Let me rephrase slightly--because the weak force very slightly distinguishes between matter and anti-matter, at very short ranges and very high energies, and because anything that makes a distinction can be expressed as a force in the quantum mechanical math, it is legitimate to say that there is a sort of force between matter and anti-matter.
However, if you're talking about chunks of matter and anti-matter, you're on a distance scale that's far larger than the range of this kind of weak force side effect. Like ten orders of magnitude larger.
#41: No, the chunks of iron and anti-iron would only be attracted by gravity. (Or, possibly, ferromagnetism, if either or both happened to have aligned magnetic domains.) In fact, anti-iron should have exactly the same material properties as iron.
In any case, there is no special force whose only operation is to attract particles to anti-particles and vice-versa.
Like Network Geek and Lee, I'm in Jersey Village (or as near to as makes no difference), and the models' shift eastward is good news for us.
I'm also pleased by the lack of intensification; the energy that would go into the storm is spreading the winds across a wider area, which is dissipatory; and larger winds churn up more water, and that means colder water, which means less energy for future intensification. So Ike may make landfall on the weak side of the predictions, which is good news for everyone inland. Unfortunately, the broad windfront makes the storm surge worse, which is bad news for everyone near the coast.
Evac traffic is starting to lock up the freeways pretty good, although not as bad as Rita. We're being told to shelter in place, which is exactly what we weren't told with Rita, which made a whole lot of people who had no reason to evac try to evac, which caused a great deal of hardship to people who really did have to evac.
Here's hoping for the best, and hoping that everyone is preparing for the worst.
Aren't all of the Republican ward bosses who are responsible for getting out the vote in their precincts "community organizers"?
#157: When my Ph.D. advisor was pregnant, she didn't fly in her third trimester. The reason cited was that there's greater radiation exposure at 30,000 feet (roughly similar to a chest x-ray, IIRC). Growing a fetus is a really complicated process, and it's happening really fast in the third trimester, and a whole lot can go wrong, and if you can avoid the chance that a stray 20 KeV electron will crack an important molecule somewhere, you really want to.
Presumably, various factors at other times reduce the chance that there are important molecules in the way of the radiation, and gives self-repair mechanisms more time to work.
(For your sodium evalution: We were doing an experiment at Fermilab, so we know considerable something about the radiation, but not so much about the biochemistry.)
Jim:
Why get someone holding c-spine before you ABC? I thought the only thing that had more priority than ABC was getting help rolling.
Suppose the patient is freaking out from pain, fear, confusion, and they're preventing us the lay-responders from treating them or they're risking exacerbating their injuries or they're risking compromising the treatment we've already begun. What do we do to calm/control the patient?
53:
As several have noted, the planet Bismoll did indeed draft its politicians.
It may be worth additionally noting that candidates for president of Earthgov were chosen by computer, prior to a democratic planetary election. In one such election, one candidate was an Indian political science graduate student who'd written an innovative paper on economic policy.
#58: There is some canonical evidence that the capital city of Bismoll is named Pepto.
This is, after all, the utopian science fiction universe that features a character named "Jo Nah" who'd gained superpowers after being swallowed by a space whale.
Jim @ 61, Xopher @ 65: there have been screwups is not passive at all. A passive construction is made with a form of be and a past participle (such as in this very sentence).
there have been screwups is a statement about the existence of screwups in a construction that indicates that the screwups are complete, that is, not on-going. It happens to omit the agent that screwed up, but that doesn't make it passive.
Existential statements are interesting cross-language. For example, a large class of languages lack a verb like have and imply possession with an existential statement. I have a pencil becomes There is a pencil.
It's also worth noting that, contrary to what folks were probably taught, there is the subject of there have been screwups. It's a dummy subject closely akin to the it in It's raining, but it behaves like every other subject in every other English sentence. Look at question inversion: Have there been screwups? Only subjects and auxiliaries invert like that.
I'm getting most of this from Language Log, and the Student's Introduction to English Grammar by Huddleston and Pullum, based on their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. If you're interested in what real English grammar looks like when you look at it like a scientist, the Student's Introduction is terrific.
If you're like me, you wondered how bridges got rated on what criteria: The FHWA's Bridge Rating System, under which the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis was apparently rated "Poor". (cite for rating.)
Personally, I would have lumped poor, serious, critical, imminent failure, and failure into a catchall category labeled something like "OMG fix right now", but then I don't have to answer to a budget committee.
Today's Thing I Did Not Know: spall. It is not surprising that we'd have a word to describe a particular category of failure evidence.
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