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Biotech Science

Nietzsche's Toxicology 109

Posted by timothy from the for-small-values-of-xxx dept.
CETS writes "If it doesn't kill ya' it makes you stronger, so a little bit of a bad thing might be alright, according to Scientific American which has this article. " If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous--they may actually be good for you at low levels.""
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Nietzsche's Toxicology More

Nietzsche's Toxicology

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  • BUSH! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @04:47PM (#6808672) Homepage Journal
    This report on toxic chemicals brought to you by the Presidential Council on Industrial Development.

    • Bush or Bush League (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Bush League, definitely.

      Another B.L. finding: It is healthier for you to be poor. However, families that have been very rich for a long time develop an antidote, so it is okay for BLers to be rich.

    • Re:BUSH! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot@mo n k e l e c t r ic.com> on Thursday August 28, 2003 @02:55AM (#6811734)
      No SHIT! That was my first thought. We're gonna fix Iraq/Afghanistan by blowing it up, we're gonna save the forest by turning into paper, we're gonna save the economy by giving money to people who've already got alot of it, and now the best lie ever, toxic chemicals are good for you.

      Tell me something, how the fuck did humans live without toxic chemicals for the last 100,000 years then?

      • Tell me something, how the fuck did humans live without toxic chemicals for the last 100,000 years then?

        They didn't. Life has been exposed to toxic chemicals from nature since life started on Earth. As another poster wisely pointed out, every chemical is toxic in enough concentrations (including water). Yet modern science seems to believe that water is good for you. Zinc, calcium, and iron, in high enough concentrations, are bad for you, yet the public routinely consumes vitamins to get their daily supply
        • Well ... I realize the situation is more complicated then my one line analysis ... However, reports like this are often funded to justify self-serving public policy. The parent and I were both remarking that this report *reaks* of cheap-labor-Republicans double speak.

          I actually don't doubt that cells do this. Alot stranger things have happened our bodies have a mechanism that defends against (low doses) of nerve agents, toxic chemicals don't seem out of the question or even out of the ordinary...

          I was

      • People live a lot longer than they used to, don't they?
    • BUSH!

      Ahh, the sound that tells you the chicken you just ate wasn't so fresh after all!

  • Poison (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hackwrench ( 573697 ) <hackwrench@hotmail.com> on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @04:47PM (#6808674) Homepage Journal
    Practically everything is poisonous in sufficient amounts.
    • Everything IS poisonous.

      Toxicity is completely dependant on dose not the substance. Too much water will kill you.

      • Re:Poison (Score:3, Funny)

        by Tyrdium ( 670229 )
        Too much water will kill you.
        Duh! [dhmo.org]
        • Wow!

          That's a lot of work for a joke.

        • Re:Poison (Score:3, Insightful)

          by SeaEye420 ( 613209 )
          I saw this on Penn & Teller's Bullshit. It was hilarious. Great show, btw. They were going around at a greenpeace rally and getting everyone to sign a petition to ban Dihydrogen monoxide(sp?) due to the dangers. All kinds of 'activists' bought it hook, line, and sinker.

          It really showed that many people who consider themselves to be activists are nothing more than cheerleaders for a cause without doing any critical thinking or research about whose and what ideals they are supporting.

          Know anyone
          • Aww, c'mon this is pure troll, even if you didn't intend it to be.

            Pick a person at random and ask them whether they support a ban on a very dangerous chemical substance named 'dihydrogen monoxide'. Anyone who isn't a chemistry graduate will have to think for at least a second or two to figure out what this is, and people with no chemistry background would likely not figure it out at all (not without more information, at least).

            Now, practically all of what you consider 'activists' are ordinary people, w

            • Re:Poison (Score:3, Insightful)

              by R.Caley ( 126968 )
              people with no chemistry background would likely not figure it out at all

              People with no chemistry background should be very rare in any developed country. If this is not the case where you live, congratulations, your school system is terminally screwed.

              It is very likely that the interviewed 'activists' [...] unthinkingly said 'yes' to an interviewer asking if they wanted to sign a petition against a 'Very Dangerous Chemical'?

              The key word here is `unthinkingly'. By using it you are agreeing that the pe

            • I can honestly say that I wouldn't sign a petition to ban something I had never heard of.

              That was the whole point of that episode of Bullshit: Many activists act blindly and support causes that they don't really understand, or wouldn't even agree with if they did understand, all for the feel-good sense that they are helping.

              Granted, there are many well informed activists. Thank our lucky stars for that. I wasn't talking about them tho... ;)
            • No, people are just stupid.

              It's just as funny as when the guys from the Man Show were walking around getting women to sign a petition to ban "Women's Suffrage". Every woman they asked signed it.

            • my response would have been different. Penn & Teller's joke played on the way people are willing to take a stand on something and publicly display a righteous opinion despite ignorance. Do you really thing it's reasonable to consider yourself informed after a three minute conversation with a stranger who has a stake in getting your signature? Just because the activist isn't out for cash it doesn't mean the transaction is any more noble than what one would get from a used car salesman. Ask me about water
              • I am not sure what my response would have been. Saying "what the fuck is that?" on national TV is always going to be a risk, as you don't know the extent to which the interviewer is prepared to go to set you up. (Ignoring for the moment that I have been aware of the DHMO parody for several years now;) - when put on the spot, with the TV cameras there, and the implied threat that if you make a mess of it and say something silly it will be broadcast on national TV, I would probably just end up saying the fi
          • There is such a thing known as "water intoxication". It is EXTREMELY rare, and you have to be either very determined or very stupid to drink that much water. Here [merck.com] are a few [nih.gov] articles [emedicine.com] on it.

            Basically, you drink too much water (or don't pee enough) and you wind up diluting the electrolytes in your blood. This causes disruptions in the transmissions of nerve impulses, muscle contractions, etc. Like I said, very, very rare, and hard to get simply by drinking too much water. You'd have to drink insanely massive

            • This happened to a friend of mine (ha ha, there goes my credibility) and it resulted in a seizure and a trip to the hospital. This is why, when I was workin' on the railroad in Felton (Roaring Camp) and I was following the train up the hill four or five times a day to make sure it didn't start fires, in weather which regularly hovered around 100 degrees (remember I'm walking on the tracks, much of this is rock and it's all in the sun in the hottest part of the day) I took salt tablets, sometimes twice a day
        • Too much water will kill you.

          Very True - Hyponatremia can occur when the body saturates with water, causing too little sodium in the blood.

          An Actor apparently died of this recently and marathon runners apparently can get this condition

    • Ban DHMO! (Score:4, Funny)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @05:46PM (#6809075) Homepage Journal
      Ban DHMO! [dhmo.org] Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound. Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment.
      • Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment.

        The website is very funny, but it does help put things into perspective a bit.

        For example, more people die from water than terrorism. I don't see the current administration setting up surveillence cameras in each of our swimming pools...

        • For example, more people die from water than terrorism. I don't see the current administration setting up surveillence cameras in each of our swimming pools...

          Just wait, i believe it's next on Ashcroft's schedule, after Bongs...


          -sam

  • homeopathy

    • No it doesn't... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @05:19PM (#6808893) Journal
      ...because homeopathy explicitly includes the idea that things get more powerful as the dilution decreases, even past the point that the original substance no longer has even a molecule in the final product. A homeopathy practictioner would thus claim that these exposures are at far too high a level to work, and still need to be diluted by a factor of, oh, at least 10^10 to be more useful, probably more. (That number is not a typo. Yes, Homeopathy shoots right past Advogadro's Number and never looks back.) Homeopathy explicitly claims to be many times more beneficial then these low-level exposures. As they are completely wrong, they still don't win any points. (Nor is this as big a surprise as the article writer thinks it is, it merely establishes some examples of a long-known general principle.)

      For those wishing to learn more about homeopathy, please see Homeowatch [homeowatch.org], and in particular this page [quackwatch.org] which provides an overview of homeopathy.

      • Re:No it doesn't... (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        [...]oh, at least 10^10 to be more useful, probably more. (That number is not a typo. Yes, Homeopathy shoots right past Advogadro's Number and never looks back.)

        Avogadro's Number: ~6.02 x 10^23

        FYI, 10^23 > 10^10
        • Note he said "10^10..., probably more". And yes, homeopathic medicines are diluted past the point where even one molecule of the original substance remains in the solution. Various promoters of homeopathy have tried to claim that water somehow "remembers" the former presence of the substance. A paper even made it into Nature, with much controversy. Their lab methods were later found to be lacking (Google for "Benveniste" and "Randi" for more information on this little episode).
      • Well at least on the plus side, it won't hurt anyone. Maybe they're just looking to harmlessly exploit the placebo effect, which really does seem to help some people...
    • Yes it does sound like homeopathy, which is snake oil, so if any of their "data" comes from the homeopathy industry, it isn't data at all.

  • nothing new. (Score:4, Informative)

    by joFFeman ( 574971 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @04:52PM (#6808709) Homepage
    george carlin's been saying this for years.

  • Now I understand.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sylver Dragon ( 445237 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @04:55PM (#6808735) Journal
    Why all those old rich people keep moving to places like Palm Springs:

    Prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures is also harmful, but Rattan has found that heating up human skin cells to 41 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) twice a week for an hour slows aging in the cells.

    Seriously, if you've never been though Palm Springs, CA, you aren't missing much. Its a couple of golf courses in the hottest damn place, its not quite the middle of nowhere, but its in the same zipcode. Though, I might just be bitter about it, because the first job I ever held involved delivering medicines to people, in home, and I had to drive to Palm Springs every other week in a truck with no A/C. Nice enough drive, little to no traffic, and the desert can be kinda pretty at the right times, but if its summer take a lot of water with you.

  • How many cigarettes a day is optimal? (Score:5, Funny)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @05:14PM (#6808865) Journal
    I ask.

  • Pollution is killing me! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <benNO@SPAMint.com> on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @05:16PM (#6808877) Homepage
    I've done tests myself that prove my tap water contains Dihydrogen Monoxide [dhmo.org], but the government won't do anything about it. They say it's naturally occuring. Never mind that it kills 350 children under the age of six every year [candac.com], and countless others who frequent beaches and lakes where industrial plants dump the stuff.

    I'm no scientist, but it's obvious to me that we need stricter envrionmental controls to regulate this kind of thing. Multinationals are going to destroy the planet unless we do something [vhemt.org].
    • Yeah, you know, even my little sister doesn't fall for that one any more. :-)
    • Despite the known dangers of DHMO, it continues to be used daily by industry, government, and even in private homes across the U.S. and worldwide. Some of the well-known uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide are: .....by elite athletes to improve performance
      Please explain!?

    • First time I hear about that movement [vhemt.org]. I'm a bit uncertain how serious the site is (I'll admit I haven't exactly the time to read it entirely right now, I'll do that a bit later), but I certainly hope it's facetious, because it appears to me the only people who would be willing to join the movement are also those people who should not actually join it.

      It's like, someone is trashing your house, and instead of stopping it, you just leave. Not exactly a responsible attitude, and very unlikely to save your hou

  • Hormesis (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crmartin ( 98227 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @06:00PM (#6809169)
    This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data. It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate. (That is, what is called the "conservative assumption" is that the response to low doses of radiation is linear because at doses above about 30 roentgen the response is linear.)

    One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.

    Here's [discover.com] another link, this from Discover magazine.
    • So spending 14+ hours a day basking in the warm glow of my computer monitor might be providing me with just the right amount of radiation to actually keep me healthy?

      =Smidge=

    • Re:Hormesis (Score:4, Insightful)

      by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Thursday August 28, 2003 @01:15AM (#6811345)
      It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate.

      There are many possible reasons for this; maybe Colorado just has a better public health system or healthier lifestyles.

      One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.

      Even if Radon did protect you against cancer in low doses, the right thing to do would be to get it out of homes and then give it to people it in well-controlled doses.

      It is quite ironic that people like you often call themselves "conservatives", but then want to subject the US population to historically unprecedented exposures to largely unstudied chemicals and radiation. The conservative thing is to avoid exposing people to new chemicals and radioactivity until we know for certain that it's safe.

      This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data.

      You are right: this isn't news. The only news is that ignorant politicians with a corporatist agenda use such obscure scientific tidbits out of context to argue that pollution is harmless.
      • There are many possible reasons for this; maybe Colorado just has a better public health system or healthier lifestyles.

        Read the sources before you respond to them. It makes you look less foolish later.

        It is quite ironic that people like you often call themselves "conservatives", but then want to subject the US population to historically unprecedented exposures to largely unstudied chemicals and radiation.

        I beg your pardon: all I said about "conservative" was that EPA claimed the linear no-threshold

    • It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates

      Citation, please? Last time I had reason to look at the numbers, CO had rates of cervical cancer about twice the national average, and skin cancer higher than that. (A friend just pointed out that we're not doing too well on lung cancer, either.) I'm not saying you're wrong, but since this contradicts everything I'd read previously,

      • You bet, although it'll be short (a Google [google.com] for radiation, epidemiology, and "Bernard Cohen" will get you more, as will "radiation" and "hormesis".

        Idaho State [isu.edu] has a site on radiaiton effects and radiation protection. They've also got some stuff on depleted uranium that looks good, although I've not read it in detail.

        There is a journal [wonuc.org] devoted to low-dose radiation studies.

        This page [ratical.org] has about a zillion references. (Some of them disagree, by the way. This makes the page very useful.)

        This paper [medical-physics.com] has a
      • As (another?) CO resident, I can probably tell you why we have high skin cancer rates here: altitude. Most of the population here resides at altitudes above 5000 feet, some much higher. Thus the filtering effects of those few thousand feet of air on UV radiation are lost. The ozone layer takes out much of the UV, but not all.
    • then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.

      It's called a "vent fan" and they cost around $20.00 to $80.00 (depending on the amount of air you want to exchange/time) down at home depot. All that is neccessary to clear radon from a crawlspace or basement is reasonable ventilation exchanging air with the outside.

      Yeah, the regulations are confusing, but that tends to be the nature of building codes, and of cou
      • A vent fan isn't the only thing needed, at least in some of the amelioration attempts. As well as the vent fan, some places out here have had to have the basement specially sealed, and in a few cases they've had to actually have hot stuff excavated from around the house and replaced with clean sand and concrete. The price of this is in the thousands or tens of thousands.

  • I have researched this phenomenon (Score:5, Informative)

    by VendingMenace ( 613279 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @06:06PM (#6809208)
    At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is know as adaptive response. The acticle is slightly misleading though. What is actually observed is that organisms which are exposed to small quantities of a toxin (lets say radiation) before being given a larger dose will experience less damage than those who were exposed to the larger dose without the small "priming" dose.

    For example, cells in group A are exposed to a small dose, of raidation, given a few hours to sit around and then are exposed to a large dose of radiation. Group B is exposed to the large dose or radiatoin only. It can then be observed that group A suffers less damage (we quantified it by looking at the damage to the chromosomes, translocations, ect.) than those in group B.

    Some caveates to this are...
    -If the large dose of radiation is too large, you will not see this adaptive response.
    -The time that the cells must wait after teh priming dose is about 6 hours, to short or too long a time and the adaptive response is not observed
    -The priming dose also must be within a range of certain values for adaptive response to take place
    -In some cases, you see a synergisti response in the radiation. That is the cells exposed to the priming and large dose experience MORE radiation than is expected from just the sum of the radiation that they were exposed too

    All the research we did pointed to the fact that there is probably some kind of repair mechanism that is turned on when chromosomes are damaged. By exposing cells to a small priming dose of radiation, you have turned on this mechanism. Thus, when you expose the cells to the larger dose of radiation this repair mechanism is already turned on and the cell can more readily deal with the damage than other cells that have not recived this priming dose.

    THis is pretty cool research when you think about it. I mean it affeects alot of stuff, esp in the medical feild. Think about chemotherapy. The idea is to kill cancer by exposing it to a dose or posion. However, the dose that is given is just caculated by body mass. This research alludes to the fact, however, that not all peope will respond the same to long term exposure to posoins. THe long term exposer acts almost like many many priming doses, and, in those people that exhibit greater adaptive response, the therapy will then be less effective. INtersting, no?

    Also, there have been several different studies concerning geographical location in the US vs cancer frequecies (melenoma, to be exact). It was found that peope who lived in higher elevations (and thus recieved contiually doses of radiation that were higher than those at low elevations) had less occurance of skin cancer, than those of us at lower elevations. It is definatly hard to prove any connection, but hte thought was that this higher dose of radiation acted like a priming dose and then the higher doses of radiation that people are exposed to durring the summer had less of an effect.

    Anyways, i just wanted to vouch for the article and say that the stuff the are talking about (however, misrepresented) does exist. THe practicalitly of it, and how much you should let it affect your behavior (still wear sunscreen!) is up to you. IT is not a very well understood phenomenon, but it is still cool.

    SWEET!
    • Note that the reason why those repair mechanisms aren't turned on all the time is because that would waste energy, i.e., food. Throughout evolution, starvation has been a problem, so organisms have become quite efficient.

      If you live in a stable or slowly-changing environment year round, then the level at which the repair mechanisms are active is probably well-adapted to your environment. But if you are an office worker and take a one week vacation in the mountains or at the beach, your repair mechanisms
    • Are you talking about the _population_ of cells showing an adaptive response or about actual _individual_ cells?
      • Well, we looked at individual cells within a population (we used both human derived cell lines, and white blood cells taken from exposed rats) to determine the amount of damage sustained by individual cells within different populations. However, in order to be able to report any of our findings, we had to do statistics on all the data for particulare populations. SO, i guess that while you can observe adaptive response on an individual cell basis, it doesn't really make any sense until you take the entire
    • One quibble: hormesis is observed epidemiologically in populations that are exposed to relatively high background exposures without the 'priming' dose characteristic. I believe the experiments you're talking about have a relatively higher dose rate, if only because you could die of boredom waiting for the effects of 300 mR/year to show up in a population of experimental subjects, but that's fuzzy memory and I'd love to be corrected.
      • You are certainly correct. We used very high dose rates. I think about the highest was...lets see, like 2 cGy over like a minute. Yeah, so much much higher.

        Yeah, i guess that i am leaping a bit to suppose that hormesis and adaptive response are one and teh same, but i don't think it is too much of a leap. Good catch though :)
        • No, no, I don't think you're wrong at all -- I suspect that you're on the right track. The underlying mechanism seems to be activation of a cell-repair (and probably an accelerated cell-death) mechanism that either uses some kind of error-correction to clean up ionization damage, or that causes a cell to "suicide" if it's irrepairable. (Now, kids, don't try this at home -- it's been 20 years since medical school and I was just auditing anyway.) Your dose of a couple of centriGray probably gets the mechan
    • Sorry, make that two quibbles: Cohen's study was overall incidence of cancer, not just melanoma -- which we have an unfortunate lot of up here, due to high UV rates and an outdoors lifestyle.

      Which proves hormesis can only go so far.

      But it wouldn't surprise me to find that skin cancer versus lifetime UV exposure isn't linear no-threshold either.
    • The same thing happens in many models, the one I am most familiar with is hypoxia. Exposing cultures, in situ tissues or even whole animals to short periods of "light" hypoxia will protect them from more severe hypoxia for a period of time. (Look on Pubmed for Kitakaze and his research on nucleotidase in the heart). However, the effect is short term. It only lasts for a few hours.

      THe long term exposer acts almost like many many priming doses, and, in those people that exhibit greater adaptive response, the

  • Of course, this was obvious enough even without scientific data. Haven't you ever had a flu shot? Let's listen to Lewis Black [lewisblack.net]: "Whatever you do, don't get a flu shot. I got one. Every year they're scaring you into getting one, 'You know what people are doing? They're shitting out their mouths!' I don't like to brush that much, give me the shot! All a flu shot does is give you a cold for 365 days. You never get the flu, because you always have a cold!" Lewis Black is one of those presentation comedians, who

  • Return of Mithridatism (Score:5, Interesting)

    by monopole ( 44023 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @06:38PM (#6809389)
    Mithridatism, the practice of ingesting small quantities of poison to develop a resistance has been practiced since ancient times. The name comes from Mithridates, king of ancient Pontus, who fearful of being poisoned, ingested small quanties at regular intervals develop a resistance. Dashiell Hammett descibes the use of Mithridatism to develop a resistance to arsenic in the Continental Op story "Fly Paper" (1929) which in turn references the practice as per Dumas in "The Count of Monte Cristo". Thus it is relatively well known that trace doses of some poisons can result in relative imunity to the specific toxin. This does not imply that the paractice is particularly healthy or desirable.

    • Cumulative Toxins (Score:5, Funny)

      by quinkin ( 601839 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:57PM (#6810767)
      In cases where the toxin is actually cumulative (ie. is stored by the body), such as many heavy metals, it is not recommended.

      Please don't have your daily lead/mercury tonic...

      Q.

      • Please don't have your daily lead/mercury tonic...

        but thessssss laead shheielsd in mmym y brraaidnnn keps thah alleeeeans out offf my thinkkking
      • actually, mercury is not too teribly horrible to ingest. In fact, for some stomach illnesses, mercury is prescribed and ingested on a regulare basis. This is not to say that you should expose yourself to mercury just for the fun of it, but in the liquid phase it is not as bad as you would think.

        Where mercury really gets you is in the vapor phase. Breathing mecury vapor is really bad for you.

        I guess this is not really all that important to point out, but i just thought you might like to know :)
        • On the topic of irrelevant mercury info...

          Many years ago hat makers used to use mercury in the process. The extensive exposure would lead to signifigant neurological damage and severely abnormal behavior. Such people were commonly reffered to as "mad".

          This is the source of the basis for the Mad Hatter character in Alice in Wonderland.

          -

  • Iocaine Powder (Score:4, Funny)

    by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @07:37PM (#6809676)
    This article has been spouting the truth I've known for a while.

    I've been building up my resistance to the effects of Iocaine Powder. Never know when you're death is going to be on the line with a Sicilian opponnent.

    • Re:Iocaine Powder (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. :-)

  • Why isn't this obvious? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @07:41PM (#6809701) Journal

    Every time this comes up I am amazed that it isn't completely obvious to almost everyone. After all, every substance known to man has the Goldilocks Property (too much is bad, too little is bad, so just right is best). It seems like everyone wants to pretend that they live in a world where things are either good or bad in-and-of themselves, when in fact nothing they have ever encountered works the way they are trying to pretend that everything does.

    The only explanation I can think of is that it would be great for people who don't want to think, except that in a would like that people never would have evolved in the first place.

    -- MarkusQ

  • Small amounts of marijuana are preventative... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...of me getting any work done.

  • Yet another lesson from nethack (Score:3, Funny)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:47PM (#6810015)

    Yet another one of life's lessons that can be learned from nethack.

    If the poison does not kill you, it will probably drop your strength, thus making you weaker.

  • facit venenum. not really a groundbreaking thought. by the way, nicotine enhances concentration. bored...
  • whoo hoo... this means i'm healthier after smoking a pack a day since the age of 11. yaaaaaayyyy...*coughs up a lung*...

  • Yeah I allready knew this. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've noticed my marijuana tolerance is much higher now. I'm sure Snoop Dog and I could serve as good indicators of the effects.

  • This is true within reason (Score:3, Insightful)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Thursday August 28, 2003 @08:36AM (#6813202) Journal
    I agree with this (hell, how can't I? It's been proven) to some degree. It always drives me nuts when I see parents sheilding their kids from every sort of germ and such and fill them full of motrin at the slightest hint of a cold. Let them get sick. Let them build up their immunities. Let the body build resistance to it. It's only gonna happen by playing in the dirt, being outside, experiencing the world. Stop disinfecting the entire house. And as we've seen throughout history (and by some posts here), it's been a common practice to ingest small amounts of poison to build up the tolerance so if you were to ingest a "lethal" dosage for a "normal" person, you'd survive.

    However...you are NOT going to catch me smoking cigarettes to "build up" my lungs, or drink gasoline, or take in any other number of highly toxic (and those weren't even "highly toxic") compounds to "get stronger". Yet...scarily enough, some people in society don't bother to use common sense and they'll just be a bunch of lemmings and do stupid shit and start drinking anti-freeze thinking it'll help them in some way.
  • article [slashdot.org], and the microwave plasmoids [slashdot.org], doesn't it? /. seems to have this thing for promoting geek sterility. Are you sure you folks aren't actually a secret society made up of the jocks who used to make our lives a living hell in high school? I always suspected there was something more sinister going on ...
  • Thats good news so in mexico city the 4 million cars should improve public health, wont they?

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