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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

#201

Post by cat199 »

ekr wrote: post #97
developer2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Certain categories of people with exposure are to this day disallowed from being blood donors as a result due to the risk and difficulty in testing.

Red Cross rules: " You are not eligible to donate if:

From January 1, 1980, through December 31, 1996, you spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 3 months or more, in the United Kingdom (UK), or From January 1, 1980, to present, you had a blood transfusion in any country(ies) in the (UK) or France. The UK includes any of the countries listed below. ... "

http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requ...

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#202

Post by ethbro »

ergothus wrote: post #198
bitexploder wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flirted with stints of vegetarianism. Still eat far less meat than "average" and can go many days without meat. I am okay eating animals, they are tasty. They think, they die, they go to my tummy. I try to eat grass fed and "humane" local stuff these days precisely to avoid issues that occur at mass produced meat factories (antibiotic needs, etc.). This makes meat cost more, which makes me eat less. The central reaso…

> I also don't think it is even subjective, even though it is a very passionate subject. I'll agree to that. If you have a definition of "thinking/self-aware/conscious/sapient/concept of choice", any given creature either IS or ISN'T. But we can't agree on a definition, and we have no real means to test. So it's a non-subjective fact that we (currently) have only subjective means to determine, and subjective argument…

I think the scale slides the other way too. So just because plants looks different than us, it seems kind of arbitrary to relegate them as "not thinking" and subject to whatever we want to do with them. I mean, I'm sure grass isn't thrilled about having its new growth trimmed repeatedly.

Not making an argument one way or the other, just have been thinking about it for myself. So I suppose my only point to the above would be that "there's always a subjective line that needs to be drawn somewhere, rather than an objective one."

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#203

Post by bitexploder »

ethbro wrote: post #202
ergothus wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't think it is even subjective, even though it is a very passionate subject. I'll agree to that. If you have a definition of "thinking/self-aware/conscious/sapient/concept of choice", any given creature either IS or ISN'T. But we can't agree on a definition, and we have no real means to test. So it's a non-subjective fact that we (currently) have only subjective means to determine, and subjective argument…

I think the scale slides the other way too. So just because plants looks different than us, it seems kind of arbitrary to relegate them as "not thinking" and subject to whatever we want to do with them. I mean, I'm sure grass isn't thrilled about having its new growth trimmed repeatedly. Not making an argument one way or the other, just have been thinking about it for myself. So I suppose my only point to the above w…

Agreed. Main thing is, I like being alive and have to eat, at least, plants to stay alive. So it does bring you to an interesting point of, so... if I can't safely say that even plants aren't really thinking food... I should just not try to formulate an argument about which things are "thinking", but not everything is relative. Using the facts we have now I will only go so far on the whole whole relativism angle. Cows are way more like me than a black bean, for example. So it is pretty easy to at least roughly group things. Anyway, we agree here, but ultimately we shaped the world in a certain way (our ancestors) so we just have to accept that we can't change certain things easily or at all (what we eat, that we have to cut grass, etc). So that line of thinking about "should I eat thing X?" just seems trickier because I have so many biases rattling around in my brain and we always construct our internal narrative to fit facts.

What isn't hard is the sustainability argument. That is super simple arithmetic. And that is the one that pretty much seals it for me.

I think a lot of people start from the sustainability angle and then convince themselves of a lot of things that are murky or they themselves didn't really personally decide this, it is just something a lot of other people are doing / have decided and it fits their narrative of "meat is not sustainable". That said I do think there are well reasoned actors out there that have "done the work" to decide eating meat is not for them, but don't dress it up as a philosophical choice until you /have/ done the work and thought it through. It starts and ends with a lot of Why? :)

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#204

Post by dmix »

abetusk wrote: post #27
quantumhobbit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a direct answer to your question (because I don't know) but there's a couple doing research into a cure for prion disease because one of them (Sonia Vallabh) has it. Eric Minikel has been blogging about their research [1] [2], maintains an active Twitter presence [3] and has GitHub [4] repositories on the issue. The blog has a lot of information for anyone wanting to know more about bioinformatics, basic research…

> Sonia and I set out on a quest to re-train ourselves as scientists. We both started taking night classes, reading papers, calling up scientists, going to conferences. We left our old careers and found jobs in research labs, and eventually enrolled at Harvard Medical School, where we are now PhD students in biological and biomedical sciences.

Wow, what a great story. Inspiring that you can change careers mid life and be successful.

Thanks for sharing.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#205

Post by ergothus »

Clownshoesms wrote: post #172
ergothus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been vegetarian for a bit over a decade (no fish, but dairy and eggs okay) - If you live in the right area, and have the right tastes, it's downright easy. In other areas, it's quite difficult. My personal tips & notes: * If you otherwise enjoy meat, there are a lot of meat-substitutes out there and more being developed. These tend to do a great job of mimicking processed meats and a terrible job of mimicking "r…

Thanks for the information, I'll have a closer read later. I think I'll take it in steps, losing beef/chicken/etc stock will be a blow to my recipes. Cheese will be hard if it comes to it. It's interesting the defensiveness aspect, I've been guilty of that in the past, although sometimes just for reasons of wanting to debate it... generally a topic I'll let someone else raise first though. I guess people get very pas…

FWIW, I like Knorr Vegetarian Vegetable bouillon cubes. (Other premade Veggie bouillons have NOT impressed me).

When I first became a vegetarian all the forums widely advised making your own vegetable broth by boiling down veggies and freezing large amounts for later use, using multiple smallish containers so you never had to deal with thawing more broth than you needed. At the time I was a college student with no freezer (or stove) so that wasn't an option, and I ended up getting used to the bouillon and never trying the recommended option, but it may be worth trying out.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#206

Post by godmodus »

menacingly wrote: post #196
godmodus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

part of that optimization is also disease prevetion, if we maximize "product" but produce more expenses in the form of diseases, we'd be losing money, not making any. the meat industry is a horror show, tbh, and they don't maximize product extraction because they want to save every last piece of protien, they do it for the cash.

This is a good point, and is probably related to our general tendency to let industry externalize consequences

Well, scale tends to even things out. These companies won't disappear, but climate and anti meat movements will force them to transform, probably soon.

By soon I mean not I our life time, but Certainly the few coming generations. We've been eating meat for millenia. I give till the end of the century.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#207

Post by jcoffland »

computerphage wrote: post #79
jcoffland wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prions are not alive and therefore do not need to compete for resources to further their existence.

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

I said, "do not need to compete for resources to further their existence." This is not the same as "do not need resources."

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#208

Post by areyousure »

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…

> 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.

This is not directly related to the main thrust of your comment, but I thought it was interesting that more than 80% of the BCE cases in England occurred in the years 1990--1995, when Google did not exist in any form. Only 6--7% of the BCE cases in England occurred after google.com was registered.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#209

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bitexploder wrote: post #173
ethbro wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a, for lack of a better term, total vegetarian, do you have any moral thoughts on different types of animals? Was the herbavore vs omnivore vs carnivore thing a consideration? Did you debate mammal protein vs fish? Curious how people arrive at "their" vegetarianism.

Flirted with stints of vegetarianism. Still eat far less meat than "average" and can go many days without meat. I am okay eating animals, they are tasty. They think, they die, they go to my tummy. I try to eat grass fed and "humane" local stuff these days precisely to avoid issues that occur at mass produced meat factories (antibiotic needs, etc.). This makes meat cost more, which makes me eat less. The central reaso…

* Americans are used to cheap meats and are very very slowly becoming used to paying for meat at prices where it can be raised more healthily*

This may be true, but I wonder how much of the cost of meat is the inability to buy direct.

My family buys all our beef (and considering pork this year) from a local farmer by pre-ordering a quarter steer. The total price I pay is far less than the supermarket price for beef and the only explanation I can come up with is that we're cutting out the middlemen.

Likewise, the bison farmers around here are advertising prices well below the cost of bison at the few stores that carry it.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#210

Post by HamSession »

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…

It is good to note that Lauder's principal is a statistical argument for degrees of freedom in a system. The Landauer principal on a statistical averaging of this effect, meaning you will sometimes be able to store a little more information.

I think you have your calculations off for the amount of energy required to store a human brain. Assume 8.6 x 10^10 neurons (more accurate number as its simple density measurement) each holding a 64-bit weight which gives us 5.5 x 10^12 bits. This multiplied by the lower bound e.g. k(1)ln2 or 9.56 x 10^-24 J, gives us 5.3 x 10^-12 J which is lower than the energy required to type a letter on this keyboard. Now even if we increase this by body temperature say 37 C we get 310.15 K or about 1.7 x 10^-8 J. This is of course a lower bound on the problem but even if you pump up the number of neurons or weight value you still get less than a joule of energy required.

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