork in achieving something no single member can do as an individual. And any sport can teach about setting goals, designing a realistic path to achieving them, and putting the time and effort needed into follow that plan. Those are really important life lessons, and there are plenty of kids who pick them up from sports when they don't from regular classes. I feel that I learned more about hard work and persistence from sports, which were always a challenge for me, than from academics, which were often easy enough to be boring. Sports as an audience really is more about artificial tribalism than anything else. If you believe that tribalism is learned, I can see that you'd see sports fandom as a malign influence, teaching people all those negative lessons about subordination to leadership and devotion to the tribe over the general good. OTOH, if you see tribalism as a basic part of human nature, sports may be more benign, with the potential to substitute an artificial and meaningless tribe for potentially more dangerous ones.

@wj: When I was in school, every student was required to take both shop (wood and metal) and home economics (sewing and cooking). I think they were all worthwhile classes, even though I already knew plenty about them. And I have certainly used the skills I picked up in typing more often than almost any other class I took in Junior High. Those aren't really vocational classes, but they do provide valuable real-world life skills. @russell: I was very interested by something like that told by the other side. Alain Briot, a professional photographer, told the story about how he was struggling with overwork. He was selling more prints than he could easily produce, which sounds like a nice problem to have except that it was keeping him from going out into the field to make new work. He hired a business consultant to look at his operation, who wound up telling him to keep raising prices until his workload went down to a manageable level. Following the advice not only gave him time to photograph again, it also made his business a lot more profitable. It seems obvious, but to somebody who has spend his life training as an artist rather than a businessman I guess it wasn't. Maybe if Academie des Beaux Arts had a basic business class as part of its required curriculum he wouldn't have needed a consultant to tell him the solution to too much work was increased prices.

As a rule of thumb, assume that everything people get paid money for is more complicated and requires more skills than it first appears. Or that maybe anybody can do the job, but a skilled operator can do it enough faster and more efficiently than an amateur that it's worth paying a premium. If a skilled backhoe operator can get the work done in half the time of a novice, they're a bargain at twice the wages since the more efficient expert saves you the cost of a backhoe. That effect is magnified in fields where you simply can't apply more equipment to a problem and have to get results by making the best use of what you can use. Even a small gain in efficiency may be worth a lot if it involves the use of extremely valuable resources.

@Hartmut: My father worked for HP back in the days where you might well meet Bill or Dave practicing management by walking around. AFAIK, they worked hard to keep doing it even as the company got big enough that it was more of management by jetting around. I think it's a style that works a lot better with a company that promotes from within and regularly moves people from line work into management, i.e. not MBA culture.

@jack lecou: To put it in more conventional economic terms, I'd say there is a sort of implicit cartel-ization going on with the demand side of the labor market. I think the elephant in the room is that many pay decisions are based on social factors rather than market forces. Pay scales wind up being tied to position in the company hierarchy rather than some kind of objective measure of the value different employees provide to the company. It's expected that managers will be paid more than the people they're managing, that educated white collar workers will be paid more than less educated blue collar workers, etc. When employees are paid market values that differ from social perceptions, some people get very upset. This is why people are so vehement about well paid blue collar workers and "overpaid" athletes and entertainers. Their pay clashes with ideas of what somebody with their social status should be paid, and the perception wins over the market. I think this is a huge part of why management doesn't want to offer higher wages to attract employees to jobs they're having a hard time filling. They're basing their pay decisions on the employees' place within the company, not the market. Responding to the market would challenge their social assumptions, either about where those people belong the company hierarchy or about the entire concept of basing pay on employees' place in it. They'd rather go without hiring than challenge to their social assumptions.

@russell: Cashier maybe. Although there are definitely good and bad cashiers. I would say that cashier is definitely a skilled job where the best people are substantially more efficient than the worst. I have even formalized this into a saying that at the supermarket you shouldn't get into the line that's shortest but into the one that has the fastest cashier. I'm guessing that anyone who goes to the same market often enough to know the cashiers will have about the same story.

@Duff Clarity: If you try to use a metric, people game the metrics. Management is just a hard problem. It takes time, and it takes good people doing the managing. And how do you tell if the people doing the managing are any good? What works surprisingly well is what Hewlett and Packard called "Management by Walking Around". Instead of sticking in their office reading reports about what's going on in the business (or department, etc.), managers go out and observe things first hand, especially the people who report to them. Watching and interacting with actual workers not only gives managers a good idea of what is going on in their area of responsibility, it also helps to keep their knowledge and skills about the details of the business sharp so they can make informed judgments.

Technically speaking, a major terrorist attack DID happen on US soil. Embassies count as such, you know. That was a terrorist attack, but there's certainly room to dispute whether it classifies as "major" for the purposes of influencing an election. It seems to me that an attack like the one in Benghazi is less likely to have a dramatic impact on an election because it happened overseas and resulted in only a handful of American deaths. People certainly seem to have been willing to shrug off the simultaneous truck bombings of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, even though they caused many more deaths. In contrast, an attack in a major US city the size of Oklahoma City presumably would have a much more dramatic effect on the election. I think the Madrid train attacks are a good example of the kind of effect something like that could produce. And BTW, the Benghazi attack was against a US consulate, not an embassy.

@Donald Johnson: I suspect that some of the see-sawing in the poll-dependent predictions (like 538 and Princeton Election Consortium) is from the parties getting excited at different paces. The DNC was more effective than the RNC at getting their respective bases fired up, so Obama got a decent sized bounce after the conventions. The first debate went Romney's way, which helped to fire up the Republican base, and he bounced back. But most of the people who got excited about the election based on those events were going to get excited enough to come out to vote anyway, so all that was going on was different timing in when people got excited. I'm not sure, though, that this is something inevitable about any election, or if we just had an anomalously predictable one. Some elections have genuine surprises, like the financial crisis striking in the middle of the 2008 campaign or Ross Perot's jumping out and then back in in 1992. One of the things that is notable about 2012 is how many outside shocks that could have upset the electoral calculus- a Euro crisis that spilled over to send the US back into recession, a major terrorist attack on US soil, etc.- didn't happen.