My article will be published next week in JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association). It describes the work I've been doing on a widespread neurological disorder. I worked hard for a long time on that project, and in the rush to finish, I was miserable. I didn't sleep well, and my daily morphine intake went way up trying to deal with it all.
In the end, science is a truly thankless and unappreciated profession with poor compensation for the amount of work put in, the required amount of education and training, the constant devotion, and no job security. This applies mainly to anybody under the age of 50. As with many other professions, The Baby Boomers, had it easy if they wanted to become scientists; anybody of average intelligence and a college degree could easily become a tenured professor if they put in a little bit of effort until around 1990. If you are skeptical, most people probably remember some stupid, yet tenured, professors they had in college. But times have changed.
Today, there is no lack of STEM (college graduates with degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math) workers. The whole thing is a fraud perpetrated from the level of the President on down in the name of cheap labor. The truth is that there are roughly twice as many STEM graduates than available job openings per year. I discourage everyone from becoming a scientist. Don't throw away your lives.
Anti-biotic-resistant tuberculosis is re-emerging in the world as a public health threat. It has been found in Russia and eastern European and as many as 1 in 100 have it in some African countries and India. The bacteria that causes TB, mycobacterium tuberculosis, are airborne and infest densely populated parts of cities: apartment blocks, homeless shelters, hospitals, city buses, and subways - basically, crowded, dank, poorly ventilated, dirty environments.. The classic symptoms of active TB infection are constant coughing with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss.
Being away from civilization for a year in the desert sort of re-energized me. I needed a break from crowded city living. It was good to be away crowds. More and more, I'm reminded of why I like the desert.
The population of Paris and its immediate adjoining suburbs exceeds 12 million people. My work is in the center of the city in the Latin Quarter, and I hadn't been outside of Paris yet. I imagined distances to be on the scale of American cities where the edge of the city, especially big ones with 10 million people, like Houston or Los Angeles to be literally 25 miles or more away and unreachable by foot or bicycle (without being shot, robbed, hit by a car, or burned alive by the hot sun).
A few weeks ago for work, we needed to do something in Alphaville, a lab at the edge of the city. We would be taking the Metro today. Le Metro is the name of the Paris subway. As we walked toward the metro, the boss started talking about pickpockets and scammers that infest Paris. She reminded us, especially me since I was new to Paris and seemed to her to be as pure as the driven snow, to be careful. One scam she warned us about is very common; that is panhandlers who pretend to be homeless.
She had a female friend who used to give money to a "homeless" woman who begged at her metro stop every day. She would say, "I need money. My children are hungry. I have 4 of them - some milk money for my baby please." The female friend gave money to this one beggar every day for years. She would often ask about the children. One time, for whatever reason, the beggar woman had a blank look and said something like "oh yeah my children, they're OK. They're hungry give me some money please. i need to buy groceries for them."
So she gave money, but this time she became suspicious. One day, the bosses friend followed the beggar woman to what she expected was to buy food as she left the subway. Instead, the "homeless" woman sent to a bar and she spent hours sitting and drinking. When confronted, she admitted there were no hungry children in her custody, and she wasn't even homeless. The thing was a scam. Everybody has probably heard a similar story.
Like she said, the hungry baby scam is vary common. I mean, even I have seen the scam first hand. That reminded me of this one time in South America, this scrawny emaciated girl accosted me in Spanish and asked for money for her baby. She said her baby was hongry. The beggar woman was skin and bones herself. She stood aournd 5 feet tall and looked like she'd been in a concentration camp with her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, etc. She couldn't weigh more than 50 pounds. She said she was 18 years old, looking at her, I knew she had some kind of problem. I was in a poor country, after all, where there is no social safety net. People really starve to death there. I didn't really believe that she was skinny for lack of money, but I was curious to find out.
In the end, science is a truly thankless and unappreciated profession with poor compensation for the amount of work put in, the required amount of education and training, the constant devotion, and no job security. This applies mainly to anybody under the age of 50. As with many other professions, The Baby Boomers, had it easy if they wanted to become scientists; anybody of average intelligence and a college degree could easily become a tenured professor if they put in a little bit of effort until around 1990. If you are skeptical, most people probably remember some stupid, yet tenured, professors they had in college. But times have changed.
Today, there is no lack of STEM (college graduates with degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math) workers. The whole thing is a fraud perpetrated from the level of the President on down in the name of cheap labor. The truth is that there are roughly twice as many STEM graduates than available job openings per year. I discourage everyone from becoming a scientist. Don't throw away your lives.
Anti-biotic-resistant tuberculosis is re-emerging in the world as a public health threat. It has been found in Russia and eastern European and as many as 1 in 100 have it in some African countries and India. The bacteria that causes TB, mycobacterium tuberculosis, are airborne and infest densely populated parts of cities: apartment blocks, homeless shelters, hospitals, city buses, and subways - basically, crowded, dank, poorly ventilated, dirty environments.. The classic symptoms of active TB infection are constant coughing with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss.
Being away from civilization for a year in the desert sort of re-energized me. I needed a break from crowded city living. It was good to be away crowds. More and more, I'm reminded of why I like the desert.
The population of Paris and its immediate adjoining suburbs exceeds 12 million people. My work is in the center of the city in the Latin Quarter, and I hadn't been outside of Paris yet. I imagined distances to be on the scale of American cities where the edge of the city, especially big ones with 10 million people, like Houston or Los Angeles to be literally 25 miles or more away and unreachable by foot or bicycle (without being shot, robbed, hit by a car, or burned alive by the hot sun).
A few weeks ago for work, we needed to do something in Alphaville, a lab at the edge of the city. We would be taking the Metro today. Le Metro is the name of the Paris subway. As we walked toward the metro, the boss started talking about pickpockets and scammers that infest Paris. She reminded us, especially me since I was new to Paris and seemed to her to be as pure as the driven snow, to be careful. One scam she warned us about is very common; that is panhandlers who pretend to be homeless.
She had a female friend who used to give money to a "homeless" woman who begged at her metro stop every day. She would say, "I need money. My children are hungry. I have 4 of them - some milk money for my baby please." The female friend gave money to this one beggar every day for years. She would often ask about the children. One time, for whatever reason, the beggar woman had a blank look and said something like "oh yeah my children, they're OK. They're hungry give me some money please. i need to buy groceries for them."
So she gave money, but this time she became suspicious. One day, the bosses friend followed the beggar woman to what she expected was to buy food as she left the subway. Instead, the "homeless" woman sent to a bar and she spent hours sitting and drinking. When confronted, she admitted there were no hungry children in her custody, and she wasn't even homeless. The thing was a scam. Everybody has probably heard a similar story.
Like she said, the hungry baby scam is vary common. I mean, even I have seen the scam first hand. That reminded me of this one time in South America, this scrawny emaciated girl accosted me in Spanish and asked for money for her baby. She said her baby was hongry. The beggar woman was skin and bones herself. She stood aournd 5 feet tall and looked like she'd been in a concentration camp with her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, etc. She couldn't weigh more than 50 pounds. She said she was 18 years old, looking at her, I knew she had some kind of problem. I was in a poor country, after all, where there is no social safety net. People really starve to death there. I didn't really believe that she was skinny for lack of money, but I was curious to find out.