h a l f b a k e r yRight twice a day.
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There is a fairly narrow range of circumstances in
which one has access to a soft drink and salt cellar, is
in need of oral rehydration, and has no access to
approved oral rehydration drinks, no? |
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More useful, at least to anyone who finds themselves
in a
molecular biology lab and is facing an abrupt
termination
of a once-promising career (say), would be a panel on
the
soft drink stating how much ethanol one has to add
to convert it into an improvised Get Completely
Pissed solution. |
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How about A website that lets you plug in Fluid oz and Sugars and Sodium from the label and get the salt and potassium amounts needed to reach some ideal mix.
There is so little room on small packages. |
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Personally speaking, I am trying to cut sodium. Finding foods to do that is tough. Whole aisles of the supermarket seem off limits if you read the labels carefully and multiply by the ridiculous number of servings per packages. |
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[Max] I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope something works
out for you. |
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Thanks, [Voice]. Things'll work out somehow. |
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Don't really understand the idea, but would like to offer MB a
job as a farmer in Illinois. Think life sucks now...just wait, it
could always get worse. |
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That's a kind offer (and I happen to have relatives in
Illinois). But it would interfere with my plans for
vengeance and a death-ray. |
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//I happen to have relatives in Illinois // |
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In the Illinois State Penitentiary, to be specific. |
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// my plans for vengeance and a death-ray // |
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Oh dear, back to the old lightning rod and "You fools ! I'll crush you all
! " days ... |
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Hey, the old ways are sometimes the best. |
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My motto is "don't get mad; get madder." |
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Yes, but he might not want to comet to that just at the present time ... |
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//don't get mad; get madder// is that the origin of the phrase "seeing red"? |
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//my plans for vengeance and a death-ray // |
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Given your specific skill set, shirley weaponised genital lice or herpes or somesuch would be a more realistic vehicle for your righteous revenge? |
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// facing an abrupt termination of a once-promising career // |
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That's unfortunate, mate. Some years ago I had an* Eureka-type moment when I finally worked out that no matter how much you love the company, the company does not love you back. |
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*Note. "an Eureka" sounds wrong, but it gramatically correct, as far as I can tell. This is bothering me more than I care to admit. |
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//shirley weaponised genital lice or herpes or
somesuch would be a more realistic vehicle for your
righteous revenge? // |
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By happy coincidence, the cancer therapy I was in
the early stages of developing can be adapted to
produce a person-specific lethal virus. |
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//the company does not love you back// Well, part
of it at least likes me back. But unfortunately not
the part that makes the kill/no-kill decisions. Meh -
I've only been with them 23 years. The next year
should be fun. |
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Actually I have just realized that I've hijacked this
discussion in an irrelevant and self-indulgent away.
Apologies, [8th]. If I can make it up to you by
returning your Max Bygraves LP, I'd be happy to do so. |
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Getting slightly back on topic - why isn't water the
best rehydratant? |
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Something about osmolarity, if that's a word. |
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Story time. I was, a couple years ago 2 days into a 4 day hike in a fairly remote area when a particularly severe case of gastro struck. I won't go into details but I basically crashed very rapidly and was evidently trying to void myself to death in record time. It was plainly evident that water simply wasn't being absorbed at all and so I was in big trouble. Fortunately knowing about ORT at the time, I broke into our pooled food supplies and made up a huge quantity of approximate mix. I pumped a good 5 litres of the stuff into myself overnight and got up in the morning still with all of the original symptoms, albeit sufficiently hydrated. We then proceeded to walk out of there at a pretty good clip, me drinking about 2 litres an hour to stay ahead of losses. Managed to get back to the vehicle sometime that night and thence on to civilisation, in surprisingly good health considering. We had an EPIRB and several times considered using it but decided to try for self-rescue, which fortunately worked. I've no doubt you couldn't keep that up for long, but the killer with gastro is dehydration, the rest is just discomfort. |
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I now take a small (well, lightweight. It's actually I think 20l worth) supply of pre-made ORT sachets with me on any hike etc (plus adequate water sterilising materials). |
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Anyhoo, ORT works. Well. Water doesn't. Even without gastro, you absorb water much more quickly when there's some sugar and salt in it, and ORT is simply the right concentrations. |
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I just wish ORT sachets were easier to get ahold of. I ended up making them myself based on the poor choice of products readily available. |
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[8th] - I think you'll find the sugar concentration in most soft drinks is far above thatsuitable for an ORT mix. Most liekly the label would have to say "add x grams of salt and Y ml of water to every 100ml of this softdrink to make a suitable ORT mix". X would be 1 or 2 grams I think, Y would possibly be up to 2 or 3 hundred mls. |
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//adapted to produce a person-specific lethal virus// |
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Hold on a minute. Are you serious? |
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// returning your Max Bygraves LP // |
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That's very kind of you, many thanks. |
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Just give us a moment .... |
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<Sound of double-barrel 12-bore breech closing> |
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//Hold on a minute. Are you serious?// |
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Very. I've been developing a way to target cancer
cells based on their genomic differences from the
normal cells of the same person. The therapy needs
to be targetted to each individual's cancer, because
the mutations in each cancer are different. |
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But, equally, you could target basically the same
thing against genomic sequences unique to one
individual. Admittedly you'd have to sequence their
genome first, but that's now cheap and could be done
from a very small, surreptitious sample. |
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So, if you want a cold virus that'll sweep harmlessly
through a population but kill person X (and, possibly,
a few close relatives), see me after classes. |
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Incidentally, the possibility of doing this (or the
similar thing of an ethnicity-specific virus) has been
considered already, to the extent that some
governments were worried about it a few years ago. |
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Yeah, I thought the really scary proposition was creating a virus specific to a given group (a race, say) or differentiating by some other trait. |
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A male-specific virus would be stupidly simple to
develop. (As it happens, one of the "target
sequences" I'm using is on the Y chromosome -
because it's easy to find cell lines that either contain
or don't contain Y.) |
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I'm very sorry to hear this. You'll have new employers clamoring for you. |
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Hey, I was just kidding with that mad scientist crack before. |
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Best I can offer [Max] is work developing strains of salt
resistant algae which produce higher levels of beta-
carotene. Could you bend your skills to this? (Please don't
virus me either) |
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//developing strains of salt resistant algae which
produce higher levels of beta- carotene// Sounds
doable. Are you using a mutate/select sort of
approach, or a synthetic biology engineeringy
approach? |
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I have nothing to offer, [MB], but blood, sweat, toil and tears - any of which you might use to target me with your virus, so perhaps I won't. |
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Except toil. I don't think you can extract DNA from Time Off In Lieu. |
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Oh, and [8th], if you got Max Bygraves with the first round, perhaps you'd like one by Max Boyce. |
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If the original bottle was labelled with the amount of sugar, and acid, present, you could easily calculate how much to dilute it (or whether to blend two contrasting drinks to balance acid vs sugar) before adding wine yeast and fermenting all the sugar out. Viola, instant* dry strong wine. |
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*plus a month or so waiting. |
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For ORT, the sugar's nice, the concentration isn't
particularly important. It's a fuel. The salts are key, and
they require fuel to move them around, back into cells
for example. Biology has developed a whole lot of
phenomenally nifty ways of moving specific ions around. |
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//why isn't water the best rehydratant// |
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Well, water just wanders around following salts,
occasionally having to use an aquaporin. If you sweat,
you're sweating 40 mM salt, if you pee it's 40-200 mM if
you have cholera... it's, I dunno somewhere in that range,
but a lot of it. You can put water back in, but it's just
going to flow right back out without the salts. We're just
a big wet bag of ion channels really. |
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Perhaps there's a job waiting for him in some space research advisory board... |
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// perhaps you'd like one by Max Boyce // |
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Oooh, lovely ... we always look forward to
opportunities to use the 88mm FlAK 39. |
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And yes, the Bygraves vinyl was a first-barrel kill, so
we still have a round left for the next record. In
your own time ... |
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//Did it occur to you that you might be getting too
close to something that worked and that's why you
had to go ? Seems like dangerous stuff. // Sadly
not. I could tell a long story, but now I feel bad
about hijacking this post. |
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Email me if you like and I'll spill the legumes. |
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