The Spark Between

Here are some humorous or otherwise interesting tidbits from my inbox and aggregator this morning:

From the national headquarters of Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering honor society, in their Welcome email:

For job seeking assistance, post your resume anonymously and browse through hundreds of current engineering job listings at our job board

Uh… anonymously? My brain hurts.

From the Official Google Blog: Women and minorities entering their senior year of undergrad or any year of graduate school in technology are eligible to apply for a scholarship sponsored by Google. The scholarship is called, I kid you not, the Anita Borg Scholarship. How awesome is that?

From the New York Times: 1 in 8 New Yorkers is diabetic. Holy crap. That’s way higher than I had imagined, as well as way higher than the national average (7% according to The American Diabetes Association)

From Space.com:

CAPE CANAVERAL – About three dozen people assembled at the spaceport Saturday to protest this month’s planned launch of a plutonium-powered space probe bound for Pluto.

36 people? Are you kidding? The protest is over the use of nuclear power for spacecraft, which carries a 1 in 350 risk of distributing nuclear material in the event of a launch vehicle explosion during takeoff. I get that people are concerned, plutonium being released into the atmosphere is no light matter, but come on. 36? That probably isn’t even enough to form a picket line all the way across the gate they set up camp by. I don’t think NASA is going to be overly moved. Stay tuned Jan. 17 for the launch of the Pluto mission.