It isn't that dangerous. The tube contains a very small amount (2-10 mg) of mercury.
In another 10 years, I expect that they will call out the HAZMAT team for any reported spills of dihydrogen monoxide.
Actually, mercury thermometers are illegal to sell in my state. I remember a program to get people to turn in their mercury thermometers similar to police department programs to dispose of handguns.
Minnesota Session Laws - 2001 Legislative history and Authors CHAPTER 47-H.F.No. 274
An act relating to the environment; restricting the sale of mercury thermometers; amending Minnesota Statutes 2000, section 116.92, subdivision 6. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:
Section 1. Minnesota Statutes 2000, section 116.92, subdivision 6, is amended to read:
Subd. 6. [MERCURY THERMOMETERS PROHIBITED.] (a) A wholesaler, or retailer may not sell or distribute at no cost a thermometer containing mercury that was manufactured after June 1, 2001.
(b) Paragraph (a) does not apply to:
(1) an electronic thermometer with a battery containing mercury if the battery is in compliance with section 325E.125;
(2) a mercury thermometer used for food research and development or food processing, including meat, dairy products, and pet food processing;
(3) a mercury thermometer that is a component of an animal agriculture climate control system or industrial measurement system until such time as the system is replaced or a nonmercury component for the system is available; or
(4) a mercury thermometer used for calibration of other thermometers, apparatus, or equipment, unless a nonmercury calibration standard is approved for the application by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Sec. 2. [EFFECTIVE DATE.] Section 1 is effective January 1, 2002. Presented to the governor April 23, 2001 Signed by the governor April 26, 2001, 10:21 a.m.
I don't know that the dihydrogen monoxide has harmed our fish, but the mercury in our fish is enough to harm us.
Actually, I could see that becoming an accepted preemptive social policy:
"I'm sorry Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The results of genetic testing show that your male fetus has a strong likelihood of subnormal intelligence. Let me discuss the options with you."
That alone, or coupled with some other minor defects, might be the reason for an abortion.
[As an aside, I believe it has been long-known that males have greater variance of IQ than females. We can wait for the research that finds the gene responsible for _higher_ than normal IQ too.]
3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice. Concentrate on making OpenOffice a great tool for creating OpenDocument format files.
Same argument I used to hear when I was running OS/2: "Don't buy WordPerfect 7 (probably the last Win 3.1 version) that would run on WinOS/2, buy an OS/2 word processor.
We can see how well that worked out. The important thing is that IBM (gulp) is helping to promote a _new_ standard.
But IQ is a sliding scale, isn't it? If defense contractors developed a machine gun equipped robotic wolf pack, I'd probably be cursing about how smart wolves are while trying to evade them, wouldn't I?
At least at the research level, I see no reason to bash this project. If they are developing techniques to give some context to speech recognition, that is an impressive achievement and should result in more "intelligent" (as a synonym for "better") pattern recognition. Developing something we'd be hard pressed not to call a mind will surely be the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of such focused projects and their coordination into a working unit. Baby steps, baby steps. That doesn't mean, in practice, I'm looking forward anytime soon to trying to reason with the spawn of GTX Global while trying to get a replacement computer from customer service.
A turning point (Turing Point?) will come when we can argue whether a device has recognition or comprehension.
Screwed _once_ out of about $8 when I put a sticker with my P.O. on the ENVELOPE I mailed the rebate in and they held it for way past the promotion (Minnesota redemption center). Other than that, I live within walking distance of a Microcenter and live by the rebate. The more of them you don't remit, the better offers they can give me.
And I _have_ had a $40 dollar one honored in which I did _not_ follow the "must be postmarked within seven days of purchase date" stipulation by about three days.
If I read the article correctly, the contention seems to be that the site acknowleges one "type" of religion (one might say the less crazy type) in contrast to evangelical creationists and is thereby delving into religious issues in making that distinction.
This might fly at the local school board with America's schizophrenic secondary school standards in contrast to our tertiary education. And I suppose part of the argument is that UC-Berkeley is also a public institution but I think they are biting off more than they can chew at the federal and college level. The government occasionally steps in on drug cults and snake handlers and parents who want god to cure their kid's cancer. There is plenty of precedent for discriminating against the expression of weird beliefs. The wild card is that this is California: will there be a jury trial?
Minneapolis has tried much the same -- playing classical music through crappy over-modulated outdoor speakers on downtown corners they target as heavy centers of drug trafficing. That's pretty annoying to everyone so I suppose the buzz would be an improvement.
"Currently, the only work-around is to temporarily discontinue the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer and use another browser, such as FireFox, (this can be downloaded for free at www.mozilla.com) until Microsoft can issue a patch."
Anyone else's bank send out a warning like this bluntly stating that if you use IE, there is nothing the bank can do to protect you?
I'm a Canadian. You Merkans would hate it here. This place sucks. Don't come here. We regularly eat children and stab puppies for sport. It's cold and everyone has a dog-sled. This is a horrible purgatory. I beg of you, please don't come here.
Living not far from the border, I've gotten across much less than I would have liked and Canada has a fascination for me but your list has the ring of truth. I've suspected that the wages/(prices+taxes) ratio, in particular, would entail an economic hit in Canada. At least before a person gets a chronic disease.
One thing I found interesting was looking at the provinces' web sites for economic information -- in particular the income distribution by quartiles. British Columbia looks like an inverse normal curve. Half the people are dining high and the other half are serving them. Some socialist paradise. If a person wants an egalitarian province with a strong middle class, it looks like French would come in handy from what I can see.
I presume you're talking about the US - one of the most socialist countries on the planet (or have you opted out of the endless socialist pork projects,
You leave out the crucial adjective. The U.S. has _National_ Socialism (i.e. fascist rule by the corporations) -- a socialism of a different color than national health and utilities.
Where does our broadband access rank us again? About 16th? Truth is, the IT infrastructure might be genuinely superior in India compared to Kissin' Cousin Township, Iowa.
The article started out as a bit of a PR piece for the Davidsons' institute. Johns Hopkins and Duke split up the better part of the country into territories on a "gentleman's agreement" and have run talent searches for decades.
I worked for three years, over four years, at Johns Hopkins CTY during its first decade. Julian Stanley is a bit of a mystery to me. Although he gets credit for starting the math study, CTY seemed quite distinct from his work at the time and I can't remember that I ever laid eyes on him, much less was introduced. Bill Durden ran the Center from a _very_ "cozy" rowhouse off-campus on Charles Avenue back then.
How could serving the needs of a highly qualified group be anything but a win-win situation? Sure, the kids get their intellectual needs met. But the social benefits are huge. It was estimated that kids at the summer school came away with address books of 100 other students. Imagine the odd kid at school suddently having a national network of equals. Elitist? Well, there is another side to the coin. First week "blow back" was a serious concern of the on-site counselors when the kids realized they _weren't_ so special now and all the other kids on site were their equals. Maturity opportunity there.
This seems like a profoundly unwise idea. And unless they can reactivate the gene at decommissioning, troops who survive their fearlessness better report to the Soylent Green Division for final debriefing. (And why wouldn't they? They're fearless.)
Talk of cell phones, flash drives, ghz, gigabytes, baud rate.
Toys.
Where is any mention of _culture_?
Aren't we in a war right now on the excuse that our nation can march in and replace another nation's 4,000 years of culture with our own as easily as Epcot Center would replace one national exhibit with another? Barbarians. Our leaders don't have a clue what culture _is_ or that it exists as a force to recognize.
And they hate science on top of it. Anyone with cable now has access to documentaries on the mating habits of Amazonian tree slugs. So what? I remember when Mr. Wizard used to both entertain and teach scientific _method_ at the same time.
And they want to mold our economy into a new feudalism. Look back six years? Let's look back thirty. I heard yesterday that it takes two wage earners now to maintain the family standard of living that one wage earner could produce in 1975.
Health care? Well, we can talk some more about cool tech toys, but the facts are that the average Cuban is healthier than the average American.
Voting? Doesn't mean diddley compared to _counting_.
No, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. What could be a better definition of a Dark Ages than governance by an elite class of barbarians?
(tech toys notwithstanding -- nerd allusion: Damon Knight's A for Anything)
I've long thought the equal-chroma Hobbit green text and brown background scheme of Loki Software's site contributed to their demise. I lynxed there once toward the end to actually _read_ the descriptions of their games.
But what really annoys me are the BEAUTIFULLY meticulous screen layouts -- in 6 pt. type. Sites like Buzzflash have it right; just make every link a new window. I probably zoom about 40% of sites.
So, yeah. Why should the blind have it better than me?
[Seriously, and unfortunately, I can see this sinking the OpenDoc deal.]
I wrote in an earlier post above that I had some contact with a similar person when he was about 19 so you got me thinking. Easy to Google his home page. Whole bunch of publications, coauthored a high-level tech book, positions at some really prestigious name research centers and a mile-wide smile in a picture with his toddler riding his neck. And a hot wife too.
Sometimes it really is sour grapes when you hate/pity them. Unless he has a whopper of a mid-life crisis over God-knows-what, case settled in my one anecdotal example.
I'm sure the first thing our current government wants to do is set up a government program to compete against the corporations to save people money. NOT.
So much depends on getting a really, really good handle on the situation. If a person opines that "most" such instances are parent pressure, I don't know that I would strongly discount the possibility. On the other hand, it is a bit vacuous to have wished that Mozart had had a normal childhood isn't it?
The questions are:
1. Are we really dealing with a Mozart here? 2. Is this really what the child wants? 3. Does he have the support in place to be successful?
I worked at one of the two national-level gifted and talented programs in the U.S. for three years. I believe I've set eyes on one similar child and spoken at length on the phone with the mother of another. In both cases, I believe the resolution at least for the moment was to keep them in their school settings as much as possible and supplement/replace their education with something more appropriate where possible. It wasn't the mission of the program to help move kids to college early.
But, as I say, there is always the rare Mozart. I had some contact with a program graduate who was at the time a 19-year-old Ph.D. candidate who paid his way through an Ivy with the software he wrote as a high school kid. He seemed adequately normal in his relations with others. It isn't my place to judge whether he was happier than the rest of us. But, in his case, would he have been happier sitting through 12 years of high school?
There is a red flag in this Korean case. Although the father claims emphatically that the child is doing what he wants, most communication is coming through the father "since Yoo-geun is lacking in his ability to communicate with adults". In one manner or another, there are obvious issues there.
But now they really can't paste the company passwords on their monitors.
[Unfortunately, not entirely a joke. It seemed to have poisoned our department relations with IT when I once visited the server room and I questioned why our server and Oracle database passwords were sitting next to our server.]
I guess I'm naive too. I don't see where this should be so difficult with server room security, desk locks and some hardware security: hardware lock-down, no cd boot, BIOS password. If the janitor is going to remove your hard drive or jimmy your desk lock, you probably do need a better overall corporate security plan.
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It isn't that dangerous. The tube contains a very small amount (2-10 mg) of mercury.
In another 10 years, I expect that they will call out the HAZMAT team for any reported spills of dihydrogen monoxide.
Actually, mercury thermometers are illegal to sell in my state. I remember a program to get people to turn in their mercury thermometers similar to police department programs to dispose of handguns.
Minnesota Session Laws - 2001
Legislative history and Authors
CHAPTER 47-H.F.No. 274
An act relating to the environment; restricting the sale of mercury thermometers; amending Minnesota Statutes 2000, section 116.92, subdivision 6. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:
Section 1. Minnesota Statutes 2000, section 116.92,
subdivision 6, is amended to read:
Subd. 6. [MERCURY THERMOMETERS PROHIBITED.] (a) A wholesaler, or retailer may not sell or distribute at no cost a thermometer containing mercury that was manufactured after June 1, 2001.
(b) Paragraph (a) does not apply to:
(1) an electronic thermometer with a battery containing mercury if the battery is in compliance with section 325E.125;
(2) a mercury thermometer used for food research and development or food processing, including meat, dairy products, and pet food processing;
(3) a mercury thermometer that is a component of an animal agriculture climate control system or industrial measurement system until such time as the system is replaced or a nonmercury component for the system is available; or
(4) a mercury thermometer used for calibration of other thermometers, apparatus, or equipment, unless a nonmercury calibration standard is approved for the application by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Sec. 2. [EFFECTIVE DATE.]
Section 1 is effective January 1, 2002.
Presented to the governor April 23, 2001
Signed by the governor April 26, 2001, 10:21 a.m.
I don't know that the dihydrogen monoxide has harmed our fish, but the mercury in our fish is enough to harm us.
So Code4Bill is meant to throw attention away from open source? And the 20 lucky winners get to work for Microsoft for a year for free?
Crazy world. If these 20 are so smart, why aren't they starting up their own companies to provide open source to schools and wi fi to villages?
Or are these at least _paid_ internships?
Any hobbyist could make one of these for $300...
You're right. $2400/$300 is a lousy ratio for defense contracting. They should probably be a round $5000 EACH.
Actually, I could see that becoming an accepted preemptive social policy:
"I'm sorry Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The results of genetic testing show that your male fetus has a strong likelihood of subnormal intelligence. Let me discuss the options with you."
That alone, or coupled with some other minor defects, might be the reason for an abortion.
[As an aside, I believe it has been long-known that males have greater variance of IQ than females. We can wait for the research that finds the gene responsible for _higher_ than normal IQ too.]
3) Take out the MS Office compatibility from OpenOffice. Concentrate on making OpenOffice a great tool for creating OpenDocument format files.
Same argument I used to hear when I was running OS/2: "Don't buy WordPerfect 7 (probably the last Win 3.1 version) that would run on WinOS/2, buy an OS/2 word processor.
We can see how well that worked out. The important thing is that IBM (gulp) is helping to promote a _new_ standard.
Not very.
But IQ is a sliding scale, isn't it? If defense contractors developed a machine gun equipped robotic wolf pack, I'd probably be cursing about how smart wolves are while trying to evade them, wouldn't I?
At least at the research level, I see no reason to bash this project. If they are developing techniques to give some context to speech recognition, that is an impressive achievement and should result in more "intelligent" (as a synonym for "better") pattern recognition. Developing something we'd be hard pressed not to call a mind will surely be the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of such focused projects and their coordination into a working unit. Baby steps, baby steps. That doesn't mean, in practice, I'm looking forward anytime soon to trying to reason with the spawn of GTX Global while trying to get a replacement computer from customer service.
A turning point (Turing Point?) will come when we can argue whether a device has recognition or comprehension.
Screwed _once_ out of about $8 when I put a sticker with my P.O. on the ENVELOPE I mailed the rebate in and they held it for way past the promotion (Minnesota redemption center). Other than that, I live within walking distance of a Microcenter and live by the rebate. The more of them you don't remit, the better offers they can give me.
And I _have_ had a $40 dollar one honored in which I did _not_ follow the "must be postmarked within seven days of purchase date" stipulation by about three days.
If I read the article correctly, the contention seems to be that the site acknowleges one "type" of religion (one might say the less crazy type) in contrast to evangelical creationists and is thereby delving into religious issues in making that distinction.
This might fly at the local school board with America's schizophrenic secondary school standards in contrast to our tertiary education. And I suppose part of the argument is that UC-Berkeley is also a public institution but I think they are biting off more than they can chew at the federal and college level. The government occasionally steps in on drug cults and snake handlers and parents who want god to cure their kid's cancer. There is plenty of precedent for discriminating against the expression of weird beliefs. The wild card is that this is California: will there be a jury trial?
Minneapolis has tried much the same -- playing classical music through crappy over-modulated outdoor speakers on downtown corners they target as heavy centers of drug trafficing. That's pretty annoying to everyone so I suppose the buzz would be an improvement.
"Currently, the only work-around is to temporarily discontinue the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer and use another browser, such as FireFox, (this can be downloaded for free at www.mozilla.com) until Microsoft can issue a patch."
Anyone else's bank send out a warning like this bluntly stating that if you use IE, there is nothing the bank can do to protect you?
The guy's just lucky his wife isn't a CIA agent.
t ml
w s/Frontpage/110805/news1.html
or he isn't an Enron snitch:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/baxterautopsy.h
or he isn't actively investigating the powers that be:
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Ne
Instead, he just got Swift Boated.
I'm a Canadian. You Merkans would hate it here. This place sucks. Don't come here. We regularly eat children and stab puppies for sport. It's cold and everyone has a dog-sled. This is a horrible purgatory. I beg of you, please don't come here.
So it's different than North Dakota how?
You sound like my sort of pessimist :)
Living not far from the border, I've gotten across much less than I would have liked and Canada has a fascination for me but your list has the ring of truth. I've suspected that the wages/(prices+taxes) ratio, in particular, would entail an economic hit in Canada. At least before a person gets a chronic disease.
One thing I found interesting was looking at the provinces' web sites for economic information -- in particular the income distribution by quartiles. British Columbia looks like an inverse normal curve. Half the people are dining high and the other half are serving them. Some socialist paradise. If a person wants an egalitarian province with a strong middle class, it looks like French would come in handy from what I can see.
I presume you're talking about the US - one of the most socialist countries on the planet (or have you opted out of the endless socialist pork projects,
You leave out the crucial adjective. The U.S. has _National_ Socialism (i.e. fascist rule by the corporations) -- a socialism of a different color than national health and utilities.
Where does our broadband access rank us again? About 16th? Truth is, the IT infrastructure might be genuinely superior in India compared to Kissin' Cousin Township, Iowa.
The article started out as a bit of a PR piece for the Davidsons' institute. Johns Hopkins and Duke split up the better part of the country into territories on a "gentleman's agreement" and have run talent searches for decades.
I worked for three years, over four years, at Johns Hopkins CTY during its first decade. Julian Stanley is a bit of a mystery to me. Although he gets credit for starting the math study, CTY seemed quite distinct from his work at the time and I can't remember that I ever laid eyes on him, much less was introduced. Bill Durden ran the Center from a _very_ "cozy" rowhouse off-campus on Charles Avenue back then.
How could serving the needs of a highly qualified group be anything but a win-win situation? Sure, the kids get their intellectual needs met. But the social benefits are huge. It was estimated that kids at the summer school came away with address books of 100 other students. Imagine the odd kid at school suddently having a national network of equals. Elitist? Well, there is another side to the coin. First week "blow back" was a serious concern of the on-site counselors when the kids realized they _weren't_ so special now and all the other kids on site were their equals. Maturity opportunity there.
This seems like a profoundly unwise idea. And unless they can reactivate the gene at decommissioning, troops who survive their fearlessness better report to the Soylent Green Division for final debriefing. (And why wouldn't they? They're fearless.)
Even version 1 had a simple interface built into the suite to do basic merges via unixODBC to MySQL or PostgreSQL. Seemed OK in my limited use.
Talk of cell phones, flash drives, ghz, gigabytes, baud rate.
Toys.
Where is any mention of _culture_?
Aren't we in a war right now on the excuse that our nation can march in and replace another nation's 4,000 years of culture with our own as easily as Epcot Center would replace one national exhibit with another? Barbarians. Our leaders don't have a clue what culture _is_ or that it exists as a force to recognize.
And they hate science on top of it. Anyone with cable now has access to documentaries on the mating habits of Amazonian tree slugs. So what? I remember when Mr. Wizard used to both entertain and teach scientific _method_ at the same time.
And they want to mold our economy into a new feudalism. Look back six years? Let's look back thirty. I heard yesterday that it takes two wage earners now to maintain the family standard of living that one wage earner could produce in 1975.
Health care? Well, we can talk some more about cool tech toys, but the facts are that the average Cuban is healthier than the average American.
Voting? Doesn't mean diddley compared to _counting_.
No, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. What could be a better definition of a Dark Ages than governance by an elite class of barbarians?
(tech toys notwithstanding -- nerd allusion: Damon Knight's A for Anything)
I've long thought the equal-chroma Hobbit green text and brown background scheme of Loki Software's site contributed to their demise. I lynxed there once toward the end to actually _read_ the descriptions of their games.
But what really annoys me are the BEAUTIFULLY meticulous screen layouts -- in 6 pt. type. Sites like Buzzflash have it right; just make every link a new window. I probably zoom about 40% of sites.
So, yeah. Why should the blind have it better than me?
[Seriously, and unfortunately, I can see this sinking the OpenDoc deal.]
Offtopic? My first thought was also "What a coinkidink."
The more linux dogfood they eat themselves, the more it gives their respective linux services credibility.
I wrote in an earlier post above that I had some contact with a similar person when he was about 19 so you got me thinking. Easy to Google his home page. Whole bunch of publications, coauthored a high-level tech book, positions at some really prestigious name research centers and a mile-wide smile in a picture with his toddler riding his neck. And a hot wife too.
Sometimes it really is sour grapes when you hate/pity them. Unless he has a whopper of a mid-life crisis over God-knows-what, case settled in my one anecdotal example.
Maybe a BRAZILIAN government funded program?
I'm sure the first thing our current government wants to do is set up a government program to compete against the corporations to save people money. NOT.
So much depends on getting a really, really good handle on the situation. If a person opines that "most" such instances are parent pressure, I don't know that I would strongly discount the possibility. On the other hand, it is a bit vacuous to have wished that Mozart had had a normal childhood isn't it?
The questions are:
1. Are we really dealing with a Mozart here?
2. Is this really what the child wants?
3. Does he have the support in place to be successful?
I worked at one of the two national-level gifted and talented programs in the U.S. for three years. I believe I've set eyes on one similar child and spoken at length on the phone with the mother of another. In both cases, I believe the resolution at least for the moment was to keep them in their school settings as much as possible and supplement/replace their education with something more appropriate where possible. It wasn't the mission of the program to help move kids to college early.
But, as I say, there is always the rare Mozart. I had some contact with a program graduate who was at the time a 19-year-old Ph.D. candidate who paid his way through an Ivy with the software he wrote as a high school kid. He seemed adequately normal in his relations with others. It isn't my place to judge whether he was happier than the rest of us. But, in his case, would he have been happier sitting through 12 years of high school?
There is a red flag in this Korean case. Although the father claims emphatically that the child is doing what he wants, most communication is coming through the father "since Yoo-geun is lacking in his ability to communicate with adults". In one manner or another, there are obvious issues there.
But now they really can't paste the company passwords on their monitors.
[Unfortunately, not entirely a joke. It seemed to have poisoned our department relations with IT when I once visited the server room and I questioned why our server and Oracle database passwords were sitting next to our server.]
I guess I'm naive too. I don't see where this should be so difficult with server room security, desk locks and some hardware security: hardware lock-down, no cd boot, BIOS password. If the janitor is going to remove your hard drive or jimmy your desk lock, you probably do need a better overall corporate security plan.