Not really one of my favorite products, actually…

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From my inbox:



11 Comments

  1. gnaddrig said,

    October 23, 2012 @ 3:03 pm

    Now that is certainly a bargain. Apparently you can get 50mg Thiazovivin for $670. That is 13.4 cent per mg. The price in this special offer is 6.7 times higher. Do they charge for postage as well?

    This reminds me of a joke I heard in Russia in the early 90s, when the first nouveau riche learned how to spend real money:
    "How much did you pay for your watch?"
    "5,000 dollars."
    "What, are you crazy? I know a place where you could have spent twice as much for the same watch!"

  2. Theodore said,

    October 23, 2012 @ 3:45 pm

    I wonder what the effectiveness of mass email marketing is for something as specialized as human embryonic stem cell culture. Maybe they just figure the bemused scientist receiving the message will share the odd email with other kinds of scientists until the right kind sees the ad. What's the life-sciences equivalent to the Erdős number?

  3. Faldone said,

    October 23, 2012 @ 5:57 pm

    "…has been shown to dramatically improves survival …"???

    See?! Splitting infinitives can lead to ungrammatical results.

  4. David Morris said,

    October 23, 2012 @ 8:26 pm

    Would you say "has been shown dramatically to improve …"?

  5. Ellen K. said,

    October 23, 2012 @ 9:21 pm

    I think Faldone would say "…has been shown to dramatically improve survival…".

  6. Pete Schult said,

    October 24, 2012 @ 1:50 am

    It would be nice to have the agent in the "shown" action named (assuming that there actually is one), whether as the subject in an equivalent active voice form or the object in a "by" PP.

  7. Faldone said,

    October 24, 2012 @ 6:54 am

    Ellen K., yes. My comment was obscured by a gratuitous swipe at the zombie rule. If I were to unsplit the infinitive it would have been "… has been shown to improve survival dramatically …"

  8. Pete said,

    October 24, 2012 @ 7:35 am

    I think "careful writers" would prefer has been shown dramatically to improve survival over the much more natural has been shown to improve survival dramatically, because the former shows an infinitive that has been visibly unsplit.

  9. quixote said,

    October 24, 2012 @ 10:05 am

    (Off topic, I know.) Yes, but how dramatically was it shown? In three acts? Was there music and dancing?

  10. quixote said,

    October 24, 2012 @ 10:06 am

    And also, that "visibly unsplit." I love it.

  11. Eneri Rose said,

    October 26, 2012 @ 8:45 am

    I'm more interested in the h designation for the embryonic stem cells. While taking Human Anatomy & Physiology, I asked my professor why some hormones are specifically designated as human, such as hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin). As I recall, her explanation was that some hormones are virtually identical among several species, so we specify the version. Is this the same for ESCs?

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