BBlasdel

The Federal Government is a massive institution made of up 2.1 million people. Congratulations, you have discovered that different people in it have different responsibilities and different mandates to give a shit about different things. This appears to be a question that is about something that is outside the mandate of the Federal employees that we have access to.

That does not mean that they don't give a damn, what it does mean is that they don't have the authority to meaningfully answer your question, and that they have done the right thing by not bullshitting you.

Could you respond to the criticisms your book has received related to why you never interviewed penetration testers who have experience in the electric generation/transmission sector?

Ted Koppel Writes Entire Book About How Hackers Will Take Down Our Electric Grid... And Never Spoke To Any Experts

I spend Lent without any alcohol, just to have an annual sense of whether I'm developing a physical dependence, and remind myself of how socially hard it is for people to go sober. I'm really glad you don't feel concerned.

That does sound like a habitual amount that could quickly cause really serious concern, but raw amounts aren't really what defines a problem. These questions form the diagnostic criteria for Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD):

AUD is a chronic relapsing brain disease characterized by compulsive alcohol use, loss of control over alcohol intake, and a negative emotional state when not using. An estimated 16 million people in the United States have AUD. Approximately 6.2 percent or 15.1 million adults in the United States ages 18 and older had AUD in 2015. This includes 9.8 million men and 5.3 million women. Adolescents can be diagnosed with AUD as well, and in 2015, an estimated 623,000 adolescents ages 12–17 had AUD. To be diagnosed with AUD, individuals must meet certain criteria outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Under DSM–5, the current version of the DSM, anyone meeting any two of the 11 criteria during the same 12-month period receives a diagnosis of AUD. The severity of AUD—mild, moderate, or severe—is based on the number of criteria met. To assess whether you or loved one may have AUD, here are some questions to ask. In the past year, have you:

• Had times when you ended up drinking more, or longer than you intended?
• More than once wanted to cut down or stop drinking, or tried to, but couldn’t?
• Spent a lot of time drinking? Or being sick or getting over the aftereffects?
• Experienced craving — a strong need, or urge, to drink?
• Found that drinking — or being sick from drinking — often interfered with taking care of your home or family? Or caused job troubles? Or school problems?
• Continued to drink even though it was causing trouble with your family or friends?
• Given up or cut back on activities that were important or interesting to you, or gave you pleasure, in order to drink?
• More than once gotten into situations while or after drinking that increased your chances of getting hurt (such as driving, swimming, using machinery, walking in a dangerous area, or having unsafe sex)?
• Continued to drink even though it was making you feel depressed or anxious or adding to another health problem? Or after having had a memory blackout?
• Had to drink much more than you once did to get the effect you want? Or found that your usual number of drinks had much less effect than before?
• Found that when the effects of alcohol were wearing off, you had withdrawal symptoms, such as trouble sleeping, shakiness, irritability, anxiety, depression, restlessness, nausea, or sweating? Or sensed things that were not there?

If you have any of these symptoms, your drinking may already be a cause for concern. The more symptoms you have, the more urgent the need for change. A health professional can conduct a formal assessment of your symptoms to see if AUD is present. However severe the problem may seem, most people with AUD can benefit from treatment. Unfortunately, less than 10 percent of them receive any treatment. Ultimately, receiving treatment can improve an individual’s chances of success in overcoming AUD.

Do two or more of these apply to you? You seem like a great guy and I hope you're ok. This industry can really fuck people up, and the pervasive culture of variably functional alcoholism is a lot of how.

I am a molecular microbiologist who works with phages that infect Pseudomonas, and I've got an answer for you, coliphage T1. For the most part phage desiccate and succumb to bleach like everything else, but T1 can infest a lab infestation in an existentially horrifying way.

T1 can be boiled bone dry into aerosolized dust, they don't care much about bleach, and these phage will fly. If you leave a plate with a lawn of sensitive E. coli out open on a bench in a contaminated lab they will fall into it. There are reports in the literature of whole labs (who for whatever reason couldn't use insensitive strains) going bust because they couldn't get rid of these things, with careers derailed and people soaking laminar flow hoods in FORMALDEHYDE in desperation. People who used to work with this thing could clean EVERYTHING, bathe their whole lab in bleach and UV and then when they'd get back to work a tiny contaminated speck of dust in the fan of their spectrophotometer would set them back to square one. However there were still plenty of people who actually willingly work with this, which leads to my favorite apocryphal T1 story from the late 60s.

The story goes that back in the day there was a lowly post-doc who was interested in studying the FhuA protein, which T1 uses as a receptor, using T1 mutants. The only problem was that the small field was dominated by this one old dude who had a big collection of expanded host-range mutants that would be perfect and difficult to recreate, but was infamously curmudgeoney about sharing them. The community thought this was, if not rude, certainly self defeating, but they were his mutants. So this post-doc figures that he could either spend a year making the mutant he needed or somehow get it from this guy, and he came up with a beautifully brilliant plan. He decided to write the dude a snail mail letter, even though by this point that was a bit odd, asking him for the strain knowing exactly what would happen. The guy then writes back a hostile, mean, dismissive and generally unkind letter back to the post-doc telling him, essentially, to fuck off and let him monopolize the work. So as soon as the letter comes in to the department mail, the post-doc comes down with gloves, reads the letter briefly to confirm what it said, cuts it up and then soaks it in phage buffer. In the end he was able to isolate the strain he needed from the phage buffer by plating it on the host it was expanded onto, and then was able to publish nice papers based on what he wanted to do, while everyone just laughed at the old curmudgeon.