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Why? Do magnets have cooties or something?

Sweet baby Jesus on a stick, they're toast!

Has everyone already forgotten about Cosmos 954?

On 24 January 1978, COSMOS 954, a Soviet nuclear-powered surveillance satellite, crashed in the Northwest Territories. The crash scattered a large amount of radioactivity over a 124,000 square kilometre area in Canada's north, stretching southward from Great Slave Lake into northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.

And for a little history of Nukes in space.

- SR

Nah, it's the damn medical sciences!

;-)

link to incident mentioned in other post.

Sorry, that was Saskatchewan

Perhaps a nice little picture of, say, a broken CD-ROM drive, or the nice little warning a Mac gives when its CD drive has been killed by one of these CDs...

or just something simple, like WARNING: This product is inferior.

Really, I learned a lot more in undergraduate genetics, microbiology, botany and orgainic chemistry courses on how to be a terrorist than I did by launching model rockets.

Got Botulism? It might take a while to isolate and identify the proper strain, but terrorists don't have the marketing department breathing down their necks to meet a shipping date. They're patient if they have to be. Once identified, it's just a matter of culturing and refining the toxin.

Got Ricin? Yes, the lovely castor bean plant (ricinus communis) produces a rather nice toxin. Readily available through many plant stores. A bit of applied organic chemistry lab work, and you too can get the desired organic compound.

Got GB Nerve gas? Malathion (an readily available and highly used insecticide) and the first component of the binary nerve gas GB are very similar. Any organic chemist worth his money would be able to do some work to make it exactly similar. The other component is isopropol alcohol. You can find that in any drugstore.

Got FAE? Why bother with ANFO (ammonium-nitrate fuel-oil, the fertilizer bomb that has been used in many, many places) truck bombs? A little bit of applied mechanical engineering and you to can have explosives on par with low-yield nuclear weapons. Sure, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide may be a bit hard to source, but you can use others to get a similar result.

Or, as was demonstrated by one nutcase in South Korea, all it takes is a determined individual with gasoline to kill many people on a subway.

Model rockets? Give me a break. Next on the list: slingshots.

I don't even know where to start..

Maybe it's the fact that terrorists don't read scientific journals.

Why not? Because scientific journals present new research, and you don't need
new knowledge to produce biological and chemical weapons.
Sarin gas was first manufactured in 1938. Mustard gas long before that.
Almost anyone who has studied a fair amount of organic chemistry can make this stuff.
It's all common knowledge.

As for bioweapons.. the same thing goes. Making penicillin-resistant E. Coli takes undergraduate biotech skills.
(at least at my uni.)

Want to make botulism toxin, one of the most toxic substances known?
Leave a bottle of garlic in oil on top of your refrigerator for a few weeks.

Or maybe we should just ban education?
And books and libraries. Knowledge is dangerous, kids.

Canada Food Guide says eat whole grain foods more often

USDA Food Pyramid says eat more whole grains.

Seriously, where do these stories come from?

Low fat diets do not eliminate fats - it is recommended you that 30% of your calories come from fat by the USDA and Health Canada. They call it low fat because people usually eat >40% fat and that pushes our caloric intake too high.

Skinless chicken, baked potatoes with the skin still on, brown rice That's what both guides recommend - whole grains, lean meats - what's the problem?

Refined grains are mostly a problem because they are more calorically dense and lack vitamins, nutrients, and protein (I get 10-15% of my needed protein from whole grain bread).

Hell's bells man, you speak of conspiracy theories - what about the vegans that (often correctly) say we don't need milk or meat for protein - soy and peanuts would work just as well.

So who's really pulling the strings? The dairy and beef council or the cereal council?

I like to call the Atkins diet the "make yourself sick diet" (someone elses quote, can't remember who - some registered dietitian) - If I remember correct, you survive off of ketones instead of glucose, which makes you somewhat ill and accordingly, you lose your appetite, eat less, and lose weight.

The best diet is one that you can stick to. I have lost ten pounds over 8 weeks without ever feeling hungry or giving up junk food. I did it by following the food guide, walking/cycling, and lifting weights.
Keep in mind, this is a net of ten pounds lost - I have gained muscle mass.

To anyone that wishes to lose weight or just eat healthy, check out the book "The American Dietetic Association's Complete Food and Nutrition Guide" - it dispels a lot of common myths (ie/ you must increase protein consumption to build muscle but not carbohydrate consumption) and is very informative.

If you just want the basics, check out Food Guide Canada or The USDA Food Pyramid for more info.

There are alternatives to these as well. I don't have any links handy, but there are pyramids for a Meditaranian (sp?) and vegetarian diets as well. A lot of vegetarians are actually in terrible health because they don't eat enough protein or are missing vitamins - if you wish to give up animal products, do make sure you read up on a healthy vegetarian diet!

A really good website is also at Ask a Dietitian - lots of good questions answered there. (Check out the icon if you bookmark it - a little penguin :)

Lastly, if you are interested in weightlifting, do it right! Use an abbreviated routine (no more than three lifting days per week) and stay away from the muscle comics and expensive supplements. I personally will eat an energy bar if I'm on the go, but wasting money on Myoplex is pointless when a chicken sandwich will work just as well.
Check out the misc.fitness.weights faq or the iron page at stumptuous.com for some good tips.

The site in question, a Canadian smokers' rights group, was forced to remove their image of the flag after Mr. Ovens contacted them.

The Ministry of Health is at all out war with the Tobacco industry up here. You see it in posters, on TV, over the radio and on the Health Canada website. The site in question is run by their opponents.

My guess is FARCES[1], oops er, FORCES overstepped the boundaries of parody and deservedly got bitchslapped for it, not unlike another group that tried to emulate a Goverment site.

[1] I'm not a fan of Big Tobacco.

I totally disagree that the Canadian government should have exclusive rights to the Maple Leaf Flag; if they do own the trademark they certainly only enfroce it rarely (and then only for commercial use). Marks the government actively protects involve the flag, but also involve other things such as a stylised "Government of Canada" script or departmental names in that script. In any event, it would be in their best interests to make the flag freely available since it is one of the few unifying sybols of such a diverse and regionalised country, and the more it is used the more Canadians will feel part of Canada and not swallowed up by the USA. Considering the goverment had a fairly successful program promoting and giving away the Maple Leaf flag freely (real flags and graphics), I'd say they agree.

That being said, it appears that the site in question is still using a Maple Leaf Flag with the "Health Canada" department name beside it, in a script and style very similar to that actually used by Health Canada. The federal government is within their rights to go after a pro-smoking group that is displaying the Health Canada department logo in any manner.

Neat.. Health Canada actually has something useful. and... I somehow feel like I'm in a session of parliament, because you should probably quote more of the Health Canada page you linked to:

The power of light emitted by these battery-operated lasers used to be less than one milliwatt (Class 2 lasers). But now the power has increased to between 1 and 5 mW (Class 3a laser) to obtain a brighter beam. Unfortunately, it also makes the laser more dangerous to the eye.

Below 1 mW, even in the worst case situation at night, the eye directly exposed to the laser light has time to activate the blink reflex, approximately 0.25 seconds, before injury occurs. But at levels between 1 and 5 mW, so much light rushes into the eye that it suffers a temporary condition called flashblindness. It is similar to the effect that occurs during flash photography where the image of the flash source remains in the eyes for a few seconds and then fades away.

There is no long-term effect from flashblindness. Normal vision usually recovers after a few seconds. But if one forces oneself to look directly into the beam, then permanent blindness might occur depending on exposure duration. This would be equivalent to looking directly at the sun for a few seconds.

One thing I did forget about is the blinking part. Since 650nm is actually red, the physiological response is to blink. This is one of the reasons class 4 lasers so dangerous: you may be looking directly into the beam and not blink until pain is induced, but by that time it's likely too late and dammage has been done.

There's no doubt that at the Rx end significant attenuation will have occured and it will be harmless. But it's not exactly bright (bad pun) to be looking at the Tx end close-up for more than a second or so. After all, we're talking about 5mW here.

From Health Canada:
But at levels between 1 and 5 mW, so much light rushes into the eye that it suffers a temporary condition called flashblindness. It is similar to the effect that occurs during flash photography where the image of the flash source remains in the eyes for a few seconds and then fades away. There is no long-term effect from flashblindness.

It may not be particularly pleasant to have one of these lasers hit you in the eye, but it won't do any permanent damage.

Something I wrote elsewhere once upon a time:

This year, I've been wearing a pager in hospital, while my digital PCS phone sits either freezing or melting in my car... stashed safely in the parking lot. It's due to the familiar fact that hospitals have those gigantic signs posted everywhere, screaming about how any device that transmits RF might cause a massive explosion or result in patient deaths. We commonly have this explained to us by the fact that "cellular phones and other RF transmitters may interfere with sensitive medical equipment." Aren't these sensitive pieces of equipment RF shielded in any way to prevent this, let alone to prevent the multitude of walkie-talkie conversations and telemetry broadcasts permeating the hospital hallways from upsetting the various electronic doodads? I've even seen docs answer their mobile phones right in front of me, ON HOSPITAL PROPERTY, thumbing their noses at the dictum that "PHONE IN HOSPITAL BAD."

I, procrastinating my own reading, did a quick search online for an answer to this question which has plagued me and my colleauges for some time now. Here are a few highlights from different points of view:

Digital Cellular Phone Interference with Cardiac Pacemakers
Is There an Effect of a Cellular Phone on Pacemaker Function?
Is it time for Cellular Bill of Rights?
Medical Center Goes Wireless
EM interference of external pacemakers... study
Effect of mobile phone on life-saving and life-sustatning systems
Interference to medical equipment form mobile phones.
Initial experience with a wireless PDA as a teleradiology terminal...

--- [DrPsycho] Coping with reality since 1975.

Does this surprise me? Yes and no. Yes, because I often look to Canada as our more enlightened neighbor to the north who's solved so many of the problems that did or have plagued us for so long: universal health care, rampant racial strife, rigorous environmental protections, etc. At the same time, Canada as a nation has long had a strange relationship with its children.

Most countries put children and minors into the same legal category as imbeciles and the insane, but Canada is much more aggressive about it and in the process, their parents are often in practice lumped in as well. Have you ever been to a supermarket in Canada and tried to buy caffeinated Mountain Dew or caffeinated rootbeer? It doesn't exist, because children can't be trusted with caffeine and their parents might be too stupid to realize that non-cola sodas may contain caffeine.

Frankly, it astonished me at first, because Canada is more dedicated than most countries to conducting research into children's psychology: if we understand our children, then we can change the world! That sort of thing. But what's even more surprising is that a recent study ; demonstrated that in spite of how much effort and funding was being poured into Canadian schools and Canadian children's programs (from prenatal and on), immigrant children still on average outperform native-born Canadian children. And that's in spite of the fact that Canada's immigrant children are in greater poverty and penury than their native counterparts; the education they received in foreign countries prior to arriving in Canada has helped them succeed where Canadian children without that opportunity languish.

I'm torn as to how to how to find a solution, of course. On the one hand, parents are proving insufficient, but at the same time, the government is proving incompetent to solve the problem. Clearly something has to be done, but who? The only choice I see is the UN, but they're usually unwilling (or not allowed) to get involved in purely domestic affairs, and you don't get any more domestic than child-rearing. But whatever Canada does, it must act soon. Certain industries (particularly the film industries in British Columbia) have been on the rise and have successfully drawn an international presence formerly reserved to the US. But if Jonny or Sally can't read, then when the children grow up to staff or lead those industries, the nation will find itself in a lot of trouble.

I only wish we in the US had something to offer in aid, but we've failed our children too. I suppose that ultimately, we'll have to rethink the legal status of children and perhaps move them into a more autonomous position and role, where they can think for themselves and make decisions in their own best interests, since obviously we can no longer trust ourselves to act in anyone's best interest but our own. First it was propertied white men who were enfranchised, and then came men of other races, and then finally ;wo men. It's time for children to join in the society of nations and receive their full share of human rights including the right to vote, not just in silly online polls but in elections that matter. They have voices of their own, and it's time we started listening.