Not fair! My antenatal class just covered pain relief this week but we got no free samples. Guess I’ll have to wait until I’m in labour, which I’m guessing is not going to be as fun.
Shh! If they’re ever to be done at all, executions should be unpleasant to watch so that the witnesses and executioners have the enormity of what they’re doing brought home to them. If we keep discussing it, the US legal system might hear and start making “humane” inert gas vessel execution chambers. If the prisoner just gets confused, goes blue, stops talking and dies looking happy they’ll have an excuse to be executing all and sundry …
The current system of floundering around trying to make killing look nice but doing really, really shitty and inept anaesthetic overdoses instead is only helping to make the death penalty unattractive. Keep executions ‘cruel and unusual’ and they might finally get banned on those grounds …
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I wonder if there’s a possibility to program the autopilot so if the oxygen level or cabin pressure drops, kick in and go in straight direction and initiate controlled descent to some reasonable altitude (if the pilot does not cancel the sequence within a timeout). There is a risk of collision with terrain, but that may be a preferable lower-probability option to a straight level flight until fuel exhaustion. Technically it’d be certainly doable.
(Well, technically it’d be even possible to negotiate with a tower over a terminal, and land on a suitable instrument-landing-class airport… Or even without the negotiation, just with a broadcasted voice-synth message in a regular interval; “rescue system, autoland chosen on airport X, please free the runway”.)
Computers can be affected too, though not that fast. The low atmospheric pressure impairs air cooling; indeed, the Helios flight issue had overheating of some avionics as an early symptom.
Another thing affected is electrical insulation of air gaps. With decreasing pressure, up to a certain limit given by electrode spacing and shape and some other factors I can’t remember, the breakdown voltage falls. And what worked well does not have to work anymore. Some rocket malfunctioned some time after launch, due to such dieletric breakdown, because the non-pressurized compartment got too low-pressure, below the level where its supplier’s vacuum chamber could go, so they did not test it so low and just extrapolated. One of those little costly mistakes that management tends to just wave off as overly worried engineers.
(Namely Athena I, in 1995; the device was an inertial measurement unit power supply, the vendor was Litton, the pressure test was done up to 70,000 ft altitude, and the subsequent tests done by Lockheed shown that it started arcing at 86,000 ft. Turned out that the IMU was originally designed for helicopters. Oooooops.)
While I was attending art school in Providence, RI, I met some friends that had acquired a NO2 tank. I found the experience to be absolutely fantastic. It was like a science fiction novel you could inhale and experience. I met the makers of the universe and they shared the secrets of all life. I had difficulty giving back the NO2 hose for others to use and believe I suffered from lack of oxygen, because I experienced a hangover that was worse than any I’ve had since. Incredible stuff but use with care if you get the real thing.
I did a bit of research on it back in the day. It hits you so hard I figured it had to be terrible for you. It’s not really, it doesn’t interact with the body like drugs do, I can’t quite remember how it works. At any rate, one has to abuse it to an extreme degree for it to do harm(outside of bad luck and/or something crazy like hooking a mask right up to a tank). It’s pleasurable, so it can be addictive in that sense, but it’s not binding with the cells of your body producing a chemical dependence.
It is extremely easy to acquire, and I think that’s a good thing,especially considering there seem to be increasingly dangerous alternatives popping up all the time now.
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I was surprised to see that amyl poppers are so easy to get. They’re sold in a few convenience stores I know labeled as “VCR head cleaner” in brightly colored bottles.
Horrible horrible stuff. In the UK it’s marketed as ‘room deodoriser’ or some such twaddle. And AFAIK it’s no longer Amyl Nitrite, which was banned, but Isobutyl Nitrite these days, which is pretty much the same. The Nitrite part being bonded with another chemical every time a ban occurs.
I’m not a chemist though, so may be off a degree or two.
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Ever took a whiff, thinking the little screwtop bottle is just another essential oil?
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Fortunately no. Have only done it on purpose. Despite being a smoker I have a fairly sensitive nose, so I’m pretty cautious about what I sniff. I can’t handle essential oils either. Way too pungent.
Same here. Valentine’s day in the office means migraine day for me. All the lovers buying each other Cologne and perfume that’s made out of whale hork and burnt alcohol.
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I never got any bloody nitrous when we went to ante natal classes in Sunderland. I feel cheated.
Isn’t amyl nitrite a prescription vaso-dialator though? I’m pretty sure I’ve read in the literature that it’s used in emergency situations for vaso-dialation.
I of course wouldn’t recommend its use by lay people anyway. It seems pretty good at choking your brain for oxygen, not to mention that the liquid distillate is very caustic and if you spill your huffing bottle it’ll burn the shit out of your skin.
Judging by my brief exposure to Facebook before I decided never, ever to look at it again, an awful lot of people suffer from it.
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On the other hand, consider the alternative…
It has been argued that Winston Churchill was such an effective war leader because his bouts of depression prevented him from making decisions based on over-optimistic intelligence assessments and field reports. Roosevelt’s optimism led him to believe he could work with and influence Stalin, which was part of the reason for the post-war Communist takeover of Eastern Europe.
I tend to be a bit depressive and all I can say is that my projects tended to come in on projected time and within projected budget. An optimistic and ignorant project manager is a disaster about to happen.
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Pretty sure the Red Army rolling through and conquering the joint was a bigger factor there.
Why did the US advance stop before Berlin? Why did the US not advance into Poland (Churchill had the sense to make an emergency advance on Denmark but the British Army could not reach Poland as well)? Why were the Czechs abandoned for the second time? Because Roosevelt believed Stalin at Yalta.
Why is US foreign policy now so anti Russia even though Russia is weak? Because the CIA doesn’t want to get caught flat footed a second time.
There are too many histories of WW2 to list here (I have probably read between 20 and 30 relating to 1944-5 in Europe) but I suggest you read some of them - especially ones by the British, the Germans and recent ones by the Russians. US histories of the war in Europe tend to be rather partial, unlike coverage of the Pacific.
The US did a magnificent job in supplying the Red Army. Less generous supply would have hindered the Russian takeover of Eastern Europe. But again, Roosevelt trusted Stalin.
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And there’s Happy Crick, when him and Watson figured out DNA.
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Funny story, apparently it isn’t a good idea to fly internationally with one of those metal n2o crackers like the one pictured in the article, I guess they kinda look like a grenade to certain TSA screeners despite having holes drilled in the lid…and the “I’m a chef making whip cream” excuse doesn’t work with those either…
