I think it was behavioral not genetic, since the other two kids went to full-term. Plus, it's a matter of weighing what's important. Both my girlfriend and her younger sister are skipped-grades-in-school smart and the kind of pretty that make people slow down to stare and whistle when they're driving by. If that comes at the cost of medical care, not maybe such a big deal.
A: that's really cool. Thanks for the overview. B: it makes me wonder if we couldn't use recombination with chopped-up human and chimp dna to show a lot of the differentiation. Fragment radiolabelled human DNA, mix with Neandertal, heat and anneal, then start looking at the overlap sequences. It'd work better and be more automated if there were markers on the human DNA as targets for some sort of ELISA or selective column adsorption. Hm. I miss biochem.
Born three months premature out of 12 gestation would be rough, but not appalling. My girlfriend was born two months premature and her younger sister was born four months early. Both required hospitalization, but it wasn't that difficult. This would be somewhere between the two. Now, there might be a lot of issues we don't expect because the child wouldn't be homo sapiens, but that could show up anywhere in the pregnancy. I was reading about pre-eclampsia last night, about how it's probably a case where the fetus and the mother are competing in a hostile manner for resources and the mother loses because the fetus successfully rebuilds the placenta to hijack sufficient maternal bloodflow to imperil the mother. There's a lot of subtle stuff going on that we don't understand yet, and cross-species pregnancy is likely to be complicated.
>they're grinding up the fossils, so ALL the DNA in the sample will be mixed together, and strands may well end up getting broken, making it much harder to sequence correctly.
To the best of my knowledge (and things may have changed in the last two years) all sequencing is done in tiny chunks because we don't have the technology to accurately sequence long strands(by which I mean even thousands of base pairs, much less billions.) To deal with this, they sequence lots and lots of strands more or less randomly, and use computers to find the overlaps between different sequences, to position them into a complete sequence. So, they'd end up ground up anyway, and this means they just have to filter the results, which might not seem to be all that bad, really: basically, you sequence everything, and anything that has more than a certain percent match with a search on bacterial DNA you throw away. But that presupposes that bacteria back then were really similar to bacteria now; that we've sequenced all bacteria (we haven't); and some other difficult bits like that. However, there are differences; maybe they can include sequences as being similar to humans, rather than discarding those that are similar to bacteria.
People have been trying to get mammoths going for at least fifteen years: my alma mater, Colorado State University, had what they thought was a successful fertilization of a frozen mammoth egg by a frozen mammoth sperm, but the implantation into an elephant was not successful. I think full-on cloning: enucleation and transplantation, sounds viable. I was just reading about a new cloning technique that's more efficent and 10x cheaper that seems promising. *mammoths*. That'd rock so very, very much.
In a broader context, it would also help slow species loss, although obviously it doesn't help at all with the vast number of species we have yet to identify. (And as many people have pointed out, it also might act to discourage species conservation: it does us no good to bring back thylacines if there is no habitat for them, which is a real concern for mammoths. Where the hell do you put something bigger than an elephant, that likes cold weather and can stomp volkswagens into tinfoil? Wait until greenland melts more and stick them on some previously uninhabited island exposed by the receding glaciers?)
Exactly. And the sucky thing is: if they (okay, WE) kept doing it, it *would* change things. It'd just take many, many more people doing it. It worked in the civil rights movement. It could work now. I'm convinced that a lot of stupid stuff like flag-burning and gay marriage and stem cells are designed to keep people too polarized about things that really don't matter to them in their daily lives so that they won't all get together and demand changes for things that do actually matter. And yes, I do think it's planned that way.
I'm saying this as someone who is twice your age: it's an age thing. She'll realize, some day, that her actions do have an effect. She already does, actually: I bet she doesn't drop her fast food bag, styrofoam container, and drink on the sidewalk when she's done with it because she knows that's disgusting and antisocial. She doesn't yet see that such an action is as "political" as not shopping at a store that's treated its customers badly. (and maybe she never will.) And on to the other part: you, too, will realize that you don't have to make a crusade out of opposition. I'm not criticizing you: I think you're doing a good, upstanding thing. But you're doing it at the cost of damaging your relationship. In another ten years, you'll think twice about that particular tradeoff. That's why young people drive a lot of the change in the world: they're willing to sit out on the curb to protest things, where people with another twenty years are thinking "I support that, but I don't want to make waves."
See, that's a perfect example. Obviously they'd never ever scratch, but even better, carbon is lightweight *and* diamond has an unbelievable index of refraction, meaning you could get the same optical correction with half the thickness and one quarter the weight of glass. It would be weight-competitive with plastic lenses, probably about half the weight, just because of the index of refraction.
They are decreasing our freedom TO do things, which they falsely imply increases our freedom FROM other things. By keeping people scared, they get votes.
I too have been writing letters. Keep them up. People like us have managed to stop bad government before: maybe we'll win this time, too.
Fulgerites are generally not particularly pretty, since they're covered in the sand that was used to create them. It's possible there are beautiful ones but the ones I've seen looked like someone's kid brother's pottery project gone badly awry.
I was going to talk about how the top of the Washington Monument was made of aluminum because at the time it was nearly as valuable as gold, but it turns out that that's somewhat of an urban myth. Here's a really interesting article about the Monument and the lightning-suppression system they designed for it.
In any case, the price of aluminum and titanium (and for that matter, beryllium, lithium, and other exotic metals) has plummetted as better production systems have come into use.
I've read several essays discussing t-shirts, and how their design echoes manufacturing costs. When the price of a quality t-shirt is maybe double the price of a cheap one, the only way to distinguish a DKNY or Old Navy t-shirt from a cheap Hanes shirt you buy at WalMart is the (copyrighted) image on the front. You're not buying the shirt, you're buying something that bears a copyright which is known to be expensive. So also with diamonds. Wired had an interesting article about synth diamond production a couple of years ago, proposing two to four orders of magnitude cheaper diamonds for fine jewelry usage (meaning: can't be detected as synth by any known tests.) I'd love to have some diamond lenses for some of my projects, so I'm happy with these developments.
Same with where I work. The janitors don't have top-secret, but they do have considerably more background checks than the employees. We only have one janitor, only that one janitor is allowed in (cameras on all doors) and all employee office doors lock and are supposed to be locked. If you don't put your trash out it doesn't get emptied. Likewise, the labs and other interesting areas are not accessible to the janitor's prox badge. We've declined to continue employing a janitor when the janitor's credit rating changed suddenly for the worse (which really sucks for the person in question.) And the kicker is: we're not even working on any particularly vitally secret stuff, just intensely competitive, high-profit-margin electronics.
Re:could someone do back-of-envelope calculation
on
Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
The only firmly known correlations to development of Type II diabetes are genetics and obesity. So far nobody that I know of has indicated even a correlation between sugar intake and development of diabetes, much less any indication whatsoever of causation.
What you say IS funny, but it frustrates me that so many people assume high-sugar and high-carb diets necessarily lead to diabetes, when there's some evidence that a high-cholesterol diet (as typically seen with low-carb, high-protein diets where the protein is largely meat) *might* be correlated with development of Type II.
(and what an image that is. Joe bent over with his head stuck in a hat, translating, and his wife sitting there trying to write down what he's saying. "Whfphw thfmamphr!" "What's that, dear? Something about a white salamander?")
Some of my friends and I were looking at buying an island off the coast of Australia. AUS$900,000 bought three large houses, 2700 acres, a landing strip (and most importantly: a freshwater well.) And there are several jets (6 person, including pilot) that sell for under 2 million. I'm not saying you could live like Paris Hilton, but you could indeed get an island and a jet for that kind of money. Dunno about supermodels and cocaine, though. Recurring costs are harder to estimate.
Cute young marketing girl: "I think we should make something like MySpace that's loosely associated with WalMart to improve our brand's image with youth."
PHB level 1: "Great idea. Write up a proposal."
Cute young marketing girl: (thinking: this is gonna be GREAT) "I already did: here it is."
PHB level 1 "Awesome! Let me shop this around. Oh, since MySpace is getting all this bad press with stalkers and all, we can't let the kids talk to each other."
PHB level 2 "Great idea! But we better make sure that kids have their parents' permission to be on there."
PHB level 3 "Fantastic idea! And let's have the kids make videos about how great WalMart is!"
PHB level 4 "Okay. Let's build this!"
PHB (as a group): "Great idea, cute young intern girl! If this works, your career with WalMart is guaranteed!"
(cute young intern girl doesn't hear them because she's busy looking on Monster.com for her way out of the impending debacle.)
Traditionally, cops didn't pay. Or, they DID pay, by not arresting the person, which was the value-added-service for which they expected considerations.
Sending oodles of kids out looking for music-sharing sites is kind of like sending angry, unattractive, middle-aged cops to "stop" prostitution. I imagine these kids sticking USB thumbdrives in their cop computers and bookmarking wildly for the evening's Internet Cafe feeding frenzy.
>Some say that's a big difference, and others call it a fine line.
I'd have to call it a big difference. In the case of delayed charges, the person has been convicted in criminal court, which requires strong evidence, and the punishment is deferred, perhaps indefinitely. In the case of ASBO, A: there is a much lower threshhold of proof (hearsay) and B: it might not even be possible to convict the person on the lower evidentiary requirements, but the person is threatened with punishment anyway. In the first case, the suspect is forgiven of existing, verified actions, and in the other the person is convicted of unsubstantiated actions.
I'm going to have to put a turbocharger on my car and hook up bleed air to the computer! AND the iPod! That's awesome and funny and scary: thanks for pointing it out. I, and just about everyone I know, have both the laptop and the iPod over 12,000 every single weekend through the summer, going over passes to get to the fun places.
This makes me wonder about the systems used in homebuilt aircraft glass cockpits. They sure aren't pressurized, and they're flying at 17,000 or higher on a regular basis. Some of those, the instrument-rated people, are flying at 24000-30000 every time they go more than a hundred miles. One would expect to hear awful grinding sounds from both the hard drives and the pilots, when their $20,000 computer takes a dump. So this makes me wonder what's in things like the Garmin 430/530 aviation GPS computers -- custom sealed hard drives, or do they put the whole OS in NVRAM? Again: stuff I didn't realize I knew so little about.
I think they must be conservative, coz I've had a dozen or more computers up there over the last 20 years and haven't had a platter crash up there yet. But I *will* go look up some specs.
I guess the reason the article surprised me is that, like I said in the summary, I haven't read about fires from unused batteries just sitting in shipping containers happening in warehouses, just in airplanes. Maybe it's that the airplanes are the ones that make the news. I'm familiar with Li and li-ion fires during use and recharging: I've seen it happen. But it's freaky that this is happening when they're literally *just* *sitting* there.
My recollection of lead-acid battery chemistry is that the sulfuric acid is there to decrease the resistance of the circuit and to catalyze the reaction; it's only when the battery is overcharged or completely discharged that it begins to produce hydrogen gas. I'd assumed that li and li-ion batteries were similar to the standard zinc-carbon chemistry in C and D cells that doesn't have any gas products, so needs only enough venting to account for thermal expansion.
So the big question remains: are the li and li-ion batteries exploding because they've been damaged or abused, or because of manufacturing defects? Or are they just exploding? If so, is it because they're in a weird environment in an airplane, or do they do this all the time in the back of UPS vans as well as airplane cargo holds?
One of the reasons I submitted this story is that I just bought a house that's at roughly 3500 meters (11,000 feet) elevation. UPS is shipping jillions of batteries, and obviously this isn't THAT common, but I still wonder about me taking up my laptop, and my friends taking up theirs. I wonder even more about flying up there in a Cessna -- not much higher altitude, but where's the knee of the safe/explode curve? (Is it a curve? or is it linear with altitude? or logarithmic, given that's how pressure drops? I'd expect it'd drop off with temperature, but if that's true, temperature drops somewhat faster than air pressure, so why are these happening at all?) With all that said, it's unsettling that a battery has *anything* going on in it when it's just sitting there in a brown paper box. Do Li-ion batteries have vents, like old lead-acid batteries? Can they evolve gas? (If so, what happens to their chemistry afterwards? it's not like they can recapture hydrogen offgassed: do they lose efficiency over time from this?) I know much less about batteries than I thought I did.
>Try releasing a much needed experimental drug to people who are willing to try it -- you'd go to jail.
This is a damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't situation that has much more to do with the vox populi, originally, than The State. In the 1880's people or companies could release anything they wanted onto the drug market, making any claims they wanted. Enough people complained that Congress established the FDA to ensure truth-in-advertising: if you *say* your drug cures baldness and cancer, it must do exactly that. Since drugs are a somewhat higher-than-average risk product, they demand a somewhat higher-than-average set of tests and verification information than bottle openers.
The drug cartel -- oops, I mean industry -- is not unhappy about this situation, and has worked hard with government regulation to drive the costs of validating a drug to the FDA's satisfaction to exostratospheric levels to create an artificial barrier for entry into the drug market, but the government gave the people what they originally demanded: protection from unscrupulous people providing a potentially lethal product.
So now we're in a situation where drug companies get sued for releasing a very effective drug (for example, Vioxx, which was a wonder drug for my mother (who would probably buy it on the black market if she could) but injured and killed some people) and at the same time those companies get sued for *not* releasing new HIV drugs that have yet to pass the tests that Vioxx passed (arguably.) I'm not crying for the drug cartel^H^H^H^H^Hompanies. I'm just saying that if you're in the business of making pharmaceuticals, in the current business environment, you're probably screwed, and it's going to be a lawyer doing the screwing, not the government.
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I think it was behavioral not genetic, since the other two kids went to full-term. Plus, it's a matter of weighing what's important. Both my girlfriend and her younger sister are skipped-grades-in-school smart and the kind of pretty that make people slow down to stare and whistle when they're driving by. If that comes at the cost of medical care, not maybe such a big deal.
A: that's really cool. Thanks for the overview.
B: it makes me wonder if we couldn't use recombination with chopped-up human and chimp dna to show a lot of the differentiation. Fragment radiolabelled human DNA, mix with Neandertal, heat and anneal, then start looking at the overlap sequences. It'd work better and be more automated if there were markers on the human DNA as targets for some sort of ELISA or selective column adsorption. Hm. I miss biochem.
Born three months premature out of 12 gestation would be rough, but not appalling. My girlfriend was born two months premature and her younger sister was born four months early. Both required hospitalization, but it wasn't that difficult. This would be somewhere between the two. Now, there might be a lot of issues we don't expect because the child wouldn't be homo sapiens, but that could show up anywhere in the pregnancy. I was reading about pre-eclampsia last night, about how it's probably a case where the fetus and the mother are competing in a hostile manner for resources and the mother loses because the fetus successfully rebuilds the placenta to hijack sufficient maternal bloodflow to imperil the mother.
There's a lot of subtle stuff going on that we don't understand yet, and cross-species pregnancy is likely to be complicated.
>they're grinding up the fossils, so ALL the DNA in the sample will be mixed together, and strands may well end up getting broken, making it much harder to sequence correctly.
To the best of my knowledge (and things may have changed in the last two years) all sequencing is done in tiny chunks because we don't have the technology to accurately sequence long strands(by which I mean even thousands of base pairs, much less billions.) To deal with this, they sequence lots and lots of strands more or less randomly, and use computers to find the overlaps between different sequences, to position them into a complete sequence. So, they'd end up ground up anyway, and this means they just have to filter the results, which might not seem to be all that bad, really: basically, you sequence everything, and anything that has more than a certain percent match with a search on bacterial DNA you throw away. But that presupposes that bacteria back then were really similar to bacteria now; that we've sequenced all bacteria (we haven't); and some other difficult bits like that. However, there are differences; maybe they can include sequences as being similar to humans, rather than discarding those that are similar to bacteria.
People have been trying to get mammoths going for at least fifteen years: my alma mater, Colorado State University, had what they thought was a successful fertilization of a frozen mammoth egg by a frozen mammoth sperm, but the implantation into an elephant was not successful. I think full-on cloning: enucleation and transplantation, sounds viable. I was just reading about a new cloning technique that's more efficent and 10x cheaper that seems promising.
*mammoths*. That'd rock so very, very much.
In a broader context, it would also help slow species loss, although obviously it doesn't help at all with the vast number of species we have yet to identify. (And as many people have pointed out, it also might act to discourage species conservation: it does us no good to bring back thylacines if there is no habitat for them, which is a real concern for mammoths. Where the hell do you put something bigger than an elephant, that likes cold weather and can stomp volkswagens into tinfoil? Wait until greenland melts more and stick them on some previously uninhabited island exposed by the receding glaciers?)
Exactly.
And the sucky thing is: if they (okay, WE) kept doing it, it *would* change things. It'd just take many, many more people doing it. It worked in the civil rights movement. It could work now. I'm convinced that a lot of stupid stuff like flag-burning and gay marriage and stem cells are designed to keep people too polarized about things that really don't matter to them in their daily lives so that they won't all get together and demand changes for things that do actually matter. And yes, I do think it's planned that way.
I'm saying this as someone who is twice your age: it's an age thing. She'll realize, some day, that her actions do have an effect. She already does, actually: I bet she doesn't drop her fast food bag, styrofoam container, and drink on the sidewalk when she's done with it because she knows that's disgusting and antisocial. She doesn't yet see that such an action is as "political" as not shopping at a store that's treated its customers badly. (and maybe she never will.)
And on to the other part: you, too, will realize that you don't have to make a crusade out of opposition. I'm not criticizing you: I think you're doing a good, upstanding thing. But you're doing it at the cost of damaging your relationship. In another ten years, you'll think twice about that particular tradeoff. That's why young people drive a lot of the change in the world: they're willing to sit out on the curb to protest things, where people with another twenty years are thinking "I support that, but I don't want to make waves."
See, that's a perfect example. Obviously they'd never ever scratch, but even better, carbon is lightweight *and* diamond has an unbelievable index of refraction, meaning you could get the same optical correction with half the thickness and one quarter the weight of glass. It would be weight-competitive with plastic lenses, probably about half the weight, just because of the index of refraction.
They are decreasing our freedom TO do things, which they falsely imply increases our freedom FROM other things. By keeping people scared, they get votes.
I too have been writing letters. Keep them up. People like us have managed to stop bad government before: maybe we'll win this time, too.
Fulgerites are generally not particularly pretty, since they're covered in the sand that was used to create them. It's possible there are beautiful ones but the ones I've seen looked like someone's kid brother's pottery project gone badly awry.
I was going to talk about how the top of the Washington Monument was made of aluminum because at the time it was nearly as valuable as gold, but it turns out that that's somewhat of an urban myth. Here's a really interesting article about the Monument and the lightning-suppression system they designed for it.
In any case, the price of aluminum and titanium (and for that matter, beryllium, lithium, and other exotic metals) has plummetted as better production systems have come into use.
I've read several essays discussing t-shirts, and how their design echoes manufacturing costs. When the price of a quality t-shirt is maybe double the price of a cheap one, the only way to distinguish a DKNY or Old Navy t-shirt from a cheap Hanes shirt you buy at WalMart is the (copyrighted) image on the front. You're not buying the shirt, you're buying something that bears a copyright which is known to be expensive. So also with diamonds. Wired had an interesting article about synth diamond production a couple of years ago, proposing two to four orders of magnitude cheaper diamonds for fine jewelry usage (meaning: can't be detected as synth by any known tests.) I'd love to have some diamond lenses for some of my projects, so I'm happy with these developments.
Same with where I work. The janitors don't have top-secret, but they do have considerably more background checks than the employees. We only have one janitor, only that one janitor is allowed in (cameras on all doors) and all employee office doors lock and are supposed to be locked. If you don't put your trash out it doesn't get emptied. Likewise, the labs and other interesting areas are not accessible to the janitor's prox badge. We've declined to continue employing a janitor when the janitor's credit rating changed suddenly for the worse (which really sucks for the person in question.) And the kicker is: we're not even working on any particularly vitally secret stuff, just intensely competitive, high-profit-margin electronics.
The only firmly known correlations to development of Type II diabetes are genetics and obesity. So far nobody that I know of has indicated even a correlation between sugar intake and development of diabetes, much less any indication whatsoever of causation.
What you say IS funny, but it frustrates me that so many people assume high-sugar and high-carb diets necessarily lead to diabetes, when there's some evidence that a high-cholesterol diet (as typically seen with low-carb, high-protein diets where the protein is largely meat) *might* be correlated with development of Type II.
Dude. Joe Smith got his inspiration and his translations from sticking a bit of rock in a hat and pulling it over his face. He never tried to read the gold tablets: he just trusted in his seer stone to tell him what the tablets said.
(and what an image that is. Joe bent over with his head stuck in a hat, translating, and his wife sitting there trying to write down what he's saying. "Whfphw thfmamphr!" "What's that, dear? Something about a white salamander?")
I didn't realize that. My understanding was that the deferment was subsequent to trial, in the sentencing section, but I could very well be wrong.
Some of my friends and I were looking at buying an island off the coast of Australia. AUS$900,000 bought three large houses, 2700 acres, a landing strip (and most importantly: a freshwater well.) And there are several jets (6 person, including pilot) that sell for under 2 million. I'm not saying you could live like Paris Hilton, but you could indeed get an island and a jet for that kind of money. Dunno about supermodels and cocaine, though. Recurring costs are harder to estimate.
Cute young marketing girl: "I think we should make something like MySpace that's loosely associated with WalMart to improve our brand's image with youth."
PHB level 1: "Great idea. Write up a proposal."
Cute young marketing girl: (thinking: this is gonna be GREAT) "I already did: here it is."
PHB level 1 "Awesome! Let me shop this around. Oh, since MySpace is getting all this bad press with stalkers and all, we can't let the kids talk to each other."
PHB level 2 "Great idea! But we better make sure that kids have their parents' permission to be on there."
PHB level 3 "Fantastic idea! And let's have the kids make videos about how great WalMart is!"
PHB level 4 "Okay. Let's build this!"
PHB (as a group): "Great idea, cute young intern girl! If this works, your career with WalMart is guaranteed!"
(cute young intern girl doesn't hear them because she's busy looking on Monster.com for her way out of the impending debacle.)
Traditionally, cops didn't pay. Or, they DID pay, by not arresting the person, which was the value-added-service for which they expected considerations.
Sending oodles of kids out looking for music-sharing sites is kind of like sending angry, unattractive, middle-aged cops to "stop" prostitution. I imagine these kids sticking USB thumbdrives in their cop computers and bookmarking wildly for the evening's Internet Cafe feeding frenzy.
>Some say that's a big difference, and others call it a fine line.
I'd have to call it a big difference. In the case of delayed charges, the person has been convicted in criminal court, which requires strong evidence, and the punishment is deferred, perhaps indefinitely. In the case of ASBO, A: there is a much lower threshhold of proof (hearsay) and B: it might not even be possible to convict the person on the lower evidentiary requirements, but the person is threatened with punishment anyway.
In the first case, the suspect is forgiven of existing, verified actions, and in the other the person is convicted of unsubstantiated actions.
I'm going to have to put a turbocharger on my car and hook up bleed air to the computer! AND the iPod! That's awesome and funny and scary: thanks for pointing it out. I, and just about everyone I know, have both the laptop and the iPod over 12,000 every single weekend through the summer, going over passes to get to the fun places.
This makes me wonder about the systems used in homebuilt aircraft glass cockpits. They sure aren't pressurized, and they're flying at 17,000 or higher on a regular basis. Some of those, the instrument-rated people, are flying at 24000-30000 every time they go more than a hundred miles. One would expect to hear awful grinding sounds from both the hard drives and the pilots, when their $20,000 computer takes a dump. So this makes me wonder what's in things like the Garmin 430/530 aviation GPS computers -- custom sealed hard drives, or do they put the whole OS in NVRAM?
Again: stuff I didn't realize I knew so little about.
I think they must be conservative, coz I've had a dozen or more computers up there over the last 20 years and haven't had a platter crash up there yet. But I *will* go look up some specs.
I guess the reason the article surprised me is that, like I said in the summary, I haven't read about fires from unused batteries just sitting in shipping containers happening in warehouses, just in airplanes. Maybe it's that the airplanes are the ones that make the news. I'm familiar with Li and li-ion fires during use and recharging: I've seen it happen. But it's freaky that this is happening when they're literally *just* *sitting* there.
My recollection of lead-acid battery chemistry is that the sulfuric acid is there to decrease the resistance of the circuit and to catalyze the reaction; it's only when the battery is overcharged or completely discharged that it begins to produce hydrogen gas. I'd assumed that li and li-ion batteries were similar to the standard zinc-carbon chemistry in C and D cells that doesn't have any gas products, so needs only enough venting to account for thermal expansion.
So the big question remains: are the li and li-ion batteries exploding because they've been damaged or abused, or because of manufacturing defects? Or are they just exploding? If so, is it because they're in a weird environment in an airplane, or do they do this all the time in the back of UPS vans as well as airplane cargo holds?
One of the reasons I submitted this story is that I just bought a house that's at roughly 3500 meters (11,000 feet) elevation. UPS is shipping jillions of batteries, and obviously this isn't THAT common, but I still wonder about me taking up my laptop, and my friends taking up theirs. I wonder even more about flying up there in a Cessna -- not much higher altitude, but where's the knee of the safe/explode curve? (Is it a curve? or is it linear with altitude? or logarithmic, given that's how pressure drops? I'd expect it'd drop off with temperature, but if that's true, temperature drops somewhat faster than air pressure, so why are these happening at all?)
With all that said, it's unsettling that a battery has *anything* going on in it when it's just sitting there in a brown paper box. Do Li-ion batteries have vents, like old lead-acid batteries? Can they evolve gas? (If so, what happens to their chemistry afterwards? it's not like they can recapture hydrogen offgassed: do they lose efficiency over time from this?)
I know much less about batteries than I thought I did.
>Try releasing a much needed experimental drug to people who are willing to try it -- you'd go to jail.
This is a damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't situation that has much more to do with the vox populi, originally, than The State. In the 1880's people or companies could release anything they wanted onto the drug market, making any claims they wanted. Enough people complained that Congress established the FDA to ensure truth-in-advertising: if you *say* your drug cures baldness and cancer, it must do exactly that. Since drugs are a somewhat higher-than-average risk product, they demand a somewhat higher-than-average set of tests and verification information than bottle openers.
The drug cartel -- oops, I mean industry -- is not unhappy about this situation, and has worked hard with government regulation to drive the costs of validating a drug to the FDA's satisfaction to exostratospheric levels to create an artificial barrier for entry into the drug market, but the government gave the people what they originally demanded: protection from unscrupulous people providing a potentially lethal product.
So now we're in a situation where drug companies get sued for releasing a very effective drug (for example, Vioxx, which was a wonder drug for my mother (who would probably buy it on the black market if she could) but injured and killed some people) and at the same time those companies get sued for *not* releasing new HIV drugs that have yet to pass the tests that Vioxx passed (arguably.) I'm not crying for the drug cartel^H^H^H^H^Hompanies. I'm just saying that if you're in the business of making pharmaceuticals, in the current business environment, you're probably screwed, and it's going to be a lawyer doing the screwing, not the government.