Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Sabine Hossenfelder"
channel.
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@richardhauer7354 hmm, do you mean like the Irish blight? The citrus greening pandemic? The Cavendish Panama Disease pandemic?
Oh, it's spelled wheat, not wheet. Just a bit of help, English is a royal pain that I honestly believe is a weapon of psychological warfare...
With monoculture in place, the vulnerability is increased for any pathogen to wreak havoc over time, whereas with multiculture, assuming proper planning occurs, disparate crops prevent the easy spread of disease between fields. Better to lose one field than one province or state, let alone primary cultivar of a food.
Not that I consume much of citrus or banana, getting vitamin C more from other food sources and potassium from a wider assortment of fruits.
Which reminds me, gotta hit the store soon. Down to one white yam and canned goods. And the decision of green beans or asparagus with my leftover ham and mashed potatoes for dinner... Overstuffed on spinach the last two days and I was sure I had another can of beets, but seem to only have pickled beets left. Probably use those for dessert... :)
1
-
1
-
@davidgalea6113 odd, I didn't see any decline the last few times I was in the UK and various EU member nations. Indeed, considering the migrations that have happened throughout Europe and the UK, I only see another migration for much the same reason - warfare in homelands.
Still, perhaps the UK should've stopped before allowing Celts and Picts onto the island, let alone those bloody Romans. Or perhaps, Great Britain could've had a smaller empire, so that folks from throughout the realm wouldn't have migrated to the island.
As for invading, having been part of an invasion or two, you confuse immigration and invasion. Immigration is a legal process by which one relocates to another nation and despite claims to the contrary, every nation on earth has had its waves of immigration. Invasions are rather violent affairs and typically are beyond obvious, what with all of the weapon play and mass deaths involved. Perhaps, you'd like to ask the elders at Normandy about what an invasion looks like. Or perhaps, an Iraqi or Afghan about more current invasions.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Let's look at one popular sugar alcohol that's used on tablets and caplets, as well as in emergency medicine. Mannitol.
It coats, in tiny quantities, those "pills" so that they won't stick to one's mouth, retain their shape better and oh, slide down smoothly. Most people won't even notice.
On the high side of the scale, say 10 grams+, well, you'll literally urinate like a garden hose is attached, as it opens the kidneys wide open. Good for a few medical conditions, coupled with dual large bore IV infusions with normal saline and electrolyte monitoring and adjustment.
As a coating, pretty much unnoticable.
Unless you're sensitive to it, then all bets are off, but the races to the bathroom are most assuredly on.
I've had some similar issues, finally traced it to a non-dietary source, my thyroid. I have Grave's disease and control can get a bit funny at times, in some very un-fun kinds of ways. Diarrhea being the least of the issues that can arise, but quite messy and annoying, as we're talking brown water projecting out. On the worse side, had severe tachycardia, tectonic hypertension and CHF that required hospitalization twice. Oh, also gave me an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Wee!
Dietary tracking helped tremendously, cooking food from scratch also helped a lot. The thyroid being absolutely no help at all. Guess it was getting too tired to help, what with all of that trying its level best to kill me.
Adjusted the methimazole dosage, went from an SPO2 of 80 on room air, pulse in the 150's and BP of a Hulk (235/190 at one point), with fluid filled lungs, which also partially collapsed to complete a set of problems on a Saturday night admission to hospital to driving the nursing staff nuts walking the halls on Wednesday.
Charting diet helped ward a repeat, as the GI tended to act as an early warning alarm.
Oh, there's another extremely common sugar alcohol in foods, cosmetics and even soaps, glycerol, aka glycerin, if you want it to sound scary, 1,2,3-Trihydroxypropane. Yeah, I'm not a fucking chemist either, but their names for various common chemicals can be quite entertaining - do look up the many different chemical names for just plain water.
Causes bloating in some, largely typically based on dosage, because too much of anything can make life miserable or shorter.
I'm fortunate that I don't have issues with sugar alcohols, straw mushrooms can make me projectile vomit, wood grown mushrooms won't do that, don't look at me, I only live here.
Sabine did get one thing wrong. Most sugar alcohols are not absorbed at all, they pass right on through and bacterial growth/overgrowth is variable, depending upon species and still poorly understood, as is our microbiome (it's now under intensive study, someone's gonna make a ton of money on Rx biotics eventually!). I am sensitive to some cholinergics, such as atropine that's an additive in some medications, burn through my beta blockers early, CNS depressants just bounce off of me, anything processed by my liver tends to have an extremely short half-life, so ethanol tends to have minimal effect in under legendary dosages. Opiates and opioids, no thanks, get a massive MAST cell dump of histamine, just under allergy level, but enough to make me feel like I'm dying and that pain is better than taking those.
Everyone's physiology is different, if it was the same, we'd all be clones and well, we'd all be the same and conversations would be boring.
Now, excuse me, dinner is calling me. Pasta, with home made pasta sauce, cooked with fresh pork hocks until they fell off of the bone, home made meatballs and probably a fruit cup that'll likely have some sugar alcohols in it naturally. There is an upside to being a reformed chef, I make the sauce in two gallon batches and can it. Next batch will have some pork, but mostly be goat meat, got a good price on that, I've also used lamb and oxtails. The bones add gelatin, thickening the sauce and flavor, the meat, more flavor and well, meat. I've also done it vegetarian, largely when I was out of meat and new in country, then I used olives in place of meat.
Tomorrow, something entirely different, with tons of green veggies and some potatoes in some preparation to be determined tomorrow.
I do a small carb load in the morning, minimal and variable mid-day and larger carb load for evening. Keeps my weight sane, which keeps my glycemic levels sane and well, I'm by far the eldest in my father's side of the family to not be type 2 diabetic, largely insulin resistance caused by high body fat index.
We also run high on triglycerides and cholesterol, all in bad numbers as a family. Because, that's not a chocolate bar at the bottom of my gene pool and some SOB urinated into it for good measure.
And I studiously avoid kryptonite. ;)
1
-
5G remains a significant health hazard. It's still not fully implemented, so the risk is having a stroke trying to get and retain signal. The same risk of every other G, aka Generation.
Huge pain in the gonads at times.
The frequency, well, look at the sun with an antenna and receiver tuned to the griped about band or frequency de jour, obviously it's harmful and we're long extinct, so STFU.
I never figured out why the State Department declined employing me as a diplomat...
Want to start a bar fight among physicists, ask when an RF field becomes a photon, rather than a wave. Still being a competitive math contest. ;)
Tissue warmed, well, consider it cooking, because it is. Heat a steak to room temperature, enjoy watching it rot. Heat it enough to denature proteins, it's called cooking. Microwaves tend to do that whole thing between 600 watts of energy to 1500 watts of energy used, microwatts griping is like complaining that the sun cooked all life on the planet to death long ago and STFU.
There is a danger to microwaves - to radioastronomers.
Toxicology 101, the dose makes the poison, as even oxygen at high levels is infamously toxic.
Now, when the frequency starts at UV-B and shorter wavelengths, there, the jury's still open.
Slightly, given oxygen's intolerance to ionizing radiation passage.
So, wanna get rid of the "risk"? Put out the largest source first, the sun.
Hope you enjoy around 4 degrees Kelvin.
1
-
I entirely advocate for the colonization of Mars.
Difference between President Musk's idiocy and my idea is, the colonists are short term, as the colony would be for research and study of Mars and low gravity environments, not some inane notion of permanence that's utterly unsustainable.
Tours would likely end up being only six months at most, due to the debilitating effects of the lower gravity and radiation (some mitigation for the radiation would be below ground facilities, allowing regolith to protect against the radiation).
Might as well go with a megastation in orbit, with a large centrifugal gravity system, since I'm going moonbeams for funding such a money pit.
Why actual humans? Versatility. Robots aren't anywhere as versatile as a human chemist or geologist, as was instantly proven when we put the first geologist on the moon and basically as soon as he set foot on the lunar surface, he discovered a sample that was groundbreaking.
A robot can't gin up a chemical test, a chemist or geochemist can. Let the robots stomp the surface, little can be achieved by personal stomping about - usually and the unusual is also where humans excel. And thankfully, the unusual is infrequent, so leave the squishy humans inside the labs and the robots outside to get broken.
As for Musk the innovative dreamer, he's invented nothing, developed nothing, everything he's gotten has been bought, save for an inherited emerald mine. I'd not have sought advice on electricity from J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt, I'd speak to Edison and Tesla, who actually did invent and develop the technologies personally.
And nuking the moon? Oddly, Russia never suggested such an absurd thing, that was the US Air Force and Carl Sagan's first assignment, which got kiboshed once Sagan's report was submitted showing how tiny a nuclear detonation would be visually from earth.
But, orbials would be a good idea, remember that mega station notion? Still obscenely, beyond the fever dreams of insane in expense, but more sustainable if properly designed and well, can be protected from major harm from holes getting occasionally punched through it. In much of earth orbit, it'd be magnetically shielded to a fair degree. Water can be the additional shielding/thermal regulation/water supply that's recycled. Use lunar regolith for soil for grow beds, although use for organic life support would require immense amounts of space.
Achilles heel, maintenance of such a behemoth would be a cast iron bitch.
Still, I volunteer President Musk's billions for funding the project. Should take only a few hundred trillion to design, construct, launch, assemble in orbit and maintain for a decade or so. I'm sure his fans will happily fill that modest gap between the two figures... I'll wait.
And wait.
And... Huh, black dwarfs sure are hard to find, even up reasonably close at 1 AU!
Until then, I advocate for Musk to personally colonize the surface of Venus.
1
-
The reality of it is, most journalists don't understand science in general and any specialty field is lumped in with The Professor from Gilligan's Island, a polymath of polymaths and full time engineer, so all science is the same and magic.
So basically, you have someone who has absolutely no damned clue about what the item being reported upon actually is, trying to explain it without seeking anyone conversant in that subject. I might as well get a medical study interpreted by my barber, at least that would have a historical relationship, if utterly unrelated today.
But wait, it gets better! For major, long playing events, they'll get science populisers, like Bill Nye, explaining why they were injecting cesium-137 into the reactor to stop reactions and how boron is a fission product (I'm not joking, Bill really fouled that up about as badly as I'd expect an engineer to foul up a field he never worked or studied).
So, we get reports about a study performed somewhere, by someone, on something, at a time indeterminate and for all I know was conducted 1000 years ago, some scientist's life story and family history reporting on one modest discovery (yeah, I fell asleep too) or other inanity that is the reason that I still keep a lead pipe next to my driver's seat.
Science is fuchsia. What? You saw it.
Science explains our universe and how it works. We started out explaining colors in really unique, precise ways, red, yellow and blue. Yay! Then, someone found the color fuchsia, which ain't all that hard to find in nature and boom, there's a new color called fuchsia. If we listen to the antiscience types, language has to be abolished, since fuchsia never exited at one point and language is hopelessly defective because now it can define what fuchsia is and worse, science can give us a specific code to reproduce that color.
You know, better is really worse or some idiotic bullshit. OK, I'll just slap a mauve on the idiot.
An oddity in myself, I perceive part of the UV-C spectrum as an odd shade of iridescent fuchsia. UV-A and B are just deeper shades of violet. I see those with the eye that had the natural lens removed and an implant that is uncoated installed and when I discussed it with a biologist, he theorized that it was likely a fluorescent effect, which would also explain some of the other effects when seeing those shades.
No, I am not about to allow anyone to start poking my eyes to see what proteins are doing what oddity with light, you're welcome to those after I'm dead and they likely have denatured.
Besides, we have plenty of similar examples in technology and nature. Why, I've got some fun crystals in the drawer that emit different colors when lit by an IR laser... Fluorescein dye is another fine example, discovered in 1871, used in ophthalmology in 1882, tagged proteins with it in 1941, actually started to understand how the shit worked in the 1990's. I laugh about how many drugs I carried in my Army medical bag that we really didn't understand how they worked!
Just as well, it'd be boring as hell if we knew everything!
1
-
I remember one credulous reporter going on at great length in a comment online about how natural things aren't harmful.
I asked how much hydrogen cyanide he wanted mixed with his ricin, both being toxic substances in the plant kingdom. The former, we prepare out of some foods, the latter, best avoided entirely if you like having a functional endoplasmic reticulum (specifically, ribosomes). The idiot promptly wandered off to kick a rock somewhere.
After all, asbestos is natural too, as is lead, arsenic, strychnine and well, we could keep that list growing all week. ;)
I of course, keep such substances in stock only in my nightmares.
1
-
1
-
Big rip? OK, spacetime ceases to exist as we know it, hence all of our natural laws are out the window. Matter won't matter any longer.
Basically, if it happened, one wouldn't have the chance to notice it, given it'd be spreading at the velocity of light.
Somewhere in the universe, some poor creature would arrive at, "I think, therefore I - ain't".
So, basically, it'd wreck one's vacation plans.
So, this is cool, my vacation plans are still on in a few dozen trillion years, by then I'll probably be able to afford it.
1
-
1
-
1