Declan admits during the standoff in his desert that his product is only about 60% pure, vs. Walt's >99% pure product. That's a big spread. If everyone else is cooking a 96% pure product, Walt's >99% pure product is not that big a marginal advantage. But if the difference is 60% vs. >99%, and you have to rob a train to get more methylamine, Walt's skills are very valuable. Purity isn't the only reason Walter's product is valuable to big time drug dealers, though. He invented a methylamine cook, which has other advantages over the pseudoephedrine cook that the competition is using. (The characters talk about "bullshit pseudo cooks" a lot.) Walt's breakthrough has real life historical precedents. The book Methland talks about how chemical breakthroughs reshaped the economy and geography of the U.S. meth trade. Sometimes the game-changer was a higher yield, sometimes a less tightly controlled precursor, and so on. (Sorry if this comment is a duplicate, I'm not sure if my last attempt got lost, or went into moderation.)

I knew how it was pronounced. As long as people know how it's spelled, it's just a goofy Douglas Adams joke geared to the geeky seventh grader in all of us. But if you just say it without spelling it out, people get the wrong idea.

Bill, I think you'll need to add a new RSS, but this URL will automatically redirect to Big Think starting on Monday, so it should be easy. homunq, my current name has been a lot of fun over the years, but the blog has grown to the point where the name is becoming a liability. When I picked it, I never imagined that anyone would say it out loud. Now that I do radio and TV, it's a problem, because announcers don't want to say it on the air.

i) Because Weinberg's a brand name, ii) Because Scientology likes objective truth just fine when they want to blackmail someone. The "church" didn't promise to publish the report in full no matter what the conclusions. That's what true independence would look like. Weinberg gave them permission to bury the report. He gave them veto power over whatever he wrote. Of course, Scientology will keep bragging about the report and its famous editor no matter what they do with it. Ethically, I have a problem with any journalist doing anything to help Scientology because Scientology has fought an all-out war against journalism and free speech for decades. If you want to be a mercenary and sell your skills to the highest bidder, go into private intelligence work. Don't call yourself a journalist.

The Big Think has several bloggers, but they each have their own blogs. I'll be the only one writing for my blog. DJA suggested another Douglas Adams reference. "The Salmon of Doubt" (It's the title of the novel Adams was working on when he died. The Salmon of Doubt is a riff off the Celtic legend of the Salmon of Knowledge.)

Sadly, the name Majikthise became a problem when I started doing TV and radio because people get the wrong idea when they just hear it instead of seeing it spelled out. Also, it's awkward when I go to a bloggy event and someone yells, "Hey, Majkithise!" across a crowded bar.

I don't know anything about Weinberg's spiritual life, but I doubt he's a member. Sounds like he's valuable to them precisely because he's an outsider.

Naomi Klein's not a leftist? If not, what counts as the left? There just aren't many avowed socialist journalists on the national stage these days--at last not so you'd know from their reporting. David Simon is a proud socialist, and a kickass reporter, but I didn't list him because he's doing more artistic/creative stuff these days instead of straight journalism.

Read carefully. Giles said that the footage with her and O'Keefe dressed as a prostitute and a pimp, respectively, was just b-roll footage: “We never claimed that he went in with a pimp costume,” said Giles. “That was b-roll. It was purely b-roll. He was a pimp, I was a prostitute, and we were walking in front of government buildings to show how the government was whoring out the American people.” I read her as saying that the footage where she was dressed as a prostitute and O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp was all shot outside the ACORN offices.

I believe there's an earmark being written for that right now.

See, assman, it was a bad movie. Would you like to supply a catchy acronym for the XY couterpart to MPDG? We could use a good acronym for that.

I don't know if anyone is criminally liable for the luge tragedy, but VANOC and the IOCC and the International Luge Federation should never be allowed to live this down. They knew as far back as 2008 that the design of the track was putting racers at risk.

You're right, I had no idea how rare birthing centers were. This discussion has been a eye-opener. I just assumed that birthing centers were a standard thing nowadays. They seem like such an obviously good idea.

Car rides during labor sound very uncomfortable. According to family lore, my mom and dad did a lot of strategic downtown window shopping at the very end of her pregnancy to make sure she was near the hospital where her doctor worked. They lived about 45 minutes away, otherwise.

Nicole, when you say unassisted, what does that mean for you? No OB or midwife? What about friends/family/partner?

Thanks for all the comments, everyone. I appreciate it.

Not everyone who has homebirths distrusts medicine, though. Leah, you had a midwife and an OB both times, right? (Yay, Canadian health care system!)

The early anatomists weren't taking bodies from graves because they were terrible people. They were doing it because they needed to learn about the human body and there was no legal alternative. Every health care professional studies anatomy, including midwives. So midwifery benefited from these early investigations, too. MsAnon, that's really interesting what you said about how stealing bodies was a misdemeanor but stealing grave clothes was a hanging offense. Was that a backhanded strategy for decriminalizing autopsies? Or was there something else behind the policy.

Cool, thanks.

Ginmar, if you remember the title, please let us know. Sounds like a good book.

I'm not denying there have been horrible abuses in the name of medical research. I'm saying that it's classic logical fallacy to jump from that sad fact to the allegation that these two doctors must have sponsored mass murder.