Cadmium is very toxic. Welding on cad-plated materials (usually the plating looks somewhat yellow) is very bad news.

Also (I believe) because kids' brains and CNS are developing as they grow ... heavy metals like lead and mercury are especially bad for neuronal tissue, which is why they're so dangerous for kids and pregnant women.

Yep, Preston also wrote another riveting New Yorker article about what they thought was an outbreak of Ebola zaire at a research primate quarantine facility just outside Washington, D.C. in 1989.

US Army doctors had to sneak into the facility in spacesuits, under the cover of darkness (so as not to panic residents), to euthanize hundreds of Ebola-infected monkeys (without panicking the monkeys and without getting bitten), bag up their corpses in biocontainment Level 4 bags, and then hermetically seal and slag the entire building with formaldehyde gas. After it was all over, it turned out that >!the macaques had a type of Ebola that didn't harm humans...the virus was eventually named Ebola reston after the town by the same name in Virginia...but talk about major pucker factor while it was all underway...!<

Preston was often an incredibly lyrical writer IMHO. At the end of the article about the Reston events, he recounts visiting the Primate Quarantine Unit some years after the crisis was over. Here he is:

>I walked along the back wall of the former monkey house until I came to a window. Inside the building, climbing vines had rioted, and had pressed themselves against the inside of the glass. The vine was Tartarian honeysuckle, a weed that grows in waste places and abandoned ground. I couldn’t see through the leaves into the former hot zone. I walked around to the side of the building, and found another glass door, beribboned with tape. I pressed my nose against the glass and cupped my hands around my eyes, and saw a bucket smeared with a dry brown crust. It looked like monkey excrement. I guessed that it had been stirred with Clorox. A spider had strung a web between a wall and the bucket of shit, and had dropped husks of flies and yellow jackets on the floor. Ebola had risen in these rooms, flashed its colors, replicated, and subsided into the forest.

> There’s a book called Biohazard by Ken Alibek

I read about him in a New Yorker article by Richard Preston entitled "The Bioweaponeers" where Alibek described leading the Russian germ-warfare lab Biopreparat (with 32,000 scientists and staff), trying to create "chimera" viruses combining the traits of anthrax, smallpox, ebola, etc. "Ebolapox" (one of the viruses Alibek believed they were working on) sounds devastating. Pretty chilling stuff and worthwhile reading.

Excerpt from that (1998) article:

> More recently, Alibek claims, the Vector researchers may have created a recombinant Ebola-smallpox chimera. One could call it Ebolapox. Ebola virus uses the molecule RNA for its genetic code, whereas smallpox uses DNA. Alibek believes that the Russian researchers made a DNA copy of the disease-causing parts of Ebola, then grafted them into smallpox. Alibek said he thinks that the Ebolapox virus is stable -- that is, that it will replicate successfully in a test tube or in animals -- which means that, once created, Ebolapox will live forever in a laboratory, and will not uncreate itself. Thus a new form of life may have been brought into the world.

> "The Ebolapox could produce the form of smallpox called blackpox," Alibek says. Blackpox, sometimes known as hemorrhagic smallpox, is the most severe type of smallpox disease. In a blackpox infection, the skin does not develop blisters. Instead, the skin becomes dark all over. Blood vessels leak, resulting in severe internal hemorrhaging. Blackpox is invariably fatal. "As a weapon, the Ebolapox would give the hemorrhages and high mortality rate of Ebola virus, which would give you a blackpox, plus the very high contagiousness of smallpox," Alibek said.

> By definition selective breeding is a form of genetic modification.

Since animals "select" their mates, in many cases based on the mother or father's (heritable) fitness to birth and rear offspring, I guess that means "genetic modification" is as old as sexual reproduction.

That's why they call # "the pound sign" in telephone menu systems, etc.

"Be vewwy, vewwy quiet..."

...or is it, "Words are used for debate, and I can't debate worth a fuck, so I'm gonna try to ban words, demonize free expression (like advertising) and call people names"?

I find delusional parasitosis much more interesting. Can't ya just feel em crawling on your entire body?

I didn't read all 4000 words of the Wikipedia article, but I'm not sure I understand. Is the gist that "Tobacco is bad and was sold through advertising; therefore, anything sold through advertising is also bad"?

> God I fucking love this book.

I thought it was an almost impenetrable slog. I'd rather read DFW...and that's saying something!

Apparently both are way above my pay grade (or crank quotient).

Much of the loss of land in the area is due to subsidence. There's a huge bolide crater -- bigger than Rhode Island and deeper than the Grand Canyon -- to the south of Tangier, and all the land, from Tangier to Virginia Beach, is slowly sinking to fill in that crater. Add the subsidence to the sea level rise and you've got some serious rising damp.

Big vowel shift still present. "House" is pronounced "hice" (rhymes with "mice" or "lice")...and the number "four" is pronounced "far" (rhymes with "car") ... it takes a while to learn to understand it if you didn't grow up hearing it.

Apparently many of the original settlers were from the Cornwall area of SW England.

The colonial explorer John Smith (or possibly his doctor, Walter Russell, I forget) named the island after the same-named place in Morocco.

I'm guessing most redditors' parents weren't even born yet in 1979. Expecting them to know what happened in the '70s is like expecting them to know what happened in pre-sumerian Egypt.

Tuna LOVE scallop guts and we fish alongside scallop boats here...using scallop guts as bait...

> It implies that a ship "weighs" less if you put it in a huge vat of alcohol, as well.

Yep, since alcohol is less dense than water, a ship floating in alcohol will sit deeper in alcohol than in water. Water density varies with salinity and temperature, too, so they have different Plimsoll or "load lines" painted on ships to estimate their weight in tropical fresh water (TF), freshwater (F), tropical saltwater (TF), summer temperate seawater (S), winter temperate seawater (W) or Winter North Atlantic (WNA)...a ship of a given weight will sit much higher in WNA water than TF water...

You forgot to capitalize LITERALLY, junior.

(Do the CAPS mean it's figuratively LITERAL, or LITERALLY figurative? And why does LITERALLY every post have to include "LITERALLY"? It's almost as amazing as, well, AMAZING.)

> Tell me again how pronouns or whatever are the biggest threat facing society

Nice straw man, LOL.

As for what they teach in schools, that's state-sponsored speech. It's paid for by taxpayers, so taxpayers and parents ought to have a say in what their kids are being indoctrinated with, yes?

What if the shoe were on the other foot, and a bunch of right-wingers were indoctrinating kids in schools? Would you be such a fearlessly principled advocate of allowing them to tell your kids whatever they want?

Censoring/suppressing what ordinary people want to say -- on the Internet or anywhere else -- is completely different from state-sponsored, taxpayer-funded speech in schools, particularly when it's the state that's doing the suppressing/censoring of speech by ordinary citizens. But nice try.

And...who's gonna be the arbiter of what "truth" is "allowed" to see the light of day? LOL

Allow me to hazard a wild guess: You?

The intolerant censors, speech police and self-appointed magistrates of the Ministry of Truth in today's Left are the McCarthyites of the 21st century. Let us know how that works out for you.

Speech is bad! Words are hurtful! Somebody please protect us from all these terrifying IDEAS!!!

Transparent Mummy. Popular color for mixing skin tones in portraiture, along with "Lead White" (pigment is lead oxide) ... hard to get the actual, genuine items anymore.

> it will cut you in half.

It'll also cut through steel pipe like a plasma cutter.

Water carries a shitload of energy and erosion never sleeps!

Yes, but possibly on different dates, depending on the latitude and the orientation of the streets. (Manhattan's streets don't run exactly E-W but rather NW to SE.)

Actually, you can do it yourself with nothing more than a sewing needle soldered to a tin can. You have to shout into it pretty loud, though.