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When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

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Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#91

Post by touchofevil »

justboxing wrote: post #66
touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…

That's really scary. I hadn't heard about it affecting slaughterhouse workers, but that totally makes sense. I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#92

Post by dragonwriter »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #8
YCode wrote: post #3

I understand prion diseases are rare and it's more likely I'll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept. Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.

What would a cure for prion diseases even look like? Are prions targeted by the immune system at all? That to me is what is scary about them.

> What would a cure for prion diseases even look like?

You'd need something that responded to the physical conformation difference in the prion (which is clearly possible because prion disease is exactly a difference in behavior based on that) in a way which somehow selectively disrupts or expels the prion form of the protein (while different reaction is clearly possible, the desired difference is less clearly acheivable.)

I suppose some kind of nanomachine that actually physically reconfigured proteins from the prion conformation to the healthy one might also be plausible, eventually.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#93

Post by wnevets »

touchofevil wrote: post #91
justboxing wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…

That's really scary. I hadn't heard about it affecting slaughterhouse workers, but that totally makes sense. I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices.

>I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices

good luck with that

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#94

Post by kevinmchugh »

thinkmassive wrote: post #33
touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

A workaround for people who would like to eat ground meat but avoid this issue is to grind it yourself, or to buy steak and have the butcher grind it for you.

Plus, your meat will be more freshly ground this way. More freshly ground meat is superior in almost every way: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2011/04/the-burger-lab-w...

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#95

Post by Bjorkbat »

riffic wrote: post #50
popopobobobo wrote: post #21

This article make me unwell. Just thinking of the cannibalism makes me wanna throw up.

Let me accelerate that then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_Was_the_End

This might just have been the best thing I've ever seen on Wikipedia.

We evolved from a species of ape that developed an appetite for going on cannibalistic brain-eating killing sprees followed shortly after by a lot of rape because eating brains fills us with uncontrollable lust. In the long-term this made us super intelligent, but killed our psychic abilities and thus our ability to connect with nature, so we began to do a lot of really awful things like pollute the environment, develop nuclear weapons, and become racially-tolerant (gasp!). If you want to escape from the hell that awaits modern society, then you should drop out, become vegetarian, get acquainted with Eastern philosophy, and maybe try and reshape your head using some wooden frames. Also, modern cannibalistic tribes are really just trying to play catch-up with white people.

But the best part of all has to be the Devo connection.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#96

Post by scythe »

Razengan wrote: post #67
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we have thousands of years of cultural belief that mind and body are distinct, I'm not aware of any scientific evidence for that. And there is a lot of evidence that the mind is directly dependent on the state of the body--change the body (drugs, injury, etc) and inevitably the state of mind changes too. So I don't know of any reason to think that it's even possible to separate a mind from a body, let alone mov…

Just copy everything then. There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up…

You cannot copy "all" of the information stored in the human body. Briefly, this happens because the physical limitations of information storage require cooling (Landauer's principle) which requires kT×log(2) energy per bit, or about 2.5 zJ at room temperature. The brain's memory capacity is about 2.5 * 10^15 bytes (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor...), but the amount of information which can be retrieved is much smaller than the amount of information required to fully describe the system -- in the same way that knowing the contents of my hard disk will not help you recreate my laptop. The brain weighs about 1300 grams, of which maybe 5%, or 65 grams, is protein, composed of amino acids which weigh about 0.25 zeptograms, so contains about 2.6 * 10^23 amino acids. If we assume that we need a kilobit of information per amino acid, which seems like a lowball, it would require about 650 kilojoules of energy at the absolute thermodynamic minimum (vastly more efficient than real computers) just to store the information in the human brain. The electrical power required to simulate its dynamics would be tectonic, and that's assuming perfect efficiency.

Therefore, no computer that is composed of components which interact with the electromagnetic field and which operates at a temperature comparable to Earth temperatures will ever simulate a human mind to complete accuracy. It will always be an approximation.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#97

Post by ekr »

developer2 wrote: post #41
metasean wrote: post #12

I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed. I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed. That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are: (a…

>> My family and I have had very frank discussion about death earlier than we would have otherwise. It would benefit any family to have that discussion, even if both parents are in their 20s and there has been no "scare scenario". Many people die every single day due to unpredictable events, with no warning whatsoever. Unfortunately, too many people have never really pondered their mortality, leading them to be incap…

Surely, after a decade it should be fairly easy to detect Prp_sc levels, or at least extract bone marrow sample for examination. That should eliminate beyond any reasonable level of doubt, any reason for worrying about the matter.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#98

Post by ianterrellwt »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #84
computerphage wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "not alive" => "doesn't need resources", then "needs resources" => "alive". That doesn't seem right to me.

That's... not how logic works.

I think that might be how logic works. The fallacy seems to be with its parent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#99

Post by cyan_atrus »

scythe wrote: post #96
Razengan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just copy everything then. There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up…

You cannot copy "all" of the information stored in the human body. Briefly, this happens because the physical limitations of information storage require cooling (Landauer's principle) which requires kT×log(2) energy per bit, or about 2.5 zJ at room temperature. The brain's memory capacity is about 2.5 * 10^15 bytes ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor... ), but the amount of information whic…

this is a really cool comment -- thank you! -- do you have any more reading you can link to?

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#100

Post by idanoeman »

yblu wrote: post #87
XFrequentist wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature cares not a whit about "species".

All things equal. Specie A (with this disease) stop cannibalizing after seeing the outcome, better chance of survival. Specie B (without this disease) eat themselves to the last person... Lower chance of survival as a specie. Nature "cares" by generating lots of options, then let the fittest to survive. So while nature doesn't intend or plan for a specie to survive, the outcome is no different from if it did. I belie…

Right, having-prions can be seen as adaptive for a species.
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