I graduated with a PhD 10 years ago from the same university (Nottingham) as he did, in mechanical engineering, and have been working in academia ever since, working my way up to senior lecturer (UK equivalent to associate professor), and I'm still earning much less than him. I do a lot of coding in research projects in my job and have some experience in web development from side-projects, as well as contributions to open-source libraries (mainly statistics and simulation based in Python) etc. Been thinking of making the career switch into a software development role for a while but wondered if it's too late. This makes me think it may still be worthwhile, even if getting that first role might prove difficult given my academic background and I'd have to start at the bottom again.
If you go the data science / machine learning route, your academic knowledge (applied maths, formulating and running experiments, etc.) will be a lot more valuable than if you go for standard software developer roles. Also, no reason you'd start at the bottom.
You won’t have to start at the bottom again, given your experience. Sounds like you could get a decent job in data science, and I guess you know of engineering businesses where you could apply your knowledge.
If you have 10 years of weak coding experience and have managed to finish a PhD, you'd probably start at least at a mid level, not junior, and quickly get up from that.
It's not intrinsically better, it's just a convention, but it helps if everyone operates to the same standard for obvious reasons. Since neighbouring countries drove on the right, it was better to adopt the same standard. This was not an issue for islands such as the UK and Japan with no direct road links to neighbours, therefore they still drive on the left. Originally, before cars, the nobility rode their horses on the left to defend against oncoming traffic since they held their swords in their right hand. For that reason, peasants travelled on the right for safety. After the French Revolution it was prudent for the nobility to blend in, hence all traffic began to travel on the right which was then spread by the French empire.
The Shanghai Maglev isn't much more than a novelty at this point. Originally it was a somewhat useful way to travel to the airport instead of a bus, but now that the metro runs there that seems to be the better option (you don't have to deal with the maglev transfer or with buying another ticket). They had planned to extend it to Hangzhou, but the high speed rail between Shanghai and Hangzhou ended those plans.
Depends on what you mean by "panned out". The tech works, but society isn't interested in trains since it was developed and matured.
We pushed cars, freeways, etc. Not just in the US. Other countries followed along for their own reasons.
It's like nuclear; the tech can work fine. We just don't have the interest.
I blame lobbying against public utilities, personally. Decades of pro-privatization rhetoric, getting people to buy-in on their own vehicle, versus pub-trans.
"And if goalies are being irrational, why aren't kickers exploiting it?"
Two reasons I can think of. First, if you shoot to the left or right (particularly top or bottom corner of goal) then the goalkeeper has further to travel to reach the ball, therefore if it is done with sufficient accuracy and power it is harder, or even impossible, to save even if the goalkeeper guesses correctly. In contrast, a central shot, even if hit with high power is often easy to save if the goalkeeper keeps central. Therefore, shooting left or right more often than centrally can be a rational choice if the goalkeeper distributes evenly between going left, right and center - especially for high level players. Secondly, shooting centrally can look a bit silly if the goalkeeper guesses correctly, since it is usually an easy save, therefore it is seen as a bit of an arrogant, or show off, move. Therefore players may be reluctant to shoot centrally - this is somewhat related to the reasoning given for the goalkeepers in that the players want to be seen to be doing something.
The estimated worth of the gold in jewellery privately owned in India alone (mainly by housewives) is estimated to be worth $600 billion. To put that in perspective, total US gold reserves are valued at around $420 billion.
That's very interesting. My hypothesis would be that even in that case the value Indians give to gold jewelry isn't just because they like shiny yellow metal, it's because they're using gold as a way to keep savings in a place where they don't trust the currency. In fact, from your article:
It’s in steel cupboards and in bank vaults across the country, where India’s housewives and other private owners have stashed their jewelry and gold savings.
It may be possible that they developed their internal compass due to their nomadic lifestyle and the use of absolute directions within language resulted from that (rather than vice versa). I have no idea if this is the case.
Seems unlikely to me: there are many nomadic tribes, but this linguistic particularity and these abilities in spatial orientation were only reported for this tribe (AFAIK).
suggests that speakers of all these languages share the good spatial orientation abilities. Anyway it's true then that my argument doesn't hold. One should first verify if there is a subset of nomadic peoples that lack this language feature, and that they have poorer orientation abilities.
Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought:
I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way proficient, their small community is an interesting place.
the more fluent ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).
Except that for the Tesla it's days after reaching zero charge, not months.
From the manual "Important! Caution: If the battery’s charge level falls to 0%, it must be plugged in immediately. Failure to do so can permanently damage the battery and this damage is not covered by the New Vehicle Limited Warranty."
It looks like one of the specific cases on this, Max Drucker's Tesla, was it bricked two months after bringing it to 25% displayed charge level. So the car wasn't even run all the way down. Presumably the time to failure is much shorter if you bring it to the 0% displayed charge level at which point it shuts down. Your guess of days is probably correct.
In the first link here you can even see the emails between Tesla representatives and Drucker, so Tesla is 100% aware that this car was bricked and the cost to fix it was over $40,000, which was the "friends and family" price for "loyal supporters", not the standard repair rate, which is presumed to be much higher.
Because they have emails on the subject, which note that even Musk is aware of the situation, their PR efforts to suggest the cars can't be bricked and the allegations in their statement are not only false, but are intentional lies and misrepresentations by Tesla, showing bad faith. It is absolutely a cover up, coupled with the start of a media smear campaign that we see getting in gear in the technical press.
edit: I see that people are so threatened by reality they are paralyzed into downvoting because they have no coherent response and so censorship is the only action that makes sense to their tiny reptilian brains. Above are actual emails between Tesla and an owner that prove Tesla is aware of the problem, bricking is possible, the repairs are a minimum of $40,000, the blogger is telling the truth, and Tesla is blatantly lying and misrepresenting the situation in their response. Downvote all you want, it only shows what a failure you are and won't change reality.
Of course the manual is going to say that. If the manual said it took weeks or months for the battery to discharge then people would dilly dally and forget and suddenly there would be a lot more bricked batteries out there.
If you tell people to plug their cars in IMMEDIATELY then maybe they won't let it sit around for more than a week or two.
