list

List of States by number of Professional Engineers per Capita

April 17, 2014
The Events that are: My Life

Apparently no one has created this list yet, so I compiled the data for the number of Professional Engineers per capita by state. Wyoming, the state with the smallest population, has the most number of Professional Engineers per capita while New York has the least.

Colorado is 17th and Washington is 18th, furthering my theory that the two states are somehow linked to each other.

State	Population	Total PE	PE per 1000
Wyoming	576412	6091	10.57
Delaware	917092	7300	7.96
North Dakota	699628	5073	7.25
Alaska	731449	4632	6.33
Vermont	626011	3739	5.97
New Hampshire	1320718	6374	4.83
Maine	1329192	6200	4.66
Idaho	1595728	7300	4.57
Hawaii	1392313	6123	4.40
South Dakota	833354	3585	4.30
West Virginia	1855413	7828	4.22
Kansas	2885905	11835	4.10
Nebraska	1855525	7262	3.91
Rhode Island	1050292	3987	3.80
Oregon	3899353	14744	3.78
Nevada	2758931	10163	3.68
Colorado	5187582	18661	3.60
Washington	6897012	24678	3.58
Louisiana	4601893	16000	3.48
New Mexico	2085538	7140	3.42
Mississippi	2984926	9701	3.25
Virginia	8185867	26598	3.25
Utah	2855287	9118	3.19
South Carolina	4723723	15000	3.18
Maryland	5884563	18655	3.17
Alabama¹	4822023	14567	3.02
Missouri	6021988	17501	2.91
Iowa	3074186	8500	2.76
Kentucky	4380415	12043	2.75
Arkansas	2949131	8072	2.74
Oklahoma	3814820	10000	2.62
Arizona	6553255	17136	2.61
North Carolina	9752073	23099	2.37
California	38041430	90000	2.37
Tennessee	6456243	15171	2.35
Massachusetts	6646144	15588	2.35
Connecticut	3590347	8200	2.28
Ohio	11544225	26071	2.26
Michigan	9883360	21564	2.18
Pennsylvania	12763536	27839	2.18
Texas	26059203	56000	2.15
New Jersey	8864590	19000	2.14
Minnesota	5379139	11440	2.13
Georgia	9919945	19997	2.02
Florida	19317568	38750	2.01
Montana	1005141	1900	1.89
Indiana	6537334	11362	1.74
Wisconsin	5726398	8905	1.56
Illinois	12875255	19708	1.53
New York	19570261	27218	1.39

Sources:

NCEES Boards Summary (http://boards.ncees.org/)
Montana Department of Labor and Industry (http://bsd.dli.mt.gov/license/bsd_boards/pel_board/board_page.asp)
State Totals: Vintage 2012 – U.S Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/popest/data/state/totals/2012/)

P.S. I successfully passed the Law & Ethics Exam part of the Washington State Professional Engineering licensing process. It’s interesting because it’s an open book exam with links to the applicable RCW and WAC, so really more of a class under the guise of an exam.

includes retired and inactive status ↩

Life Tips

February 1, 2009
Seen, Heard, Said, The Events that are: My Life

I’m posting this because I agree with them and because I want to remember them. I especially like number 6 (about failing), and it’s been part of my unofficial New Years Resolution to fail gracefully more. This is author Nassim Nicholas Taleb list of top life tips:

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
Learn to fail with pride – and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error – by mastering the error part.
Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

The TimeOnline also did a great article that’s worth a read: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom.

via BoingBoing

Unsolved Problems

July 18, 2008
Seen, Heard, Said

Alright team, let’s get cracking:

From www.kottke.org:

Another Wikipedia gem: a list of unsolved problems from a number of different fields, including linguistics, physics, and computer science. (via lone gunman)

I think my favorite problem deals with the existence of one-way functions, also called hash functions¹:

From en.wikipedia.org:

Description
One-way functions are easy to compute but hard to invert. Although there are several candidates for which no good (i.e. quick) reverse algorithms are currently known, it hasn’t yet been proven that any function exists for which no such reverse algorithms exist.
Importance
If one-way functions do not exist then public key cryptography is impossible. Their existence would imply that many complexity classes are not learnable, and that Pâ‰ NP.
Conjecture
It is assumed but unproven that they do exist. Several encryption systems are based on the assumption that modular exponentiation is a one-way function.

¹ Kind of. Hash functions usually return a value of fixed length, which precludes them from being true one-way functions.

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List of States by number of Professional Engineers per Capita

Life Tips

Unsolved Problems

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