...They knew of some sort of death star/planet and they called it "Nibiru" which means "Planet of the Crossing" (why would they name it that?!) and they drew it on one of their tablets along with the other planets.
But... But... According to the books I've read, there is some poor guy chained to the Caucasus mountains and getting his liver ripped out by eagles every morning. Shouldn't we be sending out an expedition to free him first? My source is probably newer than yours, so it's more likely to be accurate. And we could pick up the Ark of Utnapishtim (Noah) on the way, because that's just next door (according to an even newer book).
Personal attacks have been part of the evolution-creationism debate since the beginning.
True, but that doesn't make it right. And are you descended from a monkey on your mother's side of the family, or your father's side?
But to dismiss an argument because the author made a mild (for these debates) personal attack in a parenthetical is not playing by the rules of logic, either.
The person making the attack was a commentator on a blog which discussed the paper, not the authors of the paper (Melott and Bambach) itself, and the commentator was talking about a joint organiser of a conference at which the present authors presented/ published other related work. In the context of putting Dawkins and Behe (or "Soapy" Wilberforce and Darwin's Bulldog) into the pit together, this wouldn't even need a box of Elastoplast on site ("Band-Aid" in American English).
All I've got to say is that it must take a pair the size of the the former twin towers.
I'll tell the lady cave divers I know. If you're unlucky, you'll continue to live.
I'm not fearful of enclosed spaces in the slightest,
Not relevant.
but this is just insane.
The cave divers I've known, male and female, are some of the sanest people I've met. They may have differing ideas to you about what's important in life - but that doesn't make them insane. More specifically, it doesn't make them suicidally insane - which is what most outsiders think. Yes, the sport is dangerous. So you manage the risks to an acceptable level, or you "turn your back and fin away/ and live to dive another day" (to quote an old joke).
On top of that, if you manage to get that deep, you have to account for the trip back, meaning if you exceed your air supply by getting lost in dirty water, or any other number of potential gotchas, you could easily end up overstaying your welcome and just not have enough time to get back out again.
Well, isn't that obvious? Well done, you've passed Cave Diving 1.0.1. This is why the CDG chose, when it was re-founded in late 1940s BTW, time isn't important - gas volumes are important. You only have to control the amount of gas that you waste by getting emotional about things, and then you've only got the utterly inflexible laws of physics and physiology to determine if you're going to live or die. But you knew that when you were planning the dive, and now you've either got to dive the plan, or abort while you're still in your safe space of stress/ gas volumes/ consumption. ("Plan the dive, then dive the plan" is another old diver's aphorism that is important.) I'll give you a hint for Cave Diving 1.0.2 : the duration during which you are "welcome" in The Darkness is generally less than 5 seconds. For any more extended stays, the most popular way of thinking is to assume that the whole cave is conspiring with the rest of the universe to kill you, and to plan your dive on that basis. It's a way of thinking that achieves the "most popular" status because people who don't think like that tend to die. Or leave the sport in some other way.
Excuse me - the wife has just powered up her new Windows 7 laptop, which means we've got a nightmare of obscurity and terror to negotiate worse than any cave dive I've ever done.
There's a law of the electronic communications which indicates that any post that points out problems in the grammar of an earlier post is destined to contain at least one typo of it's own, which typo renders the message ambiguous or meaningless. Naturally, I comply with this law.
And the words would be homonymous like their/theyre/there, inside sentence context so a human can easily tell which meaning is intended.
As you post shows, a depressingly high proportion of people who claim English as their native language get this sort of thing wrong, so your strategy would have a distinctly high false positive rate (where misidentifying a real human as an unsuccessful voice-recognising robot is a false positive). You may find that non-native speakers of English (or whichever language you're working in) pass the test more easily, having probably been better trained in the language. So the faceless hoards of evil foreign telemarketing slaves would possibly pass your test more easily than Joe Five-Pack from down the street.
Well, that sounds like a pretty damning critique of the whole concept. I'd been debating for several years whether to try a DAB radio for my Radio 4 listening (note : I've hardly wasted ear-seconds on music for nearly a decade now, it's audiobooks or R4). I'll keep the folders in the wallet.
I see why you posted as AC - predicting that nobody would want to waste money buying into TV spectrum would be pretty politically unpopular at the moment. Another heretic-burning looms ; bring your own faggot.
My uncle would gladly have been euthanized after being diagnosed had the law allowed it.
I take this as indicating that your uncle thought that he would have so little control over his personal actions that he would be personally responsible for infecting a significant number of other people with the pathogen in the time between his postulated execution and the estimated date of his incapacity. By the early '90s (your story), it was very well known that the HIV pathogen is moderately hard to pass from one person to another, and that with a moderate amount of standard medical infection control methods, it becomes very hard to transmit the virus. Indeed, the most effective two ways of passing the virus on are direct blood-to-blood transfer (needle-sharing, needle-stick injuries), and sex-fluid-to-mucosa contact (well, sex in a few of it's wonderful varieties). Stop those routes of transfer (safe needle availability ; sharps care ; use condoms and different sexual practices) and the pathogen remains hazardous, but not particularly risky (risk = product of hazard and probability of consequence).
So... either your uncle was woefully badly informed in the early 1990s (for which he can blame no-one apart from himself ; the information was readily available at the time. I had friends with the disease then myself and we could find the information, so shove your injured-martyr complex) , or your uncle had some reason to believe himself to be a psychopathic narcissist who would deliberately go around trying to infect (more-or-less) innocent third parties in revenge for his infection.
But you knew that anyway. I call troll.
(Compulsory euthanasia = execution = judicially approved murder ; why waste electrons on other trollish euphemisms?)
just because someone from Germany navigates to my site and registers, my site is now subject to German laws?
Probably (IANAL, thank fuck). So, you need to include a choice list for "Nationality", and either treat people who flag themselves as "German" differently from other people whose data you store, or simply decline to register them. If someone were to lie to you about their citizenship, then you'd have a pretty strong defence if someone did make a claim against you. It's your choice about how you handle the fact that you live in a multi-national world where your actions can affect other people.
I find it interesting and slightly amusing that you seem to be an American and to be outraged (a bit) at the prospect of other people forcing their laws upon you ; most of the rest of the world has been suffering exactly the same issue of America forcing their laws upon us for years. I, for one, object to being asked to send my personal data (passport copies, credit card details, address, employment history, health information) to the government of a foreign country (America) simply because a travel-organising company thinks that I might possibly have some reason to travel to America at some date in the future (I have no reason to return to America). You, it seems, object to having to obey the laws of Germany when storing data about German citizens. Quelle différence!
It is as much an artificial system of hoops as China, it's just that the hoops are different,
HERETIC ! Burn the cultural relativist heretic!
(Actually, I strongly suspect that you're closer to the truth than most people would be comfortable with. But being right won't keep you off the pile of firewood. Did it ever?)
the old MSF Rugby signal in the UK (now moved to scotland)?
Darmstadt in Germany, I thought. But it seems that I'm wrong and the UK still produces a time signal from Anthorn in Cumbria.
Now, why did I think it was Darmstadt? The manual for my radio-adjusted watch said it used a station in Germany, but that's probably DCF77 in Mainflingen. Which is around around 20km from Darmstadt... but the watch manual says "This watch is designed to receive the time calibration signal transmitted from Mainflingen, Germany and the signal from Rugby, England." So I can't blame the Friendly Manual.
WTF is this? Its not the heavy ion centre. A puzzle indeed. (I see the name Messel in the same area... is it the fossil pit? Yes, looks like it is. Now that's getting me thinking holiday-wise - I watched the 1999 solar eclipse eclipse from Dachau Concentration Camp, including a diversion to go Archaeopteryx-hunting at Solenhofen. And a damned fine holiday it was too.)
But why had I associated time signals with Darmstadt? Dunno. One of the rare geographical hiccoughs that gets stuck in my brain from time to time. Oh well. Worse things happen at sea.
Not clear why you would need nano second accuracy for computer work.
You may not need it for the computer's working, but for the data that the computer is acquiring. Example : if you're recording signals at a radio telescope to be re-calculated with signals recorded at a number of other telescopes acting as an interferometer, then you may need to record the arrival time of wavefronts to sub-nanosecond accuracy at each telescope to get the sub-microarcsecond interferometric resolution that you're aiming for. I wouldn't be surprised if the recording of seismic waves in mineral exploration and earthquake studies could also benefit from high accuracy of recording at different stations.
10 years ago, walking near Bordeaux in France, we passed a prairie-like field full of mature sunflowers, ready for harvesting. Running through and above the centre of this field were the giant pylons and power-lines from the nuclear reactor about 10 miles away on the Gironde estuary. Under the 'shadow' of the the power lines, and stretching at least 500 metres(as far as we could see in the landscape)there was a basin like dip in the height and size of the plants. In the middle of this depression the plants were at best half the size of those outside the 'shadow', and the height increased evenly the further away from the centre of the dip. It appeared to us that the basin shaped 'valley' in the sunflower pattern was a direct result of the proximity of the power lines.
An interesting anecdote. Along with the originally cited report, that makes two anecdotes. And what is that famous aphorism about the plural of "anecdote", apocryphally attributed to Carl Sagan?
OK, that sounds a little dismissive. Here's some background, so you don't think I'm dismissing your anecdote out of hand (or the original report).
To be useful, your anecdote needs more detail (as does the original report) : firstly, the dimensions of the "dip" are quite unclear - at first glance it sounds like a dip that is a kilometre wide (500m on either side of the power line) stretching to the horizon. Which sounds quite gigantic, until you realise that it's a dip within a single field, and fields are not normally anything like that sort of size in the bits of France that I've seen. So, maybe your dip is X wide stretching as far as you could see into the field, some 500m?
Was the power line energised? You state that it was near a nuclear power plant (not that the power source is alleged to matter), but was the plant operational or down for maintenance - I know nothing about the power grid in that area of France.
How was the line of pylons constructed? possible by running a significant number of large loads of concrete, metal etc along a dirt road that you can't see under the sunflowers? You've dug a number of test pits to characterise the soil across the phenomenon you describe.
There are a lot of possible complicating effects in this sort of investigation. A significant chunk of modern theory and practice in the statistics of experimental design and analysis was invented to study very similar types of effect at the Rothampstead Research Centre around a century ago. (I had a statistics lecturer who had a hard-on for the topic. Which is a quite scary thought.) You'd need to control for vegetation type, and for soil types, as well as drainage and climatic effects across your field of interest and your electrical influences. I'd approach the problem by producing modest-size (say, 0.5x1.0x1.0 m half-cube) soil containers, each containing one of two or three soil types (maybe mined from the field itself?) ; into different containers, I'd place several different crop types (say : sunflower, grass, wheat, clover ; four should be sufficient). I'd place my containers semi-randomly (using a Latin Square arrangement, for a first cut at a design) so as to incorporate a range of spacings from the pylons. I'd also try to arrange negotiations with the electricity distribution people and get the pylons arranged into a loop, so that my field of investigation incorporated areas with no detectable variation in electric field, an area with a gradient to a current of "I", and an area with a gradient to a current of "2I" (you could do this with a pylon loop). And to investigate thoroughly, I'd want to look at the effects of voltage and duration of current, as well as at presence/ absence of current. Oh, and of course, you'd need to replicate the experiment over several growing seasons, moving the containers around in the field to sampl
... wrap tightly, really tightly. It is important to wrap the tin foil tightly enough to prevent dehydrogenated DHMO from penetrating the foil package to the protected person. This procedure will protect you from drowning, exposure to E-M radiation and STIs, while simultaneously preventing the police speed radar from reading your thoughts about the... fuel oil and fertilizer...
TERRORIST! BURN THE TERRORIST for trying to evade the Thought Police!
Motives be damned, as far as Microsoft knows, anyone that discovers a security vulnerability is a potential extortionist and they'll treat you that way.
... whereas Microsoft (and as somone else pointed out, Just About Any Major Software Company) are long-proven extortionists of dubious technical ability, driven by the profit motive. So that makes their actions alright? Including their kow-towing to the spying departments of foreign governments.
... particularly that with wavelengths between around 350 and 700nm.
Practically every person who has ever died of cancer has been exposed to electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm.
Sexually Transmitted Infections are more frequently reported in people who have been exposed to electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm.
Many drowning victims have been exposed to electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm in addition to their obvious exposure to DHMO.
Drug dealers and terrorists frequently use electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm in performance of their terrorist acts (including growing "peppers" for their pizzas).
I think that the journal publishing and the amateur scientist published should attempt to grow their seedlings in complete absence of electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm. That'll teach them something that every troglobite population on the planet learned millennia ago.
A technological buzz word used in Niven's 'Known Space' universe for... a high power-to-weight (and power-to-volume) ratio energy storage device. No laws of physics broken, just technology developed. 'Start Rek', eat your script-writer's heart out ; oh, you did already.
Fluoride (found in almost all toothpaste sold in the U.S., almost nonexistent in Europe toothpaste)
Hmmm, I wonder how extensive your background research on that is. My 30 seconds research tells me that the dental products in the bathroom contain 1100, 1000, 225 and 250 ppm fluoride. Now, I can also tell you two other significant data : I don't shop for dental products based on their fluoride content, and I'm very likely to be the most fluoride-aware dental-product buyer in the house.
Given those figures, I think I'll treat your claim that fluoride is comparable in toxicity to arsenic with a rather large pinch of muriate of natron. A worthwhile question : what are the consequences of lack of fluoride in the human diet compared to the consequences of a lack of arsenic in the human diet?
But birds are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes, so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?"
That the behaviour most likely evolved once in a common ancestor of the Apes (Hom.sap. included) and Corvidae. Though it's not impossible that the behaviour evolved twice, once in an ancestor of the Apes and once in an ancestor of the Corvidae.
I really should check my cladistic nomenclature, because I only wheel it out in alternating Martian years, but the first case is a synapomorphy (shared-derived character) and the latter case is an analogy or a homology (depending on how complex the similarities between the characters are). But I'll be brave and post without checking.
This is a Cladistics 1.0.1 homework question. Why am I answering it?
Slashdot Mirror
But ... ...
But
According to the books I've read, there is some poor guy chained to the Caucasus mountains and getting his liver ripped out by eagles every morning. Shouldn't we be sending out an expedition to free him first?
My source is probably newer than yours, so it's more likely to be accurate. And we could pick up the Ark of Utnapishtim (Noah) on the way, because that's just next door (according to an even newer book).
True, but that doesn't make it right. And are you descended from a monkey on your mother's side of the family, or your father's side?
The person making the attack was a commentator on a blog which discussed the paper, not the authors of the paper (Melott and Bambach) itself, and the commentator was talking about a joint organiser of a conference at which the present authors presented/ published other related work.
In the context of putting Dawkins and Behe (or "Soapy" Wilberforce and Darwin's Bulldog) into the pit together, this wouldn't even need a box of Elastoplast on site ("Band-Aid" in American English).
I'll tell the lady cave divers I know. If you're unlucky, you'll continue to live.
Not relevant.
The cave divers I've known, male and female, are some of the sanest people I've met. They may have differing ideas to you about what's important in life - but that doesn't make them insane. More specifically, it doesn't make them suicidally insane - which is what most outsiders think. Yes, the sport is dangerous. So you manage the risks to an acceptable level, or you "turn your back and fin away/ and live to dive another day" (to quote an old joke).
Well, isn't that obvious? Well done, you've passed Cave Diving 1.0.1. This is why the CDG chose, when it was re-founded in late 1940s BTW, time isn't important - gas volumes are important. You only have to control the amount of gas that you waste by getting emotional about things, and then you've only got the utterly inflexible laws of physics and physiology to determine if you're going to live or die. But you knew that when you were planning the dive, and now you've either got to dive the plan, or abort while you're still in your safe space of stress/ gas volumes/ consumption. ("Plan the dive, then dive the plan" is another old diver's aphorism that is important.)
I'll give you a hint for Cave Diving 1.0.2 : the duration during which you are "welcome" in The Darkness is generally less than 5 seconds. For any more extended stays, the most popular way of thinking is to assume that the whole cave is conspiring with the rest of the universe to kill you, and to plan your dive on that basis. It's a way of thinking that achieves the "most popular" status because people who don't think like that tend to die. Or leave the sport in some other way.
Excuse me - the wife has just powered up her new Windows 7 laptop, which means we've got a nightmare of obscurity and terror to negotiate worse than any cave dive I've ever done.
There's a law of the electronic communications which indicates that any post that points out problems in the grammar of an earlier post is destined to contain at least one typo of it's own, which typo renders the message ambiguous or meaningless.
Naturally, I comply with this law.
And the documented number of people accidentally infected by blood splatter from a haemophiliac is ? Millions?
Bullshit I called and still call.
As you post shows, a depressingly high proportion of people who claim English as their native language get this sort of thing wrong, so your strategy would have a distinctly high false positive rate (where misidentifying a real human as an unsuccessful voice-recognising robot is a false positive).
You may find that non-native speakers of English (or whichever language you're working in) pass the test more easily, having probably been better trained in the language. So the faceless hoards of evil foreign telemarketing slaves would possibly pass your test more easily than Joe Five-Pack from down the street.
Well, that sounds like a pretty damning critique of the whole concept. I'd been debating for several years whether to try a DAB radio for my Radio 4 listening (note : I've hardly wasted ear-seconds on music for nearly a decade now, it's audiobooks or R4). I'll keep the folders in the wallet.
I see why you posted as AC - predicting that nobody would want to waste money buying into TV spectrum would be pretty politically unpopular at the moment. Another heretic-burning looms ; bring your own faggot.
I take this as indicating that your uncle thought that he would have so little control over his personal actions that he would be personally responsible for infecting a significant number of other people with the pathogen in the time between his postulated execution and the estimated date of his incapacity.
By the early '90s (your story), it was very well known that the HIV pathogen is moderately hard to pass from one person to another, and that with a moderate amount of standard medical infection control methods, it becomes very hard to transmit the virus. Indeed, the most effective two ways of passing the virus on are direct blood-to-blood transfer (needle-sharing, needle-stick injuries), and sex-fluid-to-mucosa contact (well, sex in a few of it's wonderful varieties). Stop those routes of transfer (safe needle availability ; sharps care ; use condoms and different sexual practices) and the pathogen remains hazardous, but not particularly risky (risk = product of hazard and probability of consequence).
So ... either your uncle was woefully badly informed in the early 1990s (for which he can blame no-one apart from himself ; the information was readily available at the time. I had friends with the disease then myself and we could find the information, so shove your injured-martyr complex) , or your uncle had some reason to believe himself to be a psychopathic narcissist who would deliberately go around trying to infect (more-or-less) innocent third parties in revenge for his infection.
But you knew that anyway.
I call troll.
(Compulsory euthanasia = execution = judicially approved murder ; why waste electrons on other trollish euphemisms?)
You're obviously not a politician.
(For which you may well be truly thankful. Or just casually thankful.)
Probably (IANAL, thank fuck).
So, you need to include a choice list for "Nationality", and either treat people who flag themselves as "German" differently from other people whose data you store, or simply decline to register them. If someone were to lie to you about their citizenship, then you'd have a pretty strong defence if someone did make a claim against you.
It's your choice about how you handle the fact that you live in a multi-national world where your actions can affect other people.
I find it interesting and slightly amusing that you seem to be an American and to be outraged (a bit) at the prospect of other people forcing their laws upon you ; most of the rest of the world has been suffering exactly the same issue of America forcing their laws upon us for years. I, for one, object to being asked to send my personal data (passport copies, credit card details, address, employment history, health information) to the government of a foreign country (America) simply because a travel-organising company thinks that I might possibly have some reason to travel to America at some date in the future (I have no reason to return to America). You, it seems, object to having to obey the laws of Germany when storing data about German citizens. Quelle différence!
HERETIC !
Burn the cultural relativist heretic!
(Actually, I strongly suspect that you're closer to the truth than most people would be comfortable with. But being right won't keep you off the pile of firewood. Did it ever?)
Darmstadt in Germany, I thought. But it seems that I'm wrong and the UK still produces a time signal from Anthorn in Cumbria.
Now, why did I think it was Darmstadt? ... but the watch manual says "This watch is designed to receive the time calibration signal transmitted from Mainflingen, Germany and the signal from Rugby, England." So I can't blame the Friendly Manual.
The manual for my radio-adjusted watch said it used a station in Germany, but that's probably DCF77 in Mainflingen. Which is around around 20km from Darmstadt
WTF is this? Its not the heavy ion centre. A puzzle indeed. ... is it the fossil pit? Yes, looks like it is. Now that's getting me thinking holiday-wise - I watched the 1999 solar eclipse eclipse from Dachau Concentration Camp, including a diversion to go Archaeopteryx-hunting at Solenhofen. And a damned fine holiday it was too.)
(I see the name Messel in the same area
But why had I associated time signals with Darmstadt? Dunno. One of the rare geographical hiccoughs that gets stuck in my brain from time to time. Oh well. Worse things happen at sea.
You may not need it for the computer's working, but for the data that the computer is acquiring. Example : if you're recording signals at a radio telescope to be re-calculated with signals recorded at a number of other telescopes acting as an interferometer, then you may need to record the arrival time of wavefronts to sub-nanosecond accuracy at each telescope to get the sub-microarcsecond interferometric resolution that you're aiming for.
I wouldn't be surprised if the recording of seismic waves in mineral exploration and earthquake studies could also benefit from high accuracy of recording at different stations.
An interesting anecdote. Along with the originally cited report, that makes two anecdotes. And what is that famous aphorism about the plural of "anecdote", apocryphally attributed to Carl Sagan?
OK, that sounds a little dismissive. Here's some background, so you don't think I'm dismissing your anecdote out of hand (or the original report).
To be useful, your anecdote needs more detail (as does the original report) : firstly, the dimensions of the "dip" are quite unclear - at first glance it sounds like a dip that is a kilometre wide (500m on either side of the power line) stretching to the horizon. Which sounds quite gigantic, until you realise that it's a dip within a single field, and fields are not normally anything like that sort of size in the bits of France that I've seen. So, maybe your dip is X wide stretching as far as you could see into the field, some 500m?
Was the power line energised? You state that it was near a nuclear power plant (not that the power source is alleged to matter), but was the plant operational or down for maintenance - I know nothing about the power grid in that area of France.
How was the line of pylons constructed? possible by running a significant number of large loads of concrete, metal etc along a dirt road that you can't see under the sunflowers? You've dug a number of test pits to characterise the soil across the phenomenon you describe.
There are a lot of possible complicating effects in this sort of investigation. A significant chunk of modern theory and practice in the statistics of experimental design and analysis was invented to study very similar types of effect at the Rothampstead Research Centre around a century ago. (I had a statistics lecturer who had a hard-on for the topic. Which is a quite scary thought.) You'd need to control for vegetation type, and for soil types, as well as drainage and climatic effects across your field of interest and your electrical influences.
I'd approach the problem by producing modest-size (say, 0.5x1.0x1.0 m half-cube) soil containers, each containing one of two or three soil types (maybe mined from the field itself?) ; into different containers, I'd place several different crop types (say : sunflower, grass, wheat, clover ; four should be sufficient). I'd place my containers semi-randomly (using a Latin Square arrangement, for a first cut at a design) so as to incorporate a range of spacings from the pylons.
I'd also try to arrange negotiations with the electricity distribution people and get the pylons arranged into a loop, so that my field of investigation incorporated areas with no detectable variation in electric field, an area with a gradient to a current of "I", and an area with a gradient to a current of "2I" (you could do this with a pylon loop).
And to investigate thoroughly, I'd want to look at the effects of voltage and duration of current, as well as at presence/ absence of current.
Oh, and of course, you'd need to replicate the experiment over several growing seasons, moving the containers around in the field to sampl
... wrap tightly, really tightly. It is important to wrap the tin foil tightly enough to prevent dehydrogenated DHMO from penetrating the foil package to the protected person. This procedure will protect you from drowning, exposure to E-M radiation and STIs, while simultaneously preventing the police speed radar from reading your thoughts about the ... fuel oil and fertilizer ...
TERRORIST! BURN THE TERRORIST for trying to evade the Thought Police!
... whereas Microsoft (and as somone else pointed out, Just About Any Major Software Company) are long-proven extortionists of dubious technical ability, driven by the profit motive. So that makes their actions alright? Including their kow-towing to the spying departments of foreign governments.
... then I realised that they're only a game company, and I moved on to something more interesting.
... particularly that with wavelengths between around 350 and 700nm.
I think that the journal publishing and the amateur scientist published should attempt to grow their seedlings in complete absence of electro-magnetic radiation between 350 and 700nm. That'll teach them something that every troglobite population on the planet learned millennia ago.
... In which case, use the photos of you which your mother wants the world to see, but you really don't want the world to see.
A technological buzz word used in Niven's 'Known Space' universe for ... a high power-to-weight (and power-to-volume) ratio energy storage device.
No laws of physics broken, just technology developed. 'Start Rek', eat your script-writer's heart out ; oh, you did already.
Subject line says it all.
You forgot to mention putting it all in a delicate glass bulb before shoving it into your urethra. But leaving that aside, WIMP !
Hmmm, I wonder how extensive your background research on that is. My 30 seconds research tells me that the dental products in the bathroom contain 1100, 1000, 225 and 250 ppm fluoride. Now, I can also tell you two other significant data : I don't shop for dental products based on their fluoride content, and I'm very likely to be the most fluoride-aware dental-product buyer in the house.
Given those figures, I think I'll treat your claim that fluoride is comparable in toxicity to arsenic with a rather large pinch of muriate of natron.
A worthwhile question : what are the consequences of lack of fluoride in the human diet compared to the consequences of a lack of arsenic in the human diet?
That the behaviour most likely evolved once in a common ancestor of the Apes (Hom.sap. included) and Corvidae. Though it's not impossible that the behaviour evolved twice, once in an ancestor of the Apes and once in an ancestor of the Corvidae.
I really should check my cladistic nomenclature, because I only wheel it out in alternating Martian years, but the first case is a synapomorphy (shared-derived character) and the latter case is an analogy or a homology (depending on how complex the similarities between the characters are). But I'll be brave and post without checking.
This is a Cladistics 1.0.1 homework question. Why am I answering it?
Rat-onna-stick for me, followed by one of those pies made from the wobbly bits of ... assorted animals.