November 03, 2016 at 04:35AM

Today I Learned: 1) A vote in the US is arguably worth thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands. How do you figure? Well, only something like half of the US votes. Say that's 150 million people. What are the odds that your vote is the swing vote that decides the election? Something like 1 in 150 million (it's been estimated at much, much bigger than that -- I've seen numbers as high as 1 in 10 million, but this will illustrate the point plenty well, I think). That's not very likely... but if it does happen, then you've just decided, to some degree, the fate of several trillion dollars. If only 10% of the budget is affected by the candidate, then that's still hundreds of billions of dollars allocated in accordance with your vote. It's not a very precise mechanism of spending money, but it's potentially an *extremely valuable* one. 2) GamS is apparently a rather difficult protein to purify. Not sure why. Slightly relatedly, having a (standard-difficulty) protein purified costs around $500 from a protein purificaiton center. 3) The US has teams of military personel called "Red Cells" that break into US facilities and do things like take over submarines, kidnap VIPs, and plant bombs, all in order to reveal security vulnerabilities.