I appreciate the advice; better safe than sorry, obviously.
Fortunately this was a year or two ago and although she occasionally has problems with severe irritability, there's no depression to speak of (I could tell when there was; I could see it in her eyes.)
I appreciate your suggestions and apologize for the tone of my earlier response; I believe it probably came off more strongly than I'd intended.
We buy our tortillas at Whole Foods; she insists on the white ones (I wish she'd stick to whole wheat if she's going to consume the shit but she can't stand them) and we've also all but quit eating out these days (restaurant food just doesn't taste very good to us any more, nor do we tend to feel that great after we eat it) so it's not a big deal to us. Granted, there are circumstances in which it would be nice to know which chemicals (or combinations of chemicals) she should avoid but we won't have the opportunity to conduct our own trials at any point in the near future so we'll have to be content with where things currently stand.
Back to the matter at hand.:) I don't understand why it's such a stretch to think that allergies can be cured through eliminating additives. The more we learn about the human body in general and the immune system in particular, the more we realize how little we actually understand the mechanism involved! Allergies are understood to be auto-immune disorders... and there's a huge and growing amount of anecdotal evidence that people can conquer their allergies. I myself used to become completely hyperactive and out of whack when I ate eggs (I'd suffered that particular allergy throughout my entire childhood and adult life); it wasn't until I quit eating wheat that it disappeared. I can now eat eggs without any sort of change whatsoever in my behavior.
Thank you; I appreciate your sentiments. Fortunately it's been well over a year since that happened and she's pretty much conquered, for lack of a better word, her imbalances. She still suffers from bi-polar tendencies on occasion, especially when her period's coming on (perhaps I should say that I still suffer from it! lol) but when she cuts back on wheat and sugar, she's noticeably more pleasant and less irritable.
I myself can eat crappy food and not feel like killing myself afterward, although I do tend to feel like complete dogshit afterward. I suspect we lose our tolerance to certain additives and/or combinations of additives when we eliminate them from our diets for a while.
Thing with her is that she and her immediate family have suffered from various mental and emotional problems their entire lives. If she hadn't eliminated additives in the first place (and, interestingly enough, appeared to have healed herself in the process) and then reintroduced them freshly the way she did, she never would have known that they affect her the way they do.
Consider the huge percentage of the population that is on meds for a wide variety of mental aberrations (even if you and I aren't on the list); how many of these peoples' symptoms would disappear if they cut the additives out of their diet? This is a question that is decidedly not being asked by industry... and I for one am not at all surprised; after all, it's not for nothing that we generally consider corporate and organizational "pseudo-personalities" to be complete pschopaths!:)
I'd get off the "unnatural toxin" bandwagon. The most potent toxins known (lowest LD50) are all synthesized directly by biological systems, not by men running lab equipment. Just because something is an additive, it doesn't mean it's toxic to humans.
I'd really like to see how people get rid of allergies by changing their diet, other than a few corner cases. Citations please?
I knew there'd be responses like this; after all, Slashdot tends to be full of brilliant people who not only have a far higher-res view of the trees but are also quite adept at drumming-up convincing arguments against the existence of the forest.
Yes, ancient biological processes are certainly capable of fabricating potent toxins... but we're hardly talking about mere toxicity here and your point is a blatant straw man. We're talking about presumably-safe food additives and meds - after all, the FDA approved them (sic)! - that our biological processes haven't had the opportunity to adjust to. We're talking about side-effects that are often different depending on the individual, mechanisms that are subtle and poorly understood... synergistic effects caused by combining additives (I imagine you're already aware that the FDA generally only tests such compounds individually?), you name it. Things just aren't as simple as you're trying to make them out to be.
Here's some anecdotal but first-hand testimony that probably won't fit into your tidy little view of things. It's not specifically related to allergies, per se, but I believe it does demonstrates that the government, medical community, psychiatric profession, industry and you are essentially full of shit.
My wife had just given birth to our second child. It had been a much smoother pregnancy than the first, in terms of her mental and physical health (which I'm sure you can "prove" had nothing to do with her taking far better care of herself than she did during the first).
Our daughter was around several weeks old, and for months if not longer my wife had avoided all processed foods and was eating nothing but all-natural, home-cooked meals.
She went out to eat with her mother one day and they had Mexican food (or what passes for it out here in the western end of the Bible Belt, at any rate; it seems rednecks and Fundamentalists will eat *anything* if you cook it in enough grease and serve it with sour cream).
I don't know if you've read the ingredients on a package of mass-produced tortillas lately... but aside from the obvious things (wheat flour, water, salt, vegetable oil, yeast or baking powder, etc), they nearly always contain dozens and dozens of different additives, as well.
Well, she went out, had her meal... came home in a great mood (her moods had actually been great for months upon months, with no sign of depression at any time during the pregnancy) and not long after, she sat down and wrote a note to me explaining that she was too depressed to keep on living and she hoped that I and our daughters would be able to forgive her. I of course sat her down immediately and was able to get her to realize that this wasn't "her" but rather her brain malfunctioning in some way and we were able to quickly pinpoint the most likely culprit, which would've been the tortillas they served in the Mexican restaurant (virtually everything else they served would not only have been made from scratch but would have been stuff that she'd been eating here and there without problems). She hasn't had any low-grade bread products since, and the total extent of her postpartum depression was limited to that one incident. Make of it what you will but I believe it serves as adequate proof (to a thinking person, anyway) that the accepted and established view of food additives and their perceived safety is not only utter bullshit but potentially deadly as well.
I totally concur regarding tuna in particular and ocean fish in general; given its bio-accumulative tendencies, any fish with detectable traces of mercury is completely unsuitable for conssumption, especially by children! However, I didn't take the parent's use of the phrase "low-mercury fish" to necessarily mean what you took it to mean; is it possible the parents might have been referring to trout and other types of fish which tend to be low in mercury?
Now beans, on the other hand, I'm not quite as much a fan of as I used to be, due to being high in carbs and lower in fats and protein...
I know someone allergic to lettuce. I dated someone who was allergic to fish. A lot of people are allergic to legumes. Almonds are a common allergen, as are most tree nuts.
Google can find you examples of famous people with allergies to every one of those things you mentioned.
-- Terry
Riiiiiggghht... because wheat, dairy, corn, sugar and cheap, low-grade oils aren't among the biggest problems (including - but by no means limited to - allergies) in our pathetic Standard American Diet.
Seriously, though: while the allergies you mentioned certainly exist, they aren't, in and of themselves, actual causes of problems but are in fact well understood to be symptoms of something else entirely... something which, while no doubt rather obscure and difficult to track down biochemically, could certainly be described, accurately enough, as someone's immune system being "totally out of whack." Such allergies often disappear entirely when we start to rid our bodies of unnatural toxins (food additives, meds, etc).
There are a couple of foods that are by universal definition, healthy. Lettuce, spinach, low-mercury fish, most varieties of beans, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, olives (and olive oil), blueberries, almonds, and plenty more.
Holy shit, as I live and breathe! A slashdotter who's actually somewhat informed when it comes to nutrition (and summed up neatly and succinctly, even). If I had points to mod this up, I would in a nutshell... but alas, I was stupid and let 'em expire a day or two ago.
But if you collect evidence densely enough, and around the same problem from many angles, I believe you will converge towards an objective truth.
Or, you could just fill peoples' heads with lots of lots of data and yet fail to impart even the slightest qualitative understanding of what it all really means... which, if the kind if mentality displayed by the average MD is any indication, is exactly what's happening in medical schools.
Well, in that case I guess I and everyone else who are horrified on principle by this sort of thing - and the slippery slope it portends - should just shut up and move on.:P
I have to question how the plaintiff can show they received damages in good faith when they willfully purchased a copyright because it was being violated (i.e. isn't there a basic requirement or presumption of "innocence" or lack of participation on the part of the plaintiff?
An image comes to mind of an old lady erratically weaving down the road at 7mph in her Buick Roadmaster and I deliberately run out in front of her (I know, inaccurate analogy)...
And I thought Japan was a fucked-up place when I grew up there in the 70's... holy shit!
Anyway, if this works, they need to roll it out in the Middle East and Utah, to placate all the men who can't lure multiple wives and are thus left with none.:P
That... doesn't help. I wasn't talking about parking it into Earth orbit, although that wouldn't hurt. I was talking about matching EARTH'S orbit. If you don't, your impact speed is the relative speed before you start falling and the escape speed of the Earth. (They actually add in quadrature. Why is left as an exercise to the reader, but it hinges on conservation of energy.) So even for the mid-asteroid belt, you'd be getting impact speeds of around 15 km/sec. At those speeds, hitting the water would be like hitting a rock.
So there's no trajectory (even a long, really slow one) that would allow the Earth to 'catch up' with the hypothetical cargo container and essentially let it fall to Earth at merely hypersonic speeds?
Unless you want to hit the ground at more than 11 km/sec, you want to use rockets to slow the speed to at least match Earth's orbit and then drop it down kind of gently. You don't have to soft land it, but slamming it into the Indian Ocean at that speed probably won't be conducive to finding your ores.
I can think of several things that might be able to mitigate that, including giving the returning cargo containers an active aerobraking shape... but a far simpler solution would be to just choreograph the orbital mechanics (of the return from the asteroid belt) in such a way that the containers don't splash down at orbital velocities. After all, if they haven't been in Earth orbit to begin with, there's no reason their trajectories need to intersect that of the Earth with anything but a nominal difference in velocity.
Also, you're not factoring in the costs of bringing metals back to the Earth (if that's your goal).
I'm not sure I agree with that; we're sitting, right now, at the bottom of our own gravity well. Initial costs [to get a functional infrastructure into orbit - either around the Earth or around the Sun] would of course be astronomical... but once we're set up, we should be able to mine, smelt/refine, wrap (in ablative shields, etc) and gently nudge our raw materials so that they eventually end up where we need them (Earth orbit, splashdown in the Indian Ocean, whatever), without even a gram of reaction mass needing to be spent to get the job done.
Is there any reason for us to think this new system will be any more meaningful and less arbitrary than the last? Case in point: my twenty year old Audi was rated 18 city, 24 highway... but I actually get well over 30mpg on the highway (closer to 40, even, if I stick to 55). Granted, she's extremely aerodynamic with a rather tiny, multi-valve, turbo-charged engine and very tall gearing... but that's beside the point: the fact is, if we couldn't rely on the EPA for fair and accurate info back in '91 (when corporations generally had far less control and influence over the regulatory bureaucracy than they do today), how likely is it that this new system will be a worth a goddamn thing?
Likewise, until sufficient proof is offered, the US government is not performing a conspiracy.
Individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty; the government should be presumed guilty until proven otherwise... after all, this is the government we're talking about!
If something like this makes the front page at slashdot, what's next? Roswell aliens, JFK Conspiracy theories, how about the 9/11 conspiracy saying the fed's were behind everything?
Yeah, 'cause it's not like there was ever any reason to doubt the official explanation for JFK's death or anything like that... As for 9/11, those charges that you all heard going off [if you were watching the event in realtime on national news]? You didn't. Now move along...
grab a vase or other living room-type of heavy object so you can make your Hollywood counter-attack.
A Saiga-12 with twenty-shell drum magazine is slightly more cinematic than a flying vase. How about an entire wall lined with shelving units, each one loaded down with several dozen spring-launched vases... that might do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately this was a year or two ago and although she occasionally has problems with severe irritability, there's no depression to speak of (I could tell when there was; I could see it in her eyes.)
We buy our tortillas at Whole Foods; she insists on the white ones (I wish she'd stick to whole wheat if she's going to consume the shit but she can't stand them) and we've also all but quit eating out these days (restaurant food just doesn't taste very good to us any more, nor do we tend to feel that great after we eat it) so it's not a big deal to us. Granted, there are circumstances in which it would be nice to know which chemicals (or combinations of chemicals) she should avoid but we won't have the opportunity to conduct our own trials at any point in the near future so we'll have to be content with where things currently stand.
Back to the matter at hand. :) I don't understand why it's such a stretch to think that allergies can be cured through eliminating additives. The more we learn about the human body in general and the immune system in particular, the more we realize how little we actually understand the mechanism involved! Allergies are understood to be auto-immune disorders... and there's a huge and growing amount of anecdotal evidence that people can conquer their allergies. I myself used to become completely hyperactive and out of whack when I ate eggs (I'd suffered that particular allergy throughout my entire childhood and adult life); it wasn't until I quit eating wheat that it disappeared. I can now eat eggs without any sort of change whatsoever in my behavior.
I myself can eat crappy food and not feel like killing myself afterward, although I do tend to feel like complete dogshit afterward. I suspect we lose our tolerance to certain additives and/or combinations of additives when we eliminate them from our diets for a while.
Thing with her is that she and her immediate family have suffered from various mental and emotional problems their entire lives. If she hadn't eliminated additives in the first place (and, interestingly enough, appeared to have healed herself in the process) and then reintroduced them freshly the way she did, she never would have known that they affect her the way they do.
Consider the huge percentage of the population that is on meds for a wide variety of mental aberrations (even if you and I aren't on the list); how many of these peoples' symptoms would disappear if they cut the additives out of their diet? This is a question that is decidedly not being asked by industry... and I for one am not at all surprised; after all, it's not for nothing that we generally consider corporate and organizational "pseudo-personalities" to be complete pschopaths! :)
I'd get off the "unnatural toxin" bandwagon. The most potent toxins known (lowest LD50) are all synthesized directly by biological systems, not by men running lab equipment. Just because something is an additive, it doesn't mean it's toxic to humans.
I'd really like to see how people get rid of allergies by changing their diet, other than a few corner cases. Citations please?
I knew there'd be responses like this; after all, Slashdot tends to be full of brilliant people who not only have a far higher-res view of the trees but are also quite adept at drumming-up convincing arguments against the existence of the forest.
Yes, ancient biological processes are certainly capable of fabricating potent toxins... but we're hardly talking about mere toxicity here and your point is a blatant straw man. We're talking about presumably-safe food additives and meds - after all, the FDA approved them (sic)! - that our biological processes haven't had the opportunity to adjust to. We're talking about side-effects that are often different depending on the individual, mechanisms that are subtle and poorly understood... synergistic effects caused by combining additives (I imagine you're already aware that the FDA generally only tests such compounds individually?), you name it. Things just aren't as simple as you're trying to make them out to be.
Here's some anecdotal but first-hand testimony that probably won't fit into your tidy little view of things. It's not specifically related to allergies, per se, but I believe it does demonstrates that the government, medical community, psychiatric profession, industry and you are essentially full of shit.
My wife had just given birth to our second child. It had been a much smoother pregnancy than the first, in terms of her mental and physical health (which I'm sure you can "prove" had nothing to do with her taking far better care of herself than she did during the first).
Our daughter was around several weeks old, and for months if not longer my wife had avoided all processed foods and was eating nothing but all-natural, home-cooked meals.
She went out to eat with her mother one day and they had Mexican food (or what passes for it out here in the western end of the Bible Belt, at any rate; it seems rednecks and Fundamentalists will eat *anything* if you cook it in enough grease and serve it with sour cream).
I don't know if you've read the ingredients on a package of mass-produced tortillas lately... but aside from the obvious things (wheat flour, water, salt, vegetable oil, yeast or baking powder, etc), they nearly always contain dozens and dozens of different additives, as well.
Well, she went out, had her meal... came home in a great mood (her moods had actually been great for months upon months, with no sign of depression at any time during the pregnancy) and not long after, she sat down and wrote a note to me explaining that she was too depressed to keep on living and she hoped that I and our daughters would be able to forgive her. I of course sat her down immediately and was able to get her to realize that this wasn't "her" but rather her brain malfunctioning in some way and we were able to quickly pinpoint the most likely culprit, which would've been the tortillas they served in the Mexican restaurant (virtually everything else they served would not only have been made from scratch but would have been stuff that she'd been eating here and there without problems). She hasn't had any low-grade bread products since, and the total extent of her postpartum depression was limited to that one incident. Make of it what you will but I believe it serves as adequate proof (to a thinking person, anyway) that the accepted and established view of food additives and their perceived safety is not only utter bullshit but potentially deadly as well.
is it possible the parents
I meant parent (singular). :)
Now beans, on the other hand, I'm not quite as much a fan of as I used to be, due to being high in carbs and lower in fats and protein...
Wow, you just named a lot of allergens!
I know someone allergic to lettuce. I dated someone who was allergic to fish. A lot of people are allergic to legumes. Almonds are a common allergen, as are most tree nuts.
Google can find you examples of famous people with allergies to every one of those things you mentioned.
-- Terry
Riiiiiggghht... because wheat, dairy, corn, sugar and cheap, low-grade oils aren't among the biggest problems (including - but by no means limited to - allergies) in our pathetic Standard American Diet.
Seriously, though: while the allergies you mentioned certainly exist, they aren't, in and of themselves, actual causes of problems but are in fact well understood to be symptoms of something else entirely... something which, while no doubt rather obscure and difficult to track down biochemically, could certainly be described, accurately enough, as someone's immune system being "totally out of whack." Such allergies often disappear entirely when we start to rid our bodies of unnatural toxins (food additives, meds, etc).
There are a couple of foods that are by universal definition, healthy. Lettuce, spinach, low-mercury fish, most varieties of beans, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, olives (and olive oil), blueberries, almonds, and plenty more.
Holy shit, as I live and breathe! A slashdotter who's actually somewhat informed when it comes to nutrition (and summed up neatly and succinctly, even). If I had points to mod this up, I would in a nutshell... but alas, I was stupid and let 'em expire a day or two ago.
Researchers Discover Irresistible Dance Moves
Surely there's a missing footnote which reads "except when performed by bearded, potbellied programmers?" :P
But if you collect evidence densely enough, and around the same problem from many angles, I believe you will converge towards an objective truth.
Or, you could just fill peoples' heads with lots of lots of data and yet fail to impart even the slightest qualitative understanding of what it all really means... which, if the kind if mentality displayed by the average MD is any indication, is exactly what's happening in medical schools.
There's nothing wrong with it in principle.
Well, in that case I guess I and everyone else who are horrified on principle by this sort of thing - and the slippery slope it portends - should just shut up and move on. :P
An image comes to mind of an old lady erratically weaving down the road at 7mph in her Buick Roadmaster and I deliberately run out in front of her (I know, inaccurate analogy)...
...a computational tool that could model the Earth and answer the most pressing questions in geophysics: What controls the speed of plates?
My brain initially processed that as "What controls the speed of pirates?" and for very brief moment I was slightly confused...
Anyway, if this works, they need to roll it out in the Middle East and Utah, to placate all the men who can't lure multiple wives and are thus left with none. :P
That... doesn't help. I wasn't talking about parking it into Earth orbit, although that wouldn't hurt. I was talking about matching EARTH'S orbit. If you don't, your impact speed is the relative speed before you start falling and the escape speed of the Earth. (They actually add in quadrature. Why is left as an exercise to the reader, but it hinges on conservation of energy.) So even for the mid-asteroid belt, you'd be getting impact speeds of around 15 km/sec. At those speeds, hitting the water would be like hitting a rock.
So there's no trajectory (even a long, really slow one) that would allow the Earth to 'catch up' with the hypothetical cargo container and essentially let it fall to Earth at merely hypersonic speeds?
Unless you want to hit the ground at more than 11 km/sec, you want to use rockets to slow the speed to at least match Earth's orbit and then drop it down kind of gently. You don't have to soft land it, but slamming it into the Indian Ocean at that speed probably won't be conducive to finding your ores.
I can think of several things that might be able to mitigate that, including giving the returning cargo containers an active aerobraking shape... but a far simpler solution would be to just choreograph the orbital mechanics (of the return from the asteroid belt) in such a way that the containers don't splash down at orbital velocities. After all, if they haven't been in Earth orbit to begin with, there's no reason their trajectories need to intersect that of the Earth with anything but a nominal difference in velocity.
Also, you're not factoring in the costs of bringing metals back to the Earth (if that's your goal).
I'm not sure I agree with that; we're sitting, right now, at the bottom of our own gravity well. Initial costs [to get a functional infrastructure into orbit - either around the Earth or around the Sun] would of course be astronomical... but once we're set up, we should be able to mine, smelt/refine, wrap (in ablative shields, etc) and gently nudge our raw materials so that they eventually end up where we need them (Earth orbit, splashdown in the Indian Ocean, whatever), without even a gram of reaction mass needing to be spent to get the job done.
Is there any reason for us to think this new system will be any more meaningful and less arbitrary than the last? Case in point: my twenty year old Audi was rated 18 city, 24 highway... but I actually get well over 30mpg on the highway (closer to 40, even, if I stick to 55). Granted, she's extremely aerodynamic with a rather tiny, multi-valve, turbo-charged engine and very tall gearing... but that's beside the point: the fact is, if we couldn't rely on the EPA for fair and accurate info back in '91 (when corporations generally had far less control and influence over the regulatory bureaucracy than they do today), how likely is it that this new system will be a worth a goddamn thing?
The Iranian's developed a reusable 60's era cruise missile...
They had NERF in the 60's?!
Likewise, until sufficient proof is offered, the US government is not performing a conspiracy.
Individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty; the government should be presumed guilty until proven otherwise... after all, this is the government we're talking about!
...but it would seem everybody is still maintaining the same attitude they had in high school.
If anything, my experiences have taught me that it was then - and still is - a perfectly valid attitude, thank you very much. :P
So, so tired of zombies, pirates, ninjas, and robots. Jesus, Internet, can you please latch on to something else? Anything?
How about religion? :P
If something like this makes the front page at slashdot, what's next? Roswell aliens, JFK Conspiracy theories, how about the 9/11 conspiracy saying the fed's were behind everything?
Yeah, 'cause it's not like there was ever any reason to doubt the official explanation for JFK's death or anything like that... As for 9/11, those charges that you all heard going off [if you were watching the event in realtime on national news]? You didn't. Now move along...
I don't mean to Godwin this thread
Some topics come pre-Godwinned.
grab a vase or other living room-type of heavy object so you can make your Hollywood counter-attack.
A Saiga-12 with twenty-shell drum magazine is slightly more cinematic than a flying vase. How about an entire wall lined with shelving units, each one loaded down with several dozen spring-launched vases... that might do it.