Link of the Moment: Deborah's Number

At the beginning of the month, The Dayside at Physics Today talked about the Deborah number, as it's one of two dimensionless numbers not named after a man.  (If you want to know what the other one is, you'll have to click on the link.)

Hat tip: Physics Today online editor's picks email

Link of the Moment: Life of a Salesman

As part of his series on alternate technical careers, Chemjobber profiled technical sales as an option.  I was in technical sales for 2 years, followed by 4 years of sales support, so I provided a few comments for today's CJ post.
One of the persistent themes I hear about people looking for jobs is that they're sure they can do the job, but for whatever reason (wrong background, not enough education), they don't get an adequate hearing.  Because sales compensation is often by commission, some employers may be willing to take a chance on someone without experience.

Jobs Report (September '11)

A keyword search (rheolog*) conducted on September 11th found 26 jobs on Monster.com and 19 jobs on Careerbuilder.

Quotation of the Moment: Known & Unknown

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."


--Donald Rumsfeld

Quotation of the Moment: Annoying Software Note

While dealing with a sample robot for DSC that dropped a pan, the controlling software gave me this note, following a string of comments that told me the autosampler was having a problem--

"Warning: unknown warning"

That sounds ominous.