Finding Employment

Finding Employment

Finding a job can be a quite daunting task, especially if the local, or even global, economy is in a recession. Frightening accounts in the news state massive unemployment rates and dark prospects for graduates. In actuality, the situation may be even worse, since unemployment rates exclude from calculation those who are studying, working part-time, outside productive age range, and especially important, those who have given up all hope of getting work. Thus, for econometricians, the unemployed are defined as people without permanent employment who are actively seeking employment.

In the Western world, as well as other parts of the planet, the traditional path to securing employment is to first acquire qualifications or skills, through education and experience. Then, one looks for work according to how qualified one is. One niche in the marketplace, so to speak, is easily picked up in one CV (curriculum vitae) or resume, as well as the cover letter and references.

Today, many individuals turn to the Internet unlike the help wanted sections of newspaper ads. Interestingly, statisticians report low rates of success on electronic boards. Nonetheless, studies differ, so one never knows for sure. Most human resource professionals would advise to turn to one's social networks, friends and acquaintances can often point one in the right direction.

Being fired and/or prolonged joblessness may lead to feelings of sadness and despair. Image: Copyright © Elena.

Stars as in Astro

Stars as in Astro

Stars have captivated human attention since times immemorial; popular media phenomena Star Wars and cult-inspiring Star Trek are just two among many proofs.

Further, astrology is the practice of attempting to foretell the future based on the position of the stars, as in the twelve horoscope signs that stem from the belief that a person born under a particular stellar arrangement has a predetermined destiny and personality.  JoJo Savard, a Quebec born television personality of the 1990s, was the first astrologer to gain public recognition in Canada.

In the scientific realm, there are astronomy, astrobiology, astrochemistry and astrophysics. In Quebec, the most prominent are: astronomical professional endeavor Mont Mégantic Observatory (AstroLab of the National Park of Mount Megantic), the non-professional association FAAQ (Fédération des Astronomes Amateurs du Québec), and the astrophysical CRAQ (Centre of Research in Astrophysics of Quebec).

Stars as in Astro. Illustration by Elena.

Due to the impossibility to place a massive gaseous object into empty space and watch it evolve for a million years, astrophysics and astronomy are observational and not experimental sciences. Although physics is indeed a science, debates nonetheless remain. For example, Pluto has recently (circa 2008) lost its planetary status, due to the many “Plutos” in similar elliptical outer orbits. Eris, a planet larger than Pluto, has been discovered and it is expected that similar others will follow in the near future (the Hubble telescopes and the Voyager probes launched in the 1970s have advanced the field tremendously). Similarly, the Moon, essentially a rock, is larger than Pluto and due to the unusual, as compared to other planets, Earth-Satellite proportion, they could be considered as two planets.

Our solar system is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, one star (the Sun) among billions of stars, among billions of galaxies. The closest spiral galaxy to us is Andromeda; the two are expected to collide in billions of years to form a mega-galaxy, as is often the case elsewhere. Now, this is much more impressive when actually drawn to scale, but the order of magnitude (non-exhaustive list) is as follows:

Moon < Earth < Jupiter < Sun < Sirius < Arcturus  < Rigel < Antares < Betelgeuse < Binary Star VV Cephei < Vy Canis Majoris. Which of Betelgeuse or Antares is larger is a matter of argument, but both are the brightest visible red supergiants in Earth’s sky. Vy Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant located in the Canis Majoris constellation in our galaxy, is the most luminous and biggest star known to man. All entries in the above sentence including and following the Sun are stars. The Sun is young; a middle aged star turns into a red giant, and a dying star becomes a white dwarf (extremely dense). After one tries to ponder just how enormous a star like Vy CM is, one goes further by contemplating that of these stellar masses there are trillions. Still, all these stars, planets, comets, gas and other floating materials in the universe comprise only 4.9% of its totality, ¾ of the universe being dark energy (human comprehension largely pending), and the rest dark matter.

Finally, black holes are so dense that even light cannot escape them, which is why we fail to see them since we only perceive objects as photons get reflected from them. A black hole escape velocity is greater than the speed of light; therefore even light gets trapped inside once it reaches the event horizon (the point of no return). Maybe with a telescope from Naturaliste à Québec, the next black hole will be discovered from the province…

Stars as in Astro. Our solar system is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, one star (the Sun) among billions of stars, among billions of galaxies… Photo by Elena.

Chasse Galerie

La Chasse Galerie

(extract from The Forever Man by Gordon R. Dickson)

She stepped back from the open port of La Chasse Gallerie, and gestured to the interior, “Want to come in?”

Jim hesitated.

“I don’t have a Secret clearance for this project – “ he began.

“Don’t worry about it”, interrupted Mary. “That’s just to keep the news people off our necks until we decide how to handle this. Come on”.

She led the way inside. Jim followed her. Within, the ancient metal corridor leading to the pilot’s compartments seemed swept clean and dusted shiny, like some exhibit in a museum. The interior had been hung with magnetic lights, but the gaps and tears made by Laagi weapons let almost as much light in. The pilot’s compartment was a shambles that had been tidied and cleaned. The instruments and control panel were all but obliterated and the pilot’s com-chair half gone. A black box stood in the center of the floor, an incongruous piece of modern equipment, connected by a thick, gray cable to a bulkhead behind it.

“I wasn’t wrong, then”, said Jim, looking around him. “No human body could have lived through this. It was the semianimate control center that was running the ship as Penard’s alter ago, then, wasn’t it? The man isn’t really alive?

“Yes,” said Mary, “and no”. You were right about the control center somehow absorbing the living personality of Penard. – But look again. Could a control center like that, centered in living issue floating and growing in a nutrient solution with no human hands to care for it – could something like that have survived this, either?”

Jim looked around at the slashed and ruined interior. A coldness crept into him and he thought once more of the legend of a great ghost cargo canoe sailing through the snow-filled skies with its dead crew, home to the New Year’s feast of the living.

“No…” he said slowly, through stiff lips. “Then… where is he?”

“Here!” said Mary, reaching out with her fist to strike the metal bulkhead to which the gray cable was attached. The dull boom of the struck metal reverberated in Jim’s ears. Mary looked penetratingly at Jim.

“You were right,” said Mary, “when you said that the control center had become Penard – that it was Penard, after the man died. Not just a record full of memories, but something holding the vital, decision-making spark of the living man himself. – But that was only half the miracle. Because the tissue living in the heart of the control center had to die, too, and just as the original Penard knew he would die, long before he could get home, the tissue Penard knew it, too. But their determination, Penard’s determination, to do something, solved the problem”.

She stopped and stood staring at Jim, as if waiting for some sign that she had been understood.

“Go on,” said Jim.

“The control system,” said Mary, “was connected to the controls of the ship itself through an intermediate solid state element which was the grandfather of the wholly inanimate solid-state computing centers in the ships you drive nowadays. The link was from living tissue through the area of solid-state physics to gross electronic and mechanical controls”.

“I know that,” said Jim. “Part of our training…”

“The living spark of Raoul Penard, driven by his absolute determination to get home, passed from him into the living tissue of the semianimate control system” went on Mary, as if Jim had not spoken. “From there it bridged the gap by a sort of neurobiotaxis into the flow of impulse taking place in the solid-state elements.

Once there, below all gross levels, there was nothing to stop it infusing every connected solid part of the ship.”

Mary swept her hand around the ruined pilot’s compartment.

“This,” she said, “is Raoul Penard. And this!” Once more she struck the bulkhead above the black box. “The human body died. The tissue activating the control center died. But Raoul came home just as he had been determined to do!”

Mary stopped talking. Her voice seemed to echo away into the silence of the compartment.

“And doing it,” said Mary more quietly, “he brought home the key we’ve been hunting for in the Bureau all this time. We pulled the plug on a dam behind which there’s been piling up a flood of theory and research. What we needed to know was that the living human essence could exist independently of the normal human biochemical machinery. Now, we know it. It’ll take time, but someday it won’t be necessary for the vital element of anyone to admit extinction, unless whoever it is wants to”.

You want to go out and fight the dragons, but life is too short… Image: © Megan Jorgensen.

Tricked

Tricked

The Iron Druid chronicles

By Kevin Hearne

Chapter 15

The key to faking deaths is a fine appreciation of arterial spray patterns. One might be tempted to simply smear a bit of blood here and there, but forensics fellows these days are a bit more sophisticated than they used to be. If they figure the scene is a fake, they'll tell the family and the said family will never hold that all-important funeral for closure. Without a body, the coroner would never issue a death certificate, but the police would at least designate it a cold case if you could convince them there was a high probability of death.

I have found that blood bags work very well at simulating spray with a strategically poked hotel apply pressure to the bottom of the bag, practice a bit, and before long you will be able to write stories of carnage and odes to gore.

A small fan brush – the sort that one dude used to paint happy little trees – can paint a picture of bluntforce spatters if you flick the surface properly. Don't use a toothbrush; those patterns are recognizable. You could even talk to yourself, as that painter did while you flick blood around : ”And may be over here we have a nice stab wound. And, I don't know, may be there is a few more back over here. Multiple stab wounds. It doesn't matter, whatever you feel like.”

When it comes to the actual blood, my former policy was that it was best to use somebody's else. You could even leave someone else”s hair, as long as it was plausibly the same color, and that was the best practice, because magic users would have no way to track you down. Can't do that anymore, however. Police routinely send all blood and other biological samples to labs for DNA matching, because some of theses goodies might belong to the suspect. It's tougher to fool the coppers these days, but I enjoy the challenge.

Granuaile wasn't worried about constructing the crime scene, however. She steered me away from that topic.

“What I want to know is how you get around the documentation issues,” she said. She was driving us down to Flagstaff as Oberon napped in the backseat.

“Documentation of what?”

“Of your life before you take on a new identity. I mean, you can't just show up. You need all this stuff. A credit history. How do you do it?

Tricked. Illustration by Elena.

Lithiated Water

Lithiated Water

Excerpt from A Feast of Science, by Dr. Joe Schwarcz

It was once called “The Texas Tranquilizer” because of its association with reduced admissions to mental hospitals and low crime rates. No, it wasn't a pill prescribed by physicians or a weapon wielded by law enforcement officers. It was naturally occurring ionic lithium in the water supply, particularly in the town of El Paso.

The theory about the calming effects of lithium on the population of the Texas town first emerged in 1971 when University of Texas biochimist Earl Dawson noted the presence of lithium in urine samples collected from some 3,000 citizens. He suggested the lithium mush have come from the town's groundwater supply, which had a higher concentration of the element than is typically found elsewhere. Could this explain why Dallas with its surface water supply had seven times more admissions to state mental hospitals than El Paso? Could it also account for a crime rate that was half of that in Dallas, and a murder rate that was one twentieth?

There was already interest in lithium at the time because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had just a year earlier approved the use of lithium salts for the treatment of manic illness. Although the idea that lithium could curb mania had been bloating around since the late 1800s, it wasn't extensively embraced, possible because this naturally occurring substance could not be patented and therefore was of little interest to pharmaceutical companies. But chitchat about the supposed benefits of lithium in water did send hopeful people scurrying to Lithia Springs, Georgia, to partake of its lithium-containing water. Luxury hotels mushroomed to welcome the rich and famous including Mark Twain, who is purported to have suffered from manic-depressive illness. But you didn't have to traipse all the way to Georgia to experience the legendary benefits of lithiated water. In 1887, a bottling plant was built, and the water was shipped around the country. Other marketers cashed in on the popularity of lithiated waters by just adding lithium bicarbonate to spring water.

Calming ambiance. Picture by Elena.

Then in 1929, Charles Grigg decided to get a step up on the competition by adding citrus flavor and sugar along with lithium citrate to carbonated water. He called it Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda and claimed that it would “take the ouch out of grouch. The beverage was also a cure for hangovers, Grigg maintained. But the drink's name didn't exactly roll off the tongue, and he soon changed it to the simpler 7-Up. Why he chose the name isn't clear. Some suggest that it had seven ingredients and the ”Up” referred to the mental lift it provided. Others claim the bottle contained 7 ounces and featured bubbles that rose when opened. Grigg took the secret of the name to his grave, but 7-Up is very much alive, although it no longer contains any lithium. The beverage was reformulated in 1950 after the FDA banned the use of lithium as an additive.

Water with naturally occurring lithium, however, can still be marketed. “Earth's Healing Magic in a Bottle” can be purchased from the Lithia Mineral Water Company, still located in historic Lithia Springs. Whether at 180 parts per billion (ppb) lithium has any biological activity is open to debate. This is way less than the dose used to treat mental illness, but in 2009 a Japanese study did link low levels of naturally occurring lithium in drinking water with an increased risk of suicide. Then two years later, the same group showed that even with the data adjusted for suicides, lithium exposure at levels even below 60 ppb was associated with a reduction in the standardized mortality ratio (SMR), albeit only by a few percent. The SMR is defined as the ratio of observed deaths to that expected in the general population.

The researchers then went to raise a species of roundworm commonly used for anti-aging studies in an environment where they were exposed to 60 ppb of lithium continuously and found that after twenty-five days, about 15 percent of the untreated worms were still alive as compared with 10 percent of the untreated ones. Not exactly a stunning finding, but I guess if you are a roundworm, lithium might allow you to squiggle around for an extra day or so.

That study may just give producers of Happy Water, with its 100 ppb of lithium, sourced “from two ancient Canadian springs,” a little promotional wriggle room. It's doubtful that the water will put a spring in your step and a smile on your face, as the advertising suggests, but the claim that it is “free of empty calories” is good for a giggle. Contains full calories?