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CharonY

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Everything posted by CharonY

  1. Ok, so it means that you got about 100 mg zinc citrate dihydrate (C12H14O16Zn3) per tablet, which corresponds to 30 mg elemental zinc (for details see exchemist's calculation). As the daily recommended dose of zinc is about 8-11 mg, this corresponds to 300% of what is recommended to consume per day. I.e. it exceeds the recommended dosage by a fair bit and unless there is a case of serious zinc deficiency should probably not be taken regularly. The naming suggests that this is based on EU guidance levels.
  2. Sorry during deleting repetitions I removed the front end of my answer. The levels refer to magnesium, the second supplement, not zinc. Your values are the correct one for zinc. You are also correct with your assessment of supplements. Other than in situations of high deficiency, studies keep failing to show a benefit. I will state that nutritional benefits are difficult to assess in general, due to the huge range of individual differences and other factors that (again, outside of deficiency) have larger effects on overall health status. And heck, even defining good health measures to monitor can be rather tricky.
  3. As others already commented while I was typing this up I'll just leave the stuff that has not already been explained. There are various concepts at play here. Elemental refers to the element (not vitamin) in question (i.e. zinc). However, elements are often hard to absorb by the body, so there are often used in forms of citrates or bisglycinates etc. to make them more water soluble. The reference value typically refers to how much the daily recommended intake is, usually in %. So 300 would mean 3x the recommended daily intake. For adults the recommended daily amount (edit:) for magensium for men is around 400-420 mg and for women around 310-320, for example. I also wanted to add that supplements are a bit in the regulatory wild west almost everywhere. There are often no requirements to have the formulations checked independently and studies have found huge variations even between individual pills of a manufacturer. Also, the design of the pills is sometimes really marketing (more filler to appear more potent) but can also be simply that the the factory only produces a single size of pills and just vary concentration of the active ingredient and fill up the rest.
  4. CharonY replied to Brainee's topic in Computer Science
    Or for starters, books.
  5. Naah, what is the point of making rules if you yourself have to adhere to them?
  6. Not quite, viral remnants are less than 10%, a lot of the noncoding are variable in structure but duplications are fairly common (about similarly frequency as viral remnants). The biggest chunk, are the transposons are mentioned by Endy (maybe around 50% of the genome). One should also be noted that amount of coding regions have been increased with newer research, as some presumed to be non-coding areas actually do encode things like sRNA or small proteins.
  7. Also, if you are the only user of the the laptop, you will be mostly exposed to what you are already in contact of. In shared use there is a bigger worry, if the person before you had some infections while touching it. But then washing your hands before you, say, pick your nose, should be enough for most scenarios.
  8. Unless it is a Russian product, perhaps?
  9. I think part is marketing, as folks are getting more health conscious. My guess for the p would be phtalates, which are common plasticizers. But I don't think that you would find them in typical pencils (mostly part of plastic products). I don't think they are banned anywhere, though and compared to other sources I would think that stationary are a very small exposure risk (unless you chew on plastics a lot). Faber-Castell is one of those old traditional companies who managed to corner a particular market, while they provide affordable products, they also produce really expensive high-end products. I think the family holds the majority of shares of the company, which gives them significant stability.
  10. This probably falls under Occam's razor.
  11. I think that might not what OP might talking about unless I am mistaken, this is a fairly old standard ink (at least I had in in grade school). I believe a German company developed an eraser which essentially disrupts certain dyes, rendering them colorless. OOTH, most of the really erasable dyes are not used for fountain pens, so there is that (i.e. not enough info). However, since then there have been a few developments, to create truly erasable dyes. One that I know of is a ink (I think made by Pilot) that is heat sensitive. Using friction with a hard eraser it renders the ink colorless (IIRC it was basically an acid reaction, but required a heat sensitive activator). Generally speaking the dyes themselves are often somewhat toxic as they often contain heavy metals, for example. But on the other hand you do not really ingest them in large amounts either. Chemicals in erasable dyes fall under the same category. Certain permanent markers use solvent (hence the smell) which are likely a bit more harmful as the VOCs can be inhaled. But again, unless one works in an environment that produces those dyes, everyday exposure is probably too low to be a concern either way (outgassing of building materials or cooking will be much higher). Edit: I remember now the other pen, it was called erasermate and contained a rubber cement (must have been over 30 years when I last saw/used them). So the rubber with ink would be mostly on the paper rather than incorporated in it and you erase it similar to pencil marks.
  12. I think that time has passed. As you know, ID was a tactic to shoehorn religion into the evolution teaching debate and Behe's arguments (though faulty) could pass the calm and logical test. Mostly the premise was outright wrong, leading to wrong conclusion. But pretty much after it was shown that ID is not really science (in court no less), the arguments became much more ideological, as nothing else was left.
  13. Regardless of the number of senses, sensation is generally interpreted in the brain. Thus stimulation of areas can create sensation without the involvement of senses. Conversely, there are literal blind spots in our senses and/or transmission of the information to the brain can be impaired, preventing signals from sensory organs to reach our brain. So sensing (or not sensing) something is not an ideal way to establish reality.
  14. Great, thank you! Edit: I think I saw the Blocker paper earlier, and while it was interesting to see a historian's perspective, it was overall light on public health effects. This is not a specific criticism as in contrast to now, data was much scarcer to come by. But the vox article has provided an interesting paper.
  15. Do you have literature showing the health effects of the prohibition?
  16. Yeah you cannot do that easily anymore. I mean, there is a process you can start (and get the various levels of academic administration involved. And after a lot of time investment, they tend to pass anyway after a stern warning (i.e. nothing). Mostly because administration needs their money as government funding gets slashed.
  17. That is not logical, and the premise is flawed. Cost depends on more than speed, and arguably the overall infrastructure (and scale) is more important.
  18. Even on the sensory levels there are differences. Depending on how many and what types of each chromophore you have in your retina (at the areas where the light is reflected from the object) you will have various levels of excitation. Roughly speaking you will see similar reactions (such as signal going up through the visual nerves to the visual cortex), but it does not really how it is perceived.
  19. Well it does, if you do not know how things interact with each other. For example, in case of weather, we have a generally idea e.g. temperature trends, factors influencing precipitation and so on. So you could just take the recent history (or even just the model) and try to predict things. In the brain our knowledge is much more limited so if we reconstruct what is happening at any time, we have to move back further and further to see how things are connected. The other issue is that things might be handled very differently by each respective brain. For example an apple might be associated with food in one brain, but with a traumatic even in another. Without knowing that, the different activities in a brain in response to showing an apple might not be understandable.
  20. To figure out the misunderstanding here, where do you see the difference between what you describe here and: I suspect the issue might be in the details and/or phrasing.
  21. Well, yes and because the brain constantly changes, you need to know the history of the brain if you want to reconstruct what things mean from a snapshot. Or think of it that way, cognitive functions are a process and in order to understand what is going on, it is not enough to see what is happening right now. You have to understand the full context, as the brain keeps changing (unlike a crystal perhaps?) to interpret what is happening at any given time. This is not entirely true, as there are areas of the brain that are somewhat fixed and can be associated with certain activities, but I think the author refers to more complex cognitive activities.
  22. Well, it will affect its current state, but it depends a bit on perspective. Basically, memory formation is an active process that is associated with some sort of changes in structure and activity patterns. However, the precise activity is highly dependent on the state the brain is currently in at time of creation, as well as retrieval. I.e. if you stimulate the same pattern in different brains, the results for most cognitive elements will be different.
  23. This seems to suggest that the number is somehow hardcoded in the crystal, and it is a matter of finding it. This likely not how it works in the brain, though. There are quite a few different models, created by disciplines ranging from cognitive psych to more neurological sciences. One is called memory engrams , and the idea is that connections and activities in the brain (classic examples are LTPs and LTDs) are changed upon learning and acquiring information, and that activation of those patterns results in recall (i.e. it is an active and creative process as these pattern are themselves plastic and the patterns do not recreate themselves fully). So memorizing a number does not necessarily store the number itself, but it may be part of a the context in which the number is stored. One example is passwords, for example. If you often type complex password, you might note that typing it in sometimes requires little thinking, here the memory is linked to movements that have been strengthened or otherwise activated over time. Yet trying to recall them verbally can be a bit more challenging, especially if one uses many of those. Also, depending on type of memory, those can be quite distributed across the brain, so it requires many parts to recreate memories.
  24. I skimmed the essay (or at least a similar one) quite a while ago, and I think most of the time I had the term no shit sherlock in my mind. I agree with the general gist, the way the brain works is not the way a computer works. It is also true that the way we describe cognitive activities are superficial narratives (including specifically "information processing theory", as we do not really understand the underlying biology. And that is in my mind the overall issue, we have mostly a black box, we can see what comes in and what comes out and we make a story about what might happen in between. Bits and pieces are known, but we do not really know how they fit together. I think with respect to memory, we do not store memory, we (re)create memory, in part when certain paths are activated in certain combinations. I think a claim that memory does not exist is overreach, but memory as expressed in information processing theory, which was and perhaps still is something that has been heavily promoted, in cognitive psych. It also has resulted in quite a vast arrays of self-improvement theories (usually with little evidence) and which also has been liked a lot by tech folks.

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