Sometimes all you have to do to stand up for yourself is to sit down.
“I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people.”
Mark Jaquith's personal blog
Sometimes all you have to do to stand up for yourself is to sit down.
“I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people.”
The other day, Sarah noted that on her laundry detergent, it said “In case of accidental ingestion, give a glass of water or milk, and contact a poison control center.” She thought it odd that they would want you to drink milk. The purpose of drinking at all was clear… to dilute the detergent. Even very dangerous poisons can be handled by your body if they are diluted enough. But what was so special about milk? We had two theories: one involved the basicity of milk, and the other involved the lactose sugar in milk.
I looked into it further, and my lactose guess was right. See, milk contains a sugar called lactose that the human body is unable to digest by itself. Lactose is a disaccharide (sugar made up of two units) consisting of one glucose unit and one galactose unit connected by a beta linkage. Lactose is digested in mammals (like humans) only with the help of an enzyme called lactase which cleaves the lactose in half… allowing the individual sugars to be absorbed by the body. The problem here is that there is a limited amount of lactase produced, and as humans age, many stop producing it altogether, making it harder and harder to digest the lactose sugars in milk. Eventually, many adults become lactose intolerant, meaning that they are unable to digest a significant amount of lactose. Interestingly, lactose intolerance varies widely by ethnicities. Those of African or Asian descent are almost always lactose intolerant. Europeans and some from India and the Middle-East retain lactase at a higher rate, likely due to a micro-evolutionary adaptation resulting from cultures in which lactose-containing foods are more common.
At any rate, even someone with the ability to digest lactose only has a limited amount of the lactase enzyme with which to process the sugar. Once all available enzymes are put to work breaking up lactose, additional incoming lactose molecules are put on a waiting list. While they’re waiting for a lactase spot to open up, your incredibly acidic gastric juices start doing a number on the milk that is just sitting in your stomach. The hydrochloric acid in your stomach turns the milk into hard-to-digest curds… sort of like what milk looks like when you leave it out for a few days. These curds end up coating your stomach and your intestines, and give you a case of indigestion. And if you’ve just swallowed a poison, indigestion is exactly what you want!
So there’s the answer… by drinking milk, you not only dilute the detergent (or other poison), you overwhelm the lactase enzymes, allowing your stomach’s hydrochloric acid to curdle the milk, which coats your stomach and intestines, slowing down the rate with which your body absorbs the poison.
So why not just induce vomiting? Well, you could choke, your stomach acid will erode your esophagus, the substance you swallowed could be harmful to your lungs or esophagus, and you’ll become severely dehydrated, which could actually be worse for you than the poison you ingested. The milk just “pauses” your digestion until you can seek proper medical care.
One of the features of my new PowerBook I like the most is the two-fingered scrolling mechanism. Whereas you normally use one finger on the trackpad to move the mouse around, if you use two fingers and move them together, you get vertical and/or horizontal scolling. It’s so handy, I don’t even think about it anymore.
There is, however, one annoying side effect of this scrolling: Firefox for Mac OS X is set up so that “scroll left” and “scroll right” acts as “go back” and “go foward” in your browsing path. I primarily use Firefox for web development, especially CSS (which I can edit live… a huge timesave). I can’t tell you how annoying it is to have 15 minutes of CSS tweaking flushed down the drain with one inadvertant sideways scroll.
Thanks to this site (which provides a two-fingered PowerBook scroll driver for older model PowerBooks), I have the solution:
Finally, FireFox users should note that FireFox by default is set to interpret any horizontal scrolling as forward/back. In conjunction with iScroll2 (or other means of allowing horizontal scrolling), this can lead to unintentional jumping between pages. Fortunately, FireFox’ default behavior can be changed as follows:
- go to about:config (i.e. type it in FireFox’ address field)
- set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
- set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false
- play around with the mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines and mousewheel.withnokey.numlines values until you’re satisfied with the scrolling speed
Kramer 0.7.3 has been released, which fixes a rather nasty bug that, in some situations, could start an infinite loop that might not be killed on some server setups. Big thanks to Kerim Friedman for letting me know about the problem and to Ryan Schwartz from TextDrive for giving Kerim such a detailed report on the problem.
I’m a damn dirty ape switcher. I am now the proud owner of a 15 inch Apple PowerBook. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but already it is “home.” I still have my uses for Windows and Linux, but OS X is where I’m going to do the majority of my computing. OS X seems to have just enough “linux flavor” for my liking.
I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with some third party software that is really nice. For IRC, I’m using Colloquy (free), which is very pretty, and behaves out of the box quite similarly to X-Chat. For FTP, Transmit ($29.95) is quite nice. For some of my P2P needs, Acquisition ($17.99) is handy, although there is apparently some issue with the author not releasing source code that may or may not be bound by the GPL. TextMate ($47.36) is quite a handy text editor, whose potential I’ve not even begun to unleash.
A question was posed to the class today in organic chemistry and three possible answers were put up on the board. The question was how many possible products could result from the chlorination of 2-methylbutane. The choices were a) 2, b) 3, and c) 4. I counted 5 carbons, of which two were identical, which left 4 unique carbons, each with at least one hydrogen. So I was about 90% sure that it was “c.” The professor asked if anyone thought the answer was “a,” and no one raised their hand. Then, a strange thing happened. See, there are about 25 people in the class, but any time she asks a question like this, some people are not sure enough to answer… so sometimes as few as half the class will venture a guess (which is why she sometimes uses electronic remotes so that we can just key in our answer free of social inhibitions.) When she asked if anyone thought it was “b,” every single person in the class raised their hand, except for me. I counted 20 other people in class that day. And you know… my confidence plummeted.
There is an experiment you can do where you get about 40 people in an auditorium, and ask a question with an obvious answer. But unknown to your test subject, the other 39 people are on the take. They’re instructed to confidently answer incorrectly. And when the test subject is asked, he will invariably fight against his better judgement, and answer the question incorrectly as well.
For a moment, I thought that was going on, but not before my confidence in my answer dropped precipitously. “Does anyone think it is ‘c’?” she asked. I winced and raised my hand. You only live once. “Mark?” she asked quizzically. The expression on her face seemed to say “your test score suggests that you are understanding this stuff, why would you answer this incorrectly, especially after everyone else got it right?” Oh boy. Then she smirked. “Would you like to explain why everyone else got this wrong?” Why yes, yes I would.
Somehow I don’t think this is going to help my humility deficit and my mindset of “me against the whole world.”
Don’t be surprised if there is an accident in lab involving acid, my face, and the other people in the class who already hate me. What they don’t get is that I was really bad at general chemistry. Like, excited to get 75% on a test bad. I was getting C’s while they were getting A’s, so it’s simply my turn to be good at something. I just happen to be good at the one thing that almost everyone is bad at. I did the same thing with Financial Accounting. But pigs will fly before I ace a Biology test.
My apparent aptitude for organic chemistry has definitely created some tension between me and my girlfriend, of the “shut up… no… I don’t want to see your test… I can’t even talk to you right now” variety. Just wait until Spring when we’ll both be taking organic 2.