Wrong!

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Rowen and Harlyfig are scheming

If we added human sacrifice to the sport it would become very interesting indeed.

it worked for the mayans

[Alorael at Large]

It wouldn't make that much difference evolutionarily, probably. The pool of athletes is much larger than the number of actual athletes, and while great athletes are significantly more likely to have children who are great athletes, they're such a small portion of the overall athlete-making population that I think no one would notice their absence.

 

—Alorael, who can only conclude that evolutionary athletics requires mass slaughter of large swathes of the gene pool. Let the games begin?

[Harehunter]

That sounds almost Spartan, Aloreal.

[Erebus the Black]

True or False? A nurse told me that the human skeleton increases its width by 1 mm (radius) per year.

[Student of Trinity]

Babies do a lot better than that.

[Alorael at Large]

Over a lifetime? False. Your bones can remodel depending on use, but they don't change constantly or that much. It should be obvious just from a moment's thought: wouldn't you be surprised to see a 70-year-old with bones five cm (2 in) wider than a 20-year-old's, especially for long bones for which that's a substantial fraction of the total width?

 

Or, if you mean that the skeleton as a hole somehow becomes broader... it's still wrong. The ribcage doesn't widen. Again, do you more often see elderly people who are stout or who look shrunken? (The shrinking is more from loss of soft tissue than from any change in bone architecture.)

 

—Alorael, who thinks this is one of those facts that's neat, easy to repeat, and pretty easy to discard with just a few moments of consideration.

[Erebus the Black]

True or False?

Eating vegetables while eating meat or poultry is bad for you because the acid level required to break down the meat in the stomach ferments and spoils the vegetables.

[keira]

if there are vegetables fermenting in your stomach you should do something about that like see a medical professional

 

in related news i barf vodka

[Alorael at Large]

Uh, what? False. Gastric acid also breaks down vegetables. Fermentation is a process of bacterial or fungal anaerobic respiration. Nothing sits in your stomach long enough to ferment. If it did, your stomach's secretion would break down the fermenting microbes as well. And even if something in your stomach fermented, it's not a problem. Beer and other alcohols are obviously fermented, and so is bread (that's what baker's yeast is for!). Cheese and yogurt, too, and slightly less common items like kimchi, sauerkraut, fermented bean curd (obviously), and many others.

 

In fact, except for taste it doesn't really matter if food is spoiled. What matters is if it contains pathogenic microbes. Those can't magically appear in your stomach, though, and if they were there they'd usually rather invade you than ruin your food.

 

—Alorael, who will go ahead and also point out that everything about stuff sitting in your intestines for years is lies. Food stays for a few days, but there's a pretty strict first in, first out process. Everything just squishes along the tube, gum and swallowed small change included.

[Prince of Kitties]

Originally Posted By: Mud on your hands!

In fact, except for taste it doesn't really matter if food is spoiled. What matters is if it contains pathogenic microbes. Those can't magically appear in your stomach, though, and if they were there they'd usually rather invade you than ruin your food.

*raises hand* What about putrefaction products? Some of the amines are quite toxic IIRC.

[Alorael at Large]

You caught me in an oversimplification. There are also toxins produced by microbes that are harmful even if the microbes themselves are not, or are dead. Putrefaction is separate, though. While the amines produced are technically toxic, you'd find it impossible to ingest enough material to actually do harm. Putrefaction is well beyond spoiled and solidly in viscerally revolting territory.

 

—Alorael, who will point out that your stomach and intestines are a finely-honed disassembly line. Various forms of rot are breakdown of food, usually slowly. Your guts do it quite quickly.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Benseraph

—Alorael, who will go ahead and also point out that everything about stuff sitting in your intestines for years is lies. Food stays for a few days, but there's a pretty strict first in, first out process. Everything just squishes along the tube, gum and swallowed small change included.

there are a handful of exceptions to this. things like hair can't be digested and have the right physical properties to potentially form a mass in the stomach called a bezoar and get stuck there, possibly requiring surgical removal. so don't eat your own hair.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

there are a handful of exceptions to this. things like hair can't be digested and have the right physical properties to potentially form a mass in the stomach called a bezoar and get stuck there, possibly requiring surgical removal. so don't eat your own hair.

Or a bunch of unripe persimmons, apparently.

Dikiyoba.

[Lilith]

i'm not sure why or how anyone would eat that many unripe persimmons in the first place, they're pretty inedible

[Alorael at Large]

I did say intestines, not stomach. It's relatively easy to get things into your stomach that can't fit through the pyloric sphincter, including some coins and similar-sized items that children can swallow. Once it gets through there, though, it's usually smooth sailing.

 

—Alorael, who knows there are exceptions to everything. Still, the idea that food gets stuck is false. Non-food gets stuck, and even then more in the stomach than after it.

[Lilith]

pro tip: don't eat rare earth magnets

[Harehunter]

Unless you're trying to be attractive. But who would I be fooling? You've seen my picture.

[Erebus the Black]

One more Wrong before the forum change:

In the series brothers & sisters they discover all of a sudden that their ~70 year old uncle has dormant AIDS that he picked up in his 20s because he was a little promiscuous and his spouse and him never noticed any side effects until he went to get tested in his 70s, is this really possible or just another scare lesson to make teens practice safe sex?

I mean, I know it can be dormant, but to go over 50 years and remain dormant seems like a bit of a stretch.

[Student of Trinity]

AIDS has barely existed for fifty years, and has only been seriously studied since around 1980. "Dormant AIDS" is an oxymoron, because AIDS is the symptom set, but the HI virus is often dormant for years before the onset of AIDS. Nobody knows whether HIV can stay dormant for fifty years.

 

HIV is thought to have originated as some sort of mutation from a monkey virus in western Africa sometime in the 1940's. It didn't become widespread there until the 1970's, though. HIV didn't make it to North America at all until the late 60's, and there weren't more than a half-dozen cases in North America until the 1980's.

 

Some people seem to be naturally immune to HIV. I know one of them; he's been studied a lot. He's a hemophiliac who has had a lot of blood transfusions, and he has suffered a lot from Hepatitis C, but at least he seems to have dodged the HIV bullet. Or rather, been hit but bounced it off. He tests positive for it, in the sense that he has the antibody, but shows no signs of the virus itself — not just no AIDS symptoms. This implies that he was once infected by HIV, but successfully eliminated it.

 

I doubt anyone can be sure that there is not one single HI virus hiding somewhere in this guy's body, and perhaps even a single one could successfully fire up mass reproduction. So maybe he's just got dormant HIV after all. If so, I think his dormancy would be running over twenty years now.