I got a $250 digital camera for $100 through what I figure was some sort of miscommunication in the marketing department. My best guess is that they wanted a 20% discount to draw people into the stores, but the memo was sent to too many people. Net result? Advertised price of $200, minus a $50 in-store rebate, minus a $50 mail-in rebate.

A diesel engine uses adiabatic compression to raise the air temperature enough to ignite the fuel. If the engine block is too cold, it absorbs some of that heat from the air, and the engine won't start. In this situation, glow plugs are used to warm up the portions of the engine block around the cylinders.

A 400x radiation dose over 5 weeks does not necessarily a long term 8x dose make, and Slashdotters are absolutely correct to call this out.

That sort of comparison is exactly what this study is calling out, too. You know how that "8x background = evacuation" threshold was developed? By measuring the effects of a short-term dose just low enough to avoid acute radiation poisoning, and assuming it's equivalent to a low-level long-term dose that provides as much total radiation. (It's called the "linear no-threshold model". Look it up.) You're correct to say that 120 millisieverts over the course of 5 weeks (the study dose) isn't equivalent to 1200 millisieverts over the course of 40 years (a long-term 8x dose), but 1000 millisieverts over the course of 30 seconds (a dose that won't quite trigger acute radiation poisoning) isn't equivalent to it either.

Mice may not live long, but genetic damage will still take the as long to occur in mice as in humans. The fact that humans live longer means the damage has longer to accumulate.

So while 5 weeks may be "20 years" for a mouse's life span, it's still only a miniscule fraction of a human's lifetime in terms of how long damage has been accumulating.

Humans have *much* stronger anti-cancer mechanisms than mice. A mouse in its natural environment will take about three years to accumulate enough unrepaired DNA damage to get cancer; a human takes about 60 years. Five weeks of an elevated dose for a mouse is equivalent to about two years for a human, assuming the linear no-threshold model (the model that's the basis for public policy).

4'6" is the lower end of normal for women from Southeast Asia. If you're going for a "general guideline" formula, it needs to cover at least 99% of the population, everything from the 4'6" woman from SE Asia to the 6'7" average North American basketball player.

(BMI falls down for tall people, as well: the average NBA forward is moderately overweight if you go by BMI.)

The article is about people coming in UNDER weight, and I've never seen any false-positives on that end.

You're looking at the wrong end of the height scale. Someone who's 4'6" would be considered "underweight" at 76 pounds, which is actually a healthy weight for someone that short.

You still think you know more than the doctors in the WHO and AMA who publish these BMI figures?

Yes. I, at least, am aware that weight increases as the cube of height, not the square. Consequently, BMI tends to give numbers that are too high for tall people, and too low for short people. As an extreme example, many professional basketball players would be considered "obese" based on their BMI numbers, but "normal weight" based on body-fat percentage.

(Actually, because of changing body shape, it's around the 2.7th power for humans, but 3 is a better approximation to that than 2.)

Because when something goes wrong in the breaker box, it's easier to pull the negatives out of the file and look at them with a flashlight than it is to find a neighbor who will let you plug your computer in.

Takeoff isn't very stressful on an aircraft. Touchdown can be, but the stresses are concentrated in specific areas, typically the strongest parts of the aircraft, so you can repair or replace them if needed. Pressurization stresses every single joint and opening in the fuselage. You can inspect and repair individual problem spots, but eventually, the only practical option is to replace the entire aircraft.

My parents did something like this once when buying a car. My father did all the talking, while my mother sat there with a Consumer Reports article on car-buying in one hand and a pen in the other, very visibly checking off the high-pressure sales tactics as they were used. It took about five minutes for the salesman to cave and give them the price they wanted.