How did you get involved, originally? My first guess (having known a few scientologists) is that your parents were/are members and you were raised in it. Second guess: One of the substance abuse programs. Third guess: One of their entrepreneurial outreach programs.
My girlfriend recently graduated from college with degrees in communications and marketing. She was almost immediately contacted with a job offer, from a company that said they were public relations consultants. She went into the interview and there were ten other people there, also waiting. The person running the interview sat everyone down and gave them a form to fill out and sign before they started the interview process. One of the items on the form was a non-disclosure clause for everything in the interview, and another was a statement that L. Ron Hubbard's words were infallible. To which she had to agree in writing before she could get an interview. At which point she realized that she was being recruited to be a Scientologist recruiter. She walked out. But just so you know, that's one way Scientology gets new members: they hire people with degrees being convincing to go get more people.
Okay, I like Mormons and I think Scientology is a bunch of screwed-up whackjobs. But once we have that out of the way, I don't really see that much difference. The LDS church implies that they're pretty much just Christians, and that their church is basically in line with mainstream Christian churches except for the not drinking coffee thing. Many members of the LDS church don't know that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Moroni by sticking his head in his hat, where he kept a special stone that told him what to write -- because the church doesn't talk about that. They don't talk about Brigham Young's quote, "The only men who become Gods, even the sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy" (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 11, page 269, 1866) because that sort of talk isn't acceptable to mainstream American values. The only reason "anyone can find out exactly what the Mormon's [sic] believe" is because of the Internet: the LDS seminaries are instructed to answer questions tactfully and truthfully, but they don't tell people about stuff: you have to ask. If you don't know anything about Mormon seer stones they're not about to educate you and you won't know to ask.
The Mormons don't try to suck your bank accounts dry before telling you The Truth, and they don't go out of their way to quash early documents that show them in a bad light (they do buy them up, but they also release the contents, like the Salamander Letter hoax) so they're not anywhere nearly as control-freak as Scientologists, and they don't track down church critics and harass them like Scientologists do, but those are differences of degree, not kind.
As I said, I like Mormons. The religion has grown up and gotten past massacres of nonbelievers and has become respectable, just like most other mainstream religions. (The Mormons are complete saints (so to speak) compared to the background of the Christian or Muslim churches, which have killed thousands of times as many people.) But they have plenty of stuff in their background that they don't want people to talk about.
FWIW the modern Baptist movement is derived from the Anabaptist tradition, so (in theory) Baptist churches don't admit menbers to the church until they're adults and are baptised. Now, in *practice*, Baptists raise kids in the church, have dedication ceremonies when they're born, and generally treat them as members. I was raised in an American Baptist church, which is nearly as liberal as Unitarians (Southern Baptists hate us) and we had a lot of Mennonites who came to our church sometimes and vice versa.
I can tell you from personal experience that high power lasers cause cauterized burns (in fact, if it's a big enough UV laser you get to watch your skin glow briefly: everything fluoresces and phosphoresces if you hit it with enough photons, I think) and causes blindness. Weird corollary: visible lasers are the nasty ones because they blow holes in the back of your eye, where we can't fix things. Most of the visible-wavelength laser PhD's I've worked with have had partial blindness in some area because they've cooked their retinas. However, IR and UV lasers, while seemingly more dangerous (because you can't see them and don't know you're being hit until it hurts/your vision goes fuzzy) are actually nicer since they primarily bake the front part of the eye, and we can repair that, either with corneal transplants or new intraocular lens implants. One of the PhD's I was working with on a massive UV laser had given himself DIY laser keratotomy: he'd flattened one cornea when a laser discharged a single pulse while his right eye was in the beampath. (It was one hell of a laser: we'd warm it up in the morning using a brick, because they're cheap and *anything* in front of a kilowatt laser is disposable so you might as well go with cheap.)
The fluorescence/phosphorescence was the most interesting thing to me. They're the same effect but different phenomena: you hit something really hard with a bunch of UV, and the surface -- the stuff that didn't get ablated -- is now covered in molecules with electrons blown up into higher orbitals. The ones that fall down immediately (within nanoseconds) are what produce fluorescence. The ones that have absorbed enough energy that they're in an orbital/spin combination that won't allow them to directly drop down to their original orbital, take a long time before they can do something like electron tunnelling to return to their orbital -- where by 'long time' I mean from a millisecond up to maybe six hours. So that's where you get actual glow-in-the-dark. I could put a notecard up in the beam and trigger a shot, and there'd be a nice yellow glow off the piece of paper for maybe half a second, and then the paper itself would be a moderate brown color. Next shot and it'd be gone. The individual shots were on the order of a microsecond long.
Interesting factoid that I wish I didn't know: fluorine gas smells somewhat like Elmer's Glue. Deep UV lasers often use fluorine as an excimer and when you have to replace the cavity mirrors, no matter how many times you purge it with argon, there's still some fluorine in there when you finally open it up. Gack *cough*.
I dunno about studies, but there was just a major court case in Britain over who is and isn't a Jew. The court ruled that a child of a Jewish man and a woman who had converted to Judaism was allowed to go to a Jewish school, which, in the words of some Orthodox Jews, overturns three thousand years of tradition (in saying that the kid in question wasn't actually a Jew unless his mother was.)
Many Zoroastrians claimed that you could only be Zoroastrian if your father was, although some have always been open to conversion by outsiders. The religion as a whole generally prohibits proselytizing, or at least strongly discourages it.
And on the far end of the continuum are, or were, the Shakers, where you couldn't be a Shaker if your parents were, because, well, it was a celibate religion. Which is why there are only about 3 Shakers left and within 20 years it'll be a dead religion.
I'm in the USA, where our grammar rules are not only looser than yours, but also more loosely interpreted. But it's an interesting rule (and I love Bill Bryson's stuff, and was surprised to see a book of his that I don't already have.) Now I have a quest to see if it holds hereabouts. Thanks for the references.
I should research more before hitting reply: this forum has a lot more info about both the material and the history of the research & development, and has a comparison picture of one of the stealth boats compared to a normal one.
I'd never heard before about a Japanese one. The german u-boat U480 that was apparently recently re-located used a rubberized coating intended to absorb sonar to make it less easy to detect. Other sources I've read claim it was covered in some sort of polyurethane that, as it cured, developed engineered-size air pockets that were tuned to absorb sonar pulses. I'm assuming they transferred the technology to Japan, because I've read some about the subject and there's a lot of literature on the German program but I'd never heard about the Japanese one before. One of the things I found interesting about it was that the USA and USSR sub designers apparently didn't try to develop this sort of technology for another 30 years after WWII, preferring to concentrate on making the subs quieter.
Interesting. I was taught that any abbreviation was marked with a full stop unless it was just an elided vowel or syllable, in which case it was marked with an apostrophe. Do you have a source for the abbreviation rule? I'd be glad to convert.
The other day I came home and my girlfriend was standing there in a truly beautiful... uh, shirt, I guess, since she wears it above the waist. It's probably called something else. She said "isn't this beautiful?" It was. She said, "I got it for only $200!" I blinked, and said "how much did it originally cost?" She said "five hundred!" I about coughed up a lung, and said "someone would pay five HUNDRED dollars for a shirt?" She blinked innocently and said "no, five hundred euros."
This is why I don't do the laundry around our house. I'm real sketchy on putting something into the washing machine that costs more than the washing machine. Of course, this shirt doesn't go into the washing machine (unless it's inside a sweater or towel because it's silk and when crumpled up is about the size of a golf ball -- which is, again, why I don't do the laundry around our house.)
Given the amount of clothing which goes from our house directly to the local thrift store, with no holes or major stains, I think it is reasonable to assume that at least some people buy clothes they don't technically need, but because the clothes make them happy. Just sayin'.
For the record, you can weld aluminum perfectly well with an oxy-acetylene torch or a mig welder using shielding gas, but at the end of the day, tig is almost always the best way to weld any metal.
Sorry to reply to my own post but the PKC in question is protein kinase C delta, which is involved in a buttload of important pathways, and shutting it off would be problematic even if you could just kill it without messing with any other of the PKC family. PKC's are used throughout the body, since they add a phosphate group onto other enzymes, which is a sort of tagging system to mark the modified enzymes or activate them and allow them to do other things, but the specific effects/results vary depending on the cell. Metabolic and transcriptional control systems are *truly* complicated. So, in *my* (definitely not professional) opinion, I'm going to reiterate: it's very useful to have evidence that PKC-delta is responsible for killing dopamine-producing cells, but finding out why they're being killed seems a lot more useful theraputically than trying to reduce PKC-delta's activity/concentration. Maybe it's as simple as a defective cell-surface receptor that's getting modified by PKC-delta and we can target that, specifically.
There are a bunch of different types of protein kinase c (known as isozymes: they do the same general thing, reduce the energy it takes for compound A to turn into compound B, but they're different enzymes) so one possibility is targeting only the PKC that's in the brain, and another would be to target only this specific isozyme, but I can't find anything that says *which* isozyme this one is.
Personally, I'm more curious about why PKC is doing this: if we could figure out how/why the dopamine-producing cells are getting killed by PKC and reduce their vulnerability, that seems like it would be a less systemic way of getting the same result than trying to reduce PKC's activity. It'd likely have fewer side-effects since it would only affect the cells getting attacked, rather than all the other cells that need PKC for their normal function.
>I think the scientists involved already know whether or not a terrorist is more scared than the average person,
Why do you think that? Scientists (such as they are) sell magnetic bracelets to cure arthritis, and presumably scientists made the $40,000 dowsing rod bomb detectors that people are buying in Iraq. If you can make money selling useless stuff to stupid people, you sell useless stuff to stupid people. In this case it works even better because it doesn't really matter much to them whether there are false positives: they'll just search everyone and this way it's another excuse to search more people. It's all about deterrence and making people feel safer.
I think the problem is the nearly impractical one of determining intent. I dunno if you ever saw the movie Mad Max. The bad guy, near the end, basically says "I can't help what I do: society made me do it" and the hero (such as he is) says "that doesn't excuse what you did." If this guy did what he did because he couldn't help it, that's one kettle of fish. If he did it just because it seemed to him like he'd probably get away with it, that's a different kettle. (And, in the unlikely event that he did it knowing he had a chance of getting off easy on the 'genetic bias', well, that's a whole cauldron of fish, and I don't think we can discount the moral hazard of giving people the realization that they can game the legal system by claiming genetic bias towards wrongdoing.)
I'm a rehab-favoring person myself, but I can certainly understand a purely evidence-based program (for lack of a better term) where you base the sentence on how heinous the crime was. We presume that a decent justice system has at least a first phase of 'guilty or not guilty' and a second phase of 'if guilty, what were the circumstances and how does that affect the sentencing', and perhaps this is a call for a third phase of 'what was the intent, and does that mean we should aim for rehab or aim for just keeping this person off the street?'
By the way, I meant Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, not Tay-Sachs. T-S is horrible, but L-N is the one that makes me question what volition means in humans.
While I agree with the general idea behind your statement, it's not as clear as just overcoming impulses. If it were, you could just tell people with clinical depression to "just cheer up!" or schizophrenics "just stop listening to those voices in your head!" Or, as a particularly horrible example, people with Tay-Sachs disease who have been known to beg to be tied back up so they will stop chewing off their own fingers, and go back to just chewing off their own lips. They are absolutely unable to control their own impulses.
It's easy to say "just learn to control your impulses." The point with this guy is he is genetically less able to "just control his impulses" than other people, so if we presume that at some threshhold, every person will act impulsively rather than rationally, this guy hits that threshhold before most other people do.
So then we get to the meat of the question: what's the purpose of prison? A lot of people believe it's to punish wrongdoers, some people believe it's to rehabilitate wrongdoers, and some people believe it's to keep wrongdoers off the street so they can't do wrong again. If you're in the 'punishment' camp, you'll come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether the guy has the gene or not, just what he did. If you're a rehabilitation person, you'll probably assume that he's less guilty, because he's less able to resist impulse, and as such should be rehabilitated and let out. If you're a keep-wrongdoers-locked-up, you'll decide this guy should be locked up for as long as possible, for exactly the same reason the rehabilitation people think he should be let out more quickly.
Magnesium's also easy to injection mold or die cast. There are some difficulties in safely melting magnesium (as this amazing picture showing a Volkswagen magnesium casting foundry burning in 2006 demonstrates) but it's far easier to do casting processes with magnesium, which melts at a very reasonable temperature, than it is with titanium, which destroys mold materials. Titanium also burns fiercely, and goes so far as to burn in a pure nitrogen environment, the only metal that will do so. Magnesium's also cheaper. However, it isn't anywhere nearly as tough. Titanium has yield strengths on the order of 40,000-140,000 pounds per square inch, while magnesium's more in the 20,000-50,000psi range. However, since magnesium's like 1/3 the density of titanium you can put a *lot* more magnesium into a structure for the same weight, and since stiffness rises as an exponential function of cross-section, you get hellaciously stiff, light structures that are reasonably tough.
>isn't it funny that Reagan and the Dubya who are supposed to be from the party of small government are responsible for the vast majority of US debt?
You say that as if you're surprised. I think it's pretty clear that one of the Republican long-term goals is to get rid of Social Security, but since that would injure them with respect to getting votes from the elderly as badly as the civil rights movement damaged the Democrats in the South, the way they've decided to do it is by bankrupting the Federal Government through massive spending programs on projects that pump money into their own pockets and those of the people who vote for them. Once the Fed actually goes bankrupt they can say "see, we HAVE to cut SS because we're broke! It's not our fault!" and not lose the critical (and growing) elderly demographic that they need.
Oh, you want to read about insanity, read up on Colorado's Summitville disaster. The Leadville stuff was from mines that closed, at the latest, in the 1930's, and was dumping natural rock leachants into the water supply. In contrast, Summitville Mine involved synthesizing and shipping in thousands of tons of cyanide, dumping it into the tailings piles, washing it out, recovering the gold, and then letting the cyanide escape. *Cyanide*. And the best part is that this was done throughout the 1980's, up to 1992. Their leak completely killed everything in 17 miles of the Alamosa River, which (unusually, but luckily) doesn't actually dump into any other rivers: it just sinks back into the ground. Anyway, the company took 200,000 ounces of gold out of the ground, sold it, and within a year, declared bankruptcy so they wouldn't have to face the cyanide spill cleanup. There is no shortcut so foul a mine operator won't seriously consider it if it'll make a buck.
The little town I grew up in is pretty much all a Superfund site from old mine tailings piles and uncapped vertical mine shafts, but unlike this situation, where the EPA has to fork out $3M for a problem that companies created and then ran away from, in Leadville the reclamation efforts have gone past $400 million and despite levels of lead, arsenic, and selenium in the ground water that are so high the upper Arkansas river sometimes has all the fish die(*), people in Leadville want to get the EPA out at any cost and live in their polluted town. When I look at the pictures of Treese, it looks very much like Leadville used to, where the highways and streets wiggled between tailings piles 20-50 feet high, and a short walk out of town led to streams the color of Mountain Dew or orange juice (scroll down to the second-to-last picture).
So, I think this sounds like a remarkably civilized end to a nasty story, and hope they can get the people out. I've worked with people who had chronic lead and mercury poisoning from old mine contamination and some of them are really seriously screwed up.
(*) There was an old mine called the Yak Tunnel, dug not for minerals but to drain all the other mines, at a much lower level than they were, so it served as the sewage drain for dozens of huge mines. Whenever one of the old abandoned mines would have a collapse, a huge surge of contaminated water would dump out the Yak and right into the upper Arkansas, killing everything downstream for dozens of miles.
Oh, yes there are. My rabbit is named Pirate because in his previous home, it was just him and a very unhappy, neurotic hamster. Un-neutered rabbits have, well, issues. Likewise, my ex-gf had a parakeet she called Maurice (because he was a gangster of love) who put the moves on her much larger female cockatiel (who was often receptive.) Animals don't care about species. Dolphins have tried to mate with humans who were out scuba-diving with them, there's a pretty chilling account of a male gorilla raping a female researcher at Dian Fossey's camp in the early 1980's, related in the book "Woman In The Mists", and there's the existence of wild ligers, mules, and wholphins to show that animals don't care any more than humans do. It's a good thing humans and sheep can't have viable offspring or Wyoming would be overpopulated...
Much of aging has to do with genetic damage and incorrect methylation of base pairs in genes. Telomerase (the enzyme that extends telomeres) would not stop that kind of aging process.
I was just talking to a woman getting her PhD in oncology the other day at a wedding (boy did THAT conversation make everyone else's eyes glaze over) and she said that their research was into how DNA gets acylated rather than methylated, which seems to be strongly correlated with development of cancer. I'd never heard of such a thing, and thought it was really interesting.
As a side-note, I got my degree in biochem from CSU and took classes from a lot of the people referenced in that link you provided. I dunno what Jennifer Nyborg is like now, but back when I was taking classes, the whole class had a crush on her.
We wanted to do that when my brother-in-law's place was built, but because it was a rowhouse they wouldn't let anyone in until the drywall was already up so it's been a retrofit nightmare. My old house was a single story with a nice crawlspace and attic, so I could drop anything anywhere. It was wonderful. I completely rewired and replumbed the entire house while living there; from inside you would never have known save that every couple of days there was another new outlet somewhere or a switch had moved from a stupid place to a reasonable place. House I'm in now has a finished basement, and )*&)#^$!!! So nice when you can run a nice piece of conduit through the wall pre-drywall and subsequently snake anything you want through -- even fiber, I suppose. (Also a huge drawback to brick houses. Europeans look at our stickframe houses with complete horror, but man, retrofitting in brick is a whole different type of nightmare.)
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How did you get involved, originally? My first guess (having known a few scientologists) is that your parents were/are members and you were raised in it. Second guess: One of the substance abuse programs. Third guess: One of their entrepreneurial outreach programs.
My girlfriend recently graduated from college with degrees in communications and marketing. She was almost immediately contacted with a job offer, from a company that said they were public relations consultants. She went into the interview and there were ten other people there, also waiting. The person running the interview sat everyone down and gave them a form to fill out and sign before they started the interview process. One of the items on the form was a non-disclosure clause for everything in the interview, and another was a statement that L. Ron Hubbard's words were infallible. To which she had to agree in writing before she could get an interview. At which point she realized that she was being recruited to be a Scientologist recruiter. She walked out. But just so you know, that's one way Scientology gets new members: they hire people with degrees being convincing to go get more people.
The Mormons don't try to suck your bank accounts dry before telling you The Truth, and they don't go out of their way to quash early documents that show them in a bad light (they do buy them up, but they also release the contents, like the Salamander Letter hoax) so they're not anywhere nearly as control-freak as Scientologists, and they don't track down church critics and harass them like Scientologists do, but those are differences of degree, not kind.
As I said, I like Mormons. The religion has grown up and gotten past massacres of nonbelievers and has become respectable, just like most other mainstream religions. (The Mormons are complete saints (so to speak) compared to the background of the Christian or Muslim churches, which have killed thousands of times as many people.) But they have plenty of stuff in their background that they don't want people to talk about.
FWIW the modern Baptist movement is derived from the Anabaptist tradition, so (in theory) Baptist churches don't admit menbers to the church until they're adults and are baptised. Now, in *practice*, Baptists raise kids in the church, have dedication ceremonies when they're born, and generally treat them as members. I was raised in an American Baptist church, which is nearly as liberal as Unitarians (Southern Baptists hate us) and we had a lot of Mennonites who came to our church sometimes and vice versa.
The fluorescence/phosphorescence was the most interesting thing to me. They're the same effect but different phenomena: you hit something really hard with a bunch of UV, and the surface -- the stuff that didn't get ablated -- is now covered in molecules with electrons blown up into higher orbitals. The ones that fall down immediately (within nanoseconds) are what produce fluorescence. The ones that have absorbed enough energy that they're in an orbital/spin combination that won't allow them to directly drop down to their original orbital, take a long time before they can do something like electron tunnelling to return to their orbital -- where by 'long time' I mean from a millisecond up to maybe six hours. So that's where you get actual glow-in-the-dark. I could put a notecard up in the beam and trigger a shot, and there'd be a nice yellow glow off the piece of paper for maybe half a second, and then the paper itself would be a moderate brown color. Next shot and it'd be gone. The individual shots were on the order of a microsecond long.
Interesting factoid that I wish I didn't know: fluorine gas smells somewhat like Elmer's Glue. Deep UV lasers often use fluorine as an excimer and when you have to replace the cavity mirrors, no matter how many times you purge it with argon, there's still some fluorine in there when you finally open it up. Gack *cough*.
Many Zoroastrians claimed that you could only be Zoroastrian if your father was, although some have always been open to conversion by outsiders. The religion as a whole generally prohibits proselytizing, or at least strongly discourages it.
And on the far end of the continuum are, or were, the Shakers, where you couldn't be a Shaker if your parents were, because, well, it was a celibate religion. Which is why there are only about 3 Shakers left and within 20 years it'll be a dead religion.
I'm in the USA, where our grammar rules are not only looser than yours, but also more loosely interpreted. But it's an interesting rule (and I love Bill Bryson's stuff, and was surprised to see a book of his that I don't already have.) Now I have a quest to see if it holds hereabouts. Thanks for the references.
I should research more before hitting reply: this forum has a lot more info about both the material and the history of the research & development, and has a comparison picture of one of the stealth boats compared to a normal one.
I'd never heard before about a Japanese one. The german u-boat U480 that was apparently recently re-located used a rubberized coating intended to absorb sonar to make it less easy to detect. Other sources I've read claim it was covered in some sort of polyurethane that, as it cured, developed engineered-size air pockets that were tuned to absorb sonar pulses. I'm assuming they transferred the technology to Japan, because I've read some about the subject and there's a lot of literature on the German program but I'd never heard about the Japanese one before. One of the things I found interesting about it was that the USA and USSR sub designers apparently didn't try to develop this sort of technology for another 30 years after WWII, preferring to concentrate on making the subs quieter.
Interesting. I was taught that any abbreviation was marked with a full stop unless it was just an elided vowel or syllable, in which case it was marked with an apostrophe. Do you have a source for the abbreviation rule? I'd be glad to convert.
I once passed a shop offering "Sandwich boxe's". I call it hedge-your-bets punctuation...
Dude. I was in a Safeway that claimed to be selling "Mrs Whites pie's". I cried. Three words, three mistakes: HOW?
Then I pulled out a Sharpie and fixed it, which is why my friends used to call me Conan The Grammarian. Bad grammar modded for free!
This is why I don't do the laundry around our house. I'm real sketchy on putting something into the washing machine that costs more than the washing machine. Of course, this shirt doesn't go into the washing machine (unless it's inside a sweater or towel because it's silk and when crumpled up is about the size of a golf ball -- which is, again, why I don't do the laundry around our house.)
Given the amount of clothing which goes from our house directly to the local thrift store, with no holes or major stains, I think it is reasonable to assume that at least some people buy clothes they don't technically need, but because the clothes make them happy. Just sayin'.
For the record, you can weld aluminum perfectly well with an oxy-acetylene torch or a mig welder using shielding gas, but at the end of the day, tig is almost always the best way to weld any metal.
Sorry to reply to my own post but the PKC in question is protein kinase C delta, which is involved in a buttload of important pathways, and shutting it off would be problematic even if you could just kill it without messing with any other of the PKC family. PKC's are used throughout the body, since they add a phosphate group onto other enzymes, which is a sort of tagging system to mark the modified enzymes or activate them and allow them to do other things, but the specific effects/results vary depending on the cell. Metabolic and transcriptional control systems are *truly* complicated. So, in *my* (definitely not professional) opinion, I'm going to reiterate: it's very useful to have evidence that PKC-delta is responsible for killing dopamine-producing cells, but finding out why they're being killed seems a lot more useful theraputically than trying to reduce PKC-delta's activity/concentration. Maybe it's as simple as a defective cell-surface receptor that's getting modified by PKC-delta and we can target that, specifically.
Personally, I'm more curious about why PKC is doing this: if we could figure out how/why the dopamine-producing cells are getting killed by PKC and reduce their vulnerability, that seems like it would be a less systemic way of getting the same result than trying to reduce PKC's activity. It'd likely have fewer side-effects since it would only affect the cells getting attacked, rather than all the other cells that need PKC for their normal function.
Why do you think that? Scientists (such as they are) sell magnetic bracelets to cure arthritis, and presumably scientists made the $40,000 dowsing rod bomb detectors that people are buying in Iraq. If you can make money selling useless stuff to stupid people, you sell useless stuff to stupid people. In this case it works even better because it doesn't really matter much to them whether there are false positives: they'll just search everyone and this way it's another excuse to search more people. It's all about deterrence and making people feel safer.
Well, given that the average American household watches 8 hours 18 minutes of television a day, all you'd have to do is consider the proportion of the people who use Netflix/Hulu as their television. Just under half of them will be hitting that 250GB cap.
I'm a rehab-favoring person myself, but I can certainly understand a purely evidence-based program (for lack of a better term) where you base the sentence on how heinous the crime was. We presume that a decent justice system has at least a first phase of 'guilty or not guilty' and a second phase of 'if guilty, what were the circumstances and how does that affect the sentencing', and perhaps this is a call for a third phase of 'what was the intent, and does that mean we should aim for rehab or aim for just keeping this person off the street?'
By the way, I meant Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, not Tay-Sachs. T-S is horrible, but L-N is the one that makes me question what volition means in humans.
It's easy to say "just learn to control your impulses." The point with this guy is he is genetically less able to "just control his impulses" than other people, so if we presume that at some threshhold, every person will act impulsively rather than rationally, this guy hits that threshhold before most other people do.
So then we get to the meat of the question: what's the purpose of prison? A lot of people believe it's to punish wrongdoers, some people believe it's to rehabilitate wrongdoers, and some people believe it's to keep wrongdoers off the street so they can't do wrong again. If you're in the 'punishment' camp, you'll come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether the guy has the gene or not, just what he did. If you're a rehabilitation person, you'll probably assume that he's less guilty, because he's less able to resist impulse, and as such should be rehabilitated and let out. If you're a keep-wrongdoers-locked-up, you'll decide this guy should be locked up for as long as possible, for exactly the same reason the rehabilitation people think he should be let out more quickly.
Magnesium's also easy to injection mold or die cast. There are some difficulties in safely melting magnesium (as this amazing picture showing a Volkswagen magnesium casting foundry burning in 2006 demonstrates) but it's far easier to do casting processes with magnesium, which melts at a very reasonable temperature, than it is with titanium, which destroys mold materials. Titanium also burns fiercely, and goes so far as to burn in a pure nitrogen environment, the only metal that will do so. Magnesium's also cheaper. However, it isn't anywhere nearly as tough. Titanium has yield strengths on the order of 40,000-140,000 pounds per square inch, while magnesium's more in the 20,000-50,000psi range. However, since magnesium's like 1/3 the density of titanium you can put a *lot* more magnesium into a structure for the same weight, and since stiffness rises as an exponential function of cross-section, you get hellaciously stiff, light structures that are reasonably tough.
You say that as if you're surprised. I think it's pretty clear that one of the Republican long-term goals is to get rid of Social Security, but since that would injure them with respect to getting votes from the elderly as badly as the civil rights movement damaged the Democrats in the South, the way they've decided to do it is by bankrupting the Federal Government through massive spending programs on projects that pump money into their own pockets and those of the people who vote for them. Once the Fed actually goes bankrupt they can say "see, we HAVE to cut SS because we're broke! It's not our fault!" and not lose the critical (and growing) elderly demographic that they need.
Oh, you want to read about insanity, read up on Colorado's Summitville disaster. The Leadville stuff was from mines that closed, at the latest, in the 1930's, and was dumping natural rock leachants into the water supply. In contrast, Summitville Mine involved synthesizing and shipping in thousands of tons of cyanide, dumping it into the tailings piles, washing it out, recovering the gold, and then letting the cyanide escape. *Cyanide*. And the best part is that this was done throughout the 1980's, up to 1992. Their leak completely killed everything in 17 miles of the Alamosa River, which (unusually, but luckily) doesn't actually dump into any other rivers: it just sinks back into the ground. Anyway, the company took 200,000 ounces of gold out of the ground, sold it, and within a year, declared bankruptcy so they wouldn't have to face the cyanide spill cleanup. There is no shortcut so foul a mine operator won't seriously consider it if it'll make a buck.
So, I think this sounds like a remarkably civilized end to a nasty story, and hope they can get the people out. I've worked with people who had chronic lead and mercury poisoning from old mine contamination and some of them are really seriously screwed up.
(*) There was an old mine called the Yak Tunnel, dug not for minerals but to drain all the other mines, at a much lower level than they were, so it served as the sewage drain for dozens of huge mines. Whenever one of the old abandoned mines would have a collapse, a huge surge of contaminated water would dump out the Yak and right into the upper Arkansas, killing everything downstream for dozens of miles.
Oh, yes there are. My rabbit is named Pirate because in his previous home, it was just him and a very unhappy, neurotic hamster. Un-neutered rabbits have, well, issues. Likewise, my ex-gf had a parakeet she called Maurice (because he was a gangster of love) who put the moves on her much larger female cockatiel (who was often receptive.) Animals don't care about species. Dolphins have tried to mate with humans who were out scuba-diving with them, there's a pretty chilling account of a male gorilla raping a female researcher at Dian Fossey's camp in the early 1980's, related in the book "Woman In The Mists", and there's the existence of wild ligers, mules, and wholphins to show that animals don't care any more than humans do. It's a good thing humans and sheep can't have viable offspring or Wyoming would be overpopulated...
Much of aging has to do with genetic damage and incorrect methylation of base pairs in genes. Telomerase (the enzyme that extends telomeres) would not stop that kind of aging process.
I was just talking to a woman getting her PhD in oncology the other day at a wedding (boy did THAT conversation make everyone else's eyes glaze over) and she said that their research was into how DNA gets acylated rather than methylated, which seems to be strongly correlated with development of cancer. I'd never heard of such a thing, and thought it was really interesting.
As a side-note, I got my degree in biochem from CSU and took classes from a lot of the people referenced in that link you provided. I dunno what Jennifer Nyborg is like now, but back when I was taking classes, the whole class had a crush on her.
We wanted to do that when my brother-in-law's place was built, but because it was a rowhouse they wouldn't let anyone in until the drywall was already up so it's been a retrofit nightmare. My old house was a single story with a nice crawlspace and attic, so I could drop anything anywhere. It was wonderful. I completely rewired and replumbed the entire house while living there; from inside you would never have known save that every couple of days there was another new outlet somewhere or a switch had moved from a stupid place to a reasonable place. House I'm in now has a finished basement, and )*&)#^$!!! So nice when you can run a nice piece of conduit through the wall pre-drywall and subsequently snake anything you want through -- even fiber, I suppose. (Also a huge drawback to brick houses. Europeans look at our stickframe houses with complete horror, but man, retrofitting in brick is a whole different type of nightmare.)