links

* Characteristics of successful PhD students
* Emirates to block Blackberry data due to BB's use of strong encryption, so the state can't monitor.
* Indiana hospital refuses to treat a transgender patient who was coughing up blood
* Books to read after you've read 1491.
* Open-source textbooks
* Blackbeard tampons. May need DeviantArt membership to see because it's "mature".
* Is the Italian economy too Italian? E.g. too suspicious of government, too focused on family owned bespoke businesses, for growth?

Eeebuntu 4.0 may have critical wi-fi problems, but it's getting like 7 hours of battery life on powersave mode, vs. 5, and it's feeling snappy as it does so. I suppose not using Wi-Fi might be part of why it's getting long life, but that wouldn't explain Firefox being snappy. Of course, I don't know whether to thank Eeebuntu or Firefox 3.6.8.

James and Randy: minimum civ size and medicines

Regarding some recent threads[1] on their LJs, and Stross's blog, about how few people you need to maintain modern or early modern civilization, I ran across this today
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Medicines
Kind of long. Even if one choose to amateurishly prune the list (does a society need aspirin and ibuprofen, or all that many antiseptics?) there's still a whole lot of *categories*. Of course, a good chemist can make more than one drug. Still, I wonder about the expertise and capital to make all those efficiently and safely.

I'm not up for presenting a good list right now, but something like
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/2535169.html?thread=47185153#t47185153
later thread, space colonization
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/2550738.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html

I so don't have ready-made tags for this post.