Here's another interesting "radiation enthusiast", who visits nuclear sites and collects radioactive memorabilia. He actually works as a nuclear engineer.
I don't know how we are in relation to Czechs, but one of things I hear as an American is that we are often too quick to talk about politics. Whereas, in many cultures, politics is considered almost taboo to talk about with all but the closest friends and family.
As a grad student in the 2000's I was told by a professor that the department would take into consideration the expected attrition rate (typically ~50%) when admitting grad students. The idea being that they would have enough TA's for intro classes. Attrition would make the number of advanced students more inline with the money available to fund PhD students till they graduated. In other words, they purposefully over-admitted to get TA's, most of whom would leave with an MS as best.
This was in science departments. In departments that had few or no "general ed" courses, such as engineering, and thus little need for TA's, the graduation rate was much higher.
graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05
This was true in my experience as well. I applied to grad school for 2004 and heard lots of crazy stories from programs about high applicant numbers and quality. I ended up at a "hidden gem" versus a top program. A couple years later I re-applied to PhD programs and got accepted everywhere.
In today's markets it's a little hard to believe that people would be flocking to grad school due to a poor industry market, but it seemed to be the case across science and engineering fields. I'm sure that influx also made the bad academic job market even worse, unfortunately.
In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people").
Here's what Wikipedia says:
* The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups
I visited Melbourne for about a month a couple of years ago and was excited to use the train to get around, but people there routinely said I was crazy for doing that. People often offered to give me a ride to the train station (usually a few blocks away). I got the overall impression that Australia has a very similar car culture to the US.
I usually tell people to brush up on their programming skills as much as possible. If you're a theorist who only does pencil + paper or maybe Mathematica, it might be hard to find a decent job. Also, it never hurts to talk to / network with any industry people that are related to your field (software or hardware vendors, etc).
I'm now doing data science, but have also done hardware development and electrical engineering related things (signals). When I was transitioning to data science I also did some very specialized consulting related to my PhD. A few people paid me to do simulations and/or help then implement some techniques that I worked on as a grad student.
Also: I had a very supportive advisor, who encouraged me to accept a job offer before I graduated.
I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse.
Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Harvard. He was unable to get a tenure track job, primarily because in that 4 year timespan only 1 faculty position opened up in the entire US for his (tiny) field. He now works at Google.
In fact I'm not sure that anyone from my cohort is still in academia. Other students used to come ask me questions all of the time, because I had worked in industry before going to grad school. Their questions were always some variation of "what are my options if I get out of physics?".
Edit: I'll also add that most grad students I knew gave little thought to their post-grad job prospects before starting grad school. It seems now that the message has trickled along a little better that the outlook is very poor.
I'd like some UI element that lets me know how long it's been since I read/used a tab. I tend to open lots of tabs and then browse them as is convenient later. Sometimes this means tabs get "lost" (i.e. become stale before I read them). This would let me know which tabs I might have overlooked or should close, bookmark, etc.
I just checked put my sites using elinks and fortunately they came out pretty well.
One is based on bootstrap and one on skeleton. I just made some links that are icons (github, twitter, etc) visible in elinks by adding img tags with src="" alt="some text" style="display:none". Seems like an OK hack.
http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/
Highlights include Chernobyl trips, a trip to "Soviet Ground Zero", and a how-to for DIY uranium chemistry.