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What You Do...

There are some interesting groupings in the post below. Note that all the top jobs- the safest, most congenial, best compensated, most available- are mathematics oriented. What gives them a run, and comes up a bit short (though I do not know what quantitative differences their are between the individual slots) are (drum roll, please):

Historian, Sociologist, and Philosopher

Fantastic. One science gig- biology, at number four. I think this gives a strong boost to the argument that a liberal arts education is worth pursuing. On a related note only a single people oriented job makes the cut. Not a teacher, not a therapist, but a parole officer. This profession is considered Safer, Healthier, and Better Compensated than teaching. Very interesting.

Best and Worst Jobs

from a study done on pay and work conditions:

The Best	The Worst
1. Mathematician	200. Lumberjack
2. Actuary	199. Dairy Farmer
3. Statistician	198. Taxi Driver
4. Biologist	197. Seaman
5. Software Engineer	196. EMT
6. Computer Systems Analyst	195. Garbage Collector
7. Historian	194. Welder
8. Sociologist	193. Roustabout
9. Industrial Designer	192. Ironworker
10. Accountant	191. Construction Worker
11. Economist	190. Mail Carrier
12. Philosopher	189. Sheet Metal Worker
13. Physicist	188. Auto Mechanic
14. Parole Officer	187. Butcher
15. Meteorologist	186. Nuclear Decontamination Tech
16. Medical Laboratory Technician	185. Nurse (LN)
17. Paralegal Assistant	184.Painter
18. Computer Programmer	183. Child Care Worker
19. Motion Picture Editor	182. Firefighter
20. Astronomer	181. Brick Layer

A Million, continued...

Linguistics is not a field I keep up on regularly, but the preceding item raises some interesting questions. For instance, what language has the second largest vocabulary? What language, historically speaking, had the greatest number of linguistic influences?
If you read the whole Economist article you might have noted that this isn't a precise count, and that the inability to perform a precise count underscores the fluidity of human language. Odds are, however that in the months up to and just after April of this year the Hindi, Mandarin, and Spanish tributaries (as well as a host of others) will have engorged the English language past the arbitrary point we call One Million Words.
If I remember correctly, the average speaker of English uses a cluster of about 10,000 different words, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, in about 90 percent of his or her communication. Total vocabulary: 40,000 words. College education, with a specialty area? 100,000.

It seems to me that English will not only fragment into only partial intelligible dialects, but that these dialects will reflect more than geography. They will, eventually, reflect "communities of choice". A new category is being born.

Will the old progression of dialect to creole to separate language altogether fall to the wayside?