Crab Nebula Erupts in a Superflare

by Nancy Atkinson on May 11, 2011

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals the complex X-ray-emitting
central region of the Crab Nebula. This image is 9.8 light-years across.
Chandra observations were not compatible with the study of the nebula's
X-ray variations. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/F. Seward et al.
From a NASA press release:
The famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant has erupted in an enormous
flare five times more powerful than any flare previously seen from the
object. On April 12, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope first
detected the outburst, which lasted six days. Several other satellites
also made observations, which has astonished astronomers by revealing
unexpected changes in X-ray emission the Crab, once thought to be the
steadiest high-energy source in the sky.
[click to continue…]

in a high tech world, who needs résumés?

Marketing celebrity Seth Godin, who once made an appearance on this blog to talk about why people can be so willing to accept gravity but not
evolution, decided to issue a call for summer interns and apparently
wasn’t very impressed by the resumes he received in reply. In his
typical manner, he didn’t proceed to just give future applicants more
detail about what he wants to see, but decided to tackle the entire notion of a resume.
His suggestion? You don’t really need a resume because in the digital
world, you can show real world projects in action and your online
persona should be the strongest argument to invite you for an interview.
Sounds great, right? Just pitch that tired old resume and work on your
own blog and social media skills. No more job sites demanding that you
fill out your work history in septupluicate and upload a dozen copies of
your resume just so you can be one of the several hundred faceless
applicants to a position described with some vague, often canned
requirements drafted by HR once upon a time. It’s all going to be about
you, right? Well, I’d advise you to keep that resume handy just in case
since your online persona turns out to be insufficient to get hired.

Funny enough, I’ve heard some rumblings about the uselessness of
resumes in the tech world, especially in trying to hire programmers.
Some IT managers even commented how easy it is to develop your own apps
on the web and mobile platforms and that every good programmer should
have at least something handy just to show at an interview. Seems a
little unrealistic to me. Sure, you can build an app to demonstrate
something, but what exactly? If you’re trying to show depth and breadth
as a programmer, a one-off app won’t tell a future boss very much about
how you work in a team and if you show your source code to other
programmers, you’ll quickly be reminded that an awful lot of programmers
think that their colleagues’ code is an awful mess that should’ve never
been written. Besides, in the real world, you’re probably not going to
write a complete system on your own. Instead, you’ll be working on
chunks, modules, and distinct functionalities. Want to present that code
at your next interview? You’re very unlikely to be allowed to show it
to a possible competitor. After all, that code is your bosses’ property
and they don’t want anyone scouring it for a potential vulnerability or
places that would allow a hacker to inject a worm. So what about coding
exercises? Again, code can be subjective.
Obviously whatever you write has to do its job correctly but the
logic behind how it’s written is always open to a personal
interpretation. Coding tools are extremely open-ended because they have
no idea what you could be writing tomorrow or the day after, so they
give you a vast myriad of options and it’s up to you to figure out how
you’re going to design the app. For example, take what could be a little
coding exercise: a calculator that could parse an entry like 5 + 5 and
produce the correct result without using any if or while statements. In
C#, here’s how I initially tackled it and if you have Visual Studio at home, I invite you to try this code
out. It doesn’t do any real user validation but we could always add that
later. The important part is that it works. But hold on, there’s another way to do it,
using Actions instead of Functions. Which way is more correct? After
all, both work. And for the programmers out there, you might notice I
used the "var" shortcut to declare new variables and I could have went
without a custom little struct there mostly to keep things pretty and
easy to follow. Was that bad? Is this a sign of code bloat or do you
like how the logic is splayed out for future modification? Oh and you
can do the same thing with Tuples too,
though it does start getting a little messier. My point is, what in
those simple bits of code would convince you that someone is a good
programmer and can work on a large system? How much did all those
samples tell you about that and what’s really imporant in them to you?
Now imagine non-technical people scouring through all that in a
search for a new programmer or a systems architect about a hundred times
a day since you can’t exactly pull off programmers to sit there and
evaluate a whole lot of code all day long. It would be a nightmare for
the HR folks so it’s much more human to give them some sort of resume
which lets them see that you spent some time in different companies and
managed to hold down those jobs because whatever you turned it obviously
worked well enough for your bosses. Hiring a person is always a
difficult task and you never know how things will ultimately work out. A
superstar from one of the best names in your industry, a person whose
reputation truly precedes her might crash and burn when entering a new
corporate culture and working with new people. Business magazines are
littered with tales of such woes in every field of commerce and no
amount of vetting, looking at code, or technical screening could ever
completely prevent these incidents from happening. When looking at
hundreds of applicants, there’s no way that HR would be able to spend
the time required to really get to know someone’s online profiles, study
a few of their projects, and make decisions based on such a complete
package after days of scrutiny. A search like that could take years per
position. And while a resume is often rather cold and impersonal, just
as the oft derided (and rightfully so!) practice of searching resumes by
keyword, we’re stuck with for now.
https://worldofweirdthings.com/