I occasionally go two months without opening my front door. I use my garage door as an ersatz front door.

"Parietal Cell Antibodies" was the test. Was going to the GP to discuss lack of energy. Went to the Dermatologist to discuss Vitiligo. Dermatologist doesn't care about Parietal Cell Antibodies, just knows that autoimmune diseases are weakly related to B12 deficency related to IF and Parietal cell destruction. GP ended up referring to gastroenterologist, and starting B12 shots.

It's a unique situation in being a pretty clear-cut, but the blood test was directly related to a life threatening disease. The results were fairly easy to interpret with 20 minutes on Google. That, surely, isn't the case with many other tests. /frank

No, it's like a car mechanic who says "take it to the scrap heap" when he finds that the frame is swiss cheesed with rust, the body is mostly bondo hiding the rusted out panels, the wiring is failing, and the engine burns a quart of oil every hundred miles. The professional recognizes that there is nothing to save - the car's life is over.

One advantage the car has is that a zealot could indeed still rebuild it - even if the only thing left is the VIN plate. We don't have that option for the human body yet - we can replace some pieces as long as others are healthy, but we can't do the equivalent of a frame-off restoration when all the major systems are shot. And certainly there is at least one organ which is irreplaceable.

Not really.

Science requires an explanation that doesn't involve "Magic". In fact, you could say that the entire purpose of science is to debunk magic ("Q:Why does this stick burn? A: Magic), and replace it with well-understood and tested principles. In my opinion, no scientist is more alive than when existing well-understood and tested principles are overturned - see heliocentrism, relativity, quantum mechanics, dark matter/energy. A student who critically studied evolution and was able to overturn it, within the principles of science, would be celebrated as Copernicus, Einstein, Heisenberg, or whoever formulates an answer to dark energy or matter.

Creationism, however, is completely outside the principles of science. Its fundamental principle is that "magic" - whether Yahweh, Jehovah, Zeus, Thetans, or name-your-favorite-god - created man through an unknown and unknowable process, ranging from "in his own image" to "sneezed and set in motion the entirety of the cosmos with the intended end result of creating Man".

Questions of "how" or "why" end up at "because "magic" made it so". Sure you can push back the edges - "Why is the universe expanding?" "Because "magic" made it so" - but at it's heart, it's either anti-science ("here are questions you cannot ask

I live in Phoenix. The only solar hot water heaters you see around here were put up 20 years ago when the politicians handed out rebates for installing them. Now, they're simply roof decorations. This, in an area where 20' of copper pipe on the roof is probably a good enough hot water heater 6 months of the year.

I have an electric hot water heater. The developer created a very nice niche for it - inside the air-conditioned portion of the house. So, any heat leakage from it needs to be carried away by my electric Air Conditioner.

I have an electric clothes dryer. In a very nice niche inside the air-conditioned portion of the house. So, for 8 months of the year, I use electricity to run the air conditioner to cool the air in my house, which then gets run into the dryer which uses a lot of electricity to heat it back up, and exhausts it outside - which draws more hot air back inside my house.

Don't talk to me about bizarre.

while you continue to subsidize the roads and bridges I drive on with your gasoline taxes.

That is how you intended to finish the sentence, isn't it?

Not in my house. Do you people really spend your time squirting or smearing that crap on you and your kids every time there's a minor skin injury? Do you really carry it with you every time you leave the house, in fear that you'll scratch yourself on a random bit of nature?

Reminds me of Douglas Adams' telephone sanitizers.

The last time I took a blood test to my GP (ordered by my dermatologist) she said "Hmm, I don't normally order that test. Let me go look it up and see what these results mean". The five minutes that she took to do the research, and the three minutes she took to explain it to me, were insufficient; five minutes more on my own with Google after the appointment gave me a much greater understanding of the result, the meaning, and the next steps.

So, yes, I do have the knowledge to do that. And the wisdom to get my results from the NIH, Scripps, Harvard, etc. medical websites rather than someplace frequented by watchers of Oprah and followers of Jenny McCarthy.

What test are you taking?
http://www.theranos.com/test-menu?ref=our_solution

Well, it looks like a few more than that:
http://www.theranos.com/test-menu?ref=our_solution

I didn't bother to count; maybe 200 in that list? Heavily tilted towards drug detection and STDs, but still a pretty good variety.

Why would I make an appointment with my doctor for 4 weeks from now, drive over, get a referral to a testing center, drive over, get stuck and drained, drive home, make another appointment for 4 weeks to get the results, drive over, and have someone read me results with no background info, when I could go to Walgreens, walk out with the results 10 minutes later, and spend 20 minutes on Google finding out what they really mean?

I would say that the fact that I can get results from Walgreens changes everything.

I don't know where you live, but in the US your comment would be simply wrong.

Having grown up in the LA basin in the 70's, and going back there on a regular basis now, I can safely say that there is significantly less air pollution now than there was then. Open dumping of toxic chemicals in places like the Stringfellow Acid Pits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringfellow_Acid_Pits) is no longer tolerated. Rivers are no longer used as open cesspools or convenient dumps for industrial chemical processes. Landfills are now designed to catch and remove all leachate.

I would guess that we release more CO2 these days than we did then, and due to coal-burning perhaps more mercury and radiation (although shutting down atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons certainly helped on the radiation front). But the environmental movements of the 60's and 70's were vastly more successful than your comment gives them credit for.

If you'd like to see the difference, visit any major US city and note the quantity and kinds of pollution you see. Then go visit any major Chinese city and do the same.

That has a very narrow window of opportunity - basically, from the time the machine is serviced (cash removed and added) until the next time it's serviced. As soon as the money counting room notices your counterfeit bill, countermeasures will begin to be developed. The machine will be replaced and sent for analysis, firmware will get reflashed, ports will get sealed up.

This is a great hack if your intent is to hire a large number of people to pass counterfeit bills at many machines in the same day, as a one-time hack. You could collect millions and pay out hundreds of thousands. Not a bad approach - but it requires a fairly large organization. Likelihood of long-term success (think not going to a federal PMITA prison (they have those in Europe, don't they?)): low.

Look, Obama isn't involved here. Congress is the legislative body(s). Until they pass a bill and send it to the White House, they haven't done their job.

If Obama is vetoing bill after bill, and Congress can't override, then it's time for the Congress and the White House to confer and compromise. That's not the case right now. If the Congress was doing their job, Obama would be just another asshole with an opinion (although, surely, an asshole with a "bully pulpit"). Placing responsibility for this mess on the President is simply another tactic by the lunatic fringe to deflect blame from their actions.

Like the Americans at IBM that spent a billion dollars building a useless air traffic control system (http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Processes/The-Ugly-History-of-Tool-Development-at-the-FAA/) ten years ago? Surely most of the team flew at one time or another, and didn't want planes running into each other....and they were still unable to make a usable system.

Well, you can run an ICE just fine by pouring gas down the intake manifold. When I was younger and stupider, I did that with my ancient Oldsmobile. Yes, it required a bit of subtlety, but not as much as you'd expect.

Carburetors got quite complex because people expected perfect engine response, at all throttle settings, at environmental conditions ranging from startup at 10,000 feet in the winter to running below sea level at 120 degrees F in the summer, and the government expected minimal emissions in all those situations. But, basic though inefficient operation can be accomplished with a straw and a gas reservoir.