There is also the point that the dangers of Bisphenol-A are so incredibly minute as to be largely insignficant. Everybody posting here probably grew up with plastic containing bisphenol-A including plastic cups etc. Compared to any of the others items on the gawker list or any actual dangerous items, the inclusion of playmobil stuff as dangerous due to the normal BPA content in some plastics is pretty much absurd.

AFAIK, it is illegal to possess an Erlenmeyer Flask in Texas without a license.

And of course the statistics doesn't sit well with actual researchers either. Just look at the recent scandals involving psychology research.

I saw this problem in school. One of the clinic project teams was given a 1/10 scale or so model of the piping in a copper smelter. They did a semester of research before somebody figured out that Reynolds number did not scale properly for the model. Different Reynolds number meant different flow characteristics and thus a model providing useless results. The project had to be cancelled.

I never had any trouble looking up where the location of the local FedEx Ground office was. I've also never had a problem with the hours. I think I was in there at 10:00PM on Christmas Eve a couple years back trying to locate half a dozen boxes of Hazardous Materials that were shipped to my business address when I was out.

I've had the reverse. The FedEx Ground guy knows I'm not always at my office and if he doesn't see me, he will call me and wait for me to drive over and sign for the package. That saved me many times.

Ahhh. . . In most cases, even using the approved zeroizing procedure only reduces the classification by one level. DOD also requires the use of approved zeroizing software to get that reduction. DBAN was not approved last time I checked. Important stuff must be physically destroyed; usually by an approved destruction facility that sands the magnetic layer off of the drive platters and reduces it to dust.

I went to a class on Federal Contracts and we were taught that only about 15% of contracts are really open for competition. The rest are wired for the incumbent and surviving in the industry is based on identifying which contracts are wired and not bothering to bid on them.

The reason nuclear weapons are under DOE instead of DOD is that we probably wouldn't have them if DOD had been left to develop them. The security cultures of the organizations are very different. DOE operates under an open culture where the smart folks are allowed to see most all of the information except for select areas which are very compartmentalized. The DOD works by trying to keep everything on a need to know basis resulting in mass duplication of effort and the people capable of solving a problem typically not being allowed to do so.

The scientists on the Manhattan project largely prevented the paranoid security culture from slowing their work during the second world war. Once the bomb was developed and the affair no longer results-oriented, General Leslie Groves pulled Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance because Military culture was incapable of handling someone whose ideology did not fit with their own. Why they never pulled Edward Teller's clearance is a mystery but I suspect it is because Teller was still needed in H-bomb development. Even in his later years, Teller, in a speech he gave to a group I was in, said that the security rules at DOE were a bunch of bunk. Some old DOE hands at the speech said this was one of the first time they heard Teller mutter at the end that the security rules also must be followed (around 1992).

DOE has some great programs but now that it has been run by defense contractors for the most part rather than University of California, for the last 5 or 10 years, DOE is a much poorer place and bound to be plagued by the same inefficiencies that DOD is. A large group of scientists openly sharing information in what was definitely a collegial setting in the late 1990's is almost certainly being replaced by DOD type folks with a bunker mentality.

For me, the DOE should probably should remain doing energy research and the weapons function could be transferred to DOD. Unfortunately, most of the technical capabilities in the national labs are based on having gold plated everything and top rate people trained to produce and analyze anything, especially the odd kinds of things encountered designing nuclear weapons. Budgets are such that most of these facilities probably could not be maintained for peaceful work if all of the equipment, supplies and technicians weren't being paid for from a bottomless defense budget. If all the nuclear weapon budget at DOD went away, there is a good chance that the useful civilian science would also stop unless a large amount of funding was added to civilian science programs to make up for the lost support of the first rate infrastructure.

Clevo is a Taiwanese Manufacturer of High End Laptops. I do visualization research and use a 6 core Clevo laptop with a quadro card because it was 6 months ahead of Dell offering a similarly capable machine.

I'm in firefox 5 in Linux and had no problem with the app except that the contrast on the pictures was so poor that I had to open them in GIMP and adjust the levels to even see markings on the scroll. 10 times the resolution would be needed for me to make much more of it than dark outlines of scrolls.

Take a look at Aspen Aerogels. They make an apparently cost effective aerogel building insulation. They also make variants for use as high efficiency furnace insulation.

I was googling for Baez's crackpot scale and I found a fascinating paper by Greunberger at the Rand corporation based on a discussion he had with Nobel Laureate Richard Hamming on crackpots. It's a more serious crackpot detection paper and it's excellent reading. http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2006/P2678.pdf If schools taught the contents of this paper, critical thinking skills would be improved.

Just goes to show that women are not a Linear Time Invariant System.

Not all liberal arts colleges are the same. I went to Harvey Mudd College which bills itself as the liberal arts college of science and engineering. I can still recite a lot of Chaucer and Shakespeare. By the same token, HMC was listed in Money Magazine as having the most financially valuable Bachelors degree in America. See: http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/22/pf/college/highest_paying_college_majors/index.htm?hpt=T2 Studying humanities as well as engineering allowed me to relate better to human events and command a knowledge of history and mathematics that I have found isn't shared with other engineers I know. Despite having only a bachelors degree, I now do research work in image processing which is on the verge of being commercially licensed. I didn't even study image processing in college: I taught myself.