This is a nice sentiment but as someone who has been a programmer for biology and medical research, it's not true. It's just like any other mediocre programming job, but your office is a folding table under a decommissioned fume hood. Physicists and mathematicians who program are so underpaid they dream about the glamour and glitz of working in a cube on Wall Street. There are bad jobs with technology firms, but by far the programming jobs with the most "respect", most fun and usually highest pay are with tech firms and well funded startups.

As a person that many people want to get in front of, I can hereby certify that this fellow would have been blocked by a bayesian spam filter by email #2.

The trouble here is his attitude. It's all about demanding and demanding and demanding. Gimme. Gimme some time. Gimme some attention. Then gimme some mentoring, gimme some money, gimme an investment. You know what? Ef you.

The solution to landing meetings with anyone you want is fairly easy and has been understood since Dale Carnegie explained it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc...) in 1936.

You have to stop demanding things from people and start doing things for them.

Comment on their blog posts.

When you find out they have a new puppy, mail them some homemade puppy treats with a nice note.

When they ask a question on Twitter, move mountains to find an answer and send it to them.

Find out what charities they work for and make a donation. Or volunteer.

Write a blog. Give freely of your own knowledge. I did that and went from anonymous to internet-famous in 2 years. When I wanted to raise money, everyone knew who I was, and I got meetings with anyone I wanted with a one sentence email. Not because I was lucky and not because I was blessed and not because I was in the right club, but because I had been making a contribution for years before I started demanding things.

It DOES require us to collect sales tax for a bunch of different states, though. This would be a big deal if we were an ecommerce company... you'll notice that Amazon is fanatic about avoiding telecommuters; they don't want to accidentally get themselves in a position of effectively raising their prices by 8% on the entire state of Texas just to have one remote employee there.

"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."

I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550

It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.

I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.