Jump to content

ewmon

Senior Members
  • Posts

    1295
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by ewmon

  1. It's the illegality of producing, distributing, selling, possessing and using these drugs that helps protect those individuals who have brain chemistry that makes them addicted. The justice system handles these addicted individuals rather kindly (for example, successful completion of a detox and rehab programs followed by two years probation in lieu of jail time), while banishing the evil traffickers/producers (who heartlessly enslave these addicted individuals) to stiff prison sentences. Historically, it has almost never been the case that drug addicts are imprisoned for their addictions. If they do go to jail, it's for additional charges: possession of a firearm, home invasion, shoplifting, trafficking, etc. No longer can police let drunks sleep it off in their lockups; they must be PC'd and undergo detox out of the real concern of dying from withdrawal. And do you really want to have, for example, teachers in our schools who have been publicly drunk/high countless times because it would not be a crime and thus have no record of it? I can just see it now: John and Mary Jones and daughter Susie walking down the street. MARY: "John, look out for that drunk weaving down the sidewalk and now ... ugh ... puking in the gutter." SUSIE: "Mom, Dad. That's no drunk, that's my biology teacher, Mr. Smith. [now shouting] Yoohoo Mr. Smith! It's me, Susie." John and Mary Jones and son Bob walking down the street. JOHN: "Mary, look at that pathetic woman laying unconscious in the doorway of that shooting gallery." BOB: "Mom, Dad. That's no slut, that's my Cub Scout leader, Ms. Smith. ... I didn't know she wore pink panties" Addicts are not mindless slaves to their addictions. There are programs that educate and retrain them on how to live their lives. It is ultimately their decision on how they behave. Plenty of addicts have told me that everyone can get straight, but only if they want to. Some of the most pathetic sights I've seen were interviewing young people in recovery programs who came in with their parents who were paying for it. I could guarantee that 90% wouldn't make it beyond two weeks, because they obviously didn't want to be there, yet my bosses would take them. And everyone experiences withdrawal, not just those with addictions. For example, if you were administered large amounts of ethanol through an IV for several days and then it stopped cold turkey, you would suffer from DTs, etc, and perhaps death from withdrawal due to physical dependency. Take OC's for a week or two for some sort of pain, and then have your doctor refuse to write another prescription (which they sometimes do), and you will suffer withdrawal and feel lousy like you have the flu. When you have a few drinks in the evening and then have a restless night's sleep, that's withdrawal. When you can't get going in the morning before your first coffee, that's withdrawal.
  2. Seriously, it's called "science fiction", some of which has been ahead of the curve (and very useful).
  3. I'd also like to point out the crackpottery of using "broken instruments", rendering subjective data as factual, assigning arbitrary mathematical values, performing statistics on them, drawing scientific conclusions, etc. My formal study of psychology began with lots of science — first with simple organisms and the chemistry of life, then with multicellular organisms, and then sensory organs, central nervous systems, Pavlov's dog, classical learning, etc. That was all well and good, but then it shifted into various theories, etc about the human experience as, essentially, a "black box" ... why people behave as they do, various stages of life, etc, etc. This was also tolerable because it was explained that these were theories, that nothing was written in stone, and that even the experts obviously could not all agree on one theory. I was fairly impressed with psychology as a "soft" science. Then, years down the road, I began reading psychology research papers, where I found researchers using "broken instruments", rendering subjective data as factual, assigning arbitrary mathematical values, performing statistics on them, etc and making it all sound very scientific. For example (from an actual "study"), let's define an abusive incident, and let's give these definitions to children participating in our study and have them tell us how many times they experienced abusive incidents, and then we'll pick the nice, round number "10" out of the air as the threshold for whether a child was "abused" or not. Then assigning numbers to other things, we can find means and standard deviations, CVs, confidence intervals, etc and plot grafts, show correlations among the "facts", etc. To begin with, the researchers suspected children of being abused (in a sense, of being "broken"), but then they used these "broken" entities to make judgments and provide data, which obviously turned out to be subjective answers. So, even though a kid said he could only remember being abused, say, three times, he might be purposely lying, or unconsciously forgetting, etc. And that's if an 7yo to 15yo kid could actually make proper judgments about such an adult and wide-ranging subject. And then using an arbitrary threshold without regard to the severity of the abuse, the kid who was beaten to within an inch of his life (complete with physical scars, broken bones, ruptured organs, etc) seven times over the last year supposedly was not abused, but a kid excessively spanked 13 times over the last five years supposedly was abused. They began with flawed 'instruments" so to speak, that provided subjective data that researchers rendered as objective. They focused on the number of incidents and ignored the severity of the incidents. They assigned an arbitrary threshold, and assigned mathematical values to other data, performed statistical analyses, and made it all sound very scientific and professional. But I saw it for what it was ... crackpottery.
  4. Interesting. I wonder how plants would grow within a very strong electric field (>>10vdc) without being part of the circuitry. Or whether a passive instrument, such as an unpowered micro-volt meter, would detect voltage between different parts of vegetation (perhaps from the roots to the top of a tall tree).
  5. I knew a couple of addicts with attention deficit problems who, without actually knowing what they were doing at the time, took street drugs (one smoked pot, the other drank) to try to self-medicate their problems. Typically, pain management clinics test some of their patients to ensure that they are taking their prescribed meds instead of using street drugs. It's not uncommon for such patients to sell their prescribed meds and turn around and use the money to buy their favorite street drugs to try to self-medicate themselves. As to the "medical condition as a crime" perspective, some addicts would rather take street drugs because "the world sucks" or "life's a bitch", than to get diagnosed, admit that the problem is within themselves (ie, "own" it), and take the prescribed meds for it. I've also seen many recovered/recovering addicts laugh at the idea that their addiction itself was a "disease". They say it's a cop out or a lousy excuse. Truly, it's the addict him/herself who must decide not to walk into a bar or package store, or not to seek a street-corner drug dealer. Ultimately it's their decision on how to perceive themselves and their life, and how to act upon it. I worked for years in the substance dependence recovery industry in nearly every capacity, and for example, heroin addicts told me that they'll sniff 1 bag to get high the first day. Then they wake up on Day 2 feeling lousy, so they sniff 1 bag just to feel normal and a second bag to get high again (2 bags total). They feel even worse on Day 3, so it's 2 bags to feel normal and as third bag to get high (3 bags total). Four bags on Day 4, Five bags on Day 5, etc. They say it progresses arithmetically: 1, 2, 3, etc until their money runs out. My extensive readings have shown me that, basically, you can't cheat the brain. Whatever you take (heroin, benzos, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc), your brain is "smart" enough to recognize something's wrong and adjust for it. Unfortunately, the brain's response is longer lasting, so when the drug wears off, the compensation remains. Heroin numbs pain, so the brain effectively increases its sensitivity to pain. Heroin addicts tell me their withdrawal symptoms feels like the flu. The brain is always receiving pain signals (tired feet, uncomfortable chair, sore elbow, tired eyes, etc), but it chooses to ignore them. Think of when you had the flu ... everything starts to hurt (but not really because the signals were always there). Alcohol is a depressant, so the brain increases its stimulation, leading to withdrawal and delirium, often called "the DTs" (delirium tremens, which is Latin meaning "trembling madness"), "the horrors", etc that can cause insomnia, anxiety, nightmares, hallucinations (bugs, snakes, etc), tremors, convulsions, tachycardia, and death (from bodily over-stimulation). Drinkers trying to recover from a serious hangover (ie, withdrawal) might find that having some "hair of the dog that bit you" (an alcoholic drink) helps them recover. Medicos might prescribe benzos (another sedative/depressant) to ease withdrawal from alcohol. Nicotine is complicated, but it basically gives a relaxing and restorative feeling at first, but ends up makes the person feel worse than before, thus the need for another cigarette/fix. The withdrawal cycle is much shorter than with other drugs, and smokers might crave cigarettes several/many times a day. Both experts and addicts say that nicotine is the most addictive of all substances. Caffeine gives the user stimulating, get-up-and-go, America-runs-on-Dunkin feelings. Withdrawal the next morning results in grumpy, can't-get-going, don't-talk-to-me-until-after-my-first-cup feelings. Yes, Dunkin Donuts traffics in caffeine, and America is addicted.
  6. It should be easy to prove/disprove experimentally. I'm an EE, and I haven't heard of any plants emitting electric fields or growing strangely among electric fields.
  7. What you ask is so fundamental that I fear you know too little about science to play with hydrogen and oxygen safely. Therefore (and I'm not kidding because you sound inexperienced enough to blow yourself up) ... WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT THE FOLLOWING WITHOUT PROFESSIONAL SUPERVISION. Invert the tank.
  8. By definition, extreme life may not require water as a solvent or water at all, so it leads me to whether liquid neon could dissolve extreme life. On liquid neon and extremophiles, an Indian stratospheric probe used liquid neon to cool cryotubes to allow collecting huge volumes of air, and discovered three new species of bacteria*, one at about 18 miles altitude and two at about 25 miles. These extremophiles are resistant to ultraviolet radiation, and apparently, are not found "on earth" in the technical sense.
  9. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine Two statements by nec209 shown above: That is why people that lack dopamine also called addiction personality tyes get so addicted. If the brain does not make enough dopamine, it causes an illness called Parkinson's disease. Do you say that Parkinson Disease patients have addiction personalities? — or that people with addiction personalities have Parkinson's Disease? The cause-and-effect that you propose is far from being so simple. Here are some things to consider (and keep in mind that I am not offended by your statements, but merely speak from my own experience). I have Parkinson's Disease, and I take L-Dopa. I have PD so severely that my neurologist recommends that I seriously consider DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation). Not only have I never had any substance dependencies, but I highly suspect that PD patients do not have substance dependencies at a significantly higher rate than the rest of the world. I do not want this to be a thread-terminating post. Please reply.
  10. Shadow and mississippichem, thank you for your derivations and comments. Ashamedly, I was more practiced in math than I am now. Do you think this would be appropriate for mathoverflow.net?
  11. It detects and quantifies proteins using a method similar to Southern blot (used on DNA). The Southern blot was developed by a guy named Southern, and when others developed similar methods, they used a play on words with his last name and named the methods after other compass points. That's why, technically, Southern blot is capitalized, but western blot, etc are not. In general, blots use voltage to draw molecules through gels over est periods of time. Known molecules are used as standards, the performance (ie, the distance traveled through the gel) of which analysts compare the performance of the samples to determine their molecular composition.
  12. I wonder if this work grew out of this other research.
  13. This seems like the right place to post this science news item: LHC Director Nicolas Samichlaus reported early Sunday from CERN-Geneva on source (and to all a good night.)
  14. I just noticed this. Any reason why (x+2)x+2/(x+1)x+1 – (x+1)x+1/xx → e as x → ∞? Does it actually do this? I checked it in Excel but can't get past x = 141.
  15. Really? Read your own contradicting posts —
  16. I get the impression that the sellers (and makers) of the winches don't want to be responsible for anything falling (damage to the object or what/who it falls on), so they say it's approved only for horizontal pulling (trucks out of mudholes, downed trees through the forest, etc).
  17. Again, no. Most drugs do not cause the release of dopamine, especially not pain killers. If you want to continue making such claims, please provide a link to an Internet reference.
  18. Drugs do not contain dopamine, and much of what you have said in posts #5 and #7 about dopamine is wrong.
  19. I don't know ... I take a drug that makes more dopamine for me, but I don't experience what you're talking about.
  20. ewmon

    Trolls

    I see the cliques/elitists more of a concern than trolls, especially when it's a moderator or when two or three essentially hijack a thread by use of fast and furious postings on some slight detail to the point that other concurrent conversations/posts are woefully diluted/lost. It's even worse when their posts are several screen lengths long due to them quoting and replying to each other's every sentence, phrase and/or word. It's then that a moderator should cull their postings and make them a separate thread. In the very few instances where I've been involved in these thread hijackings, I try to narrow down the points instead of fighting each point to the bitter end. It's about picking the battles worth fighting.
  21. Give us some of your thoughts because what interests you will help to choose the research most appealing to you. What is your favorite topics within soil sciences? Are you interested in soil sciences in general, or specifically to Pakistan? If it is within Pakistan, do you want to keep the research wholly within soil sciences (such as Pakistan's history of soil management, or the need/means for erosion control in Pakistan, etc), or do you want to research something broader (such as the correlation of soil type to a region's economic success, or to the health of a region's people, etc)?
  22. Random, what is the grade level of the student(s)?
  23. Slightly on the humorous side, you could literally pee on them.
  24. I don't know, but have you read about pulmonary compliance in Wikipedia.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.