Mercury is about as toxic as lead. Avoid eating it or breathing its vapor for long periods, and it's sensible to wear gloves handling it and wash afterward, but there's no need for panic - casual handling of mercury metal is not going to hurt you.

I'm with #13, passing token for single-track railway lines.

Q. What's the difference between a rottweiler and a social worker?

A. You can get your child back from a rottweiler.

My 11-year old son brought that joke home from school one day. Sadly, the UK social work industry has a history of snatching children for no good reason. Even the kids know it.

I've liked all Shyamalan's movies, some more than others, but all the endings suck. He really needs to resist the temptation to tie up all the loose ends. You can't be good at everything. He should stick to directing and let a more creative writer take care of the plot twists.

sensai, black please.

Progression

I was interested in this for a moment, until I clicked the link and found it was from the British Daily Mail. In any other country, this paper would be called a "supermarket tabloid". Witness Darren Stevens, from the Mail's own comment thread:

"Depending on what and who you read, Jesus was an alien, if indeed he existed at all. So was Moses. They were reptilian - check them out."

I rest my case.

Apart from the mercury fumes, mercury thiocyanate is a poison in its own right that can be absorbed just by skin contact. I hope they washed their hands after touching it. The common firework version is made of nitrated naphtha pitch, and doesn't contain any mercury.

What makes anyone think the People choose? US presidential elections have been managed at least since 1912. Sure the outcome eventually depends on the ballot, but there are managers who can control public opinion through the media. What seems to happen is the winner is chosen, then constrained to adopt the required special interest policy line by threats of support for their opponent. A good example would be the 1948 Truman-Dewey contest where, Truman being chosen but reluctant on some policy points, there was a blatant auction of special-interest influence, to the point that Dewey was sure he would win and was quite surprised to lose. Managing that election required someone to die. Go read about it.

In this year's contest - my opinion only, of course - Hillary was the chosen one, and the surge of grass roots support for Obama in the primaries was unexpected and problematic. Clinton's shocked sense of entitlement and reluctance to give up was quite understandable in the circumstances, but Obama couldn't be managed out of the way without the manipulation becoming public. So now he's being "encouraged" to toe the special interest line by the threat of the White House being handed to McCain. Personally I don't think there's much chance that will happen. I think it's been decided that the Dems should get the White House and JM's recent poll bounce is just to warn BA that he has to obey.

I'm sure this post will attract some disagreement. After all, if everyone knew how it worked, it wouldn't work any more. Trust me though, the candidates know how it works.

Helium is really difficult stuff to contain, because the molecules are so small they slip through the minutest cracks. "Major" in this case probably means a leak that would have contained air at 100psi for a century, and the amazing thing is they managed to make a structure of that size and complexity function for 10 days before they found one. I once worked in a place that made vacuum chambers, and we tested for leaks by pumping them down, puffing helium on the outside of the casing and seeing if any showed up inside. We didn't just find leaks in the welds, we found them in the middle of inch-thick stainless steel plates where the rolling process (at the steelworks) had left a molecular-sized crack.

It was an alien civilization experimenting with a proton supercollider that converted their entire solar system into strange matter.

I was sleeping (Pacific Time). My brother woke me up calling from a bar in Australia and told me to turn on the TV.

This is what happens when you have a lot of bank foreclosures. It happened in Britain at the end of the 1980s. People would hang out at the court and the moment a foreclosure order was made, they'd head off to the property with a truck and strip it of everything valuable. The former owner didn't care, and the new owner wouldn't find out until later. It happened with a house I had an interest in. I stopped by a few hours after the foreclosure and found water pouring out under the front door. Someone had ripped out all the plumbing - boiler, radiators, bath, sinks, even the toilets, without bothering to turn the water off.

After that went on for a few months the banks started negotiating with the homeowners instead of evicting them, as Wilde suggested above.

The biggest question in my mind about 9/11 is why certain people go to such pains to attack this particular "conspiracy theory". Why do they care so much? Why so much vituperation, such vicious ad-hominem attacks on people who question the official explanations? There have been numerous other "conspiracy theories" in the past century but only a few of them have drawn this kind of response. And these few have something in common, suppression of public debate about something that might influence the course of government policy in international affairs.

If I had to pick one thing to draw attention to in the referenced article, it's the very last word.

That's a very interesting article, especially this bit:

"the U.K. government was told by Europe's highest court, the European Court of Justice, to entirely refund Marks & Spencer Group Plc more than 20 years of sales duty charged on chocolate-covered tea cakes."

Since the tax was 17.5%, that's no trivial amount. But Marks & Spencer didn't actually PAY the tax - they just COLLECTED it from the customers and passed it on. So now they get to keep it? I suppose they deserve some reward for being one of the few organizations to impose a little humiliation on the UK's obnoxious tax collectors.