English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:09 AM

Word of the day: Eid-e-Qurban

Maki Madni

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3 hours later…

3:08 AM

> Store your tablets separately from your grandmother's

> The school says such a rule would violate “sincerely held religious beliefs” because they say humans were made in the image of God, and masks shield that image from being seen. michiganradio.org/post/…

SmokeDetector

4:08 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive answer detected (78): Does the term "garbledy gook" have racist origins? by Maximo on english.SE

2 hours later…

5:57 AM

How did they start using Bismuth for stomach problems in the 17 century?

"I have a heavy stomach. What if I take some Bismuth salts, might help".

2 hours later…

M.A.R.

8:13 AM

@CowperKettle someone should tell these bozos if the same argument can apply to shoes and shorts, they should spent several seconds doing this horrid thing called thinking

I know it seems really harsh, but it is a requirement if we are to reach an agreement

Matt E. Эллен

Ill Person: wise elder, my stomach hurts. What should I do?
Elder: have you tried Bismuth salts?
Ill person: ah thank you. *walks off*
Apprentice: will that work?
Elder: We're going to find out soon!

medical science with fewer ethical oversights

Cigarette butts have finally met their nemesis: BeachBot, an AI-enabled robot

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@MattE.Эллен Yes, that how the first vaccine in the West was tried out, on a poor child

James Phipps

James Phipps (1788 – 1853) was the first person given the experimental cowpox vaccine by Edward Jenner. Jenner knew of a local belief that dairy workers who had contracted a relatively mild infection called cowpox were immune to smallpox, and tested his theory on James Phipps. == Early life and vaccination against smallpox == Phipps was born in Berkeley parish in Gloucestershire to a poor landless labourer working as Jenner's gardener. He was baptised in St Mary's parish church, Berkeley, when he was 4. On 14 May 1796 he was selected by Jenner, who took "a healthy boy, about eight years old for...

@CowperKettle Does that Russian word for tablet cover both pills and hand-held computers?

@Xanne No. It covers both pills containing medicines and pills containing illegal drugs.

But not tablets.

For tablet computers, we use the word planshet (планшет), derived from French planche (board, plank), from Latin planca

8:32 AM

I remember a friend showing me a couple of LSD “tabs”—one yellow and one pink. Sunshine and Strawberry Fields.

I would be afraid to take an LSD tab, because LSD, it turns out, affects the dopamine system. On the other hand, psylocibine seems to avoid the dopamine system.

Thus LSD might cause a psychosis in some people.

I never tried it. I would fear being out of control.

Some small-scale research indicates that psylocybin might have a very positive lasting effect in depression.

Lasting! A permanent change?

I’m not sure I trust these researchers. Some of them have been their own subjects.

> Even after 14 months, those who reported mystical experiences scored on average 4 percentage points higher on the personality trait of Openness/Intellect; personality traits are normally stable across the lifespan for adults. (Wikipedia)

The research is small-scale.

It might turn out to be wishful thinking.

More research is needed.

Selection bias might affect the results. That is, patients enamoured with psychedelics by reading books, listening to music beforehand might cling to the notion that psychedelics are good. And such patients might be more likely to enroll.

One must read very closely the reports and pay attention to the way the patients were selected for the studies.

8:45 AM

Hard to do double-blind on that sort of thing.

9:21 AM

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_subsalicylate

Article on Pepto-Bismol.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_subsalicylate

I don’t know why my Wikipedia pastes don’t show up except as text.

It seems that Pepto-Bismol is effective against E. Coli, thus good for travellers.

Gigili

10:01 AM

@CowperKettle "Poor" as in impoverished?

2 hours later…

12:03 PM

@Xanne Yes, that's why it's part of the H.Pylori eradication treatment which I'm taking now.

I had come across the name Pepto-Bismol in books and films, but never took care to read about what it was.

Now I'll know. A useful thing.

@Gigili Yes, from a simple, low-class family.

12:17 PM

12:51 PM

@Xanne oh...it's the '.m' in the URL, intended for display on a m obile (phone) viewer. I'm guessing the one-boxing algorithm must not account for it.

@CowperKettle It could be exuberance by non-experts (or by those who want to sell it). BUt it is not unreasonable to think that there is a plausible mechanism -and- not enough experimentation has been done because of the drug taboo.

But I've also heard contradictory things about it - namely one one hand the reduction in depression comes from a large dose, and on the other the reduction comes from a period of 'sub-clinical' (whatever that means) or much smaller doses (those that are not hallucinatory).

And then, supposing there is a substantiated mechanism, it'll probably only work for very specific kinds of depression.

1:13 PM

@Mitch And 4 per cent is a tiny effect.

Almost negligible.

1:43 PM

@Mitch Yes, because depression is really a collection of different diseases. If you have an untypical BH4 deficiency-caused depression, no amount of psychedelics would get out out of it.

2:06 PM

@Cerberus I think the wording of @CowperKettle's quote was intended to imply that even such a small percentage is huge in comparison to longitudinal personality measures: "personality traits are normally stable across the lifespan for adults." I take 'stable' to mean that they hardly change at all. They're not saying percentages, but one could say < 1%.

But this is a problem with all kinds of scientific communication. Precision anticorrelates with concision.

also practicality...sometimes you just have to say 'more' or 'a lot' or allude to a difference because you may not actually have numbers to compare.

@Mitch It may be relatively "huge", but isn't the absolute change what's most relevant?

What I'd like to see is the distribution.

If, say, ten per cent of participants exhibit a 50 per cent improvement, that's quite useful.

If everybody exhibits exactly 4 per cent improvement, it will not be noticeable for anybody, almost.

Пуск ракеты-носителя «Протон-М» с модулем «Наука»

2:58 PM

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60 seconds left to launch

@Cerberus All excellent points.

@Cerberus Yes, that is way better than simple point estimates (like the mean or standard deviation). But again limited by communication medium and by actually having recorded that data to begin with.

@Cerberus Yes, that points to there being a sub population where there is.a direct causal effect, and for the rest of the population no causal effect at all.

@Cerberus Yes that seems like hardly something to bother with. But it could show signs of 1) a very short step of progress which can be be engineered to make further progress. eg heart transplants probably had a very very low life extension at the beginning (a month?) but further progress extended that time.

or 2) maybe that's only one piece of small improvement and many distinct improvements are needed for appreciable improvement.

I've heard that in medicine, these small improvements are really important, eg survivability of a procedure from 20% to 25% is really good.

3:16 PM

Erfurt latrine disaster

In July 1184 Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held court at a Hoftag in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the assembly building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement. This event is called Erfurter Latrinensturz (lit. 'Erfurt latrine fall') in several German sources. == Background == A feud between Landgrave Louis III of Thuringia and Archbishop Conrad of Mainz which had existed since the...

One mathy thing... often you'll hear things like (I'm making it up) 'inhaling helium increases asphyxiation death by 100 times'. This is called relative risk. And you're pointing out that maybe you should consider absolute risk (asphyxiation deaths may be super rare to begin with, but of those most of those are from inhaling helium). It is a common miscommunication to only report relative risk. It usually only gives a shock value rather than telling you what to do.

Word of the day: head (ship's toilet) (The name derives from sailing ships in which the toilet area for the regular sailors was placed at the head or bow of the ship.)

3:49 PM

> 83% of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. are caused by the Delta variant, according to new figures from the CDC

4:37 PM

> One exhibit is the BBC's guide to pronunciation from 1928. In it, it informs announcers that pristine rhymes with wine, respite is pronounced as if there were no e, combat is cumbat, finance was finn-ance. Even then some of the suggestions were becoming archaic. Not only is housewifery no longer pronounced huzzifry, it is almost entirely obsolete as a word.

I was googling for "huzzifry" because I had come across this pronunciation in an audiobook, "A History of Britain" by Simon Schama

1 hour later…

5:52 PM

6:26 PM

@CowperKettle Manspreading is as old as the habit of making poems out of bus rides.

3 hours later…

Robusto

9:10 PM

@CowperKettle That same argument could be used to force people to appear nude in public at all times.

2 hours later…

11:10 PM

@Mitch Yes, true.

@Mitch For chances, like one's chance of survival, yes, because they have an effect on the population level. But for something like an absolute increase in happiness of 4 per cent, that's different.

@CowperKettle That is...fascinating.