Sweden has no oil, but is as rich as Norway.

Saudi Arabia has lots of oil, has nothing like the economy or standard of living of Norway.

Is it worth it to save on that?

I find, as you do, that generally the cost of things made in EU/US are double that of things made in Asia, but I still try and buy Western. It's not a matter of nationalism, or perceived quality, but a conscious decision to ensure things I own are made by people that have the assured quality of life that I would like for myself.

Yes the cost is double, but then I just buy less. And despite the occasional article (like this one) haranguing the options for buying Western, I have yet to be anything but spoiled for choice when trying to avoid exploitative manufacturing practises. Saving money without considering the moral issue is lazy.

(Although I would add that I personally find the rise of China to be a wonderful event, dragging millions of people out of poverty, I don't consider my avoidance of their goods to be something that will impede that rise).

Aluminium toxicity has been possible the most disproven causative theory in the history of science. A thousand studies, not a single piece of evidence.

Please stop spreading this snopes level bullshit.

due caution requires assuming that the same effects that occur at the larger scale (DNA damage by ionizing radiation leading to cancer, for example) are problematic at the smaller scale as well.

That research is well and truly done, You can read about it if you search for the term 'Heat shock". The premise is you can shock a cell with a slight heat increase, and then hit it again with a heat increase that would kill the cell had it not been prepared by the initial benign heat shock. This effect also transfers across different types of shock, so you can hit the cell with a small heat shock and it will subsequently survive what would have been a lethal UV exposure, or mechanical stress and so on. This is due to the upregulation of shock proteins, called Heat shock proteins due to their method of discovery but they are obviously more general than that.

Nokia has seen Apple and Google jump in on the high-end, taking almost all of the high-profit margin of the market. On the low-end they're going to be increasingly attacked by Chinese firms pumping out phones that are good enough to use, and cheaper than Nokia can make them. They can only try and regain some market share from Google/Apple and there is no way Symbian was ever going to do that. It's a dead OS in terms of mindshare. I think the hardware looks great (The new E9 is stunning) but they need to change OS.

Maemo has been fun but never got any focus from Nokia, and it looks like Meego is being aborted. It was either teaming up with MS or turning to Android.

This fucking sucks though, I have been waiting for a decent maemo phone for ages, ignoring the N900 because of the USB port issues. The hand-me-down E51 I am using is starting to show its age though, so I guess it's a second hand N900 for me now. I can't see this ending well for Nokia. Did they learn nothing from the MS behaviour during the "plays for sure" debacle?

Especially when the N900 is made in Finland and the iphone is made by a vendor in China.

***Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts -- embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue -- from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum***

There are several problems here. I don't grow meat in the lab, but I have grown many types of cells, human heart, FSC, CHO and currently mouse keratinocytes, fibroblasts and skin stem cells. Forget about them long enough and you get your first little layer of meat on the bottom of the tissue flask. (As an aside, growing human heart cells is amazing, you can add adrenaline and they start to beat in sync).

The reason this will not currently work is the cost, it is in the media, which for eukaryotes requires FCS (usually) to grow. FCS is calf serum, you can read how it's made on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum). FCS costs money, comes from animals and can be a disease vector.

The answer in every article I've ever read from people growing meat is that serum free media will be designed so that eukaryotic cells will be able to live and grow without animal products. This is rubbish, if it was so easy to make a perfect 'defined' media (as a media without FCS is called), that works well with eukaryotic cells, all of us working with animal cell culturing would use it. It would be a far bigger breakthrough for the biotech and pharma industries than it would be for the meat makers. It would make the inventor rich and give them a Nobel.

Secondly you have running costs, people see the idea of growing meat in a vat as like growing beer in a vat. This is bullshit, beer is made from tough, resilient yeast. And beer manages to have QC problems.

Meat is made from eukaryotic cells, which are a lot more complex and a lot more sensitive than yeast. If you want to know what growing meat in a vat would be like, look at pharma, recombinant protein products. Stuff like Factor VIII. It's worth more than it's weight in gold. Contamination is a much bigger problem, media costs are higher and all hardware costs a ton.

Economies of scale would bring down prices, but not that much, it all just COSTS a lot. And the FCS problem will never be economy-of-scaled away. It's the elephant in the room that nobody in these stupid interviews ever mentions.

I've had less pleasant interactions. My first mac had some serious hardware issues that took some legal threats to get fixed despite it being only a month old.

A few years ago I convinced my SO to buy a macbook, she had to return it to Apple 14 times (!). Everything failed on it, screen, harddrive, DVD drive, graphics card, the case (splintering white plastic on the edges.

This continued until it went out of warranty, then they told her she was out of luck. Ultimately the third party shop she had bought through gave her a new macbook despite Apple refusing to consider the constant repairs as grounds for some kind of warranty extension.

She got Applecare on that and it seems to make some small difference in how they treat you when the increasingly shoddy hardware starts to break.

try a better martial art? I studied Muay Thai for around three years and found it rewarding and fun, but ultimately body-size is such a huge factor that the skills you learn don't compensate so much. Also injuries were common and painful. Now I study BJJ and find that even with my scant 2 years of experience I can literally play with people double my weight. No amount of strength can compensate for not knowing what to do in a new realm, the realm of grappling. I've had cause to use BJJ in one fight and handily controlled a guy who was throwing punches as fast as he could. As far as combat skills: I worked with "jocks" who came off the street with no previous martial arts experience and beat black-belts. Could I hazard a guess that this is TKD or Karate?

So I guess all the cities with large buildings or subway routes with total perfect coverage are just magical?