On an interesting sidenote, the reason that you aren’t supposed to feed babies honey is because the honey contains spores for clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that creates botulin toxin. Adult’s immune systems can easily fight off the bacteria, and the toxin is also easily denatured with heat.
[quote]Drive wrote:
MrChill wrote:
Botulinum toxin is the most poisonous substance known.6-7 A single gram of crystalline toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, would kill more than 1 million people, although technical factors would make such dissemination difficult.
Wikipedia differs, closer to what I learned in microbiology:
It is possibly the most acutely toxic substance known, with a lethal dose of about 200-300 pg/kg, meaning that somewhat over a hundred grams could kill every human on earth (for perspective, the rat poison Strychnine, often described as highly toxic, has an LD50 of 1 mg/kg, or 1 billion pg/kg).
We have a hostage situation on Alcatraz…get me Stanley Goodspeed.[/quote]
Depending on how they (stakeholders) rank, the company can choose one of four strategies:
1- Deflect. Stakeholders with power but no passion should be deflected. Distract them, change the subject, or just wait them out until their attention wanders elsewhere.
2- Defeat. People with passion but no power, on the other hand, can be defeated. Sure they care, but can they do anything about it?
3- Dismiss. People with neither passion nor are easier still. Just dismiss them.
4- Defer. The one occasion when real reform is necessary is when dealing with people who have both high passion and high power. Those people are a force to reckon with, and the company will eventually have to defer to their demands, one way or another, to one extent or another.
[quote]calgarynewf wrote:
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
I’d love to know how this works. Wouldn’t it depend on perspective? For example which pole? Or if you mean around the sun, which solar pole?[/quote]
ROTATE VS. REVOLVE
A planet “rotates” on its axis and “revolves” around the sun.
CLOCKWISE DEPENDENCY ON PERSPECTIVE
It does depend on perspective, but I am pretty sure that looking at the planet from the north is considered the “default perspective”. On earth the sun appears to move from east to west, which means the earth rotates from west to east. West to east rotation is counter-clockwise from the perspective of the north pole. If the perspective were from the south pole, then the earth would rotate clockwise (which would contradict the statement that Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise). So the “default perspective” must be from the north pole.
It used to trouble me when people would describe things as rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise without specifying perspective. But eventually I accepted the conventional default perspectives: “from above”; “from the north”; “from the side with the writing or other stuff of interest on it”.
[quote]larryb wrote:
Chad Waterbury wrote:
Try this:
Extend all of your fingers and thumb as if you were signifying the number 5. Now, try to bend (flex) your pinky finger without moving your ring finger at all.
Can you do it?
I’ve never seen anyone do it, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who can.
Easy for me, probably because of all the typing I do. With the left pinky, I have to cheat by pulling back a little, if you know what I mean. For a computer programmer, the right pinky gets a good workout - ;:'"{}=+?/ .
[/quote]
I work as a programmer-analyst, and I hit those keys fairly often, but I usually (not always) hit them with my right ring finger. I usually hit the “pinky” keys with my ring finger, except that I usually hit the key with my index finger.
I probably shouldn’t mention it on this forum. A real “T”-man would use the right finger for each key.
