@Mitch Always the same thing: style doesn't matter, we must approve of new developments if enough people participate in them, regardless of the dvelopment.

@Mitch is orange syrup good for making drinks for what purpose?

You'll have to make do with my brainfarts. It's late.

@alphabet avoiding is a good policy, but it should be safer than most other inhalants. The nitrite in the body is converted to several metabolites that can be problematic when they accumulate in the blood. The problem is "recreational use" covers a very wide range of doses. You can be sure that it will be dangerous for someone, people that don't know when to stop

@Cerberus I dunno. Maybe. The body is very complicated. The brain is the most complicated part of the body.

FTR, it is possible for a drug to be extremely dangerous for someone after a single exposure (the most famous example being the anaphylactic reaction from drugs like penicillins), or to be dangerous only when acutely overdoses, or to be dangerous only when chronically used, or any combination.

Penicllins themselves can cause seizures. It's not hard to trigger seizures with acute overdose of most drugs that do penetrate the brain appreciably

Lasting seizures can cause permanent damage to the neurons somewhere in the brain, leading to epilespy. There's a lot of handwaving here

@CowperKettle someone's salty

But sure, the psilocybin peddlers probably don't do sound science

@M.A.R. Huh, TIL.

It's generally a good idea to have a healthy dose of skepticism towards people that are pushing for the therapeutic use of compounds that have been identified decades ago. There's a good reason they haven't been until now.

When a drug is repurposed, it's usually because of statistical analyses of clinical trials. It's not because of the subjective opinion of a few experts.

There's so much sutff around about cannabinoid receptors that I get nauseous.

@M.A.R. You know what might treat nausea?

@alphabet yoga

@M.A.R. I was going to say huffing essential oils, but sure.

Produced by my new business hawking all-natural huffing glue alternatives.

@Cerberus I think the only right answer is "we don't know" because no study ever probably included "couple of glasses a week".

Someone oughta study the health benefits and risks of converting to Mormonism

The CDC has yet to take a position on whether the benefits outweigh the risks

who.int/europe/news/item/…. @Cerb

But again, this has not been directly observed for any possible amount of alcohol consumption out there. It's just an inference from the heap of data available.

And FWIW, it is a pretty big heap, since so many people have tried to find a healthy range for alcohol consumption

It's not like you can easily run a randomized controlled trial of alcohol

> To identify a “safe” level of alcohol consumption, valid scientific evidence would need to demonstrate that at and below a certain level, there is no risk of illness or injury associated with alcohol consumption.

Ditto

No identified NOAEL or LOAEL

@alphabet it's probably really hard to follow up on people for years to see if they get cancer

And besides, researchers usually want positive results. They want to show some compound does something to the body and call it a day, not sit around stalking NOAELs

@M.A.R. What is FTR?

@Cerberus For The Record

I do wonder if anyone's studied the effect of quitting alcohol for religious reasons

@M.A.R. We don't know, but neither do we know what percentage of cancer is caused by alcohol as a whole; however, statistical inferences could be made?

Neuroscientists are the last people I'd trust with studying religion

Well, I actually don't trust anyone to study religion

I don't trust religion.

I don't religion.

@M.A.R. I've decided to try faith healing

@Cerberus we can only compare people who drink alcohol with people who don't, and watch out for the interfering factors

@M.A.R. Why?

Why not use surveys?

Sure, it will be even less reliable.

But it can be done.

I don't think any "drinker group" in any study would solely be composed of people who drink a glass of wine every week

I believe science has established that prayer is as effective as phenylephrine as a treatment for congestion. So why does my insurance cover phenylephrine, but not Bibles?

Because you don't need to buy anything for religion.

@Cerberus Those Scientology e-meters are $5000, as I recall.

@Cerberus I dunno, how would that work? You can blind studies to eliminate most sources of bias, and the result would probably be much more reliable than any survey with any sample size

@alphabet But that's science.

@Cerberus It has a needle that goes back and forth, so it's science.

@M.A.R. You just ask people, how much do you normally drink? And ask several times during their life how many glasses they had the past week. Then, when all are dead, you apply statistics. You will get a wild guess, but it is something.

@M.A.R. Don't the existing studies work by asking "How many drinks do you have in a week?" and then trying to find the correlation between that and disease risk?

As I understand it, the real problem is that people with health issues often can't drink, so it often looks as though "zero drinks" is somehow bad for you.

@alphabet I'll be honest, those menthol inhalers work wonders for nasal ingestions. I dunno if it's temporary or not, just remembering the moments in my childhood when a stuffy nostril opened up

It was heaven

@alphabet only one type of study done on human volunteers

There's a lot of flexibility in toxicology studies of rats and mice

Don't even have to survey them

@alphabet I'd assume a proper survey would certainly take that into account when reporting the results

@Cerberus well some of the inferences certainly derive from that.

And then they put it on a chart, and see that there's no baseline. E.g. it's a line that starts going up from the origin.

@M.A.R. Yeah, but all those alcohol-industry-funded studies used it to support their claim that moderate drinking was better than no drinking at all.

@alphabet the hormesis you're referring to is probably a statistical artifact yeah. I don't know the specifics honestly

I just thought that even if, in moderate doses, alcohol is good for the cardiovascular system, as the claim goes, it'd still be bad for other organs

Indeed.

@alphabet coffee only really stimulates less than half of the population apparently

Who knows where the caffeine ends up. There's a lot of places in the body for caffeine to stick to before the brain

It's tough being a nocturnal raccoon in a world where the workday starts in the morning.

I am like a raccoon in many ways. I stay up late at night. I have erratic and generally unbalanced eating habits. I reached sexual maturity at age 2.

(Sorry, I don't mean I'm like a raccoon, I mean I am a raccoon. Definitely not a human pretending to be a raccoon. Just to clear up any confusion.)

@M.A.R. I don't believe in faith

@alphabet I am like a human in many ways. First of all, genes.

Why do I spend so much time bitching about men, when I could be praying the gay away?

@Mitch I don't have faith in belief.

@M.A.R. That's something you can believe in.

@Mitch that was a close one. Just a couple of extra genes and you'd have been a plant

@Mitch "Species" is a social construct invented to uphold human supremacy.

@M.A.R. Plants have a lot more genes than mammals.

Like 20, 000

Or is that chromosomes

Chromosomes

But I'm sure there are plants with 46 chromosomes

And plants with thousands, yeah

It feels like 20,000 genes wouldn't be enough to encode 'here's a blueprint for a human, go make one'

@M.A.R. the last time I checked it was in the thousands

Depends on the gene maybe?

That's kind of a lot for each cell to have.

Is that why plants need so much nitrogen?

I mean, 98% of the human genome is noncoding DNA

@alphabet Tell that to the gene therapy scientists.

@Mitch I've never given it any thought. But, well, animals obtain nitrogen much more readily, that's for sure

@M.A.R. I thought it codes for -something- just unknown?

@M.A.R. how do animals get it?

By eating plants?

@Mitch I think they do things we don't know, but they're never gonna be translated. I'd think we'd have known if they did.

@Mitch Personally, I believe the main reasons why raccoons are so much more intelligent than humans have more to do with culture than genetics.

@Mitch yeah. Or other animals.

In today's depressing news, the brave fight for freedom and democracy has apparently entered the "ban dissenting news outlets" phase.

I've ridden 937 km on bicycle since the end of March

@CowperKettle So you will be here in two months or so?

@alphabet To be fair, we have banned RT and such.

And Al Jazeera publishes what the tyrant of Qatar wants.

And it publishes nicer information in English, more hateful stuff in Arabic.

@Cerberus Qatar is not a belligerent in this conflict.

Nor does it tend to produce the sort of shameless propaganda put out by RT.

Granted, the RT ban was also wrong.

@Cerberus LOL

@alphabet I do believe it has produced some terrible stuff?

@Cerberus It's not nearly as bad as RT, which might as well be an arm of the Russian government.

That's not to say it's unbiased or that it has a particularly stellar history, of course.

As you can see from Wikipedia's list.

But bias in itself is not sufficient cause to ban a news outlet; the American media can be pretty heavily biased also.

More relevant is the fact that Qatar is not a participant in this war, and that Al Jazeera is not just a Qatari government mouthpiece.

But I bet Al Jazeera is pretty anti-Israel.

Pro-Arabic.