@lila Hey at least it's not blizzarding!

@Sarov Knock on wood

hi

@Sarov don't tempt fate :) We had some light flurries here this morning (and a coating of snow for a day or two last week)

Hooray for winter in late April~!

@Sarov Oh you jinxed it, before sunset there accumulated large volume of dense dark clouds, sounds of thunder and flashes of lightning were there, thankfully it didn't rain (yet)!

I have been conditioned like a Pavlov's dog: I see the kaleidoscopic avatar in this chat room = I go to check suggested edits queue (as a bonus, I salivate while this happens, too).

@lila Hahaha! :)

:D

suggested an edit now

How's your day/week been going?

@Nai54 cool I'm salivating now

:D

@Nai54 It is mixed: half I am happy because Monday means open shops with groceries, half sad because today I discovered one dead fish in my aquarium, and the fish are White Cloud Mountain minnows and are extremely hardy fish and rarely die. I also found one dead shrimp (small Caridina spp., I got used to them passing away one by one, I suspect molting problems); luckily my two giant shrimps (Atya gabonensis), that I am worrying about the most, seem to be fine.

@Nai54 And you?

Okay. Same old same old

For me, technically, also same old, except the things mentioned above.

I have a habit of looking at recently earned badges from time to time, I saw the silver badge for consecutive 30 days for you, I am always so happy anytime anyone earns a badge that indicates commitment like that, but today I noticed that you missed a day yesterday and now it resetted back to 0! I was expecting the gold 100 consecutive days badge for you soon, now I am so heartbroken! :D

@lila "now I am so heartbroken! :D" Is this a 'laugh while crying' thing?

@Sarov Haha I am laughing so hard at the way you pointed this out! :C :( ;(

@lila I know! I was enjoying the sun outside and never even got online. It is kinda sad. I had about 84 days on Meta SE too :(. First day missed in about many months

Oh well. I will regain my streak! :D

(now that I think about it, I was close to earning a second fanatic badge on Writing SE as well)

@Nai54 I am jealous of the Sun :D I know that one person on Pets had, I don't remember exactly, but certainly above 90/100 (it was displayed on the profile because the user chose "fanatic" badge to be shown). I had been following it and checking in the user's profile daily, only to discover that the user missed a day and it got reset back to 0 before reaching 100/100 :(

I was reading articles about ammonia and mechanisms of its toxicity (mainly in the context of aquatic organisms, but I fell down the rabbit hole and started reading about humans as well). It turns out that in alcoholics, alcohol itself isn't directly responsible for all the damage. Alcohol could directly cause cognitive deficits and brain damage, but in alcoholics with severe liver disease it's ammonia that is responsible for the majority of cognitive dysfunction. Human liver ...

...is responsible for neutralizing ammonia from the blood (it converts ammonia into relatively non-toxic urea, and urea is then excreted with urine by the kidneys), but if liver is severely damaged then ammonia accumulates in blood and damages the brain because ammonia is highly toxic to brain cells; that's both fascinating and deeply disturbing at the same time.

We have better "safety systems" and more refined metabolism than fish, but our brains, as far as I understand, aren't fundamentally more resilient against ammonia poisoning than fish's brains.

It is somewhat disturbing because ammonia is natural byproduct of our metabolism (as well as fish's metabolism); in aquarium, we rely on ammonia being neutralized in the filter via nitrogen cycle into relatively non-toxic nitrates that are "excreted" by the siphon via water changes; in ourselves, we rely on ammonia being neutralized in the liver via urea cycle into relatively non-toxic urea that is excreted by the kidneys with the urine.