The return of the sanitarium and things like leper colonies could be in our futures.

And they'll be absolutely necessary. The infrastructure exists now. As an example, if you contract XDR tuberculosis you will be quarantined under orders from the CDC, by force if necessary, until the infection is cleared, which can currently be done reliably only with surgery.

I learned a few years back that higher cost doesn't necessarily equal high quality.

I'm narcoleptic. Sleep paralysis happens pretty often to me and it still causes me distress almost every time until I "boot up" enough to realize what is going on.

Hypnagogic hallucinations (at least that I remember) are quite a bit rarer and much more terrifying, since my brain pretty much dreams up the worst possible scenarios possible (burning building, demons, reapers, Sasquatch, being dead in a morgue drawer, and even evil leprechauns have made appearances).

Don't forget the alien strobe lights. Sorry now you are gonna see that too.

In all seriousness, wiggle your big toe. For some reason your fine motor controls are probably still online, and it will break you out of the hypnagogic state. Kill bill wasn't lying.

But... if you wanna real trip, try to remain calm, still and breathe deeply through the hallucinations and keep in mind that nothing can hurt you (I like to repeat the mantra, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself").

You will reach a state of blissful calm. Congratulations, you just achieved a meditative state that people strive for years to reach. From there you can have out of body experiences, transcendental meditation, etc. Seriously it's some spooky business.

For some odd reason, I don't really see flashing lights or anything extraterrestrial. I don't know why.

And wiggling my toes or fingers doesn't seem to ever work for me, but my phone buzzing or someone touching me breaks me out almost instantly.

As for the calm, "astral projecting" thing, I used to do some things like that and really enjoyed it, until I ended up "seeing" some jackal-headed monstrosity battling shadow people and something that looked like smoke with diamond shaped blazing yellow eyes.

If corporations are going to run the system, you might as well get some benefit from having a large one go to bat for you when you can.

Locks just keep an honest man honest.

If someone wants what you have bad enough, there really isn't anything you can do to stop them.

If my kid is talented enough to create a silicone-gel replica of my fingerprint in order to buy in-game merch, she's earned it.

>The ash is more radioactive than most nuclear waste is and there's a whole lot more of it to contain.

The question is if it's safer to be next to a nuclear meltdown or a burning coal plant, not whether portions of the waste of both plants during normal operations are more or less radioactive than each other.

It's not a burning coal plant that's the problem. A tsunami would spread the ash from the coal plant everywhere.

Heavy metals from the ash would be a lot more hazardous in the short term than the radiation unless you were standing on top of the reactor.

The only circumstances where you will burn a significant portion of muscle before fat is if you are eating a high fat diet with less than 30 grams of carbohydrates or protein per day.

If you are fasting or in nutritional ketosis, your brain still needs about 120 grams of glucose (or as low as 20 grams after it adapts to producing and using ketones for fuel). If you aren't getting the glucose it needs or ingesting carbohydrates that can be broken down into glucose, your body will begin gluconeogenesis, a process that turns amino acids (from the breakdown of protein) into glucose. If you are still consuming dietary protein, it will break this down first, but if you are not, it will get these amino acids from your muscles and other "lean" tissues.

Basically, if you are consuming an adequate amount of protein, it's pretty hard to lose muscle mass without losing a significant amount of fat.

I might not be right on the money that the body would burn muscle first, but I can say with certainty that drinking causes your muscles to degenerate: http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/277/2/E268

RE: the only circumstance -- I think sleep deprivation would do the trick, too.

Who is paying them and giving out assignments?

The dogs aren't purposefully trained to give false positives, that's just a side effect of how social dogs are. They want to please their handler and the handler gives them rewards.

It could be the dog trying to naturally please the cop, or the cop could have inadvertently trained the behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans), or the training may very well have been deliberate.

It would be damn hard to prove the last, but what is relatively easy to demonstrate is that dogs do give false signals that correspond to certain biases of the owners. Regardless of whether the last is true or not, the way we view detector dogs needs to be revisited in light of these clear biases. As it is, detector dogs seem to be barely better than dosing rods.

The handlers give the dogs false cues, obviously.

If a meteor hits, you have bigger issues than nuclear fallout, like tsunamis, earthquakes, vaporization of water for an ocean strike that leads to weeks of rain, dust from a land strike cooling the planet, etc.

It's all a question of size. A 1Mt impact outside a city would probably not be that bad unless it hit a nuclear power plant or other nasty target. Probably a 1 in 1+ trillion risk but if all your asking is what's the worst that can happen it's on the list.