Journal: News & Comment

I wanna grow up to be a weapons inspector

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When I was on the Board of Governors of the University of B.C. ten years ago (as elected student rep), then-UBC president David Strangway told me that when he was in university in the '50s, the job he eventually landed -- Chief of Geophysics for NASA, responsible for designing experiments to take place on the moon -- didn't even exist. That ended up being true for me too, in a much less spectacular way: when I graduated with a B.Sc. in Marine Biology in 1990, I could never have known that I would make my living for a time as a Web designer, since there was no Web then.

So now we ask (and Slate answers): how do UN weapons inspectors going to Iraq get the qualifications for the job?

Bonus neat (and totally unrelated) explanation: in 1973, people in Iceland used five months of constant spraying with water to stop a lava flow from blocking a harbour.

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