Re: Toxoplasmosis
It's a parasite that uses feline intestinal tracts as a host and dispersal mechanism. Cat urine isn't going to be a vector, although it's got its own special characteristics and resemblance to toxic waste.
I didn't know that toxoplasmosis is tough on otters, but it can cause fetal death if the mother contracts it. In rodents, advanced toxoplasmosis causes the rodent to be attracted to, instead afraid of, the smell of cats. [1]
[1] This, and other fun facts about parasites are available in Scott Westerburg's novel Peeps
Nancy Lebovitz @ 30
Terry Karney can probably give you a better idea of how interrogation got civilized, but I'm pretty sure it worked like this:
1. You capture enemy soldiers. You know they have useful information.
2. Misleading or inaccurate information would be actively hazardous to your own troops, so you want to be confident of the results of your interrogation.
3. The enemy is also capturing your own soldiers, and the quality of treatment will probably be reciprocated. Also, you like to think of yourself as being civilized.
4. If you talk to enough prisoners, even the little bits they do know can add up to a useful picture, so you need enough interrogators feeding information to enough analysts.
5. Somewhere along the line, somebody realizes these are particular skill sets and shouldn't be handled by overworked stressed-out line troops.
Or I could be entirely wrong. It happens.
Ronit @ 35... Should we be checking the Potomac and Anacostia rivers for dragons?
We should be looking for slapstick orcs. Foolish hobgoblins are a consistency of little minds.
I blame Lawrence Watt-Evans for the joke. I blame my brain for remembering it.
The old-fashined lever-action voting machines? Why, they're old. If they're old, they cannot be good.
The real problem with big old lever operated machinery is that it's really expensive to acquire, really really expensive to maintain, and really really really expensive to individually configure for a voting precinct. They also require a lot of secure storage space between elections, and they're slow for vote tabulation.
Minneapolis saved a boatload of money about twelve years ago by shifting over to machine scanned paper ballots. Our elections go faster, disputes are fewer, and recounts are easier.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 2 |
| 2008 | 2 |
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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