I shouldn't complain about your wonderful abstract, but if you write it somewhere else, why not use something like collagen, instead of starch, as your non-informative polymer example, since collagen's actually a protein rather than being a sugar. With that said: I wish I'd written what you did. It's lovely and if I had mod points you'd get them.
When you land, you begin to pull back on the stick/yoke to flare, and somewhat before you get to the ground -- when you're about as high as your wingspan is wide -- the airplane behavior changes a LOT. You start floating, because of wing/ground interactions, and your descent and flare change. It becomes nonlinear, basically -- the lower you get, the stronger the ground effect is so the more you glide. In MSFS you fly, you approach, you pull the yoke, you hit the ground, you stick. Oh, yeah, that's the other thing: in a real plane if you flare wrong you'll either do a very short stall and hit the ground with one hell of a thump, or you'll bounce (and bounce and bounce and bounce) -- neither of which MSFS models. Landings are either Whump-rollout, or Whump-bounce-whump-rollout. And the most important thing is that the visuals are weird so you don't know WHEN to flare correctly. If you rely on MSFS reflexes, you're going to make some really bad landings.
I don't like Thompson and I think he's crazy. With that said, *I* think forty hours on a flightsim would give a person more than sufficient skill to fly a plane into a building, especially considering that totally untrained people have been known to safely land airplanes with considerable radio instruction. And with THAT said, you'd have to ban a lot more than just MSFS to keep us all totally safe from potential nogoodniks. Libraries wouldn't have anything more than coloring books, probably not even the crayons for those books, because you can do stuff with wax, y'know, DANGEROUS stuff. I bet even Thompson doesn't really believe that modern life can be safe -- he just, for whatever irrational reason, hates computer games. If he had a whit of reason, he'd be spending his time picketing Detroit for their weapons of terror that kill 40,000 Americans a year, but he's too busy being a hot air generator.
I disagree. It's obviously not a skyhawk -- it's a computer. But when I spend ten hours practicing steep turns and instrument approaches using MSFS and then go do them in the 172, I'm markedly better than when I haven't done any practice at all and try and do those same things in a 172. Yeah, so the throttle settings aren't perfect -- do you *ever* look at the throttle? I just look at the tachometer and make sure it's either in the green or if it's not that I know WHY it's not (and have carb heat on.) When I was getting my PPSEL cert, my instructor said he could actually tell when I'd been spending lots of time on the flightsim because my flying skills were markedly better from lesson to lesson, whereas my LANDING skills, the point where MSFS is the most far-off of ALL, still sucked. I flared like a startled starling, coz MSFS goes from 'similar to flying' to 'complete nonsense' in the last bit of final. But for the large-scale stuff: establishing a scan, establishing a coordinated turn, setting, reading, and reacting to radio navigation, getting comfortable with pattern work, ground reference maneuvers in a strong crosswind -- MSFS is quite good and made/makes a very significant difference in how prepared and comfortable I am in the skyhawk after a month of not flying. Now if only they had realistic ATC simulation, with the interminable "say again" and people stepping on each other as you're trying to hear if you do actually have clearance to enter the airspace...
Well, what do you call a species? That's a serious question and it's not easy to answer. We call donkeys and horses different species, but they can interbreed, and sometimes their children can interbreed. Ditto lions and tigers. We, as humans, really like to draw lines, but Nature doesn't seem to like those lines very much. There are a number of places where we can find a set of populations across a landmass, where members from populations on opposite sides of the landmass cannot interbreed, but can interbreed with members living in the center. Ability to interbreed isn't necessarily a good determinant for making the same/different species call: I'm just using it to illustrate the idea. So bearing that in mind: every chemical that is produced in the USA intended for consumption by or exposure to humans is tested for its ability to mutate cells. That's hundreds of new chemicals per week. The way they test for mutagenicity is: they take a bacterium that cannot digest a certain sugar or protein, expose it to the chemical they're testing, and then try and grow it on the metabolite it couldn't digest. They measure the number that CAN grow -- the number that were damaged by the chemical and in repairing that damage managed to gain the ability to live on something they couldn't previously -- and that's a direct indication of how strongly mutagenic the chemical is. If evolution didn't exist, the test wouldn't work, and as I said, it's used hundreds (if you count chemicals) or millions (if you count bacteria) of times every day all across the world. The test works.
... I can't argue with you. You're entirely right. I'm playing semantics games with the variable definitions of 'theory' and 'fact' -- but so are the ID people, albeit unknowingly.
So how about this: from what we currently know, evolution is as trustworthy as gravity, and the theory of evolution beats the pants off the theory of gravity.
Ya know, I have to take issue with this, and with post-modernism in general. 95% of the time, people take, and have, a neutral point of view. I'm remembering a rebuttal of ad hominem attacks, here: Tojo: "Boy, those Allied bombers sure are effective." Just because a Bad Person said it, doesn't mean it's wrong, and just because an intelligent observer said it, doesn't mean it's intrinsically biased. Consider: toast is made of bread. It's colder in winter than summer. That car's paint job sure is shiny! Those are all neutral point of view. It's when you start trying to interpret and establish the significance of such simple statements, when you start talking about a statement's place within a system of reason or philosophy, its historical context, or even just try to summarize someone else's story (as we all do when we read books), that we innately start introducing bias. The fundamental ideas of post-modernism apply poorly to the lives of insects. They apply very well to humans. But there are a lot more insects than humans.
However, with that said: yes, we are much better served with varying viewpoints. If we see further than our parents, it is with the help of their eyes and all that have come before us.
If I had mod points you'd get them all. Hell, if I could, I'd throw in a free pizza for the "half-melted blobs melting from human into porcupines, like some frozen outtake from Species the movie" line: that's the best chunk of words I've read all day.
Ya know, I'm going to agree with the GP: computers have evolved. If you sat down right now, on a desert island, and tried to build yourself a computer from sand, you, well, couldn't. No one person could. It's doubtful that 1000 of the brightest minds in the world, given their whole lives, could. While each individual computer part is the result of many intelligent design decisions, the sum total has evolved, with many side-avenues and dead-ends, to fit a market niche. Consider the Apple Lisa, the ZX-80, mainframes, the Newton -- those were all intelligently designed machines that have died or are losing marketshare. The free market is a type of ecosystem and our smartest minds can't seem to design intelligently enough to force a success -- consider Itanium -- onto a dynamic, evolving system. To put it another way, even *with* intelligent designers, many thousands of them, evolution is emergent and overpowers everything in its path. I think sometimes that even if there had been an Intelligent Designer, life would've outstripped anything s/he managed to create and buried it utterly.
I'm not precisely disagreeing with what you've said. But a lot of scientists do indeed say that evolution is a fact, seeing as they watch it happen on a daily basis in microbiology laboratories and drug/chemical testing facilities all across the world. The theory of evolution posits HOW it happens. In a similar way, gravity is a fact. There is a theory of gravity that posits how IT happens, and that is, in my opinion, a much weaker theory than evolutionary theory. But it doesn't mean gravity's just a theory. It means our explanation for it is just a theory.
Evolution is a fact. We're just filling in the details, and that's the theory part.
>Then they took away some more economic freedoms and people had troubble making it, so they said both you and your spouse should work.
This is a tragedy-of-the-commons thing. There was no big authorial Government They that said in a huge booming hollow voice "both you and your spouse should work". What happened was that women started working during WWII, we had a brief period of economic stability afterwards, where they didn't have to, and when things got even slightly tight some women started going back to work, and since now the supply of workers exceeded the demand, wages started dropping and more women started going to work, until the economy stabilized with a 40% larger workforce and resultant lower per-person wages. At every individual point, for each individual family, having both parents work was good for the family, nearly doubling its income, but bad for the community as a whole, slightly reducing wages.
Ah, but see that's the point. They keep complaining they can't find engineers to hire. There ARE engineers, but not the ones who precisely fit their requirements -- or, at least, oddly enough, no American engineers, just people they can hire from China. NYT did an article about this last week, and their take was basically that if you set the requirements correctly, you can ensure that all your new-hires are low-price.
The New York Times recently had an article saying basically exactly the same thing: engineers say there are lots of unemployed engineers, while employers say there's an engineering shortage, because employers are looking for a 95% fit rather than a 65% fit that they have to actually invest a little bit of training into. It's part of the new corporate idea that people, like computers or forklifts, are plug-and-play. Companies no longer feel like they need to pay for learning curves. I rather hope that they get what they deserve: little round cogs, rather than the interesting-shaped people who think up Google.
Re:Wikipedia on Aspartame oddly omitted by Google
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Merck's Deleted Data
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We have done our jobs well; now we get to ride off into the sunset with the smug grins of the self-righteous.
>I never saw The Passion, and I don't think it's a great idea for a movie, and so forth. But think how much more pointless a film it would be if the guy who was being tortured and suffering wasn't Jesus.
For me -- and I also didn't see the movie -- one of the ideas the furor over the movie brought up, was that Jesus was just another guy, and the Romans were doing this to thousands of people a year for hundreds of years. What he went through wasn't special, it wasn't unusual, it was the way that maybe a million people died. It's a pretty horrible thought, and in my mind changes the underlying message. They focussed, from what I can tell, entirely on the pain and sadism, but that wasn't unique. The part that mattered, the only thing that's relevant, if you're a Christian, is that he chose to undergo something truly horrible, for an ideal. All the rest of it was routine behavior for that point in time.
Ya know, every single time I come up with a great idea, I find out that someone else came up with something even better, before I did. Phoo. I was born too late.
Two step process. Machine one, inside the curtain, has a touchscreen. You push where you want to vote. It prints out a nice ballot, with your vote clearly marked. If you don't like what it did, you crumple it up and do it again. That machine is dead simple: display, read, print. If you didn't use a touchscreen, but had buttons, it would be trivially easy to program. The touchscreen is better for ease-of-use and will impress PHB's with its full-color moving graphics of waving flags and fireworks.
Second machine is the counting machine. You take your just-printed ballot, fold it in half, walk to the counting machine, unfold it, and feed it in. The machine scans it and saves the paper ballot, while tabulating your vote. Every now and then it SSH's into some central server and deposits its results.
Everyone has a ballot that is printed, clearly. It is retained after the vote for recounts. There is no way the display machine can be made to falsify the ballot, since it's printed for your approval. The display machine has no I/O other than a touchscreen and printer, and a hardwired interface to load in the options list, which is not connected during voting. If it were me, I'd require that the scanning machine has no I/O other than the scanner and the network card, so it can't be jiggered: all it does is scan, and every 100 or 15 minutes, whichever comes first, it sends in its results. At that point, the only way to rig the vote would be at the central server -- which is not to say that that couldn't happen, but then again, that's no different than the system as it currently stands.
Guh. Formaldehyde's pretty nasty stuff. I hadn't read its MSDS before. Suxx0rs coz one of my favorite reactions, the mixed aldol condensation, uses loads of it. Hrmph.
memo to self: no swigging methyl alcohol.
I still maintain, however, that the amount a reasonable person consumes is going to be on par with the amount formed through normal metabolic processes. Although having said that, I can't remember which pathways produce methanol. My first thought was heme lysis and scavenging of the iron, but a quick check says that makes carbon monoxide. (I knew it was something nasty.) So I'm just going to have to wave my hands and claim that several references about methanol say it occurs on the ug/kg level naturally in humans.
I seriously don't believe that Monsanto/Searle thought there was anything wrong with aspartame (unlike Merck, apparently.) They just believed that they knew better than anyone else, and getting this on the market was more important than listening to nervous people, (who might very well be right, as it turns out.) Most of MY conspiracy theories involve malice and forethought, like, oh, say, financially massively overextending the government by engaging in two-front wars, pushing the US close enough to bankruptcy that massive cuts in Social Security and Medicaid become 'necessary' -- tidy, insofar as it gets us involved overseas AND gives a good excuse for a politically very unpopular decision. Now THAT'S a good conspiracy theory. And they're planning on offering us up as snacks to the aliens, who have spycams implanted in our cats.
I think the established no-harm recommendation is 0.5mg, which is 1/1000 the observed no-harm level as measured in rats (which don't have good feedback mechanisms for saying "I itch all over and my eyes hurt.") I may be reading it wrong. Other sources have indicated a *significantly* higher LD50 for humans, more like 2500-3000 mg/kg. But, hey, that's the thing about killing stuff off with poison: it's variable.
I'm not trying to minimize your symptoms: aspartame does have effects on people. I'm also not trying to defend Searle. The approval process for aspartame was pretty damned sketchy, with a very uncomfortable number of high-ranking people changing jobs back and forth between Searle and the FDA during and immediately after the approval process. It wasn't just Rumsfeld, it was also Ronald Reagan and Arthur Hayes who essentially ramrodded the approval process.
With that said, aspartame *can* break down into methanol, but usually only does so at extreme pH or temperature. Warm water alone very slowly hydrolyzes aspartame. I'm trying to find some good kinetics studies; this one indicates 90% hydrolysis after 53 days at 25 degrees C which is a good argument for only drinking refrigerated pop.
But the sheer amount you'd have to drink to produce blindness is astounding. I once calculated that with 100% hydrolysis, it would take 20 cans of pop per hour to build up and maintain harmful concentrations of methanol in the blood. EPA studies have indicated that 0.5g/kg/day doesn't result in observable health problems. There are (Google calculator r00lz) 0.014g of methanol per can of 100% hydrolyzed Coke. Hm, so that indicates that you probably don't want to drink more than 35 cans per day or you'll be above the no-observed-adverse effect level.
The official Materials Safety Data Sheet for methanol lists "Carcinogenicity: Methyl Alcohol - Not listed by ACGIH, IARC, NIOSH, NTP, or OSHA." That doesn't mean it's not carcinogenic, but it does mean that none of them has ever found any evidence for it being carcinogenic, as opposed to things like the nitrites in bacon, which have definite carcinogenic activity. The point being: we're eating things that are probably orders of magnitude more carcinogenic than the released methyl alcohol in aspartame; our bodies produce more methyl alcohol and its metabolites naturally than any but the most aggressive pop drinker will ever experience.
I'm not defending aspartame's use, but if you're going to attack what the FDA did when they certified it for use, attack it on other grounds, like your observed reaction to it, rather than because of methanol.
Read "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They have the cojones to *start* the book by claiming, and supporting their claim, that if you look at the rise in teen violence in the '70's and '80's you'll see that it peaked 17 years after widespread legalization of abortion and then began to drop rapidly.
I don't LIKE thinking that we now tend to cull the dangerous part of society, but it's pretty hard to argue with their thesis.
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I shouldn't complain about your wonderful abstract, but if you write it somewhere else, why not use something like collagen, instead of starch, as your non-informative polymer example, since collagen's actually a protein rather than being a sugar. With that said: I wish I'd written what you did. It's lovely and if I had mod points you'd get them.
When you land, you begin to pull back on the stick/yoke to flare, and somewhat before you get to the ground -- when you're about as high as your wingspan is wide -- the airplane behavior changes a LOT. You start floating, because of wing/ground interactions, and your descent and flare change. It becomes nonlinear, basically -- the lower you get, the stronger the ground effect is so the more you glide. In MSFS you fly, you approach, you pull the yoke, you hit the ground, you stick. Oh, yeah, that's the other thing: in a real plane if you flare wrong you'll either do a very short stall and hit the ground with one hell of a thump, or you'll bounce (and bounce and bounce and bounce) -- neither of which MSFS models. Landings are either Whump-rollout, or Whump-bounce-whump-rollout. And the most important thing is that the visuals are weird so you don't know WHEN to flare correctly. If you rely on MSFS reflexes, you're going to make some really bad landings.
I don't like Thompson and I think he's crazy. With that said, *I* think forty hours on a flightsim would give a person more than sufficient skill to fly a plane into a building, especially considering that totally untrained people have been known to safely land airplanes with considerable radio instruction. And with THAT said, you'd have to ban a lot more than just MSFS to keep us all totally safe from potential nogoodniks. Libraries wouldn't have anything more than coloring books, probably not even the crayons for those books, because you can do stuff with wax, y'know, DANGEROUS stuff. I bet even Thompson doesn't really believe that modern life can be safe -- he just, for whatever irrational reason, hates computer games. If he had a whit of reason, he'd be spending his time picketing Detroit for their weapons of terror that kill 40,000 Americans a year, but he's too busy being a hot air generator.
I disagree. It's obviously not a skyhawk -- it's a computer. But when I spend ten hours practicing steep turns and instrument approaches using MSFS and then go do them in the 172, I'm markedly better than when I haven't done any practice at all and try and do those same things in a 172. Yeah, so the throttle settings aren't perfect -- do you *ever* look at the throttle? I just look at the tachometer and make sure it's either in the green or if it's not that I know WHY it's not (and have carb heat on.) When I was getting my PPSEL cert, my instructor said he could actually tell when I'd been spending lots of time on the flightsim because my flying skills were markedly better from lesson to lesson, whereas my LANDING skills, the point where MSFS is the most far-off of ALL, still sucked. I flared like a startled starling, coz MSFS goes from 'similar to flying' to 'complete nonsense' in the last bit of final. But for the large-scale stuff: establishing a scan, establishing a coordinated turn, setting, reading, and reacting to radio navigation, getting comfortable with pattern work, ground reference maneuvers in a strong crosswind -- MSFS is quite good and made/makes a very significant difference in how prepared and comfortable I am in the skyhawk after a month of not flying. Now if only they had realistic ATC simulation, with the interminable "say again" and people stepping on each other as you're trying to hear if you do actually have clearance to enter the airspace...
Well, what do you call a species? That's a serious question and it's not easy to answer. We call donkeys and horses different species, but they can interbreed, and sometimes their children can interbreed. Ditto lions and tigers. We, as humans, really like to draw lines, but Nature doesn't seem to like those lines very much. There are a number of places where we can find a set of populations across a landmass, where members from populations on opposite sides of the landmass cannot interbreed, but can interbreed with members living in the center. Ability to interbreed isn't necessarily a good determinant for making the same/different species call: I'm just using it to illustrate the idea. So bearing that in mind: every chemical that is produced in the USA intended for consumption by or exposure to humans is tested for its ability to mutate cells. That's hundreds of new chemicals per week. The way they test for mutagenicity is: they take a bacterium that cannot digest a certain sugar or protein, expose it to the chemical they're testing, and then try and grow it on the metabolite it couldn't digest. They measure the number that CAN grow -- the number that were damaged by the chemical and in repairing that damage managed to gain the ability to live on something they couldn't previously -- and that's a direct indication of how strongly mutagenic the chemical is. If evolution didn't exist, the test wouldn't work, and as I said, it's used hundreds (if you count chemicals) or millions (if you count bacteria) of times every day all across the world. The test works.
... I can't argue with you. You're entirely right. I'm playing semantics games with the variable definitions of 'theory' and 'fact' -- but so are the ID people, albeit unknowingly.
So how about this: from what we currently know, evolution is as trustworthy as gravity, and the theory of evolution beats the pants off the theory of gravity.
Ya know, I have to take issue with this, and with post-modernism in general. 95% of the time, people take, and have, a neutral point of view. I'm remembering a rebuttal of ad hominem attacks, here:
Tojo: "Boy, those Allied bombers sure are effective." Just because a Bad Person said it, doesn't mean it's wrong, and just because an intelligent observer said it, doesn't mean it's intrinsically biased.
Consider: toast is made of bread. It's colder in winter than summer. That car's paint job sure is shiny! Those are all neutral point of view.
It's when you start trying to interpret and establish the significance of such simple statements, when you start talking about a statement's place within a system of reason or philosophy, its historical context, or even just try to summarize someone else's story (as we all do when we read books), that we innately start introducing bias. The fundamental ideas of post-modernism apply poorly to the lives of insects. They apply very well to humans. But there are a lot more insects than humans.
However, with that said: yes, we are much better served with varying viewpoints. If we see further than our parents, it is with the help of their eyes and all that have come before us.
If I had mod points you'd get them all. Hell, if I could, I'd throw in a free pizza for the "half-melted blobs melting from human into porcupines, like some frozen outtake from Species the movie" line: that's the best chunk of words I've read all day.
Ya know, I'm going to agree with the GP: computers have evolved. If you sat down right now, on a desert island, and tried to build yourself a computer from sand, you, well, couldn't. No one person could. It's doubtful that 1000 of the brightest minds in the world, given their whole lives, could. While each individual computer part is the result of many intelligent design decisions, the sum total has evolved, with many side-avenues and dead-ends, to fit a market niche. Consider the Apple Lisa, the ZX-80, mainframes, the Newton -- those were all intelligently designed machines that have died or are losing marketshare. The free market is a type of ecosystem and our smartest minds can't seem to design intelligently enough to force a success -- consider Itanium -- onto a dynamic, evolving system. To put it another way, even *with* intelligent designers, many thousands of them, evolution is emergent and overpowers everything in its path. I think sometimes that even if there had been an Intelligent Designer, life would've outstripped anything s/he managed to create and buried it utterly.
I'm not precisely disagreeing with what you've said. But a lot of scientists do indeed say that evolution is a fact, seeing as they watch it happen on a daily basis in microbiology laboratories and drug/chemical testing facilities all across the world. The theory of evolution posits HOW it happens. In a similar way, gravity is a fact. There is a theory of gravity that posits how IT happens, and that is, in my opinion, a much weaker theory than evolutionary theory. But it doesn't mean gravity's just a theory. It means our explanation for it is just a theory.
Evolution is a fact. We're just filling in the details, and that's the theory part.
when are they going to release the sourcecode so I can tell what my girlfriend is thinking?
>Then they took away some more economic freedoms and people had troubble making it, so they said both you and your spouse should work. This is a tragedy-of-the-commons thing. There was no big authorial Government They that said in a huge booming hollow voice "both you and your spouse should work". What happened was that women started working during WWII, we had a brief period of economic stability afterwards, where they didn't have to, and when things got even slightly tight some women started going back to work, and since now the supply of workers exceeded the demand, wages started dropping and more women started going to work, until the economy stabilized with a 40% larger workforce and resultant lower per-person wages. At every individual point, for each individual family, having both parents work was good for the family, nearly doubling its income, but bad for the community as a whole, slightly reducing wages.
Ah, but see that's the point. They keep complaining they can't find engineers to hire. There ARE engineers, but not the ones who precisely fit their requirements -- or, at least, oddly enough, no American engineers, just people they can hire from China. NYT did an article about this last week, and their take was basically that if you set the requirements correctly, you can ensure that all your new-hires are low-price.
The New York Times recently had an article saying basically exactly the same thing: engineers say there are lots of unemployed engineers, while employers say there's an engineering shortage, because employers are looking for a 95% fit rather than a 65% fit that they have to actually invest a little bit of training into. It's part of the new corporate idea that people, like computers or forklifts, are plug-and-play. Companies no longer feel like they need to pay for learning curves. I rather hope that they get what they deserve: little round cogs, rather than the interesting-shaped people who think up Google.
We have done our jobs well; now we get to ride off into the sunset with the smug grins of the self-righteous.
>I never saw The Passion, and I don't think it's a great idea for a movie, and so forth. But think how much more pointless a film it would be if the guy who was being tortured and suffering wasn't Jesus.
For me -- and I also didn't see the movie -- one of the ideas the furor over the movie brought up, was that Jesus was just another guy, and the Romans were doing this to thousands of people a year for hundreds of years. What he went through wasn't special, it wasn't unusual, it was the way that maybe a million people died. It's a pretty horrible thought, and in my mind changes the underlying message. They focussed, from what I can tell, entirely on the pain and sadism, but that wasn't unique. The part that mattered, the only thing that's relevant, if you're a Christian, is that he chose to undergo something truly horrible, for an ideal. All the rest of it was routine behavior for that point in time.
Ya know, every single time I come up with a great idea, I find out that someone else came up with something even better, before I did. Phoo. I was born too late.
Two step process. Machine one, inside the curtain, has a touchscreen. You push where you want to vote. It prints out a nice ballot, with your vote clearly marked. If you don't like what it did, you crumple it up and do it again. That machine is dead simple: display, read, print. If you didn't use a touchscreen, but had buttons, it would be trivially easy to program. The touchscreen is better for ease-of-use and will impress PHB's with its full-color moving graphics of waving flags and fireworks.
Second machine is the counting machine. You take your just-printed ballot, fold it in half, walk to the counting machine, unfold it, and feed it in. The machine scans it and saves the paper ballot, while tabulating your vote. Every now and then it SSH's into some central server and deposits its results.
Everyone has a ballot that is printed, clearly. It is retained after the vote for recounts. There is no way the display machine can be made to falsify the ballot, since it's printed for your approval. The display machine has no I/O other than a touchscreen and printer, and a hardwired interface to load in the options list, which is not connected during voting. If it were me, I'd require that the scanning machine has no I/O other than the scanner and the network card, so it can't be jiggered: all it does is scan, and every 100 or 15 minutes, whichever comes first, it sends in its results. At that point, the only way to rig the vote would be at the central server -- which is not to say that that couldn't happen, but then again, that's no different than the system as it currently stands.
memo to self: no swigging methyl alcohol.
I still maintain, however, that the amount a reasonable person consumes is going to be on par with the amount formed through normal metabolic processes. Although having said that, I can't remember which pathways produce methanol. My first thought was heme lysis and scavenging of the iron, but a quick check says that makes carbon monoxide. (I knew it was something nasty.) So I'm just going to have to wave my hands and claim that several references about methanol say it occurs on the ug/kg level naturally in humans.
I seriously don't believe that Monsanto/Searle thought there was anything wrong with aspartame (unlike Merck, apparently.) They just believed that they knew better than anyone else, and getting this on the market was more important than listening to nervous people, (who might very well be right, as it turns out.) Most of MY conspiracy theories involve malice and forethought, like, oh, say, financially massively overextending the government by engaging in two-front wars, pushing the US close enough to bankruptcy that massive cuts in Social Security and Medicaid become 'necessary' -- tidy, insofar as it gets us involved overseas AND gives a good excuse for a politically very unpopular decision. Now THAT'S a good conspiracy theory. And they're planning on offering us up as snacks to the aliens, who have spycams implanted in our cats.
I think the established no-harm recommendation is 0.5mg, which is 1/1000 the observed no-harm level as measured in rats (which don't have good feedback mechanisms for saying "I itch all over and my eyes hurt.") I may be reading it wrong. Other sources have indicated a *significantly* higher LD50 for humans, more like 2500-3000 mg/kg. But, hey, that's the thing about killing stuff off with poison: it's variable.
With that said, aspartame *can* break down into methanol, but usually only does so at extreme pH or temperature. Warm water alone very slowly hydrolyzes aspartame. I'm trying to find some good kinetics studies; this one indicates 90% hydrolysis after 53 days at 25 degrees C which is a good argument for only drinking refrigerated pop.
But the sheer amount you'd have to drink to produce blindness is astounding. I once calculated that with 100% hydrolysis, it would take 20 cans of pop per hour to build up and maintain harmful concentrations of methanol in the blood. EPA studies have indicated that 0.5g/kg/day doesn't result in observable health problems. There are (Google calculator r00lz) 0.014g of methanol per can of 100% hydrolyzed Coke. Hm, so that indicates that you probably don't want to drink more than 35 cans per day or you'll be above the no-observed-adverse effect level.
The official Materials Safety Data Sheet for methanol lists "Carcinogenicity: Methyl Alcohol - Not listed by ACGIH, IARC, NIOSH, NTP, or OSHA." That doesn't mean it's not carcinogenic, but it does mean that none of them has ever found any evidence for it being carcinogenic, as opposed to things like the nitrites in bacon, which have definite carcinogenic activity. The point being: we're eating things that are probably orders of magnitude more carcinogenic than the released methyl alcohol in aspartame; our bodies produce more methyl alcohol and its metabolites naturally than any but the most aggressive pop drinker will ever experience.
I'm not defending aspartame's use, but if you're going to attack what the FDA did when they certified it for use, attack it on other grounds, like your observed reaction to it, rather than because of methanol.
You say that to all the girls, don't you?
Myself, I always say let Bhagwans be Bhagwans.
Read "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They have the cojones to *start* the book by claiming, and supporting their claim, that if you look at the rise in teen violence in the '70's and '80's you'll see that it peaked 17 years after widespread legalization of abortion and then began to drop rapidly.
I don't LIKE thinking that we now tend to cull the dangerous part of society, but it's pretty hard to argue with their thesis.