Sure, but some things are more poisonous than others, no? Or do you like to eat sodium cyanide for fun?

BTW, I looked at that article you linked to. By no means was I suggesting that it would be a good idea to have a kid drink a whole bottle of lugol’s. That would be insane. On the other hand, the occasional drop in their fruit juice is probably a good idea. Unless you’re treating a diagnosed defficiency (which people suffering from thyroid diseases often have), it’s a safe bet to keep the dosage below the average Japanese diet, which is 1 to 3 milligrams per day. My kids get substantially less than that.

See “http://www.mastersofdentistry.net/why-choose-mod/health-prevention/“ for a suggestion about use of iodine in place of flouride for tooth hardening.

I haven’t vetted this web page for accuracy against other sources, but the general themes jive with what I know: http://drsircus.com/medicine/iodine/iodine-dosages

Unless you’ve displaced iodine too much with other halides (which happens), the body doesn’t need much iodine intake, because it gets stored. If you’re low, then you might need high doses for a while. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/06/29/iodine-deficiency-risk.aspx

I can’t address all of your misinformation. However, it is well known, for instance, that bromine displaces iodine in the thyroid. They’re both halides, and bromine acts therefore as an endocrine disruptor, inhibiting proper thyroid function. It’s also linked with thyroid cancer (indirectly at least, because low iodine is linked with thyroid cancer). SO, if you want to keep your thyroid healthy, don’t consume bromides.

Fluorides have a similar effect, actually. It too is a halide and displaces iodine. What about chlorine, you say? Chlorine (or several chloride compounds anyway; we’re talking about bound forms of all of these chemicals) is another essential element used by the body, so there is no conflict there (although I can’t say what happens if you get them out of balance).

If you don’t care about your thyroid function, that’s fine. But people with Grave’s, Hashimoto’s, auto-immune thyroiditis, and various other such diseases DO care about that and DON’T appreciate these contaminants exascerbating and/or causing their trouble. But maybe you only give a crap about your own health (or maybe not even that?).

You didn’t address the mercury in fish or arsenic in rice. Convenient that you left those out? Oh, and the carcinogenic flame retardant.

As for BPA, allow me to quote wikipedia (which you should have looked at before responding): Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor that can mimic estrogen and has been shown to cause negative health effects in animal studies.

High doses: For iodone, a high dose would be MANY times the RDA, but well within safe limits. See "http://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/“. The RDA depends on your condition (e.g. pregnant) and ranges from 150 to about 300 micrograms. However, regular doses of 12.5 milligrams are completely safe, and some people with thyroid diseases are recommended to take up to 50 milligrams/day for a while to treat a defficiency. The average Japanese diet brings in 1 to 3 milligrams per day from edible seaweed. Extreme doses *much higher than I’m talking about) are at risk primarily of disrupting thyroid function (differently from a deficiency, of course).

As for teeth, instead of getting fluoroapatite (Ca5(PO4)3F), you get iodoapatite (Ca5(PO4)3I). Basic chemistry. Go learn some.

Of course, you’re one of those conspiracy people, but like backwards or something. You think some people just want to make things more expensive or inconvenient. Are the commies trying to disrupt our economy by suggesting we don’t use chemicals with known health effects? There’s also not a conspiracy the other way either. These contaminants are not in our food and water because some people are conspiring to hurt us. Free-market factors have given rise to cost-effective solutions to problems, some of which we have subsequenty determined to be unhealthy. The main problem is that people are cheap and ignorant.

Clarification: You can safely consume iodone in dosages several times the RDA with no negative effect. Instead of “high”, perhaps I should have said “a few times normal.”

You’re kidding right? Instead of fluoroapatite (Ca5(PO4)3F), you get iodoapatite (Ca5(PO4)3I).

Let’s see rising levels of mercury in fish, arsenic in rice, methylbromide in bread, adding fluoride [*] to drinking water ON PURPOSE, BPA in plastic food containers, volatile PBDE flame retardant in yout furniture, VCOs in your paint and building materials, trans fats. I can go on and on and on.

Besides eating a diet excessively high in carbs and low in other nutrients, we’re poisoning the shit out of ourselves. And you’re surprised that some people aren’t handling it well?

[*] Fluoridation is controvercial, the target of commie conspiracy theories, etc. In reality, it’s shown to have a substantial positive impact on tooth development in children, it’s dirt cheap, and kills many pathogens in water. However, it’s also strongly linked with lowered IQs and thyroid disease. It’s basically poison. If you’re smart, you’ll get a fluoride filter for your water and give your kids high doses of iodine instead, which has the same effect on teeth, the same disinfectant properties, and is an essential mineral.

If Russia are not doing anything nefarious, why should they worry about what spies might discover? :)

In all seriousness, while it’s nice that NSA spying on US citizens has been exposed, it’s NOT good that so many US state secrets were revealed in the process. Contrary to what some lunatics would like to tell you, there ARE external threats that face America and the American people. You can’t run proper defensive operations if all of your strategies are visible to the enemy. I’m not sure that Edward Snowden realized just how much damage he was going to cause. And I’m not sure that the benefits necessarily outweigh the costs in this case. That being said, if the whistle-blower laws had provided contractors with a safe avenue for reporting legal violations, Snowden may have had the option to blow the whistle WITHOUT fucking with US national security.

Someone should mod up the AC’s comment.

The fly’s brain is not doing calculus (or rather, differential equations). It’s a neural net that has evolved to respond to stimulus in a way that appears like what we’d use diff-eq for. Within certain bounds of range and accuracy, we can make artificial neural nets do this. So why is it surprising that meatware that evolved over millions of years can do the same thing?

In fact, there are so many O(N**2) algorithms that they can parallelize that there’s really no excuse for continuing to use the ones that have O(n log n) versions. Yet they keep doing it! Why does everybody keep using O(n**2) n-body and shortest path algorithms? That you can parallelize those teaches us nothing about parallelizing algorithms unless all you care to do is benchmark the supercomputer (in which case there should be an appropriate footnote). This is just laziness.

It’s wrong to publish fabricated or falsified results, and people who do that should be slammed. There are other situations where people are being neglegent or hoping you don’t catch their slight of hand. For instance, there are the innumerable parallel computing papers that use O(N^2) algorithms to show a speedup on a GPU or supercomputer where there exists a serial O(log N) algorithm that runs faster on a PC. (No joke.) All of those sorts of things should be actively retracted.

However, what we don’t want to do is discourage publication of preliminary results that MIGHT be wrong. Honest, legitimate work that gets superceded should not be subject to retraction, and a wrong theory published can often inspire others to do a better job. When a researcher can say, “That was our best hypothesis at the time, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data,” then it should stand as a legitimate publication. Relativity and quantum mechanics supercede Newtonian physics, but that doesn’t mean we should retract everything Newton said.

Now, most people reading this will say “duh!” Because that’s obvious. All I’m saying is that we need to be careful to not create an environment where publication of preliminary work is discouraged in any way or where honest mistakes can hurt the career of an honest researcher. That would put a damper on science in general. The bar for retraction should be very high and require solid evidence of intentional wrongdoing.

There’s this one opponent to common core that made a presentation based entirely on quotes from people who originally contributed to and supported common core: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF16la1IiGI”. Originally it seemed like a good idea, but the cirricula kept getting watered down so badly that students wouldn’t leave high school with enough education to get into college. There are those who like to suggest that common core is now only about indoctrinating students with {liberal | conservative} ideas. I don’t know enough about that. But if you can’t do basic algebra when you leave high school, you’re in trouble.

This “no child left behind” idea has only resulted in the general cirriculim being dumbed down. You can’t fail anyone, so you have to teach something so lame that any idiot can do it, and then even the smart kids don’t learn anything.

I think there are some bird species with super efficient ATP generation due to superior mitochondria. I’d love to be able to replace all of mine with theirs.

Actually, it’s also time to not forget that many of the microorganisms living in our body are yeast as well, not just bacteria.

I currently work as a CS professor, but I still do some tele-consulting for a company I used to work for full time. Because I do tops 8 hours/week, I now consult under someone who used to be my subordinate while I was there. That may sound awkward, but it isn’t. My supervisor has a CS degree but his engineering skills aren’t rockstar, so he gravitated to organization and leadership roles, and that was precisely the best thing for him. I find him very easy to work with because he is technical enough that I can communicate with him, he listens to what I say, and because he manages me at exactly whatever level I need for any given task. If I’m having trouble keeping track of what I need to do (because it’s easy to lose track when I work for him once a week and have a whole other day job to do), he’s right on top of it. If I have a really clear idea of what I need to do, he gives me space and is available to answer questions, discuss strategy, etc. I’m used to being the babysitter, keeping junior engineers and grad students from getting off track. This guy does that for me, but he does it in a way that isn’t awkward at all; in fact, he makes me feel respected for the work I do. (Incidentally, he also directs an engineer that used to be an owner of said company before it was sold, and they have a very good working relationship as well.)

My point is that the technical skill of the manager is only somewhat important. Even more important is people skill and the ability to keep track of all the high and low-level details necessary to keep employees on track. You don’t have to know all the implementation details in order to maintain a clear vision of what everyone is trying to accomplish and help them get the resources to do it. In the most successful companies, “managers” spend little time “directing.” Instead, they primarily work to serve the needs of their subordinates, insulating them from company politics and ensuring that the engineers have all the tools and support they need to work effectively without distraction.