yellowstone10

Word of God is that she was on heavy anti-anxiety meds at the time.

Couple questions inspired by Wikipedia's remark that Treacher Collins is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder...

• Do they know whether you got the gene from one of your parents, or was it a new mutation?

• How do you feel about having children, given that they would have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease (absent some sort of embryonic selection technology)?

Best way that I've seen this phrased:

Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.

This is a good place to explain why this happens. When you buy your ticket from Anchorage (ANC) to Las Vegas (LAS) via Seattle (SEA), the assumption most folks make is that you're buying a seat on a flight from ANC to SEA, plus a seat on a flight from SEA to LAS. That's not actually true. If you read the fine print, you're actually buying transportation from ANC to LAS. The stopover in SEA is completely irrelevant to the contract. If the airline wants to route you through Portland or San Francisco instead, they can do that.

As a result, pricing is determined by supply and demand between the origin and the destination. On the demand side, people are willing to spend more to get from ANC to SEA than they are to get from ANC to LAS - this may be because there's just more people wanting to get to SEA than LAS, or because SEA gets a lot of business traffic while LAS is visited mostly by price-conscious tourists. On the supply side of things, one must consider whether a route is served by competing airlines. For instance, flying from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale via Atlanta may be cheaper than flying to Atlanta only. That's because Delta is the only nonstop carrier on the PHL-ATL leg, but they're competing against US Airways on the trips to FLL (Delta goes via ATL, US Airways via Charlotte).

Anyway, the moral of the story is that if you get off in SEA and don't continue to LAS, you've broken your contract with the airline. You bought from them transportation from ANC to LAS, but instead you took transportation from ANC to SEA.

AKA the "Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness":

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned