Is there a physicist or possibly chemist in the house.

[dessiato]

I didn't mean that literally.
More figuratively.

Nobody would suck dry ice...

A bar in Lancaster put liquid nitrogen in drinks. Someone drank it. So it's not too far away from consuming dry ice.

Wine bar fined after woman's stomach removed following liquid nitrogen shot

Oscar’s Wine Bar and Bistro in Lancaster must pay £100,000 after Gaby Scanlon needed life-saving operation following consumption of cocktail

www.theguardian.com

 

[dessiato]

And...what happened?

I moved on.

 

[WouldBe]

And...what happened?

He sucked some dry ice.

 

[gosub]

Midges. The absolute curse of Scotland for much of the year.

What I was hoping was that the dry ice, being confined, would remain as a block, thereby allowing you to vent the box, and release the CO2 at a steady rate.

CO2 is what attracts the midges, the CO2 in your exhaled breath.

I was toying with the idea that releasing CO2 at a greater rate than breath CO2 might lure the little bastards away from people.

When I were a lad on Harris, the ice cream was delivered in insulated boxes and packed round with dry ice, this was still solid when it arrived. The cafe owner used to decant it onto the pavement, and we played football with it.

Swedish candle ftw

 

[Curiouscarl]

To the clever clogs here.


Just an open question.


I was watching Dahmer on Netflix, and even though he was a pretty reprehensible person. He did appear genuinely remorseful. I have extensive knowledge of Dahmer, as I was always curious of his crimes. (Morbid I know)

But, the question I always asked was.

Why?

So this got me thinking. On the extended Dahmer tapes. The women taping and interviewing him said, "we should have protected him and studied his brain while he was alive, as, he wanted to understand himself."

We can all agree as it is evident he was.... lacking something. Dahmer himself was at a loss to why he did the things he did and he hated himself for it. But, instead of vilifying him. We should accept that, he is just an extension of what we are.. And that is human. He is not some mythological demon who hides amoung us in human form. He was someones son, brother, uncle. He could be anyone of us.

But, maybe our impulses are not, human flesh. But, Mars bars. An overwhelming urge to eat Mars bars. That you go to unhealthy lengths to gain one. Now, I know this won't be a Netflix hit as it dosen't sell for a story.

But, everything we do as organisms, comes from the brain. Our impulses, ideas, wants and needs. Sometimes there are biological factors that we can account for like the need to eat. Which is straight forward. Then, there are times where ideas are put into our consciousness by, say, subconscious advertising. Think, trends like. The Kardashians wear a certain item of clothing. Now I MUST have it. We don't need the item that the Kardashains are wearing, but it is more of a want. But, the Psychological and Biological process was apparent in all the decision making. How do we tap into that?

If we studied the brain, using technology today like, AI to map the possibilities and pathways of the brain. including defects and disorders etc. Plus, use extensive, Psychological approaches. Past, present and future. While using, biological analytics to the studies. Then apply, practical and logical reasoning, with sound principles and thinking. I know we could make real improvements on human kind.

Like Psychology, we don't look at the brain we talk about it. We don't do that for the heart. We ask the patient what symptoms they are suffering and then look at the heart for any defects, ETC.

Richard Dawkins said, "No child is born a Christian, he is born to Christian parents."

So if we could find what area of the brain holds these strong dogmatic beliefs, and what chemical formulations are responsible plus the environmental factors. Then we could briefly alternate it, so they give the induvidal a different view point briefly. Without long philosophical debates or violent interventions or people getting angry.

If we could crack the brain, couldn't we not get the best version of ourself as a species?. Could we learn to understand the causes of the next, "Dahmer"? Then intervene. Take a pill, re-organise the brain. I know I am over simplyifying it.

But, use, Luminal for epilepsy. We had people devoting their life to finding out what works and what doesn't work for epilepsy, and now we are here with medications and magnets for people with epilepsy. They say Caesar suffered from afflictions. To what is no thought of as epilepsy. Or modern day ADHD. Amphethamine is an, illegal street drug. But, it has practical uses. Have you seen someone who has the correct dose for their ADHD. They are a differnt person. Who all say, "wow, I did not know this is how people were normally. Now I can think clearly"

Imagine we could do this on a massive scale. Re-organise the brain. But imagine on a broader scale. Not only for disorders and diseases, but every aspect of what makes us human. Good and Bad.

I don't mean anything nefarious. Nor, a sort of, Brave new world, nor some sort of eugenics. I mean rational discussions about the truth of the matter. With open, rational discussion about humans. Regardless of, sex, race, beliefs. No ideology. No emotions. No right and wrong, , no hippy dippy utopia. Peace and love. The law of the jungle will always apply.

The kind of discussion that got the species here in the first place. Without the fear of judgment. Like, we all need healthy food, we all need clean water, no one wants to feel unsafe. The factors in life EVERYONE agrees on. Not because of ideology, but factual. No one can survive without clean air. That kind of thinking.

What are your thoughts.

 

[NoXion]

Humans have a tendency to over-indulge on sugary junk like Mars Bars because in our ancestral evolutionary environment, simple sugars were a rare and valuable source of nutrients, and so our bodies evolved to take maximum advantage of them whenever they were encountered. In the relatively nutrient-starved conditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the occasional encounter with a load of sweet fruit or honeycomb would have been a handy boost of calories. It's only in the past few hundred years that humans have had easy access to sugary foods whenever the fancy takes them, and our cravings and metabolisms have not had time to evolve in response. Hence the widespread obesity problem among many modern societies.

I think aberrant individuals like Dahmer have always existed. Whether through some kind of congenital defect, childhood abuse, or some kind of brain tumour or degenerative dysfunction, the natural randomness of human generation would occasionally bring forth monsters. Maybe in the future technology will enable us to fix such people after the fact. But until then what we can do is improve initial conditions and monitoring in the hope that we can intervene before such people go on to kill.

 

[hegley]

Curiouscarl read up on James Fallon, or look up his Ted talk; he’s done some interesting work on neuroscience of psychopaths.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Just get some hydrochloric acid in a bucket and chuck in a marble bust of Ludwig Boltzmann. You can modulate CO2 output by adjusting the concentration of the acid.

Stir in a few tablespoons of honey and the bucket should also trap, and dissolve, wasps.

 

[kabbes]

Bit of a sudden turn for this thread, Curiouscarl , but I’ll endeavour to give you an answer.

You can’t separate the physical system of the brain from the metaphysical process of thinking or from the developmental process of learning. They are all part of the same system. Every time you have a thought, your physical brain slightly reorganises itself and thus develops into something new. The brain is not some static object that merely generates thoughts. It is also the case that the thoughts generate the brain.

This means that you have to be very careful with any conclusions you might draw from analysing the brain of a “psychopath”. Even if you identify a strong correlation between pathway X in the brain and psychopathy, that doesn’t mean that the pathway came first. The act of thinking about, desiring to perform and then actually performing murder will have reformed the brain. It would be unsurprising, therefore, to find a common link across multiple brains that have gone through this process.

You also wonder if we could “crack” the brain — figure out its workings and thus create better versions of ourselves. While it’s interesting to speculate about such things, it’s important to note that the idea of doing this is hopelessly beyond our wildest imaginations at this point of the development of science. The brain is a non-linear dynamic system of staggering complexity, which constantly changes and adapts to ongoing experience. Even the simplest of actions involves a bewildering complexity of interacting systems within the structure of the brain. And things like thoughts are not simple actions. At the moment, we can take particular views of the brain at particular resolutions at particular moments in time. The analysis this allows for is equivalent to drawing approximate boundaries around the countries of the world and getting a rough measure of their levels of international trade and cooperation in a given year. But the thing you’re talking about requires the equivalent of tracking every individual human being in the world system and measuring what they are saying, reading or feeling at every moment of every day. We’re miles off that, and we’re miles off knowing what to do with the deluge of data even if we could measure it.