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You can't be serious. First of all, wildlife and the rich biodiversity of nature has its own intrinsic value without needing to be "useful" to humans. Second, we're constantly learning from other species and I doubt we're even close to knowing everything there is to know about them. Some of our best tech was inspired by wildlife (sonar, swarm robotics, aviation, the list goes on).

Couldn't agree more. Protecting wildlife is like protecting nature's most valuable works of art, and it's a real tragedy that they have become so marginalized in our anthropocentric system. It would be fascinating to focus on solving problems that go beyond our own species. One of the main issues is the economics of biodiversity — how do you put a price on the preservation of an ecosystem or a species? It's certainly not a straightforward answer, but it's a question that's well-worth thinking about.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ⚛ Berkeley, CA

Web Developer | full-time or part-time

Berkeley Lab is looking for a talented web developer who will work on building powerful web-based tools for materials scientists on the Materials Project team (see materialsproject.org). We use millions of CPU-hours a year to compute the properties of advanced new materials, and disseminate the information with web interfaces and APIs.

This is a great opportunity for a developer with an interest in science and energy-related innovation. You'll work with a very small team of scientists and engineers and will have a major impact on any aspect of the project that interests you — from application architecture to data visualization.

A successful applicant will have experience in:

   ▪   HTML (HTML5 desirable) / CSS3

   ▪   Python and Django (or similar framework)

   ▪   Javascript — experience with Backbone.js, 
       CoffeeScript, and Require.js is highly relevant

   ▪   Web services technologies and REST

   ▪   Information visualization — knowledge of javascript
       graphing libraries such as d3 or HighCharts and   
       understanding of information visualization techniques
       highly relevant

   ▪   MVC-style development

   ▪   Writing unit-tests for client side applications

   ▪   Unix environments 

   ▪   User interface design principles
If you're interested in applying, or you simply want to ask some questions about the position, feel free to get in touch via the email listed on my profile.

"The problem with your comment is you assume everyone can dabble in everything."

How is it unreasonable to assume that a designer should dabble in web development? That's hardly 'everything' and it's highly relevant to their work and goals. Frankly it's remarkable to me that web designers can still get jobs without taking the time to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the engineering stack they're designing for, even if they don't work with it on a day-to-day basis.

Learning anything new is all well and good, but the thing that's actually valuable to society and "america's future" isn't really more coders, it's people who are really fantastic at what they do; whatever it may be. I'd rather someone dedicate their life to becoming the best preserve-maker in the world than fixing bugs in groupon. The preserve-maker may not reach billions of people with his/her work, but based on my own observations, I've found that the relative quality of one's achievements in a field has more leverage than the scale.

Replace the word 'black' with any other color you can think of in this article and it's pretty clear how dogmatic this is. I'm all for setting rules and constraints for a given design project, but trying to set universal rules apart from the context of the project with these arguments is fallacious since one can easily give strong counter arguments in favor of pure black. In fact, OLED screens are as black as they come since a pure black OLED won't draw any power. This is a wonderful aspect of it's function that results in incredible saturated graphics like those found on the op-1 synth display: http://www.teenageengineering.com/products/op-1/overview