Sugar is the devil, but don't trade groups always do these sorts of study sponsoring.
Sugar is sweet. It makes many foods taste better. I'm assuming these articles are being funded by some other evil entity that is selling a sugar substitute.
I was saying on the twitters that, politically speaking, sugar is tobacco, and as a result, sugar is also coal. I bet we'll find people whose careers link all three fronts, in the same way as lots of tobacco lobbyists also worked for climate-denial front groups (and in Steven Milloy's especially egregious case, DDT deniers to boot).
I was really struck by this when watching a Seinfeld episode recently. There's extensive drama over whether the yummy nonfat frozen yogurt is secretly loaded with fat, which would explain everyone's weight gain, but they never mention sugar once.
2: They sponsor the studies, but the studies usually just come from in-house research or third-tier universities, not Harvard. And they usually just result in advertising copy or casting a little doubt on the conventional wisdom, they don't usually become the conventional wisdom.
Or so we like to think. Who knows, maybe every scientific discovery with any financial implications for the past century was driven by those financial implications, and we'd all be driving electric cars and living 20 years longer if the scientific community was completely immune to the profit motive. I doubt it though. Call me Pollyanna but the Harvard sugar thing seems almost as egregious as the studies funded by cigarette companies.
I'm trying a low carb diet the past few days. It's been easy to stop eating bread, rice, and pasta, but sugar is a pain in the ass. What's the guideline for how much sugar you can eat from fruits? Is it only refined sugar that should be cut out or should I not eat so many apples, oranges, tomatoes to limit total grams of sugar?
What's the guideline for how much sugar you can eat from fruits?
Using a cleaned out gourd as a spoon with which to eat molasses is right out.
But if you use it for rum that's fine.
Well, my other problem is I still like to drink beer and wine. Before deciding to try this I got one of those mini-kegs at Costco and have to work my way through it.
7: I kind of assume that anything that tells you not to have raw fruit isn't a diet, it's a cult. (Or advice about how to handle a rare medical condition, but anyways.)
As long as you wash it, I guess it's fine.
7: The dietary recommendations concern added sugar -- fruit also has fiber, etc., which mitigate some of the insulin-spiking effects. Some of the low-carb diets also emphasize low "net" carbs, which allows for some fruit.
Brown sugar must have fiber, by analogy with brown rice.
7. Seconding 14. God forbid that I should sound paleo, but raw fruit is a food basic for pretty much all primates, and no harm comes from eating it (unless it's grapefruit and you're on statins).
If you're actually trying to get fat burning through low carb, you have to limit your net carb intake from fruit. This is the main reason I drop out of low carb every summer. (The brownies are just incidental.)
If you have 30 net carbs a day to budget, you can reasonably decide to take in a few with beer, wine, or some fruit.
You guys are the scientists, but my understanding is that for insulin production or fat v. sugar burning purposes a net carb is a net carb, no matter where it comes from.
My unscientific belief on the low carb thing is that it works as a means of calorie restriction -- it's just a lot easier to overeat carbs than it is to overeat protein and fat. And that fruit is not particularly easy to overeat, even if there is sugar in it, because of all the fiber and water. And very good for you on the whole micronutrient front. At which point restricting fruit intake seems silly.
That may be right. You can overeat dried fruit more easily than fresh because the water is gone. Not that the fiber won't make you regret it.
Not that the fiber won't make you regret it.
Surely the point of eating an excess of dried fruit is exactly that.
I just really like the taste of figs.
19: That's my unscientific belief, too. But that's not it say it's not important -- if going low carb makes it easier for someone not to overeat instead of feeling like they're going to gnaw their arm off, that's surely for the better.
I am very sensitive to sugar when pregnant/nursing and found I am a lot happier if I eat more protein and minimize empty carbs, because eating carbs just leaves me even hungrier.
I just really like explosive diarrhoea.
My extensive review of nutrition research has revealed that Warren Zevon was correct -- life will kill you. The rest is commentary.
24: I tend to favor the explosive farts.
23: Oh, yeah, I think eating fairly low carb is both probably useful for weight loss and generally healthier; it's not unimportant. I just think the super low carb counting-grams diets are probably not all that important.
Also OTSO sugar, it's amazing how much money the beverage industry is pouring into defeating the Oakland/SF soda tax measures. I see it all the time on Youtube and Twitter, have received at least 3 mailers, and have heard two people not actually opposed to it use the scare term "grocery tax", presumably just because that's what all the ads say.
Trying to increase my protein without eating meat is taking a lot of work. (This is partly M/tch's fault because he hasn't been cooking as much as usual lately, which means I eat cereal for dinner more often.)
Or cut the middleman and just live off squirrels. I don't think rodents count as meat.
I feel bad about the fact that soda and/or chocolate from the vending machine in the afternoon has become a daily routine. I blame a cold. A jolt of carbonation, sugar, and caffeine is very nice when I'm coming down off DayQuil. I don't have junk food too often when I'm healthy.
I developed a vending machine habit when I was working in call center hell. It dulled the pain a little.
Some switch flipped in me suddenly a couple of years ago and I became a full on sugar truther, from "whatever hippies, you're all jealous of all my cake" to now refusing to accept a proposal from boyf unless he demonstrates that he can rein in his kid's sugar intake. There are uh different examples of unhealthy behaviors in both those instances.
I don't even feel better if I avoid sugar, I just think the analogy with smoking really got deep in my head and now I have to control my horrified reflex to actually take candy from actual babies; thanks a lot medical consensus.
Wow, the mean old dance teacher runs deeper than I realized!
I'm gonna show him this post and explain to him that he's not scared enough of sugar because he thinks it's 90s. That's how I explain a lot of his own opinions to him
37: You have to pass a "taking candy from a baby" test before they'll even let you buy one of those smocks.
Live off nuts like a squirrel?
Nuts do have an admirable amount of protein, but I'll have to work myself up to eating a 10-oz. jar of peanuts every day.
Peanuts are only pretending to be nuts, so it should be easy.
Having gone through the whole red meat leads to high cholesterol leads to imminent death, now I don't take any of these dietary scares seriously.
Of course, I am vegetarian, but that's just because I'm so incredibly fucking compassionate.
37 I don't see why the kid's complaining, there's a whole cabinet full of Wasa Crisps.
Is sugar is even worse than smoking because at least smoking has the upside of looking super cool despite efforts to convince teens otherwise? Yes.
41: I'm sure if there was a 10-oz jar of salted peanuts at my desk each day, I would eat them all every day, and not because I was trying to get protein.
I would love it if eating a Snickers bar became the new brooding angsty thing for a James Dean heartthrob to do.
39 If you can't handle me acting like a know-it-all you don't deserve me actually knowing everything.
I actually quit smoking by using lollipops, all an obvious mistake in retrospect.
The paper sticks go up in flames really fast so they're quite dangerous as a substitute.
smoking has the upside of looking super cool
Well, I mean, Brezhnev could make anything look cool.
50 pretty uncool of you to find and post pictures of me dude.
i am the child of the ghosts of telly savalas and leonid brezhnev
I find it incredibly annoying that everyone points out that peanuts are not nuts, but never mention that neither are brazil nuts, almonds, etc.
It's because the peanuts try too hard.
||
OK. The most wonderful thing just happened to me, which I am going to write up properly, but anyway ...
I was in the office today, and due to go to a party at my publisher's this evening, but in the course of the day developed a really massive snotfountain of a cold and decided that it wasn't fair on me or anyone else to try to cycle across london and schmooze i this condition. So after work I got straight on the train to Cambridge, and an elderly gent in a three piece suit sat next to me. He was in animated conversation with a much younger man (I'd have said fifties or sixties, but healthy with it) and I read my Kindle. So the elderly gent after a while asks me, very politely, if that was one of these Kindle things. He has a slight colonial accent. I thought it was very odd to know nothing about them, but I said it was.
"He comes from Zimbabwe", explained his younger companion. "They can't have them there." So I thought, maybe not a luddite, and showed him all the things it would do. Then he asked why I read so much, and I told him my job, and he said what a great paper the ugnadiaur was and I managed not to say *was* in a meaningful fashion, since we had just had an email round announcing layoffs in the US operation. I asked what he was doing over here, and his companion said that he was one of the leaders of the opposition in his native land.
I couldn't return to my Kindle, so I started listening to their conversation. The younger man was talking with a lot of energy and knowledge about global warming, and methane specifically. I mentioned clathrates, to show that I know some of the jargon, and he said yes, he had discovered their significance. Uh huh. Then he launched into a long and pretty technical explanation of how the level of atmospheric methane is rising, and the ration of Carbon 12 to Carbon 13 shows that it's coming from the tropics now. It's swamps, and bovine eructations, he said. Everyone thinks it's farts, but it's actually the other end.
He warmed to his theme. Dinosaurs did it, too, he said. We published a paper on that. Have you ever seen a cow with bloat? He gestured with his hands to show a gigantic distended belly. Yes, said the politician. Well, dinosaurs got it too. And when we were working on the dinosaur paper, we worked out that they could ferment so much inside them it would lift them off the ground. We couldn't publish that. It would have ruined my reputation as a serious palaeontologist. But think of it. They could float into the air, and if they had a long tail, they could have used it to steer and direct themselves around.
It gets better, he went on after a while: suppose they had a little silicon in their teeth, so that when they gnashed them together, there was a spark.
Dragons! I said
Well, flame-breathing monsters of the air. But I couldn't publish that, he said again. We just couldn't.
Now, I had given them my cards, and he had not given me one in return. On the other hand, he spoke of a wife, the master of - College, who would meet the two of them at the station and drive them to the college where the politician (and, obviously, old friend) would be staying.
So as soon as they had left, and the train continued on to Ely, I fished out my phone and worked out who he was. A genuinely hugely distinguished expert on the Archaic climate. So I have no reason whatever to doubt the story of the dinosaurs belching flame as the wind bumps them gently among the treetops and above the ferns. I just have no ethical way to publish it either, except in the comments to an eclectic web magazine.
If the snot fountain dries up tomorrow I'll try and give the story a more polished treatment. Oh, and the book I was reading while this complete Professor Challenger story played out was, of course, The Difference Engine.
I'm not convinced 56 is OT
It might have fitted better in the end of the world thread
I'm going to assume all of 56 is true, not just truly reported.
Also 56 urges the inference that with a bit of light-touch genetic engineering of the sort accessible to the casual hobbyist, we can get flying, fire-breathing cows.
Which can light our cigarettes.
also full circle, some very normal work googling shows me that bloat occurs with higher-protein feed eg alfalfa and so cow-dragons will be easily maintained in our grainless future
Suppose that a dinosaur consists of methane and restofdino. If it can float, its density should be less than air. Playing around with the algebra, I got:
v_dinomethane/v_restofdino > (d_restofdino-d_air)/(d_air-d_methane)
If we assume d_restofdino = d_water = 1000g/L, d_a = 1.2g/L (current value, was probably higher then), and d_methane = 0.656g/L, that volumetric ratio comes out to 1836, which seems order-of-magnitude right to me given how big helium blimps are. If we allow the density of air to double to 2.4g/L, it's down to 572 times. Still a bit out of the realm of believability for me, which is too bad.
71 so... are you saying I should return these cows?
No, just that it's going to get a little DIY and inhumane.
I would bet devonian/carboniferous, era of dragonflies the size of chihuahuas for peak air density and also peak oxygen content. I vaguely remember from reading about their flight biomechanics a density then of about 1.25 current value.
This is sort of on topic: Does Donald Trump weigh 236 pounds, or does he weigh 267 pounds? Various Respected Publications (the NYT for example) have said one, and some (the NYT, for example) have said the other.
Also, how much methane would it take for him to fly? (The gas fueled fire breathing is clearly no problem.)
75: I think there were varying eyewitness reports from the Oz taping yesterday, but the new 1-page letter from Bornstein released this morning said 236.
236 sounds right based on my experience re 6'3" men of varying weights.
77:
Sure. Assuming little to no muscle on him.
Trying to increase my protein without eating meat is taking a lot of work.
I hear you. Sugar-y soft drinks and such are not my main problem. But I know I eat too many carbs, and replacing carbs with protein is a real challenge, given that I have followed a vegetarian diet for many years, and have no interest in ever again eating meat.
Also: I love dairy (have occasionally flirted with the idea of going vegan, but I love milk and cheese too much to submit to the discipline of veganism). Also: I love potatoes (they're high-carb, but I'm pretty sure I cannot live a life that is worth living without taters).
Oh, and I have about a hundred or so great recipes for lentils and pulses and chickpeas. Which I sometimes use. But since I also cook meat (which I do not ever eat) for the carnivores in my household, I can attest that cooking meat is way, way easier than cooking a protein-rich vegetarian dinner. I appreciate the efforts of those vegetarian cookbook authors who tell me that cooking veg is no more difficult than frying up a steak for supper. But, from personal experience, I'm afraid I do not believe them.
56 is an awesome story, but it's *clearly* a scientist bet. He won.
I interpret this thread to mean I can have some beers as long as I also get wings.
I can have some beers as long as I also get wings.
There's a slice of bread in every bottle, is what my dad used
to say about beer. So, yeah, you need the wings for a bit of protein.
There's a whole lot of delicious egg based dishes, most of them easy to prepare too. And some pretend meat is tasty. I like tacos with pretend ground beef. I'm not even a vegetarian.
Juice, fruit smoothies etc is right out if you're gonna go low carb. Lots of calories and no filling.
Most fruits have a lot of fiber but not all of them. Grapes are probably worse than cookies in that respect - wrong kind of sugar in them too.
If micronutrients and fibers trumps high GI depends on how much you eat maybe? Only so much of a given micronutrient you need. I feel like most people don't eat huge amounts of fruit anyway?
But snacks of any kind can be problematic, even healthy-ish snacks, ups your overall calorie intake.
Peanuts would be a good example. they aren't quite as good as a lot of real nuts, but still good for you in the right proportion. Problem is you tend to eat and eat roasted peanuts, and then eat the same amount of dinner anyway.
There's a whole lot of delicious egg based dishes, most of them easy to prepare too.
I agree, but I am (my own fault entirely) ridiculously fussy about eggs. When I was a kid, my dad used to do a big fry-up on Sunday mornings, after Mass. Pancakes with maple syrup, and bacon or sausage, with toast and jam, and, of course, eggs, sometimes scrambled, sometimes fried. If the eggs still looked, well, egg-y, I refused to eat them. And for a while when I was 15 or 16 , I called the eggs "an abortion of a chicken," just to be obnoxious and provocative, just to get a rise out of my RC, pro-life mother.
Nowadays, Mr. Just Plain Jane makes the only eggs that I will eat. He scrambles them with good Canadian cheddar; and manages to hide their fundamentally egg-y quality.
I am starting a diet, in theory, where I can't have wheat products, which will be tough but ok, but also no onions or garlic, and no beans/pulses/etc. This is not starting right away because it sounds sad.
What?! no garlic or pulses? What is the plan here? and where is the bigger picture? (if you don't mind my asking?)
And what in God's holy name are you supposed to eat?
"an abortion of a chicken,"
Technically they're more like chicken menstrual discharges.
Comments about vegetarians not getting enough protein always make me a tiny bit nervous, but luckily, I don't actually have principles and will just have some meat every now and then. I eat terribly when left to my own devices, but when I have someone else to feed, I do OK. Moving back to the (not city) Midwest makes our normal diet look seriously health-nut and hippy, though. A friend brought seven 1-lb steaks over for dinner for seven a few weeks ago, and we were amused and vaguely concerned. I kept staring at them, wondering how much would be left over. The answer? 1.5. The boyfriend and I split one, and one guy managed a meagre 8 oz portion.
As long as you don't fill up on the potato, a pound seems about right for a steak.
Four guys finished four steaks at a pound each, 3 lbs potato salad, and 4 ears of grilled corn after drinking and snacking all afternoon. I counted up bottles and cans: 76 in less than 24 hours, plus the fifth of vodka for breakfast drinks and going out to a brewery.
Midwesterners take their drinking seriously.
I counted up bottles and cans: 76 in less than 24 hours, plus the fifth of vodka for breakfast drinks and going out to a brewery.
Or, as I like to call it, "Tuesday."
If you had to live in the Midwest you'd be an alcoholic too.
I have lived in the Midwest. For 21 years.
Alcohol, tubular meat products, and football. The Midwest summarized. I'll assume you know the obesity part is implied.
I'm legally not obese. I stay about 2 pounds under.
Five pound if I'm not wearing pants.
111: Do Pittsburgh doctors give you that option? I was pretty furious after I found that getting weighed with an air cast and my boots on was enough extra to get a little shaming line about my BMI on the medical printout last visit. On the plus side, I guess it will be really easy to lose that weight once my ankle goes free again.
Doctors? I use the scales at the grocery.
I do find it a little weird, though understandable logistically, that the standard weigh-ins at doctors' offices are fully clothed. Clothes have their own weight, people!
114: Just make sure to always wear your weighin' suit.
94: It's a low FODMAP diet. It's supposed to help with things like feeling bloated and gross immediately after eating and other stuff not worth discussing in detail! It's been at least a decade of this and periodically I try something.
But seriously it involves eliminating a ton of stuff from your diet. Onions (which are in everything) and wheat are the big ones but there are also a bunch of fruits and vegetables you can't eat. Some of which I think very fondly of.
And now that my mother has been dead and gone these past three and a half years, and I never will feel her hands again, combing my hair into pigtails, and perhaps tying a jaunty ribbon into a bow to mark a special occasion...
How bad do I now feel about my 16-year old, obnoxious and cheeky self, baiting my RC, pro-life mother with talk of eggs and chickens and abortions?
I feel very bad, indeed; just awful, really.
And of course I had to let my mother know that while she was ignorant and uneducated, I was a smartypants: I knew everything! and I had all the answers.
Eh, I guess I'd now give a limb, or maybe even a vital organ, just to have my dear little mum back here with me for just one day again. She was so much smarter than I realized, and she used to comb my hair into pigtails.
Beer and soda isn't even a thing.
Sprite and beer is a thing, at least in some of the topless parts of Europe.
I balance weight/health maintenance and my sweet tooth by avoiding any added sugars that aren't actively making something sweet in a way that feels decadent. So, no jarred pasta sauce, sliced sandwich breads, sweetened yogurt, granola bars, etc. I try to limit sweets to once a day, and besides ice cream, I pretty much bake any sweets I eat. I eat as much fruit as I want, which is usually about 2 pieces a day, sometimes more sometimes less. For beverages I drink only water, unsweetened coffee, and sometimes tea, with sugary beverages being a treat. For complex carbs, I try to stick with whole grains.
Carbs are one of the biggest sticking points in my relationship. I eat lots of Wasa and knackebrod (pretend the umlauts are there), which my boyfriend considers to be a crime against carbohydrates. He would eat refined wheat pasta covered in butter and cheese and then mopped up with a whole baguette for 2 meals a day if I let him (which I don't). The main way I get him to do the shopping is by telling him I'm going to buy whole wheat pasta.
For beverages I drink only water, unsweetened coffee, and sometimes tea, with sugary beverages being a treat.
No booze? That's not very topless-European of you.
Or very Midwestern, for that matter.
Shit, I knew I was leaving something off. Yeah booze, mainly beer or wine. I've cut back not really because of health but because the 30s hangover is way worse than the 20s hangover. And sometimes I get those weird and horrible two beer hangovers.
IME weird and horrible two beer hangovers are caused by stress and fatigue more than beer. Sleep more, drink more.
Beer and soda isn't even a thing.
I thought Pittsburgh was supposed to be quite German. Hasn't Radler/Diesel made it over there?
116: I think alameda had a post up about trying a low FODMAP diet for IBS.
The only way to be certain that your diet has all the nutrition a human body needs is cannibalism.
but also no onions or garlic
This qualifies as cruel or unusual punishment.
The story in 56 is rendered more plausible by the little known fact that many dinosaurs had hollow bones, like birds, so they weighed a lot less than that looked as if they should have done.
132. Early colonists were way ahead of you.
It was on my mind because yesterday I read the Wikipedia entry on the Franklin Expedition.
132 is only roughly true. To be sure, you need to cannibalize a vegetarian who's eaten recently.
many dinosaurs had hollow bones, like birds, so they weighed a lot less than that looked as if they should have done
This is possibly the coolest unknown fact in biology: birds' respiratory systems. I only learned it when I got to university. Birds don't just have blind bag-like lungs, like mammals do - they have a system of air sacs around their organs that allows them to have unidirectional flow through their lungs, which is far more efficient for gas exchange. Look at this!
http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdrespiration.html
The professor in 56 was very clearly taking the piss. There is, see 71, no way that that story would be even remotely credible. He was blatantly trying to see just how ludicrous he could make it before you said "haaaaang on..."
I took Poli Sci instead of Bird Lungs.
This was before everybody said you had to major in STEM.
137. Are human livers as lethal as dog livers or polar bear livers?
141: no, they're one of the best bits. Most mammal livers are OK (if healthy), it's just polar mammals that should be avoided.
I never see dog livers in the grocery anymore.
Apparently lion and leopard livers are also lethal.
Also 142 clearly belongs to Opinionated Doctor Lecter.
I've been watching the "Hannibal" TV series and it is really making me want to raise my game in terms of cooking.
Is that what they call "The Great British Baking Show" in the U.K.? I heard they had to change the name in the U.S. for some trademark reason.
It's carnivore livers in general. At the top of the food chain they accumulate a scary amount of vitamin A, to the extent that it becomes toxic. Distressed polar expeditions seem to be a high risk group. I was wondering if most people were carnivorous enough for it to be a problem.
148: I don't watch TV cooking shows but I would tune in for one presented by Mads Mikkelsen, in character.
Better, one presented by Mads Mikkelsen in character as Hannibal and Simon Russell Beale in character as Falstaff.
Only one way that story ends. But many possible menus.
I endorse 147.
I am completely mystified by 156.
Stronger (and completely mystified) together!
Not at all, ajay. If you look at the linked paper -- which he sent me again this morning -- you will see that they reckon that .18 of a sauropod's mass might be excreted as methane every day. That's (a) a really thunderous amount of belching and farting and (b) would only require five days without belching to produce a bloat more or less equal to the body's mass.
Ume says these are all just handwaving figures. But it would only take one constipated dinosaur to make it true. And everything else he has told me, including the existence of a ruminant vegetarian bird with clawed wings in the jungles of Venezuela, turned out to be entirely true.
Also, this might solve the problems of my employer. A population of ruminant vegetarians in a socialist country represents a huge marketing opportunity.
a bloat more or less equal to the body's mass.
The problem is that the lifting capacity of methane gas is dependent on the volume that gas occupies. There's only so much space inside a dinosaur, and at some point either the gas compresses under pressure, and therefore is no longer lighter than air, or the dinosaur explodes. I haven't even done a back of the envelope calculation, but just eyeballing how, e.g., hot air balloons and dirigibles are proportioned in terms of size of the gasbag to size of the payload, an airborne dinosaur is not going to happen.
From the Wikipedia entry on hoatzin: This is a noisy species, with a variety of hoarse calls, including groans, croaks, hisses and grunts. So it has apparently already taken over your employers' comment sections.
Can different mass gases occupy different volumes at a fixed temperatures? I'm sure this is a dumb question. But can you have a lighter, fluffier gas which would lift the dinosaurs towards the heaven, as opposed to this dense wet gas we burp in modern times?
160: first of all, methane production wasn't 0.18 of the body mass. Methane production in litres was 0.18 of the body mass in kilograms. A litre of methane is 0.6 grams. The paper actually says "methane emission of 2675 litres per day for one [20,000kg] animal, equivalent to about 1.9 kg per day". Your sauropod would have to be bunged up for three years to generate its mass in methane, not five days.
And second, my scepticism isn't to do with methane production rate, it's to do with containing the volume of gas, because I know how big an twenty-tonne airship has to be to take off.
It seems like a lighter fluffier gas would compress down under pressure until it was the same as the denser gas, unless it was a high-energy light fluffy gas. Could the dinosaurs have been so exothermic that they'd heat up the gas inside themselves?
Even if the professor 56 was fabulizing, the story is nonetheless fabulous.
my scepticism isn't to do with methane production rate
It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a 1 pound coconut.
164: well, sure, hydrogen or helium are both better lift gases than methane. But even that won't get you past the problem that anything that has to be lighter than air is going to have to look very much like an airship, not a swollen dinosaur. After a point, the problem isn't the density of the lift gas, it's the density of the atmosphere, because that's what determines your maximum lift per cubic metre.
Now, on Titan, you have a rather better chance of getting away with it. The atmosphere is 1.5 times as dense at surface, and the gravity is 0.14g, so to fly you'd only need roughly a tenth of the lifting volume for the same mass. (You can fly like Icarus on Titan, with wings attached to your arms.)
Buoyant force equals the difference between gas and atmosphere density, times g, times volume.
A Titanic blimp creature with a body mass of 100kg would only need a volume of about ten cubic metres, containing hydrogen at room temperature. But it would need some way to keep that hydrogen warm; Titan is pretty cold.
The dinosaurs were basically birds already, with hollow bones and dainty appetites. I don't see what's so ludicrous about a little jet propulsion to get them flapping.
(You can fly like Icarus on Titan, with wings attached to your arms.)... Titan is pretty cold.
ADVANTAGE, TITAN!
Wait, no, I think I'm wrong. Fifty cubic metres. That's still achievable though.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an SF story about a pilot who discovers lighter-than-air life living high in the Earth's atmosphere. It doesn't end well for him (not a spoiler: the story is called "The Horror of the Heights".)
Ugh, god, I hate it when people ruin the title for me.
172 right I mean some of them did, in fact, fly. I feel like the physics here are analagous to those those of levitating, idk, an ostrich and my untrained physics instincts tell me that would be pretty easy.
Retroactively applying for exception to analogy ban for 177.
levitating, idk, an ostrich
The Yippies attempted this before moving on to the Pentagon.
175
Every time I fly I think of that story and look for malevolent jellyfish above the clouds. I haven't seen any yet. (I haven't seen any lighter-than-air dinosaurs either; maybe the jellyfish eat them all?)
Not really an analogy, since ostriches are theropods and the practicalities of levitating, say, a medium sized ornithomimid would be much the same. On the other hand, as a matter of observation, ostriches are not known for spontaneously levitating.
Ostriches don't take a dump flight without a plan.
179 Well it must have worked otherwise why would they have thought they could move on to the Pentagon? Also re Yippies, putting a pin in this for some future more relevant thread, I will have to share the stories about my parents' years-long feud with Jerry Rubin over a parking space.
181 that's just because they don't get bloat though, which I just learned by searching google scholar for "ostrich bloat." The disappointing part of all this is that any levitating dinos would have to be mostly herbivores which I guess is better than no levitating dinos.
159/162, etc.: I did the back of the envelope calculation to assume that there'd be any lift at all back in 71. You can fiddle with the numbers--probably easiest to change d_restofdino by assuming that it has bird innards, and making d_air a little bit denser because it's the Cretaceous, but you're still going to need an absurdly huge fart bladder.
The obvious solution is to give up on the levitating part and settle for a fire-breathing pelican. Digesting fish has to produce methane too, at least potentially. Help me out here, science people.
Of course you'd need an absurdly huge fart bladder, but that sounds like the kind of thing that wouldn't appear in the fossil record very reliably. But we can infer its presence by logic.
186 you need to be a vegetarian to have methanogenic bacteria in your gut, and you neet flints in your teeth for the spark. So pelicans fail completely. All they can fucking do is fly.
And hold in his beak, enough food for a week, though I'm damned if I know how the hellican.
188, 189: Was there a dinosaur that was a giant chipmunk? That's what I'm picturing.
A remarkable front page poster is the Lizardbreath.
Known for the rarity of its appearances on the front page. Its primary habitat remains the comments section.
188.1 needs to be fixed, by scientists. Get some fucking ambition, NW.
183 Check my pseud Stabby, I'd love to hear that parking feud story. Jerry was a douche.
I know a guy who was nearly killed by a pelican. There was a flock resting on the road and he was on his motorbike doing in excess of 120 km/h when he encountered them. They were scared by the sound of the bike so took flight but were only about chest height when he hit them. One got him clean in the chest and threw him off the bike. They are pretty big and heavy birds. He survived thanks to leathers and a helmet. No word on the bird.
Also I took this same idiot to the hospital three times. Once for the pelican, once for driving drunk and rolling his car (he stopped breathing while I was trying to help, which is the most terrifying thing ever, but he started breathing again simply by straightening his airway preparing to do mouth to mouth), and once for reasons that I don't really recall.
This has been an episode of "Togolosh free-associates about pelicans." Tune in next week for "Togolosh free-associates about small angry rodents."
Bloated vegetarians six inches off the ground shooting sparks are some pretty weak-ass fire breathing dragons. I demand cooler semi-plausible scientific theories.
194 my dad knew his then-girlfriend well, she said he could park outside the girlfriend & jerry's place (idk if they had a driveway space or what) and JR pitched a fit because the noise of the ancient beater car parking distracted him from writing... wait for it... DO IT: scenarios of the revolution. So from then on every time my parents came into town they would pull up near the house, detatch the vacuum hose from the engine (I think, does that sound like a possible car thing?), and just idle extra loudly until he came out to yell about it, then drive off.
Do my parents sound like terrible people or the best possible people in this story?
This is why science should focus more on things like death rays and re-creating aurochs. There's no room for lameness in your results when you are LITERALLY BUILDING AN AUROCH.
Toggles, could you free associate about either Megatherium or Glyptodon, two of my favorite candidates for recreational cloning?
Just think how much better 195 would be if the pelicans breathed fire.
Glyptodon is for sure sweet. Build me a gigantic fucking Armadillo, Cambridge train-riders!
do aurochs bloat/possibly fly tho or should we be focusing on more buoyant megafauna
Do ants ever walk backwards?
I think I just saw one doing so, but instinctively smote it before I could confirm.
My research shows me that the best candidates for floating clone revival are ruminants with foregut fermentation, HOWEVER, the process of foregut fermentation limits the size of a species to approx hippo size, which poses a problem insofar as bigger things are cooler.
Definitely making the perfect the enemy of the good there, Stabs.
My free-association on pelicans involves a decomposing one, in December on a Texas beach, sometime after Hurricane Ike, and the pet dogs of my cousin who got into the pelican after a day or two and stunk so bad that it might make you throw up.
Anyway though, let's put this on hold, my plan for science is to just focus on time travel until we have that figured out and that will solve most other problems. This feeds into my theory of constitutional interpretation, Ambitemporal Originalism, let's just interpret the law in the way that most favors the development of time travel UNTIL we have then we can become principled originalists and go back and ask Oliver Wolcott or whoever what he thinks guns are.
God, how am I not president already.
If pelicans breathed fire, that story would take on the melancholy grandeur of The Farthest Shore.
I like it. We can just keep shuttling John Marshall back and forth and have him serve as perma Supreme Court chief. Also some live Glyptodons outside the SCT building because the majesty of the law.
"I cannot break with a precedent that my alt-universe time travel clone will write in 300 years"
I was at a dinner with RBG a few years ago and thought seriously enough that it surprised me about walking over to her table and being like listen.
Your future self was trying to tell you something. Too late now.
But I can't imagine why they didn't put me at her table to begin with.
Maybe the future-law should just be do whatever the recreated Glyptodons want to do.
217 at least it's an ethos
Glyptodon-centric augury is an obvious fit for Halfordismo.
206. Your research has not accounted for the even-toed ungulate Gigantocamelus, whole lot bigger than a hippo. Giant tapirs are also recently extinct, plausibly revivable.
You guys are thinking small-- ant supercolonies are one of the few examples of intraspecies warfare and murder aside from humanity. There are two warring clusters of argentine ant supercolonies in the US now, horrific trench warfare at the border between them. Consider slightly more malevolent and better organized supercolonies, a distributed insect intelligence strong enough to realize that primates are their enemy, able to eat PVC and to synthesize gaseous rather than liquid neorotixins. helpful image
I'm not sure you and I are reading the same memo.
There is an excellent not at all optimistic time travel cartoon, "WOrld of Tomorrow", about 20 min, low-tech. I saw it on Amazon.
220 woooaaah there with the antpocalypse, wrong iteration of the multiverse, I'm just trying to get into some light time travel, maybe a couple of floating sabertooths.
220: HG Wells, "Empire of the Ants". Early 20th century Brits have all the best ideas, I think this thread demonstrates.
220, 223 = "pizza"/"kill and eat you"
For millions of years, Earth was fertile and rich. Then pollution and waste began to take their toll. Civilization fell into ruin. This is the world of the 25th century. Only a handful of scientists remain, men who have vowed to rebuild what has been destroyed. This is their achievement: Ark II, a mobile storehouse of scientific knowledge, manned by a highly trained crew of young people. Their mission: to bring the hope of a new future to mankind.
Or maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnation_Alley_(film)
Now I really want to practice time-law. You could cite antecedent: "Chuck, you know that case law you're looking for? Well, listen to this:..."
200: Both excellent candidates for resurrection, IMO, though perhaps not as excellent as the ankylosaurus (Spiky eyebrows!). In practical terms however, the Wrangel Island Pygmy Mammoth is probably our best shot at making ancient megafauna come back to life, though it's debatable whether a pygmy mammoth really counts as megafauna (they were only about 3 feet tall). They lived fairly recently and well preserved carcasses are available. An elephant could serve as the gestation host. They would no doubt make excellent pets. I dream of brushing my mammoth and tying little ribbons in its fur and playing with it in the sprinkler. It would be a total blast. Also, this would be the first steps in cloning a full sized mammoth. Compared to aurochs (wild cows?! Hunt a mammoth with me, Tigre! Show those chicken-munching punk-ass bitches who's paleo and who's just pale!) they are a far superior store of nutrition, as one would feed a whole clan for a month.
Just checking in to make sure all of you know about, and/or already live in recreations of, the Ma'alta mammoth bone huts.
I guess it's spelled Mal'ta but pretty sure they didn't even have apostrophes so whatever.
An elephant could serve as the gestation host.
I just had this conversation with my dad. Cross-species mitochondria, no prob at all. I think the way to go with this is a modified future Crispr/cas that's much more efficient than the current version, and then starting with a current elephant and introducing 1000 mutations at a a time to get us to the desired genomeover many cloned generations (no need to actually grow the intermediate stages, "just" keep demethylated cell lines).
A 3 foot tall mammoth is way preferable to full size, if you are keeping one at home.
If you have a house with standard 80" by 36" doors like some commoner asshole, sure.
would it be too grim to have a pet dwarf mammoth in a home made of regular mammoth bones, asking for a friend
You could always just get a hyrax. Or like ten of them all squeezed together into the same crevice. (cf: http://charleskinsey.co.uk/gallery/rock-hyrax-family.jpg/image)
You could always just get a hyrax. Or like ten of them all squeezed together into the same crevice. (cf: http://charleskinsey.co.uk/gallery/rock-hyrax-family.jpg/image)
I will spare you the third through tenth identical comments squeezed together into a single comment thread.
http://charleskinsey.co.uk/gallery/rock-hyrax-family.jpg/image
Bleah, without the evil trailing parenthesis to mess things up. Dammit.
238: Thank you! Nothing can cheer me up like a family of rock hyraxes.
238:　Funny, I had never thought the interior of Fresh Salt looked quite like that
100% seriously: 3-foot-high mammoths would be the greatest, most prestigious pets ever. If you controlled the 3-foot-high mammoth creation and distribution process you could get fantastically rich. Loads of people would pay, what, $50,000 for one? Easily?
could a person be a gestational surrogate for a dwarf mammoth, asking for the same friend as in 234
not a woman but "gestational surrogate" and "mammoth" don't seem to be like things that would go awesomely together
Rock Hyrax are awesome! And probably taste delicious, though I don't know from personal experience. I have seen and stepped in a lot of Rock Hyrax poop. Little balls of poop like from a rabbit.
Also, how the hell does a tube like a colon manage to form little balls?! I get the vaguely banana-shaped poops of humans, but I just don't understand the dynamics of a Hyrax's ass. How the fuck am I supposed to sleep not knowing this?
They're ridiculous pathetic little animals. Their only redeeming feature is provision of convenient snacks for magnificent birds of prey.
198.last Your parents are great.
And 'rock hyrax' is a totally inappropriate name, with its suggestion of badassery. They're appropriately diminuated as 'dassies'.
Not necessarily agreeing but I'm glad to see someone coming out with a strongly anti-hyrax POV. We need more "fuck hyraxes" voices out there.
I will say that Americans' majority-positive view of the hyrax is mostly based on the following: (a) you go to the zoo and there is this weird little rodent looking thing with (b) a sign that says it's the closest relative of the elephant. Comedy gold, affection guaranteed. If you had them for real like on your porch all the time they would just be like a vole or some other loser species.
"The conies are a feeble folk" not good enough for you? In fact any creature who has been treated in this manner by human language can be considered fully smacked down.
Also I am worried about the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
241
You could probably get a million for a dwarf mammoth in China if you market it right. Top Tibetan Mastiffs went for around that, and they haven't even been extinct for 10,000 years.
252.2
Me too! The numbers are not going in the right direction.
I just wish they would bring back Hydrox. Way better than stupid Oreos.
Black Hole by Bucky Sinister uses a biotech startup that custom breeds mini-whales for rich Silicon Valley types as a plot point.
Whales are ALSO foregut fermenters as I learned today.
You likely couldn't make a three-foot mammoth without first being able to make a three-foot elephant. And that would probably command just as much if not more on the open market.
"We Genetically Engineered the Mammoth"
As long as we are genetically engineering three-foot mammoths, I want mine in purple.
Are we breeding these things purely for the pet market? Because hyraxes are halal but not kosher, and I think mammoths would be too. So there might be a labelling issue if you wanted to breed them for food.
We only missed the Wrangel Island dwarfs by about 3.5Ka. And there's an outside chance the Egyptians knew about a population on some Mediterranean island. Getting DNA should be easy compared to Neanderthals, and they've done that.
With pets, it's always implicit that you can eat them if you really want/need to.
But not their livers, unless they're vegetarian pets, like mammoths.
IT'S NO FUN, BEIN' A HUGE OXYYYMORON...
I refuse to be drawn into this.
||
It was a hell of a way to start the day.
Around 5:45 this morning Bonsaisue shook me awake, distraught and said, "There's a man in our downstairs bathroom."
I had been fully asleep, but I leaped out of bed, flooded with adrenaline. And also fear. "Call 911," I said, and then quickly checked Noser and Rilee--both were fine.
I went to the top of the stairs to look and listen, if I could hear anything over my heartbeat raging in my ears, anyway. The door was closed, chain in place.
The guy walked into view, seemingly headed to the door--basically right at the bottom of the stairs, the top of which I crouched on. In the dark.
He tried to unlock the door--at this point I started to think okay, he's leaving and I guess he came in the back door--and I was trying to figure out how he might have our keys. But he couldn't unlock the door.
They weren't our keys.
I began to calm down, but I was royally pissed off--it was starting to become likely this guy was just drunk or high and confused.
I knew that you're not supposed to confront an intruder, but at that point I preferred to get the fucker out as quickly as possible.
So I turned on the light in the stairwell.
He was clearly confused and in the wrong house, and said it was an honest mistake and that he was a neighbor, even telling me his address--never seen him, and not a good excuse in the least, obviously--and I told him to back off and stay away. He did, and I watched him continuously even as I unlocked the door.
I backed up the stairs, watching him, and told him to get out. He did, and I locked the door behind.
I looked around and found that the back door was still chained and locked. I checked the windows... sure enough, he had slid a screen up, come in the window, and even closed the window behind.
Nothing was missing or damaged.
The cops showed up a couple of minutes after the guy wandered off, out of sight.
They took our statements, and boy I was both surprised and completely not surprised at at how poorly I could describe the whole thing.
They checked the address and found it was, in fact, a resident of a house up the block, who was totally drunk.
The officer told us it appeared the guy had committed a class A misdemeanor, and we could go to the magistrate to report and swear and they'd issue a warrant for the guy--whom they knew well as a pain in the ass drunk.
So.
We're torn about pressing charges--unlikely to have any real durable positive outcome, isn't it?
Would you tell the kids? Recall that Noser is 8 and Rilee 6.
|>
I know drinking to the point of being a pain in the ass very well, and I've never once broken and entered.
I you had a miniature mammoth as a pet, I bet he would have been scared away or at least realized his house didn't have a small elephant-thing.
Do you need keys to get out of your house? That sounds dangerous for fire-related reasons.
Also, the experience sounds awful for you and the family. Wishing you the best.
268: I'm not a parent, so feel free to disregard my thoughts, but I'd let the kids remain blissfully ignorant.
I have a ten-year-old, so you'd better not ignore my thoughts. Especially the elephant-related thoughts.
When I was 7 my mother woke up to find a guy going through the drawers in her bedroom. She lay quiet and he went away. My father slept through the whole thing. In the morning she told me and I was totally unimpressed, because my experience at that age wasn't sufficient for me to realise how scary it was.
CONCLUSION: Don't mention it because either they'll be scared or they won't even get excited about it. Lose/lose.
225.
"The Hydrox are a feeble folk" is the correct translation. No anti-hyrax propaganda please, even from RT, who is obviously misinformed or has false hyrax consciousness.
By the way the western pika, another cute animal, is threatened by climate change. Its range has diminished as warmer weather creeps higher in the mountains. Hyraxes and pikas, though both extremely cute, are not closely related.
Obviously nothing came of it. We were just freaked out.
274.2: that's where we came down. Both the kids run a little bit to anxious.
271: Yeah, the double deadbolt isn't the very best arrangement, but I think we're okay. Maybe reconsidering it, though.
We had a situation (that wasn't quite as scary as yours) a few months ago, finding a drunk river-goer sleeping on our deck in the morning. Pokey was right with me when I found him, so there was no hiding it from the kids, though.
I think in your situation I would probably not tell them until they were older, given that they didn't notice at the time. There's something unsettling about knowing that you slept through the whole thing.
Also, just leave a key permanently in the interior side of the deadbolt.
Problem is the deadbolt is stupidly close to the window in the door.
If he's a known pain in the ass criminally, reporting it might be a good idea to get it on the record,in case he does more stuff later. A childhood friend-turned-meth addict broke in to a neighbor's house twice, and the second time they were told to press charges so the court had more leverage to get her into mandatory rehab. She'd been stealing for years from family and clients (she worked as a nanny), but since most of them hadn't pressed charges her record didn't really reflect the extent of her stealing and drug problems (first heroin then meth).
Hm. Well we'll think on that, Buttercup.
Would you tell the kids?
I wouldn't. They're awfully young, and why cause them needless anxiety?
If it were me who had to make the decision, I'd also be torn about pressing charges. But since it's not me: I think you should press charges. As Buttercup says, this should go on record; and if you just let it go, he's likely to keep doing crazy shit like this.
No need or obligation to tell, TJ. The girls know the mildest possible version of Rowan and his friend's infractions and think basically they're in jail for stealing Grandma's wallet. If they hadn't seen that the guys were at the house before going up to bed, I wouldn't have told the girls even that much.
And now I am already second-guessing my advice to press charges.
On the one hand, and not to get all Florida-style "stand-your-ground," but still: to break into a private dwelling in the middle of the night is basically to terrorize its occupants.
On the other hand, it sounds like it might have been an honest, if massively effed-up, mistake? And if pressing charges would totally ruin this guy's life, is it actually worth it?
If this had happened in Florida, of course, the answer would be easy. Either you would have already put a bullet through this dude's head; or, if you, like me, are of a more bleeding-heart liberal persuasion, you would know that pressing charges might see him working county roads on a Florida chain gang for the next ten years or so (so: no charges, of course).
My instinct would be to create a record some way other than by calling the cops, is note to a neighborhood association a thing? Not because I think cops would be an overreaction but more because every time I've had to ask the police for help (3 times?) it's gotten turned around on me and been scary/stupid and so I assume you'd probably just get yelled at.
Nvm, missed the point about interactions with officers in 268. So there is a record, idk that pressing charges adds anything other than hassle for you. Ugh how scary though. Don't tell kids, at that age I worried enough about imaginary kidnappers (who all looked like Mr. Roper?) rappelling into my room with grappling hooks without any real-world fodder for it.
In your own house, it's Caste Doctrine, not some johnny-come-lately "Stand Your Ground." I don't think Florida has anything to do with it. Blaze away.
I mean, if somebody else breaks in at night. You can't retroactively use self-defense as a justification.
Caste Doctrine
Not even the Untouchables are unshootable.
In Texas, you can shoot somebody for pointing out typos.
291: You've got a great start on a 2017 summer blockbuster.
Yes, 288.1 is onto it re: the lean against following up. Minimal upside, mild potential downside, broadly construed.
We both agreed the kids have no need to know, as they slept the whole time.
I, too, was obsessively in fear of kidnappings at those ages. Thanks, newspapers! Thanks, "Unsolved Mysteries."
Why is it that spambots are so much more constructive and fun to read than the average (presumed human) news site commenter?
Because they so want to be loved!
This is true. Whereas the others have, wisely, given up all hope that this might ever happen.
OTOH, I had occasion to search my twitter feed for mentions of icann the other day, and, sweet Jesus, the Trumpist comments. I will never joke about "Weimar America" again. There will be occasions to use the phrase but I won't be joking then.
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