What kind of soup?
Posted on 10/14/2019 10:45:03 AM PDT by BenLurkin
In the 1950s, researchers stumbled upon a new class of drugs that provided relief for those suffering from schizophrenia. These drugs were known as antipsychotics and, as the name suggests, they reduced symptoms like hallucinations and delusions — primarily by reducing the levels of dopamine in the brain. This led clinicians and scientists to argue that dopamine was linked to the experiences of psychotic symptoms, and a concerted research effort ensued, seeking to solve the puzzle of why excess dopamine might produce hallucinations.
Although it was later shown that increasing dopamine could produce hallucinations, establishing a consistent link between them, it has not been clear why.
They achieved this by taking advantage of a simple fact: Your brain is lazy. It makes shortcuts to understand the deluge of information that bombards it daily. If you’re presented with consistent information, consistently, your brain adjust its expectations of reality in turn. This is the basis of Bayesian theories of how we perceive the world – that is, the brain makes inferences about the world around us based on statistics and probabilities on what is likely to occur.
[I]ncreasing dopamine made it more difficult for participants to adjust their perception — an effect comparable to how the hallucinators had struggled. Moreover, the extent to which participants struggled was strongly associated with the severity of hallucinations — but not with any diagnosis of schizophrenia. In other words, the difficulty appeared to be associated with a symptom, not a diagnosis.
Using brain imaging, the researchers also showed that an increased capacity for dopamine release, from a part of the brain known as the striatum (an area involved in schizophrenia), was associated with the severity of hallucinations. Together, these experiments showed that excess dopamine was associated with difficulty in accurately predicting reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
I went to Weight Watchers. It was okay. Janis, who sits next to me most weeks, has married a Jewish man and is studying Hebrew. She’s very happy and doesn’t mind making the effort, but it’s frustrating learning a new script. Also, their thing with vowels.
The kids are fighting over lunch.
w00t!
Tell them to fight somewhere else so they don't accidentally ruin the food.
And make a mess.
And pour people like soup into machine intelligences! (* said in Cave Johnson voice)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keMBtyjYUPQ
Like soup.
I’m making soup ...
What kind of soup?
Chicken-vegetable.
Vegetable chickens, horrifying!
Walking around, clucking and leafy green!
And they spread like kudzu!
Well, it’s a thought. Chickens with chlorophyll-laced feathers; greens to go along with the meat. (Normally the feathers are discarded when the poultry are harvested.)
We’ll put it up there with my suggestion that the luciferase gene be transplanted into tobacco leaf, so that you could have a cigarette that lights itself.
And they produce their own fertilizer!
I propose we send chickens along with the human colonists to Mars. Perhaps not the first arrivals, but they would be able to glean sustenance from the otherwise inedible components of the food system there, just as they do here.
Among other things, it would be a sign that we are serious about surviving there.
We learned at Environthon that the soil of Mars is not good for growing plants.
Did they mention that Mars has as much dry land area as Earth?
The immensely deep prairie sod of the American mid-west was turned into a dust bowl, but we eventually learned better land management.
I’m sure we’ll do a better job on Mars.
Kudzickens, kudzu chickens.
What abomination did we just imagine?
Are we.. are we bad?
It needs some chemical reactions and breakdown plus some organic goop added to it first.
Massive undertaking, but lichens might be able to to be modified to survive in certain areas there.
Everything will depend on carefully manufactured and monitored greenhouses, or even otherwise dark tunnels illuminated with LED grow-lights.
Which means that possibly at least one cargo launch to Mars will have a Boring tunnel machine aboard. It could be that "soil" a few meters down from the surface won't be as toxic.
In any case, greenhouses on Mars will be very carefully constructed and maintained, but they will be spread out as widely as possible for any number of good reasons. Maybe they'll simply be warehouses for hydroponics trays and stuff, or eventually raised beds for beans and tomatoes.
By then, after the harvest, the chickens may get turned loose to peck every morsel of greenery left like a flock of locusts.
And then the planting will start again.
Kudzickens, roaming Mars.
Unsupervised and uncontrolled.
It’s not science unless it’s mad science.
Good morning, Undeaders.
While all y’all are talking about Mars and Kudzickens and all those other alien things, I’m sitting here, listening to the wind again, knowing that when I step out there to walk over and get my mail, I’ll be frozen solid by the time I get back in.
The temp is 27°, the wind is E @ 24 mph, gusting to 44 mph making the wind chill a whopping 13° to -1°. Anyone care to visit me?
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