I've seen that people lie to me more often via text msg more often than via emails. Email seems more like an official documentation than text to most people, I guess even though both are logged and documented.

It doesn't matter whether your PhD certificate says Biology or Computer Science. The only things that people will care when they hire you after your PhD are your references, experience, skill set, and publications. I got my PhD from Scripps Inst. Oceanography and so my PhD paper says Oceanography, but for my PhD I worked on organic synthesis of naturally occurring medicinal compounds from the ocean. So I don't know anything about Oceanography. I'm an organic chemist. So I was hired as an organic chemist at another university.

People should also look at Pinguy OS as a Mint-alternative. It's my distro of choice at home at the moment. It is also an Ubuntu-based distro that is very polished and works "out of the box".

Oh I see, you got the story from the Wikipedia page. I never check Wikipedia for chemistry stuff... Anyway that's just an anecdote and I think my point still stands.

I only verbally heard about this from my colleagues, but I heard that it happened at one of the smaller startup biotech companies in Oregon and not at a college. So maybe we're talking about two different incidences? Having said that, since I only heard this verbally, I'm sure some of the details I heard or remember could be wrong.

Here's another piece of misinformation: elemental mercury is more dangerous than organic mercury compounds.

For instance, diethyl mercury is known to be one of the most dangerous neurotoxin known to mankind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylmercury). The consensus on the mechanism of action for this compound is that it's the oxidation state II mercury itself that is neurotoxic, but it's the alkyl groups that help it go across the blood-brain barrier. Look up the structure of thiomersal. It is an organic mercury compound that has an alkyl group directly on mercury, thereby giving access to the brain directly.

Similar compound, dimethyl mercury is also very notorious for its neurotoxicity. I do research in organic chemistry for living and a fellow organic chemist one time accidentally dropped a drop of Dimethyl mercury on her hand. It went through the gloves that she was wearing and onto her skin. Within several hours she was dead from what the doctors described in layman terms as "her brain melted". It is scary stuff. Some things about chemicals you don't necessarily have to do human clinical trial to predict that it'd be dangerous. If you have trained eyes you can just look at the chemical strcuture and predict its toxicity. However, as the good Book says, the love of money is a root of all evil. Once a big pharma company starts liking using a compound, they'll push for research that says it's safe even if it's not. That's just the way it is sadly.

I was wondering the same thing....

Yeah. in fact, I'd get rid of all the depts except for depts of State, Treasury, HHS, Defense, VA, and Transportation. I doubt that we'd notice any difference in our daily life without the other depts.

I am an organic chemist whose salary comes entirely from federal research grants (mainly from NIH). However, the same kind of money can come from many different federal depts. I do development of new cancer drugs. Believe it or not, I could get money for that from DoD (don't ask me why DoD have grant money for cancer drugs), NFS, or the state and not just from NIH. There are so much redundancy in the fed govt that just because DoE goes, it doesn't mean all of the research activities done through them will cease. Stuff done through USGS, etc could be done through DoD or other depts in place.

Less redundancy will mean less bureaucracy and less money wasted. Also it will mean that researches won't have to submit different forms of grant applications to different depts (this sucks up so much time!) and their research may become more efficient! These are the important details that average nay-sayers won't understand. Go Ron Paul!

This would be great! The OpenOffice document reader on Android currently ignores most of the formatting that I need to be able to read documents correctly. So it's not usable except when I'm desperate

What applications do you need? Do you need some special programs like CAD, etc? That's an importance of piece of info we need before we can recommend either way. For that matter, what are the main uses of your computer?