Metallic mercury isn't good for you, but it's not terribly dangerous, as it's hard to get it into your system where it can screw with your nerves, liver, and kidneys. Methylated mercury will soak right through your skin and kill you right quick. As noted above, it'll go right through latex gloves, too.
I used to work in a silicon fab. Fun chemicals there included hydrofluoric acid, also a skin penetrant. Lethal dose is a couple ounces; I regularly worked with a bucket full of the stuff. The real entertaining one was the bottle of arsine gas: lethal levels are something like 6 parts per million and the level of detectability is 10 ppm.
I learned all kinds of entertaining stuff. Proper treatment for inhalation of sulfur hexafluoride gas? It's non-toxic, but heavier than air, so someone who breathes it in won't be able to breathe it back out once it settles to the bottom of their lungs. So what you do is drape them over a railing so the heavy gas flows out of them again....
Fragano @ 3:
That's exactly what I said when I heard the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore.
I was sort of hoping this would hold off until we had a competent administration. Oh well--interesting times.
Hell.
Best wishes for a speedy & complete recovery.
It's not Weimar Republic time yet. Zimbabwe is there, you bet.
One of the most interesting things I got out of my grandmother's stamp collection is a letter mailed in the Weimar Republic, in the late twenties. It has seventeen million Reichmarks of postage stuck on the front. When you hold that in your hand, you get a visceral feel for why fascists* can win elections.
I'm afraid things are going to get worse--a lot worse--before they get better.
*Real fascists, not the whiny spitbuckets we have in office currently.
Greg @10:
I like to let the opposition do my researching for me.
McCain has a 100% approval rating from the Christian Coalition, and there are some other fruit-bat organizations that love him long time. Dobson's Focus on the Family was the only one whining, and that was while Huckabee was still in the race. Dobson will be endorsing McCain after the first debate between the nominees.
What the Cheney administration always wanted in Iraq was a client government that was just strong enough to sign a binding contract (assigning development rights to oilfields, for example) but too weak to actually enforce the terms of it.
That's where the real money is. The assorted billions in war profiteering is more like the loose change in the sofa cushions.
Actions that appear irrational and disorganized make a little more sense when you realize there's several trillion dollars (at current commodity pricing) under Iraq. Lots more if we're really past the Hubbert peak.
I always use The Fountainhead to check on anyone who introduces themselves as a libertarian. I ask them if they take Rand's dating advice, too. If they get the joke and laugh, they're a human being I can deal with.
If they don't get it, I suspect psychopathology.
If there's another Al-Quaida attack on the US homeland with casualties>100, we will likely end up with a draft. If it happens before November 2008 and the casualty count is above 1000, we will wind up with another reactionary Republican administration, a draft, and war in the Middle East until we run out of money.
This concludes today's briefing on bin Laden's plans for the next year and a half.
Oh, please, Mr. Bell. We all know that the president will wake up if and when Cheney decides he will. Who do you think picked out his doctors, after all?
albatross @ 145
I've gotten rid of my TV, and don't really miss it much. There's stuff I'd like to see, but not enough to invite that enormous time-suck back into my house.
The visual noise of the CNN screen is designed to draw attention. Turn it on and look at something 90 degrees away--all that fidgeting stuff like the news crawl and the embedded window are an irritant in your peripheral vision, so you'll turn and look.
chris @ 144
I haven't given any money to WVTF because I don't think they're a very good radio station. I will probably donate directly to the programs whose production I care about. Morning Edition and All Things Considered have taken a considerable slide in the past couple of years.
bruce @ 147
A friend of mine was the news director for a local TV station in Flagstaff. She quit not too long after getting a phone call about an accident on the Interstate and her first question was, "Any fatalities?" She didn't care for the person she was turning into.
About ten years ago, there was a foofarah over an LA TV station that interreupted its afternoon children's programming to carry live coverage of suicidal person on a freeway. Broadcast footage included the man shooting himself in the head. The following week, Diane Rehm had the news director on her radio show talking about the decisions he had made. He closed the show with a statement I've been unable to forget, saying(more or less): "If the American people didn't want to see what I put on the air, I'd be unemployed in a week."
This statement bugged me for days, until I realized that it's the same arguement used by drug dealers and pornographers.
Remember how the TV market works? Your eyeballs are what they sell. Whatever keeps your eyeballs stuck to the tube is what they will broadcast. Titillation and arousal are both reliable and cheap.
Stephanie, thanks for your comment on use of databases wrt controlled substances. I don't think anyone here has a problem with catching criminals and preventing harmful drug interactions, but we've seen too many examples of government stupidity to want idiots poking about in our personal data.
On the depression subthread, the best description I ever heard for clinical depression was this: Imagine someone has replaced your brain with five pounds of roofing tar. You can still think anything you like, as long as it's black and sticky.
And lastly, in today's Cho news, it turns out that Virginia didn't bother to report his competency hearing (which would have placed him on the do-not-purchase list) to the feds. This concludes your lesson in the usefulness of security founded upon databases: garbage in, garbage out.
#5 Idiot gun-rights people opining that "if only there had been more armed people in the classrooms."
They were teenagers, you fools. Utterly ineligible, by federal law, to purchase handguns or apply for concealed-carry permits. We don't even trust them to buy beer.
Maybe he can sing the Internationale for the John Birch Society next.
Reportedly, the folks behind the Conservapedia are the Schafly family, whose most noted member is of course Phyllis.
So not a joke. Merely batshit insane.
From Theresa's particles, here's a photo of one of our marines.
Rot in hell, George Bush.
re: comment #20
Oh, Bush has plenty of political successes to put in an ad. It's just that none of them are the sort of things that will make actual voters go out and vote for Republicans.
Exxon/Mobil is worth a trillion dollars more than they were in 2000.
Larry Brennan:
You might want to check out these folks in Issaquah:
http://www.naturaldentist.com/
My wife swears by their work. Dr. Saepoff did a good job with an implant and a crown of mine.
The mid-eighties novel you're thinkin of is Timescape, by Greg Benford. Our physicist heroes create a time machine (text-only) to tell their past selves not to let a massive particle accelerator get turned on as it will create a swarm of micro-black holes that will eventually eat the planet. It did contain the entertaining word "bugophant"--the size of a bug, and the mass of an elephant.
Why on earth can't I remember stuff that would result in financial recompense?
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| 2008 | 6 |
| 2007 | 11 |
| 2006 | 5 |
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