Random Facts - Page 16

[Reverend Jim]

"clearing" is not the same as detoxifying, detoxifying is making something toxic not be toxic anymore which rarely happens in the body

Detoxification (detox for short)[1] is the physiological or medicinal removal of toxic substances from a living organism, including, but not limited to, the human body, which is mainly carried out by the liver. Source

de·tox·i·fi·ca·tion (dē-tŏk′sə-fĭ-kā′shən) n.

1. The process of detoxifying.
2. The state or condition of being detoxified.
3. Physiology The metabolic process by which the toxic qualities of a poison or toxin are reduced by the body.
4. A medically supervised treatment program for alcohol or drug dependence designed to purge the body of intoxicating or addictive substances.
   Source

de·tox·i·fy (dē-tŏk′sə-fī′) v.

1. To counteract or destroy the toxic properties of a substance.
2. To remove the effects of poison from something, such as the blood.
3. To treat a person for alcohol or drug dependence, usually under a medically supervised program designed to rid the body of intoxicating or addictive substances.
   Source

And I'll add (again) this from How The Liver Works from The Canadian Liver Foundation

Cleanses blood:

metabolizing alcohol and other drugs and chemicals,
neutralizing and destroying poisonous substances.

By definition, the liver is a critical part of the body's mechanisms to detoxify itself.

[<M/>]

A story in "Time Magazine" once reported that while Donald Trump was in college he enjoyed reading federal foreclosure listings just for fun.

[Agilemind]

The liver is involved in processing & 'detoxifying' metabolic by-products (aka garbage your body produces itself). This is not what is meant by organic-food/anti-pesticide groups or what you ment when you said detoxifying chemicals coming into the body -> eg. environmental carcinogens, pesticides, heavy metals, drugs...

The liver does not detoxify the vast majority of external chemicals (except ethanol), those are excreted as is via the kidneys. Some external chemicals are metabolized by the liver but typically this does not make them less harmful (actually often it makes them more harmful, such as my previous example of methanol) thus cannot be described as detoxification, this is also why liver damage is one of the most common side-effects of drugs. If you think about it this is intuitive since the human body has evolved the mechanisms of processing & clearing external toxins, novel chemicals like synthetic pesticides and industrial pollutants have not been seen by the body before so it cannot have evolved metabolic enzymes to process them efficiently. Thus any metabolic activities it performs on them will have random effects w.r.t. toxicity (and most cases random is not going to be helpful).

[Reverend Jim]

I never claimed that the liver was the only organ that helps to cleanse the body of harmful "stuff". Yes, the kidneys play an important role as well. The whole point was not to get mired down in minutiae. The point is that we have been pumping toxic chemicals into the environment for decades and to claim that these chemicals are harmless is to deny decdes of science that says otherwise.

[Reverend Jim]

No scientific consensus on GMO safety

Note two of the comments

Rigorous studies investigating the safety of GM crops and foods would normally involve, inter alia, animal feeding studies in which one group of animals is fed GM food and another group is fed an equivalent non-GM diet. Independent studies of this type are rare, but when such studies have been performed, some have revealed toxic effects or signs of toxicity in the GM-fed animals.

Among the animal feeding studies and reviews of such studies in the list, a substantial number found toxic effects and signs of toxicity in GM-fed animals compared with controls.

[advent_geek]

The World's oldest known creature, a mollusc, was 507 years old until scientists killed it by mistake

source

[Reverend Jim]

Titanic is considered the highest grossing movie of all time, however, when you adjust for inflation (using the same dollars) the top grossing list looks like this (domestic gross only)

$1,640,602,400 1939 - Gone With the Wind 
$1,446,331,100 1977 - Star Wars (Episode IV)
$1,156,412,900 1965 - The Sound of Music  
$1,151,857,200 1982 - E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 
$1,100,052,700 1997 - Titanic 
$1,063,720,000 1956 - The Ten Commandments 
$1,040,000,000 1975 - Jaws 
$1,007,979,900 1965 - Dr. Zhivago 
  $898,065,200 1973 - The Exorcist 
  $885,080,000 1937 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
  $811,328,100 1961 - 101 Dalmatians 
  $797,226,800 1980 - The Empire Strikes Back 
  $795,760,000 1959 - Ben-Hur 
  $789,712,800 2009 - Avatar 
  $763,762,400 1983 - Return of the Jedi 
  $746,406,300 1993 - Jurassic Park 
  $733,334,000 1999 - Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 
  $723,868,900 1994 - The Lion King 
  $723,840,000 1973 - The Sting  
  $718,837,500 1981 - Raiders Of The Lost Ark 

Source

[advent_geek]

The dinosaur noises in the "Jurassic Park" movie were made from recordings of tortoise sex.

Source

[Nutster]

The first episode of Doctor Who (November 23, 1963) aired the day after President Kennedy was shot (November 22, 1963).

[advent_geek]

Over 90% of American movies made before 1929 are lost, no copies are known to exist

Source

[Reverend Jim]

In 2002, The US passed The American Service-Members' Protection Act which would authorize the United States to invade the Netherlands in order to prevent prosecution of US military personnel by the International Criminal Court.

Source

[Reverend Jim]

In 2014 three people died in a plane crash while in a flight simulator. A plane flew into the building killing them and the pilot. Source

[stultuske]

so ... that flight simulator was in the building which was crashed by a plane? or how did that happen?

[Reverend Jim]

The flight simulator was in the building that the plane crashed into.

[almostbob]

Three people in a flight simulator have died after a real plane crashed into the building in the United States.

somebody is playing with the infinite improbability drive

how would it be ??
get to the pearlies and say
"I was in a safety trainer learning how to fly, and a plane hit it"

[advent_geek]

In 2010, the Catholic Church had an income of US$97 billion

Source

[advent_geek]

There have been serious scientific attempts to study whether or not our "reality" is, in fact, a computer simulation a la "The Matrix."

Source

[Agilemind]

@advent_geek While that is an interesting article the lack of peer-reviewed references suggests it is more a fanciful notion considered by scientists rather than something subjected to serious study (scientists like to have fun with ideas too). Though from a rigorously objective point of view the whole concept doesn't make a lot of sense because it assumes our current mode of computation is somehow the inevitable climax of any technological civilization. Plus that any sufficiently egotistical culture that would have the desire to create a simulated universe would also have no intention/desire to interfere with it (every simulation we've ever created has been subject to immense interference and it's unclear to me whether we would allow the simulation of artifical life if we had the ability to do so).

[Reverend Jim]

some philosophers have long argued that we’re actually more likely to be artificial intelligences trapped in a fake universe than we are organic minds in the “real” one.

Without researching the philosophic writings that propose this, it seems to me that if this is the case, then you could make the same case for the intelligent beings running the simulation, ad infinitum. That's about as satisfying as saying that you've solved the question of creation by claiming "God made everything" without explaining how God came into existence. Shades of "the church of last Thursday".

[Agilemind]

Plus all the quoted scientists are physicists or mathematicians who professionally make lots of simplifying assumptions to make the universe model-able. Propose this to any molecular biologist/biochemist and they will laugh in your face, because even modern supercomputers with the most up-to date physical & chemical models can't correctly model the folding of a single average sized protein (300 amino acids long) in standard laboratory conditions (nor most RNA molecules either). And can just roughly approximate the basic metabolism of a single bacterial cell.

Considering that there are ~100 trillion bacterial cells in a single human's gut, and an estimated 20,000-200,000 human proteins each with potentially several different conformations depending on which other molecules it is bound to. That's not even getting into the 100 billion neurons and 10^15 synapses in a 5 year-old's brain. It will be a very long time before we can accurately simulate a single human being, never mind the 8 billion currently on the planet.

[ddanbe]

I saw a zebra spider jumping of of my garden table of about 70 cm heigth.
Asume a human being is about 1.70 m. That would mean we could easily jump of a rock of about 100 m.

[Nutster]

@ddanbe: The smaller an object is, the further it can fall without injury. A 3-metre (10-foot) fall would be pretty much harmless to a house cat, would leave a human injured unless that person has special training and time to prepare, and would kill an elephant. As height or length increases linearly, the mass increases cubically. If you increase a 5-mm long, 400 mg (total guess on the weight) spider to 1 metre long (200 times as long), its mass would increase eight million times, to 3.2 tonnes. It would be crushed under its own weight.

I am 6" tall (72 inches) and 290 pounds (considerably overweight). If I was to be shrunk to 1 inch, my mass would be about 300 mg to in the same proportion. Maybe Antman could work, so long as we can figure out what to do with the missing mass.

[Reverend Jim]

Plus with wind resistance, terminal velocity is much lower for small creatures.

[Agilemind]

Plus the strength of materials can scale differently than mass. Bone strength is proportional to the diameter of the bone thus larger creatures need proportionately thicker bones than smaller creatures. Whereas insect chitin scales the same as mass.

[advent_geek]

Four Japanese scientists measured the amount of friction between a shoe, a banana skin and the floor: it's 0.07

Source

[Reverend Jim]

In 2015, the US has averaged more than one mass shooting per day (defined as any single incident in which at least four people are shot, including the gunman). Source and Source

[Stuugie]

That's a nasty stat RJ!

[Reverend Jim]

You're right. But "nasty" doesn't begin to describe it and calling it "a stat" just masks the horror. That's a big part of the problem. In the days after each shooting when we should be discusing it and talking about what to do the Right cries "While we are mouring and burying the dead is not the time to politicize this". And then after the outrage has died down it is yesterday's news and therefore just another "stat". UUntil the next mass shooting. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[Reverend Jim]

In the US in 2012, there were only 259 justifiable homicides, or what is commonly referred to as self-defense, compared to 8,342 criminal firearm homicides. In 2008-2012, guns were used in 42,419 criminal homicides and only 1,108 justifiable homicides. Source

[vegaseat]

Germany spends an estimated 1000 Euros on each asylumseeker per month. They expect about one million new asylumseekers this year alone, more than that next year. Many arrive without any papers, so the approval process takes up to 2 years. Luckily, Germany is a very rich country and gladly spends the money.

Once given asylum status the person can compete with the local workforce. So all those engineers from Syria and software experts from Somalia can prove themselves. If the status is denied, you can simply stay on with the present support system, but you can not work. Sweden is similar to that, but their support system is much more generous.

I think the Germans are hoping that their rejects will over the years all end up in Sweden.
Source: BBC