Belated Tuesday Fact checking

Every Tuesday night, Nick and I hang out: go geocaching, to the local cinema or just stay at home and play with Lego bricks. Each week he asks me questions about the world and I try to answer them as best I can. I always wish I had a wireless Wikipedia to see how accurate my addled memory is. Last week I was smart and had Nick write down the questions so I could check my work. Here we go:

How do we know how far away stars are?
Astronomy for Kids gave half the answer I did, which is parallax (observing an object from different locations) but I also brought up red shift/blue shift to illustrate our universe's expansion. One nice thing about talking about abstract concepts in the field is that there's no shortage of examples to help visualize matters. Our GPS uses triangulation to locate our position in a manner of reverse parallax. Passing cars illustrate the doppler effect which is the best way to get one's mind around red shift/blue shift.

Are there any pills (of medicine) that cost $100
Leaving aside $275 art pieces the pharmaceutical industry is famous for Byzantine and bizarre pricing structures. To begin with the cost of developing a new drug is an estimated eight hundred million dollars and every drug needs production facilities and thorough testing before it enters the marketplace. The fact that insurance will pay for many medicines leaves little cause for lowering of prices. In addition, hospitals must raise the price of even common drugs to subsidize the high cost of patient care. Ten bucks for a single dose of aspirin is not unusual.

This Google Answers thread led to some interesting drugs, including Enbrel: a rheumatoid arthritis drug. From a linked article:

Unlike chemical compounds such as aspirin and other prescription medications which are taken orally, biologicals such as Enbrel and insulin are currently derived from human proteins grown in live cells taken from bacteria or mammals. The long production cycle and limited shelf-life of biological drugs encourage manufacturers to underestimate demand, while the expense of just building the production facilities, as much as $500 million, means an individual dose can cost up to $20,000.

The linked article is a few years old and Enbrel currently doesn't cost anything near $20k a dose. Still $250 for a twice-weekly medicine is pretty spendy.

"Dino, short for dinosaur? Remember to ask Jeeves."
A quote from The Simpsons episode "Mobile Homer", asking Jeeves has replaced googling as the nundinaenym of choice for referring to searching the web. Ask.com (Jeeves is no more, as of early 2006) gives the following results. Pretty disappointing.