Links for 2010-06-18

A good spoof of American sports television, applied to soccer. the titles are Dutch, but the video is in English.

"An animated recreation of England's first match against the USA. "

"A PhD student at Carnegie Mellon costs approximately $80,000 per year. (Research programmers and post-docs cost about the same.) Given that PhD students have to take classes for the first couple of years and are therefore running at 50% capacity, this means that each effective person in my research group costs on average $100,000 per year.

I'm from Guatemala. For $100,000, you can hire 4-5 extremely competent full-time engineers there (even accounting for the 50% overhead rate inside CMU). My question today is: would it make sense to take 5 engineers instead of a PhD student next time I have extra money?"

"I'm an experimental physicist. If you think this sounds like a job second in glamour only to rock star you would be right. Just like being a rock star, you have to deal with the people, the shows, the lights, the groupies . . . okay, maybe I'm lying about the groupies. Unless you're Brian Greene. Also similar to a rock star, no one really knows what it is we do behind the scenes (when we're not touring the nation or publishing papers). I'd like to pull back that curtain a little bit."

"More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. The map below visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement."

Hysterical overreaction on the Internet in 3... 2...

"Somewhere on the internet, I came across this Cracked.com article on movie myths about guns. The article wasn't too bad, but I really liked this video they included from Arnold's movie Commando.

The myth for this particular clip was that guns never run out of ammo in the movies. Right away, I thought: I wonder how many bullets he shot? BRING IT ON."