Case in point: in Germany, there are occasionally "Durchgang verboten" ("passage forbidden") signs next to driveways leading to e.g. an inner courtyard. These are most of the time a sure sign that it's possible to take a shortcut through the courtyard to the other side of the block. Of course, this is a country where you can be reasonably sure of not getting shot for trespassing...
I couldn't find anything to support the idea that Hawaii’s protection of beach access allows anyone to traverse private property except where a specific rights-of-way easement exists on that property. I don't think the gp would consider use of land via an easement to be disrespectful as the easement holder has rights to the land that must be respected as well.
Various legal systems have varying definitions of what is and is not a legal infringement on property rights.
For instance, in (some parts of?) the UK there's the Right to Roam, I believe, which grants the public limited rights to pass through certain private property (such as an open field). Obviously this doesn't extend to harming anything. The point is, passing through someone's private property without causing any damage or inconveniencing them is not automatically considered unethical.
For the record, freedom to roam in England and Wales is rather limited in scope; the quintessential right-to-roam countries are the Nordics (and to an extent Scotland, but it’s an honorary Nordic country anyway). For example, in Finland the customary rights extend beyond just hiking to activities like gathering wild berries and mushrooms.
The courtyards of apartment complexes/condos are usually considered either semi-public or semi-private spaces, and their status with regard to passing through is not clear-cut either legally or morally.
Even in cattle country, if you make no attempt to hide your presence, I would expect no trouble. I have pulled a gun on someone and had one pulled on me. It was fine both times. Just needed to be explained.
... if you got to the point where gun was pulled on you, that was already a situation where it's so fine? I'll be honest, I don't understand how can you be so calm.
I live in a mostly rural state. Guns are common. Dealing with some person who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know what you want, and is an hour away from law enforcement support has to have some self-reliance. Hands up, explain why you are there, and you can be friends. High-visibility vests help, but you might ditch them.
I was disappointed that it was a bit bitter, yes, but not in the category of “won’t do it twice”. Such that I even tried multiple cartridges. I’m retirement age, though, so maybe my taste buds are shot.
I thought it tasted like quinine/tonic water or maybe grapefruit rind (the ingredient in the Beverly soda from Italy). Coin batteries sometimes have a bitter taste coating which is similar to the Switch cart.
I stuck just the tip of my tongue on there, and it was so bitter that it was more of a sensation than just a taste. Enough that I reflexively pulled away.
I found this out accidentally. I have a habit of holding the cartridge between my lips when I switch cartridges (my hands are occupied with the case). Then minutes later I'd notice a bitter taste when drinking water or licking my lips, and have no idea why!
Back in the day when I worked desktop support, we would use a lot of canned air. And when they added bitterant to that stuff in order to keep kids from huffing it, it became almost unusable for its intended purpose because it turns out that nobody wants to have to breathe the bitter air after they clean out a PC. So, I went to the office supply store and sampled some different brands to see which ones didn't add a bitterant. The irony that their anti-huffing measure led to me (essentially) huffing canned air at the store was not lost on me.
And if you don't want to buy an air compressor, an electric computer duster saves you money in the medium and long term. I haven't bought a can of compressed air in years.
> If they don't wear down their teeth, they'll grow out of control and kill them.
cf the Babirusa - "If a male babirusa does not grind his tusks (achievable through regular activity), they can eventually keep growing and, rarely, penetrate the individual's skull."[0]
Unfun pet rat fact: if their teeth start growing at weird angles for whatever reason, this mechanism stops working and you have to get the teeth trimmed every couple weeks.
"Still, I fired off a couple emails to Honda’s PR team just in case. To my great surprise, Chris got back to me the next business day"
Why do people think that Twitter is the support page for companies? Honest question.
Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
I had an issue for 2 months with Verizon where they messed up my new phone deliveries by sending me the wrong ones and they didn't ship other merchandise I purchased at the same time. Their customer support was terribly unhelpful, even after repeated escalations. It was enough I nearly went to AT&T[0].
They first wanted to charge me re-stocking fees on an order they very clearly messed up (for the wrong phones delivered). Then they wanted me to pay for shipping on the correct devices, and they incorrectly billed me as well, and it took several escalations to get them to understand I didn't receive my other merchandise either, which they then told me I had to make another support request for. It was a whole mess.
I sent a tweet (and mind you, I'm a nobody) and within 24 hours it was resolved correctly, and they even next day shipped everything to me, which I did not expect.
It will be the last time I ever buy from Verizon instead of Apple directly, but at least it got resolved in the end.
[0]: Still might. I need the coverage of the big 2, unfortunately I can't jump to say, T-Mobile, as a result.
I'll let that marinate for a few years first before I decide to trust it entirely.
Though its not rural areas that are the only issue. There's saturation issues with other carriers in some of my travels. Only Verizon and AT&T doesn't fall apart comparatively.
I had to go out of the country, so I overpaid my AT&T internet bill so it would cover 2 months and rounded up by ~10 cents to the nearest dollar amount.
First month bill, no problem. Second month bill, no problem.
Third month bill should be $amount -credit, nope. They took my credit, listed it as an underpayment and applied a fee.
So I go to the store; they can't help with account issues, you have to call.
I call, sit through the waiting music, get a rep who get a rep is quite obviously doesn't care. No "Sorry for our obvious billing mistake" or anything. They correct the account and ask if I will pay right now, I decide that I will since I don't trust their system to update in a timely manner.
The rep then has the audacity to talk about how AT&T charges a convenience fee to pay via phone but they are going to waive it this time.
AT&T fiber and Xfinity cable are the only options in my area....
I still can not understand how they made that error in the first place. It's not like accounting, credits and balances are a new thing. The bill even showed the credit transaction correctly, showing it coming out of the bill balance owed.
I do set up auto payment when I am sure the bill will be stable, this was while I was still in the introduction rate and I wanted to be aware of when the price change hit.
Now the question is, since they messed up what should be a simple accounting transaction, do I trust their billing system to have unfettered access to take funds from my bank :)
I can much quicker get an answer from Bank Of America--and get a Tier 3 Customer Service person to call me--on X than I can by calling their main number.
Only if their software thinks you have enough followers, and the software thinks they aren't fake followers.
If you don't have enough potential impact, the humans may never even see your post.
If anyone thinks that insert company here cares about your tweet about your issue because they replies to insert even slightly famous person here, you're deluding yourself.
It's still the fastest/only way to receive customer support for a lot of place. It's very sad but it's the truth.
The last time an airline screwed up and refused to fix their mistake the employee at the booth lowered her voice and said "Do you have twitter? You might try complaining there, they don't like it when people complain on twitter" which was just the most depressing thing to hear.
The old piece of advice if you were getting stonewalled was to write a personal letter to "$CEO_NAME, $HQ_ADDRESS". I wonder whether that still works today.
It often does. The other thing that has worked for me is contacting the legal department. Probably the same address, c/o legal.
Just don’t say something stupid like, “I’m going to sue you”. If you escalate too far they’ll wait for the summons.
—-
I worked in a department called “hot site support” back in the 90’s for Iomega (maker of the Zip drive). That meant I delt with two things, customers who spent over $100k on hardware, and customers that wiggled their way up to the CEO’s admin. I had carte blanche to resolve the issues and I was just 20 years old and early into my career.
I would dearly love to return to even the 2021 era of the internet in general. 1999 would be ideal, actually. But I'd settle for most anything up to 2012 or so.
I've been trying to work out what the end date of the good internet was, and if there was a trigger event, and I'm starting to think it was somewhere between Tahrir Square (2011) and Euromaidan (2014); once the political internet became really effective, it had to be countered by those in power.
If only it fading away didn't mean instead of being able to treat Twitter as support there's no place to get actual support from a lot of companies. E.g. Google sent me a promotion for a Nest camera if I bought their subscription, and instead of a camera I've had their "support" read the same script about how they'll fix it within a few days since November. At least if I used Twitter as support, other people would see the issue that didn't get resolved.
I think there was a _time_ when this worked; companies were very anxious about their Social Media Presence (TM) so would treat public social media messages, particularly complaints, as priority support cases. You can imagine all sorts of factors which would have decreased its effectiveness in recent years though; overuse, companies becoming more used to social media, the death of a usable Twitter API, making tracking this stuff difficult, the general decline of Twitter (if it's likely to be presented beside Elon Musk retweeting a white supremacist or something, are twitter complaints about your dishwasher being too noisy really all that consequential?)...
It's definitely a thing some people still _believe_ in, though, and some people have twitter accounts which they use _solely_ for moaning about brands (there used to be a fun Twitter account which replied to them, as if from the brand they were moaning about; not sure if it's still a thing).
Some still are anxious about it, but others have seemingly stopped caring, as I think they believe their near monopoly positions means bad PR no longer matters. Looking at Comcast in particular.
In India, there are dozens of imposter accounts on twitter that pose as a bank's or telco's official handle.
They are very often the more responsive, and very caring and polite, quick to admit they are at fault ... and lure complainers into sharing personal info on DM on promises of speedy resolution.
This was a problem before Twitter became X. The blue tick mark was the only indicator of genuine accounts. Then X started selling tick marks to whoever pasy 8 dollars.
Facebook has a similar issue (although in this case the accounts may be from India but they go after everyone). People commenting on a company's page will get replies from accounts that set their name to "CUSTOMER SERVICE" or "TECH SUPPORT" (Mr. and Mrs. Support must have really had a specific career path in mind for their child) saying they're here to help and to kindly message them for a solution.
I've tried reporting these and Meta really does not care. Report as scam, nope looks fine to us. Report as fake name, nope looks fine to us. I don't think I've ever seen their report system work.
It can depend on the company, but some companies literally don't have a public facing email anymore. I was trying to get in contact with Bank of America of whom I am not a customer because they were (and still are) spamming my inbox and the only human contact I managed at all was via their support Twitter page.
Back when Twitter was the most useful and popular (roughly 2018-2022), it was common for some companies to do support over tweets. Delta Air Lines (@delta) comes to mind.
I once had an insurance problem that was resolved only after I posted about it .. on Livejournal. They'd namesearched themselves and assigned a special team of super-customer service "fixers" (maybe just one person!) to look at complaints on social media.
We all understand that the only customer support channel for Google for things like unjust account cancellations is to post and hope a Google employee reads it, yes?
I myself have always had luck with contacting customer service via Twitter. It's the only reason I have ever used Twitter.
I recently had a problem with FedEx that wasn't resolved with multiple phone calls and emails.
I messaged them on Twitter and had the problem resolved in minutes.
I've had the same luck when I had a problem with a collections department calling my phone daily for 2+ years. They were looking for an individual that must have owned my phone number prior to me.
I told the caller to remove my number from their list every time they called. I sent multiple emails.
I finally had luck by reaching out to their Twitter account and politely threatening to alert my attorney general. The issue was resolved that same day.
I stumbled upon a new way to get out of this same situation - they’d been looking for Joshua for five years by calling my phone, and I am very much not him. All kinds of tactics.
Mid last year, I just offered to pay the debt. Conversation looked like this:
Them: “Can I speak to Joshua?”
Me: “No, he’s not here, and I think he’s dead. But I’ll write you a check right now for the debt amount to stop you calling me. How much is it?”
Them: “So you are Joshua?”
Me: “No, I’m just irritated and you’ve won, I’ll solve this by paying you”
Them: “What is your social security number?”
Me: “Doesn’t matter. How much do I write this check for?”
Them: “We can’t tell you the debt amount without verifying you are Joshua”
Me: “Well, I guess we’re at an impasse then.”
And they haven’t called me again for nine glorious months.
> Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
German here. Raising a stink on social media is the only thing that helps even for large national companies (cough telco providers cough).
The reason is simple, the callcenters are either absolute doofuses barely capable of following a script or they're artificially restricted by the script. People with access to the corp social media account are more carefully vetted to have brains (because you don't want them to like some pr0n on the official account by accident) and social media criticism always has the potential to go viral, so the agents have a lot of leeway to deal with enraged customers.
You mean the cartel ruining (running) the telecommunication services? And then running ads on the radio gaslighting potential customers about how "cheap" they are? Yeah..
Fun fact, it's often cheaper to use a foreign European data plan in Germany than to get a local contract. (Of course your mileage my vary. Some providers forbid it.)
I actually think it is just the public nature of it all. If there's a bunch of twitter posts on your page complaining about the product being crap that you're ignoring that already says something. Whereas if you resolve them in public you've turned bad PR into good PR. But bad customer service when they call in is just a rumor.
I had to have my password reset a several years ago for some service, and the only mechanism they had to do this was to reach out to the company on Twitter. This would have been around 2018 and I remember thinking it was bizarre at the time.
A couple of years back I had a problem with a package that didn't reach me, and it was marked as delivered. The only point of contact that responded in any way was Twitter, the shipping company did not have other functioning way to connect to them.
This was in Spain, so no, not only USA. I have not deleted my X user, even though I never use it, just in case I need to ever go in and contact some company that I can't contact otherwise.
The selling point software that monitors social media to do support is about brand reputation. If people are saying bad things about your company on social media, then that is hurting your public image, so you should respond to those issues and make sure they get resolved. In practice, this means that the people responding are less likely to be outsourced because the the funding is more than just a support cost. In practice, this means you can often get better support through Twitter than email.
I wonder if it could prevent mice from chewing into food bags in the backcountry. Not sure what it would incur in terms of weight but could be another type of product instead of the alternatives (odor proof sack, Ursack and hanging).
Bear spray is supposed to attract bears, and the story is they even like the taste - except when it's blasted into their eyes/nose/mouth/lungs. It is a food product. So I would be a little concerned about that.
- 6 of the tokens were within the top 10 predictions
- 8 of the tokens were in the #10-100 range
- 3 of the tokens were in the #100-1000 range
- 3 of the tokens weren't in any of the top 1000 predictions
So we can conclude that the LLM doesn’t think much of “tasted Honda” or “repelling tape”, and was very surprised by “Honda’s spicy rodent”, but it knows enough about human nature that “and I will do it again” came as almost no surprise whatsoever.
The people who produce envelopes know that envelopes are likely to be licked, and that they would likely be in big trouble if they or a supplier substitutes in a material that sends someone to the hospital.
My guess is that this is a funny column about whimsical things (often food related, the author seems to have worked as a restaurant critic) and it's full of "don't do this at home" disclaimers.
So I'd say:
- Your children shouldn't be reading her blog.
- Adults reading her blog shouldn't imitate her behavior, and instead, take it as a bit of humor.
I bet in reality she did a little bit more fact-checking than she shows on her blog post.
Liquid capsaicin treatments for bird seed are an effective squirrel repellent.
They also illustrate the evolution of this protein: birds have no receptors for capsaicin, while mammals do. Birds eat seeds mostly intactly. Their digestive systems are capable of breaking them down - but it's stochastic and some seeds make it through the bird undigested, being redistributed elsewhere. Obviously, having an agent sow your seeds widely is a fitness advantage, and so seedy plants are ultimately served well even if 90+% of their caloric investment into seeds goes into the birds.
Mammals, on the other hand, have teeth - particularly molars. Mammals that eat seeds grind them apart orally before even swallowing. As a result, any seeds ingested by mammals are very likely to be completely destroyed. Plants - peppers, anyway - found a chemical irritant that repels the mammals without even being sensed by birds.
I've used one such treatment (with an amusing logo illustrataion - https://i.imgur.com/JAl8vyW.png) to good effect to discourage squirrels at my feeder, so that they stick to my dedicated squirrel bungee with a log of compressed corn instead.
Oh? Which pepper species and carrier mammal are involved here?
Edit: DERP duh you mean humans. :D Literally made the comparison without recognizing it, too. /Edit
Not challenging you, just curious and not immediately finding the answer myself with a quick search.
The capsaicin receptor is TRPV1, which is a critical protein for thermoregulation and detection of being burned. In other words, it's not just a quick and easy evolutionary path to have a mutation break the receptor for capsaicin and now be immune to the taste. Obviously the animals could evolve behavior or even simply learn as juveniles to tolerate or even enjoy the taste (as many humans do).
I do declare I thought it was a cheeky reference to those tomato plants that grown down by old railroad tracks.
You see a long time ago, someone at a tomato. Could've been a slice in a cold sandwich. Could've been a fresh one, maybe with A little cheese and pepper. But chili just won't do. Neither would spaghetti.
Then, before we had such regulations as we do today, they deposited that tomato seed, post digestion, in the train lavatory toilet. Being back then as it was, the tomato seed and associated fertilizer was dropped from the train car to the track ballast below where it germinated.
It's the same process where researchers deposit tomatoes on new volcanic islands.
You know what they say: when you gotta go, you gotta go.
I mentioned in another comment about growing a Carolina Reaper last summer and trying it with my dad and 13 year old son. My dad and I instantly knew how bad the next half hour or so of our life was about to be. My son also found it hot but no more then 5 minutes later comes out of his room (after we all chewed a pepper and spat it out he went to his room with a slurpee) he casually walks out and says dad is it okay for me to have a shower. He didn't have his slurpee and really did not seemed bothered by the experience at all. Me on the other hand was in insanity pain. Could not stop running water over my tongue or suck on ice and suffered for at least a half hour. I just couldn't believe he took it so well. My only thought was he must not be so sensitive or lacks something like the receptors that detect it.
After writing all that I did a search about people with low TRPV1 receptors and found an interesting study done on a couple people lacking functional TRPV1 channels. They were insensitive to the application of capsaicin to the mouth and skin. Furthermore they had an elevated heat pain threshold as well as an elevated cold pain threshold. Why I found this interesting is because my same son who barely reacted to this insanely hot pepper I can never get to wear a jacket to school. He does not mind the cold at all. He will if we were up a mountain or something but he always complains the car is too hot when I am cold. Anyways not sure he lacks function TRPV1 receptors but still interesting to think about. Article linked below.
> Could not stop running water over my tongue or suck on ice and suffered for at least a half hour.
Capsaicin is a nonpolar molecule that is fat soluble and hydrophobic, so running water over your tongue either has no impact on the problem or makes it worse.
You want to consume anything with fat like milk or sour cream or even pure olive oil which will dissolve the capsaicin and carry it down your digestive tract. For something as strong as a reaper challenge, you’ll want to gargle olive oil because the mechanical action of the bubbles helps break up anything coated on your tongue like soap does when washing your hands. Alcohol based mouth wash also works as does ethanol (Everclear) in general. Edible surfactants and emulsifiers work best but unless you like drinking blended raw eggs or mustard, that might not work for you.
To help when it comes out the other end: drink lots of dairy because the casein helps and eat a bunch of starch (rice, potatoes, bread, etc) and bananas, and stay well hydrated.
Definitely. And I did do thinks like swish milk and wiped my tongue with a paper towel and a cracker and a couple other things. But ultimately the running water and ice was a huge relief but only while I was actively doing it. It didn't lessen the pain if I stopped. Where I am the water is very cold this time of year so it helped.
As for the other end I really didn't want the pain in my throat or other end so I chose to only chew a big chunk briefly and spit it out.
At the end of the day I had to know what it felt like. It is pure pain lol. Will not be doing it again.
If he consistently avoids dressing warm the human body is pretty adaptable to cold conditions so I wouldn't look to deep at that. Both a persons circulatory pattern and metabolism change when exposed to the cold, and people who expose themselves to cold consistently enough respond in far better ways. Their metabolism will shoot up near immediately when someone not adapted will only gain that after they are already cold and shivering. And blood flow is maintained to the extremities but just avoiding more of the skin's surface, where as the unadapted will have just a general decrease in bloodflow to that entire extremity.
If you go extreme enough humans can even walk barefoot through the snow without a problem all day without a real problem, where as someone who wears socks and shoes when it is freezing cold will get serious frostbite on their feet in like 30 minutes or less if they tried it without adapting themselves over time.
For a direct application of this, ice climbers will soak their hands in ice water for 45 minutes every day in the weeks leading up to a climb so that their hands don't freeze and maintain blood flow when on an ice climb, because obviously you can't just stop and warm up your hands by a fire when you are halfway up a frozen waterfall and having stiff or frostbitten fingers makes climbing more difficult/dangerous.
side note: It kills you by making all your muscles tense so strongly that you can't breath any more. The muscles in your face tense in a way that it gives you whats called a "Strychnine Smile".
THC from the cannabis plant. It is a very long list though, plants go to a great deal of effort to deter pests so the list would be more limited by the subset of plants that humans find useful to cultivate.
Though you're right, in kimchi the primary preservative is initially the saltiness and then later the low pH caused by lactobacilli producing lactic acids.
I don't dispute that. My understanding is that the introduction of chili allowed a reduction in salt content, which was important in an era where salt was expensive to produce.
Chilli was introduced to Kimchi during the Imjin War. The Portuguese had brought them to Japan perviously, as far as I've seen all kimchi recipe prior to that is only garlic heavy, I like that style of kimchi better personally.
Whatever it is, I'm absolutely certain that it can be launched in a few seconds on archive.org, with no special software requirements besides the JavaScript interpreter that a web browser already has, and that all of this can happen even on your standard-issue pocket supercomputer.
(Every couple of years I fire up an Apple ][ version of Oregon Trail on archive.org because even though we had a PC at home way back when, that's the version I remember playing in school. That game is still hard and I'm not sure exactly what it is that it is supposed to teach except that dysentery is evil.)
driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field: tasted a lot like flour. what is that "thing"? an attractive tasty flour nodule? the energy yolk to the seed's egg?
Wild potatoes look pretty close to some domesticated potatoes I had.
Also I had lots of wild berries (of various species) in forests, and they look pretty much like the berries you can find in a garden. (Though probably not like the berries you can get in a supermarket?)
Wild grass also looks pretty much like some of the domesticated variety. (Well, some varieties do.)
My understanding is that most berries weren’t farmed until recently because they couldn’t be domesticated like other plants, rather they were typically foraged. I remember reading that initially wild blueberry bushes were simply dug up and replanted. Not certain of the veracity of this, however.
Wheat still generally looks like wild grasses, but like maize its seeds are much larger than you’ll find on wild grasses.
I picture your ancestors impulsively tasting mushrooms, and figuring out which ones were not poisonous enough to kill them. Thank you for your lineage!
In Mexico, our ancestors cultivated corn despite not knowing fungicides to prevent mycotoxin contamination. Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. Guess they really loved corn.
>Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value.
that one always amazes me. How did they figure it out? it's not exactly intuitive, especially when they wouldn't have known about the chemistry underneath.
It would probably take weeks or months to notice if doing A instead of B was making people sick or not
It might not be that the process was discovered so much as the method of cooking pot production happened to suit the food being cooked.
In particular, lots of civilizations learned to strengthen the basic clay pot by the addition of lime-y things, eg burnt mussel shells. If all your pots are made in this manner then you dont so much discover nixtamalization as experience it only by its absence when you meet settlers that have pellagra and dont use your style of pot.
See [0] for a technical write up on this and many other pot themes.
Maybe some people with sensitive stomachs are able to detect things like this quicker than others. Further, maybe the gene for a sensitive stomach confers a survival advantage not just to the individual, but to relatives of the individual (who can ‘free ride’ on their relative’s discerning stomach).
Sure, there _are_, but also don't underestimate humans...
> Nine young backpackers were rushed to hospital in the west Australian city of Perth after snorting a drug they mistook for cocaine. Three remain in critical condition after *ingesting the mystery white powder which arrived in the post addressed to someone else*
> The bystander states that the older man is a “death with dignity” patient who invited loved ones to be present while he consumed the [Medical Aid in Dying] medication. After his first swallow, he remarked, “Man that burns!” The younger man said, “Let me see,” and then also took a swallow.
It's been nine days, and I've been thinking sporadically about your comment. The two links you provided are great to make your point. Specially the second.
> She remarks that the older man “should be dead” and the younger one “should be alive.”
If you have a few 100 people in an area literally spending their waking hours worrying about having enough food. Areas without enough of the right nutrients are pretty common. People are pretty good at figuring out what makes them feel better/healthier.
Some places are iron poor, some even resort to eating dirt, especially when pregnant when you need more iron. Some areas are salt poor and animals will go to extreme measures to get to salt. Some areas have poor bioavailability and require crushing, special cooking, soaking, or a narrow range of acidity to be available, which of course becomes the norm for cooking in those areas. Some even become religious standards, things like fish on fridays or avoiding pork (before trichinosis was controlled).
I was in Cape Cod for a wedding late last year with some friends, and came across what we later learned was a Yew. Some of us had popped into an ice cream shop, and one of the members of my party apparently decided to eat a sweet berry while they waited.
When we came out, we were initially incredulous but they clarified that the flesh of the berry was sweet, but the seed was disgustingly bitter. Which prompted the rest of us to quickly do some research on what this plant was. The mood was initially somewhat light-hearted, however articles with titles like “Why is the Yew Berry sometimes called the Death Berry?” had us on the phone with poison control pretty quickly.
Poison control was very professional, and once they confirmed that it was indeed a Yew Berry that had been ingested, things got pretty serious. Apparently even small doses can quickly cause irreversible heart failure, with death the earliest “symptom” in some cases.
My friend didn’t die— just experienced some terror and gastric distress— the latter likely exacerbated by the terror). No drugs or alcohol or involved, just an impulsive decision, and a sobering reminder about the fragility of life.
One of the other replies in this thread mentions mushrooms. Which reminds of the aphorism: _There are old mushroom foragers, and bold mushroom foragers, but there are no old AND bold mushroom foragers._
Oh wow that was a journey. As soon as I saw "yew" I started internally screaming.
The route that my kids walk to school took us underneath a large yew tree, and the road underneath is often covered in hundreds of delicious-looking pink berries. Since they were tiny they have had to know all about how yew berries look lovely but even one can kill you. What I didn't ever tell them is how apparently the flesh is actually not toxic and is tasty, and it's the seed that will kill you.
The aril (the red flesh of the “berry” surrounding the seed) is tasty, and not toxic. But the leaves, stems, roots, and seeds are poisonous. Our elementary school has evergreen yew bushes growing around it and I taught my children not to eat the seeds. A fellow parent advised use not to eat them because other children might not be so careful.
Are yew rare where you are? Here in Ireland (and also in Britain), they're traditionally found in churchyards (where grazing livestock cannot get at them) and are well known to be poisonous. (Agatha Christie used yew as a poison in one of her novels.)
I read this and thought; I sure hope so if I’ve made it this far in life not knowing. I believe someone’s rectangle plant-identified this particular one as European Yew (Taxus baccata). None of us had encountered it before and this particular plants arils (thanks drjason) were quite strikingly pink.
Apparently, there are others in North America, but mostly not in the Southwest. I lived in the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago which also has a yew (Taxus brevifolia) but I don’t recall if I ever saw the berries.
That said, most folks I know were raised with a baseline of “don’t eat random berries you don’t recognize.”
They're common in landscaping throughout the US. We had some in our front yard, but us kids knew better than to eat random berries. It's painful for me to think that there are people out there without the common sense not to eat random plants they don't recognize.
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
Except for grass and most trees, suburban foliage is often quite toxic. A lot of your ornamental plants are poisonous. Think lilies, foxglove, Solomon's seal, and all the excitement of morning glories. The basic understanding that you don't eat anything you can't identify as edible is important in the suburbs too.
I don't disagree, but I'd say there's not really a big problem with people or kids trying to eat flowers. Foxglove and solomon's seal are dangerous but they also don't grow where I'm at. Lilies and morning glory do grow here, and they are also not terribly dangerous to humans (without eating a lot of them.)
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.
I'd add hemlock in there in too. Both are plants you'll see in parks in town. A toddler died here a few years ago because his parent allowed him to play in the big plants with the pretty white flowers. They don't look dangerous and don't have to be eaten to be deadly. Breathing too much pollen is enough, especially for a child.
I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.
This is an example that mushrooms unfairly get a bad rap - there are much nastier things in the plant kingdom. Some of them you don't even have to eat to get seriously hurt by, and they're not even that rare (e.g. giant hogweed)
> driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field
Fun fact: The danger in eating raw cookie-dough isn't primarily from fresh eggs (though they can have problems too) but rather from the raw flour, which before cooking may have a bunch of bacterial nastiness in it.
At least where I live, only a minority are advertised as "ready to eat". It's more common to see the opposite, an explicit warning that it must be cooked.
microwaves cook eggs, throw some scrambled eggs in a glass and into the microwave you get a very smooth scrambled egg. Unpleasant generally but a lot of coffeeshops do this for breakfast sandwiches.
You can pasteurise eggs with a basic sous vide setup. Take any of those home sous vide circulators, set it to 140 F, and once it's up to temperature put the eggs in for 4 minutes...
I feel like dividing the outcomes into just two buckets of "direct cause of permanent death" versus "everything else" isn't the ideal way to approach routine decisions about what to eat. :p
("This cardboard is unlikely to kill me, sooooo...")
Being delicious to humans is a pretty good evolutionary advantage. Although, not necessarily good for the longevity of individuals of that species, see, for example, cattle.
I find that it is an effective rat repellent - a neighbor has a rat colony they will not address - but while it was effective for squirrels at first, they seem to have gotten over it, and we now see them eating dropped seeds without any pause at all. I think the first generation never overcame it but now they do eat whatever the birds spill.
Mice are cute as hell, but we have traps on the kitchen counters (they come in in the fall) because they shit everywhere they walk. It's not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
I have a deal with all of the animals. They stay out of our houses, we leave them alone. We can't coexist in a home with wild rodents for sanitary reasons. Thankfully, at my home only ants don't get the memo and must be poisoned at scale outside their favorite point of access.
(Spiders have a special deal: Just stay out of sight while inside and we're gucci. But I'll just move them outside because I see them as allies against the insects.)
I tried to make a similar deal with an ant colony. I was even more lenient than you. Told them they can stay if we split the rent on a per-capita basis. They failed to caugh up the money though so had to poison them.
If you poison them then they die in the walls or somewhere you can't get to them and stink. Shooting is the sporting method (a very low powered .177 air pistol works well indoors if you take careful shots), but trapping also works. You can make a trap guaranteed to kill a rodent with a sheetrock bucket, a butter knife, and a delicious morsel. Walking the plank is a much more effective method of execution than the spring loaded guillotine, no partial results.
A mouse died in my plow truck this summer and the smell was unreal. Like, thank god I got the power windows working bad.
I was told that Irish Spring soap is minty enough to repel mice. Based on the scratch/tooth marks in the bar I left in the glovebox, it apparently isn't.
Next summer, I'll try something with peppermint oil. Assuming I can get the transmission fixed for a reasonable price. Not having reverse is proving to be a hassle.
Pure essential peppermint oil definitely works as a rodent repellent, even in very small quantities, although the effect wears off pretty quickly (that's the thing about essential oils, the essence is volatile). Plan to reapply every 3-7 days. Btw. the reason it works that that for rodents the sense of smell is primary, and mint smell overpowers everything else, so in its presence they are effectively blind.
Drinking them is usually how fatal doses are reached, yes. There isn't much risk topically, as you say, or by inhalation. I have read in the literature of one fatality from topical oil of wintergreen, I believe a teenaged marathon runner who was treating her muscle pain. I don't know if her preparation (an FDA-approved over-the-counter patch from a mainstream pharmaceutical company, if I recall) used DMSO or similar excipients. But such topical fatalities are very unusual.
But we are specifically discussing ingestion of non-recommended substances here.
To correct a minor misconception that could arise from your comment: essential oils do not contain active ingredients. They are, generally speaking, the active ingredient. Some, like oil of wintergreen, are an almost pure compound, while others, like oil of peppermint, are mixtures, but generally they do not contain inert or nontoxic components.
One specific way that a fatal dose could be ingested is if the person ingesting it had previously obtained adulterated essential oils from an irresponsible drug dealer, containing an active ingredient but consisting mostly of something like canola oil, and then switched to a pure essential oil without realizing it.
I don’t think people are ingesting peppermint oil to ward off rats in a plow truck.
It really doesn’t matter how you classify the active ingredient (and there is absolutely an active ingredient). It’s not getting absorbed in five gram quantities unless you snort it, drink it, or apply a stupid homeopathic topical with DMSO that penetrates the skin.
Edit: you’ve edited your post several times since I’ve made mine and I’m just not going to bother. There a dozen everpresent household chemicals that are deadlier than essential oils by a long shot. Nobody seems to have a problem except the kids who eat Tide pods, and they solved that with a zipper.
People who are handling chemicals whose lethal dose is less than a teaspoon need to understand the hazards involved. That is as true of common household chemicals like lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid as it is for essential oils (though I would not describe any of those three as "everpresent").
However, it is worth noting that most household chemicals have a much larger lethal dose (are much less toxic) than commonplace essential oils! Such less-toxic chemicals include not only Tide Pods, but also everything else commonly used for laundry (even liquid bleach), window-cleaning ammonia, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, hair-bleaching-concentration hydrogen peroxide, most paint thinners, and even industrial degreasers like trisodium phosphate. I thought bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) was an exception, but I just looked up its LD50, and it's 850mg/kg orl-rat. So the lethal dose for an adult human is probably about 50 grams, which is an order of magnitude less toxic than oil of peppermint.
(Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough. But in reasonably concentrated forms they're corrosive enough to cause fatal injuries if ingested, even, potentially, at the teaspoon quantities we're talking about. Your mileage may vary, though, and you may just end up permanently maimed.)
It is possible that you don't appreciate just how small a quantity five grams is, or you have a vastly exaggerated idea of how dangerous commonplace household chemicals are. I have no idea how you could get to a dozen. Are you poisoning your rats with strychnine and sodium cyanide? There are much safer options now, you know. Most people stopped keeping those in their houses decades ago, even in poor countries.
(Yes, I edited my comment, just as you did, because I think it's important to make it a high-quality comment so that people who read it are not misinformed.)
For the record, 5 grams is a teaspoon worth, and it’s pretty easy to accidentally splash that around if you’re pouring something.
Essential oils aren’t obviously caustic like bleach and since it’s food product someone might think that getting a little in their mouth or food they’ll eat is no big deal.
Usually people don't transfer oils like oil of peppermint by pouring, but rather drop by drop, a drop typically being around 20mg. That is a fine quantity to put in your mouth or your food. Turpentine (essential oil of pine resin) is the main exception. If you have enough essential oils in one place that splashing teaspoonfuls is common, you need to take additional precautions, probably at least a suitable respirator or active ventilation.
"Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough."
Right. Decades ago when I was in highschool and learning chemistry the chem teacher brought out reagent bottles of HCl, HNO3, H2SO4 and NaOH (in soln.) which he intended us students to smell and taste. He also had boxes of brand new test tubes and he issued everyone with four thereof for the demonstration/experiment which he insisted that we wash thoroughly under running water despite them being brand new.
His stated reasons were that as chemists that (a) we needed to become familiar with these common reagents as they were ubiquitous in chemistry labs and industry, and (b) we needed to know and experience the acidity of acids and to clearly distinguish them from the soapy character of the alkali. He also had a more important motive that I'll come to in a moment.
He then diluted the reagents to a safe level (I think it was about 1/40 Normal but I can't remember for sure). Then we students all lined up and he poured a few ml of each of the reagents into our test tubes for us to first smell then taste, which we all did.
Afterwards when we were all back in the tiered seats of the demonstration lab he made a statement in the sternest tone that shocked the wits out of lot of us:
"You're all dead!"
—long silent pause—
"Don't you ever do that again. You don't know whether the reagents are true to label, for all you know I could have given you poison and you'd be none the wiser until it was too late. And even if the bottles are true to label then you've still no idea how pure they are—they may contain impurities that are highly toxic."
He then went on to point out that these bottles of reagents were new and that he'd unsealed them in front of us and asked if anyone of us had noticed that.
He then pointed to print on the label that said BP—British Pharmacopeia grade and then to the assay list of impurities which were many decimal places below one percent (the minutest of a trace).
This chemistry lesson was by far the most important one we ever learned—nothing at university was ever the equal of it.
It's a great tragedy that these days health and safety rules preclude students from ever participating in such a demonstration. Students must be taught not to fear chemicals but nevertheless to treat them with care and great respect lest they bite.
These days much of society has an almost irrational fear of chemicals despite the widespread teaching of chemistry. That tells me there's something terribly wrong with the way we teach the subject—a matter that I've covered on HN previously.
I agree. (Nitric acid is somewhat toxic as well aside from its corrosivity; accidental fatal poisonings with neutralized nitrates are well known in the literature.)
Essential oils are generally not at high risk of deadly impurities, for three reasons. First, they are mostly intended for human consumption (whether BP grade or not), except for turpentine; second, their production process is just steam distillation and so doesn't normally involve any highly-toxic impurities; third, because the essential oils themselves are sufficiently deadly that most potential impurities would have to be present at very high levels before they were a concern.
Agreed. Whilst the lesson played out almost to the letter as I described it (I well remember the experience) some of the fine minutiae/details may be a bit unclear (after all, that lesson was in the 1960s). Thus, it's possible the 'odd-man-out' in the lineup wasn't HNO3 but rather H3PO4, but don't think so.
Remember, the amount the teacher put in the test tubes was at most only a couple of ml and most just barely tasted the samples (you can imagine, there was much ooing and arring at the bitter taste) so the amount tasted was actually minuscule). Incidentally, there was general agreement that the most objectionable reagent to the taste was NaOH, 'yucky' was the most common description.
Whilst I said the dilutions were about 1/40 N. that was almost certainly so for HCl but not necessarily so for the others which may have been more highly diluted (HCl's dilution specifically comes to mind because the teacher mentioned it in connection with stomach acid).
The reason I don't think it was H3PO4 is that we didn't do much chemistry with it although I do remember it being discussed in connection with Coca-Cola in that we shined up pennies with it.
I'd also point out there were other 'safety' lessons of a similar nature. Ones that come to mind Immediately include the need to take great care when handling aqua regia and H2SO4, especially so if heated in a retort, another was the preparation of H2S in a Kipp's generator/apparatus—the mandatory use of the ventiated fume cupboard and that H2S is particularly dangerous as it desensitizes one's sense of smell in even quite small concentrations. Then there were the strict rules surrounding the use of Hg (of which the lab had many litres thereof).
It's interesting you mention turpentine as an exception. I occasionally do a bit of woodworking and I know others who are more avid woodworkers than I am. One thing that characterizes a small subset of them is that they insist on using real oil/spirit of turpentine rather than the mineral (white spirit) variety for no other reason than it's 'natural' whereas the mineral stuff is 'unnatural' as it comes from the petroleum industry.
Frankly this horrifies me. As you'd know oil of turpentine is a catch-all name for any number of terpenes—of which there are hundreds if not thousands—all mixed in ill-defined ratios, what you get depends on where it's sourced.
There's no telling these guys that many terpenes are both irritating to the skin and quite toxic—and that some are known carcinogens. What surprises me is that woodworking suppliers are actually allowed to stock and sell the stuff.
If I had my way I'd ban it for that purpose (there might be some excuse for its availability if mineral turpentine was actually inferior in this application but that's not the case).
Yeah, phosphoric would be another great example of "corrosive but not toxic per se." But even nitrate is something you could ingest a reasonable amount of, and is commonly used in food. Too much and you turn blue and die.
As for turpentine, it depends on the person and the particular turpentine, but generally turpentine on your skin isn't particularly irritating and may even be therapeutically beneficial. Like many other essential oils, it's a broad-spectrum fungicide, bactericide, and antiviral, but isn't absorbed particularly well through the stratum corneum, and it's a pretty decent solvent for removing other chemicals that may be more toxic and are commonly used in woodworking.
I think there are two good reasons for preferring natural turpentine, despite its variability, to mineral spirits:
- as with cyanide, the humans evolved with frequent exposure to small amounts of plant terpenes, from chewing pine needles and other leaves and from dermal exposure to broken and crushed plant matter and to pine resin. So you'd expect them to have reasonable ways of clearing out the terpenes that occur naturally, and in fact they do. Mineral spirits might just contain the same compounds (and other well-tolerated ones like octane and xylene) but they also might have novel compounds humans don't tolerate as well. And you can't usually tell from the label; just as with turpentine, what you get depends on where it comes from. Typically the MSDS will tell you the major components, but not the impurities thought to be harmless.
- culturally, there are millennia of traditions about how to use turpentine safely, due to its extensive use in shipbuilding, painting, and woodworking, so we can be reasonably sure that the health risks are small when handled in traditional ways. Mineral spirits are only 200 years old or less, and the processes for producing them today aren't the same as the processes used 50 years ago. So it's much more plausible for them to contain impurities that turn out to be dangerous. Indeed, many such novel nonpolar solvents widely used in the past turned out to be unexpectedly dangerous, such as benzene, carbon disulfide, polychlorinated biphenyls (used as solvents for woodworking in old Fabulon; see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2267460/), and "cleaning fluid" (carbon tetrachloride). It would be much less surprising to find some novel hazard in mineral spirits than in turpentine.
I used mineral spirits last month to clean oil off my immersion blender. They're probably pretty harmless. But we can have a lot more confidence in the exact degree of harmlessness of turpentine.
"Mineral spirits might just contain the same compounds (and other well-tolerated ones like octane and xylene) but they also might have novel compounds humans don't tolerate as well. And you can't usually tell from the label; just as with turpentine, what you get depends on where it comes from. Typically the MSDS will tell you the major components, but not the impurities thought to be harmless."
Right, I agree. It's necessary to say where I am and that's Australia. It's important because I've lived and worked in both the US and in Europe and from experience nomenclatures and formulations of these substances vary substantially from country to country.
The term 'mineral spirit' for mineral turpentine (aka mineral turps) is rarely used here. If one went to any hardware store and asked for mineral spirit the person serving would likely be quite confused and ask for clarification 'do you mean Shellite?', or whatever.
BTW, Shellite† is our version (concoction) of naphtha, it's much more flammable ('explosively' so) than turps.
Here, labels on containers of mineral turps are always titled with the name 'Mineral Turpentine' followed by its UN number and description, ie: UN-1300, Turpentine substitute. The UN-1300 MSDS is: https://advancechemicals.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/0....
As with all SDSs, almost every warning possible is described but for mineral turps two particularly relevant points stand out which are 'Mutagenicity: Not mutagenic' and 'Carcinogenicity: Limited evidence…'.
Despite the usual danger warnings to not inhale it, to avoid skin contact and avoid long exposure to it etc., the facts are that in practice there's little evidence of any serious harm coming to those who are exposed to it on a regular basis—so long as they take reasonable safety precautions. Here, painters use it as their primary most-used solvent for linseed oil-based paints. Go to any hardware shop and you'll see 1, 4 and 20-litre containers of it everywhere. Paint shops stock mineral turps along with acetone and DCM. At a guess, for every litre of DCM there'd be 5 litres of acetone and 20-50 litres of mineral turpentine.
I'd always have several litres of mineral turps at home. Today, I used about 300ml to wash out dirt from an old clock, here it's a household solvent with a multitude of uses. I've a range of pre-mixed solutions—mixed with Shellite, with ~5℅ EtOH and trace H2O, etc; they're used for degreasing, stain removal, etc.
EtOH is the safest chemical I use on a day-to-day basis (I've always about 10 litres of 95% available—unlike the US, denatured EtOH is readily available here). The next safest solvent I use is mineral turps, yes I avoid deliberately sniffing it or getting it on my skin but I take no other special precautions (that's the procedure most here would adopt).
It's worth noting that mineral turpentine that's available here is very consistent in its formulation, benzene and other toxic impurities never exceed 0.1%, and I'm reliably informed levels are usually much lower. I cannot speak for stuff that's called mineral spirits that I've seen in the US and in Europe. I've not done an assay but I know they differ significantly to our local product, for starters they have quite dissimilar odors (here, all brands have an identical odor).
I'm in no way trying to whitewash the dangers of mineral turps but in this highly regulated country it comes in as one of the solvents of least concern. On past evidence it draws pretty much the least attention.
I say that as someone who considers ALL aromatic hydrocarbons as potentially dangerous, especially so if they've benzene rings. DCM is considered significantly m...
I promise it's not as exciting as you're imagining. Getting the truck back out of the snow bank, on the other hand, would probably be amusing in a schadenfreude sort of way. Lacking traction (because winter), we used a lot of momentum. It was pretty undignified.
In my previous house, I had mice get into a bag of gochugaru, so I guess some mice can tolerate it. For squirrels, I've only sprinkled it on the ground to keep them from digging up my garlic cloves.
Not a good deer repellant, though—at least for the mule deer around here. My mom once sprayed some plants she had to prevent the local pests from eating them, but instead, they just ate the plants anyway, and then proceeded to shit all over the yard everywhere.
If the above comment was interesting to you... you might really like the YouTube video "The truth about Hot Ones sauces"! It goes into this theory, along with how spice levels are measured.
Your squirrels are wimps. I use WBU's no-mess spicy version ... Squirrels have little problem with it. Every now and then one will bounce around a bit after eating it but they still come every day.
Capsaicin binds to TRPV1 receptors, which are mammal-specific. Other animals have different proteins in this role and birds in particular are not sensitive to it. Also TVRP1 is only triggered by temperatures over 43°C, lower temperatures are sensed by other proteins.
Capsaicin isn’t just effective on mammals, it also has an effect on some fungi and insects, though mostly through metabolic disruption.
The fox population has grown a lot near me. I often have a couple foxes sleeping in my back yard at night. I used to have a major squirrel problem, but The foxes ate them all.
We have coyotes around in DFW. Not too many in the urban core areas (mid-century suburbs), so the squirrel are rampant. Out in the exurbs (more recent suburbs), the coyote population is high enough I practically never see a squirrel.
Granted - the older areas have more mature oak, pecan, and other nut producing trees too. But there should be some squirrels out in the exurbs and I never see any. I've spent some significant time out there too. They have more rabbits than I see intown, which I imagine is the coyotes main food source.
At my house, they crash into the windows because they are so damn aggressive. They see themselves in the reflection and attack the other bird. They shat all over my cars this year because they kept seeing themselves in the side view mirrors. Then shat all over the back of my car because it has a chrome bumper. I have watched robins sit on the side of my car for an hour just attacking the sideview mirror over and over. They regularly crash into the one window in my house that has a tree next to it, because they land in the branches, then decide to attack the other bird in the reflection. They will sit there for hours doing this until they finally hit the window hard enough to scare themselves off.
I've used the UV reflective "anti-collision" stickers with reasonable success. You can get discrete (to humans) ones that look like etched bird silhouettes.
Just make sure to put them on the outside.
Squirrels kept trying to get my squirrel proof bird feeder and then they’d get mad and chew on the furniture when they couldn’t get the seed. And they’d poop in the rails because they’re squirrels.
I smeared some Last Dab on the bird feeder support and cayenne on the furniture and railings and haven’t seen a squirrel since.
I friend of mine got that and spilled it in their house and I had me coughing the whole time I was over there till they were able to air it out so be careful if you're handling it indoors some people get got by it worse than others.
>birds have no receptors for capsaicin, while mammals do.
True. I suspect it is only placental mammals. Brush-tailed possums (a marsupial mammal) do not seem repelled by it at all. I've had my birds eyes and Carolina Reaper chilly plants and fruit eaten by them.
I'm seeing quite a few websites suggesting cayenne pepper to keep Virginia Opossums out of your plants. I've never tried it myself, but that's a marsupial that appears to not like spicy food. The only species coming up in these increasingly useless search engine results as liking spicy food is Chinese tree shrews.
I'm getting so frustrated anymore trying to use google, bing, brave search, startpage, etc for finding anything except reddit or quora answers and business pages. If you find any more info on marsupials and peppers, I'd love to see it. It's a super interesting question.
One of my pet-peeves: Certain science fiction writers (often amateur) posit that humans will greatly impress aliens with our willingness--no, zeal--to consume capsaicin, a terrible death substance all sentient races flee from etc.
This is nonsense since it's basically an narrowly targeted false-alarm trick between relatively closely related creatures. It's not acidic, caustic, corrosive, etc.
> this protein
Just to head off the ambiguous phrasing here: Capsaicin itself is not a protein, but a much simpler kind of chemical.
It's wild to think that plants are engaged in this constant struggle to produce seeds that have an outer shell that is just strong enough not to be consistently dissolved in a bird's stomach but not so strong that they won't ever dissolve.
One one hand, some seeds must survive passing through the bird's digestive system intact to later grow into a plant, on the other hand, some seeds must be digested in order to keep the birds interested in consuming that seed... Alternatively, a bird species interested in eating indigestible seeds may become extinct due to malnutrition.
There's some products that you spray and it's supposed to give them a nasty headache and then they learn and stop coming. It gave me headaches as well though.
Contrary to what the internets want you to believe, there are bird murder machines called "cats", which seems to skip most of the "learning" and the "headache" part.
I can not remember the tree or plant and the following is only my best recollection and may be slightly incorrect, couldn't reach my dad to ask, he told me about a plant and I forget if it had basically been eradicated possibly to human harvesting and was unique to a region if I remember correctly and it was believed to be gone. But then some seeds were found and they tried to germinate them but continually failed. As I remember what he told me was that someone going through some ancient writings or paintings and it showed the tree and birds eating from it. He then said the person had the idea to feed the seed to a bird and see if it did anything. Apparently it was successful and he was able to grow this lost plant/tree what ever it was. The whole story sounds far fetched but my dad is not a bullshitter he would have seen it on some history channel or similar. Looking up birds eating seeds and germination explains that the digestive enzymes in a birds stomach can help break down the hard outer coating on some seeds helping germination. I will ask him when I can and report back if I can verify anything he said.
As for spicy peppers funny to me story. I grew a Carolina Reaper plant last summer and the plant did well and I got something like 200 peppers from it. Of course I had to know what it felt like so me my dad and my 13 year old son tried them. We all threw a big chunk in our mouths chewed for about 5 seconds and spat it out.
The pain was basically instant. It was at about 2 seconds I knew this was not going to be good. It was insanely hot which lasted about half an hour, the entire time me running my mouth under the tap or putting ice on it, trying crackers and milk, even tried to wash my tongue. Some how my son after about 5 minutes very calmly says can I go have a shower. He was hardly bothered by the pepper.
Funny thing happened couple weeks later. I was telling my friend how insane these peppers were. He then asks if he can have some as he has a bear knocking over his garbage every night and wants to leave some for the bear to eat and hopefully encourage it to stop. So he makes a burrito and fills it with 5 or 6 nice sized reapers and leaves it out before bed. Well middle of the night his phone dings and his outside camera detected motion. Fires up the video and what does he see, not the bear but some stray dog walking the neighborhood run up and down the thing in a couple bites. Oh man I hope that dog didn't suffer too bad when it came out the other end.
Of that list, we have a Metasequoia / Dawn Redwood tree in our yard, it's great fast-growing shade tree with deciduous leaves that are so small you don't need to rake them. Thought to be extinct, re-discovered in China in 1944, availability in nurseries is pretty good.
Mammals that eat seeds grind them apart orally before even swallowing. As a result, any seeds ingested by mammals are very likely to be completely destroyed.
not really true, mastication isn't practiced to perfection in the wild, which is why you might often see seeds right on the poop. a portion of them get distributed intact.
Evolution doesn't plan ahead. Various plants got various random mutations that produce various random chemicals. The ones that were tasty to birds but disgusting to mammals for their seeds spread all over and ended up pretty widespread, so they survived and became common.
The ones that were repulsive to birds but tasty to mammals got eaten by something that grinds up their seed, and so they are extinct. Or, (after humans invented agriculture), possibly got domesticated and became extremely numerous since we'd intentionally save some seeds to plant despite eating the rest.
But there was no awareness and no plan, just chance and history and whatever happened to work.
Rodents love chewing on the electrical harnesses in these vehicles.
When I ran an import repair shop, my clients owned over 100 Jaguar sedans, and every single one of them was towed in at some point due to rodent-damaged wiring. While the problem wasn’t as severe with Land Rovers, we still had more than 40 of them towed in each year for the same issue.
In one of my previous flats we had rats and mice which we ignored - my flatmate was jain so very live and let live - until one day I turned the cooker on and there was a huge bang - they'd gnawed off the insulation on the power cables.
I didn't know about chillies but it might have helped.
It's a big problem in old airplanes too. I've known a few pilots who found out their nav lights (on the wingtips) weren't working anymore because a mouse got inside the wing.
I had a Subaru that required over $1000 in labor replace a $13 master wiring harness that was chewed by a rodent.
Of course, nothing will beat having a rodent die somewhere in the engine, and not noticing it until exiting the car after a 45 minute highway ride and making my in-laws neighborhood smell like someone barbecued rotten meat.
I found this spray at the feed store that looked to be a sort of small outfit based on the label. It was hot pepper extract, diesel, glycerin, a few other ingredients. Worked really well. But then it disappeared so I made my own.
I bought a few bags of dried cayenne peppers, crushed them and soaked them in acetone (no I didn't care if the mice got cancer at that point). Then filtered and discarded the remaining pepper chunks and let the acetone evaporate in a pan outside. I then got a few glycerin suppositories from the pharmacy and mixed with kerosene, the pepper extract and a little peppermint oil and had my own spray. A few times a year I spray down the engine blocks and wiring harnesses and we haven't had an issue since.
> It smelled like a Band-Aid-flavored Rockstar Energy drink. It tasted like…heat. The capsaicin was subtler than I expected: nothing abrasive or punishing, just a blushing, ambient warmth like a string of white Christmas lights. There was almost a numbing, mala element, in the vein of a Sichuan peppercorn.
I remember reading that rodents chewed car cables since the insulation was made using the same compound as soy and that attracted them, but in reality it was just they liked chewing on stuff.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a21933466/does-your-car-ha...
I just read that article and it doesn't appear to agree with your conclusion. That was just a single quote from a a pest control guy who works for Orkin.
The article does say that car owners and mechanics have noted a large increase in rodent damage to car wiring with the new soy-based insulation while manufacturers have denied any connection. Likely because they are fighting several class-action lawsuits over it.
I had a car once that a chipmunk or mouse decided to give birth in. The car wasn’t used often but as fate would have it the litter was born somewhere in the engine and when we went for a short trip they were all killed. This was not noticed until the stench of their decomposition wafted into the vehicle a week or so after the fact. Again, the car wasn’t used often.
The shop removed the mangled bodies, replaced all the air filter components, etc. It took a few months for traces of the scent to finally dissipate. Or maybe we got used to it?
Regardless, the car sold a couple years later. My next car was new.
I love humans. You all are so weird, wild, and wonderful.
I'm also inspired to use capsaicin to fight my personal fight with some squirrels that feel the _need_ to live in my garage. They ignore all my humane traps and are chill with all the light and sound disruptions I put in there.
Yes? And while they're there, you don't want them to chew on the wires.
You can't prevent your engine from being warm (assuming you need to use your vehicles), but you can make it less appealing to gnaw on the nice chewy parts of it.
Rodents chewing through cables is a problem even in latitudes closer to the equator, where it can get hot enough that they don't (need to) seek an engine for its warmth.
465 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadHow exactly does that make it OK to be disrespectful of other people's property and privacy?
For instance, in (some parts of?) the UK there's the Right to Roam, I believe, which grants the public limited rights to pass through certain private property (such as an open field). Obviously this doesn't extend to harming anything. The point is, passing through someone's private property without causing any damage or inconveniencing them is not automatically considered unethical.
If it’s not someone’s home, and you are not engaged in nefarious activity, you will not be shot for trespassing. You will be told to leave.
And ran the hose outside, because nobody wants to breathe the dust, either.
IIRC, they don't like to, they have to. If they don't wear down their teeth, they'll grow out of control and kill them.
cf the Babirusa - "If a male babirusa does not grind his tusks (achievable through regular activity), they can eventually keep growing and, rarely, penetrate the individual's skull."[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babirusa
They both have to and like to!
[0] https://www.davebarry.com/columns/how-to-make-board.php
[0] https://foodisstupid.substack.com/p/escargogurt
Takes me back to my high school days when I would have to choke down my laughter as I surreptitiously read Cracked.com articles in class
https://web.archive.org/web/20180712104826/http://www.thesne...
Another adaptation I enjoyed https://x.com/AthertonKD/status/585661777645547520
This is just to say
- quit fucking with that poem
"Still, I fired off a couple emails to Honda’s PR team just in case. To my great surprise, Chris got back to me the next business day"
Why do people think that Twitter is the support page for companies? Honest question.
Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
I had an issue for 2 months with Verizon where they messed up my new phone deliveries by sending me the wrong ones and they didn't ship other merchandise I purchased at the same time. Their customer support was terribly unhelpful, even after repeated escalations. It was enough I nearly went to AT&T[0].
They first wanted to charge me re-stocking fees on an order they very clearly messed up (for the wrong phones delivered). Then they wanted me to pay for shipping on the correct devices, and they incorrectly billed me as well, and it took several escalations to get them to understand I didn't receive my other merchandise either, which they then told me I had to make another support request for. It was a whole mess.
I sent a tweet (and mind you, I'm a nobody) and within 24 hours it was resolved correctly, and they even next day shipped everything to me, which I did not expect.
It will be the last time I ever buy from Verizon instead of Apple directly, but at least it got resolved in the end.
[0]: Still might. I need the coverage of the big 2, unfortunately I can't jump to say, T-Mobile, as a result.
Thus, I'm stuck for now.
Though its not rural areas that are the only issue. There's saturation issues with other carriers in some of my travels. Only Verizon and AT&T doesn't fall apart comparatively.
First month bill, no problem. Second month bill, no problem.
Third month bill should be $amount -credit, nope. They took my credit, listed it as an underpayment and applied a fee.
So I go to the store; they can't help with account issues, you have to call.
I call, sit through the waiting music, get a rep who get a rep is quite obviously doesn't care. No "Sorry for our obvious billing mistake" or anything. They correct the account and ask if I will pay right now, I decide that I will since I don't trust their system to update in a timely manner.
The rep then has the audacity to talk about how AT&T charges a convenience fee to pay via phone but they are going to waive it this time.
AT&T fiber and Xfinity cable are the only options in my area....
I still can not understand how they made that error in the first place. It's not like accounting, credits and balances are a new thing. The bill even showed the credit transaction correctly, showing it coming out of the bill balance owed.
That's a bit XX century, why not have some form of automatic payment?
(Not that it wasn't moronic of them, but you probably hit what now is a corner case ...)
Now the question is, since they messed up what should be a simple accounting transaction, do I trust their billing system to have unfettered access to take funds from my bank :)
If you don't have enough potential impact, the humans may never even see your post.
If anyone thinks that insert company here cares about your tweet about your issue because they replies to insert even slightly famous person here, you're deluding yourself.
The last time an airline screwed up and refused to fix their mistake the employee at the booth lowered her voice and said "Do you have twitter? You might try complaining there, they don't like it when people complain on twitter" which was just the most depressing thing to hear.
Just don’t say something stupid like, “I’m going to sue you”. If you escalate too far they’ll wait for the summons.
—-
I worked in a department called “hot site support” back in the 90’s for Iomega (maker of the Zip drive). That meant I delt with two things, customers who spent over $100k on hardware, and customers that wiggled their way up to the CEO’s admin. I had carte blanche to resolve the issues and I was just 20 years old and early into my career.
It's definitely a thing some people still _believe_ in, though, and some people have twitter accounts which they use _solely_ for moaning about brands (there used to be a fun Twitter account which replied to them, as if from the brand they were moaning about; not sure if it's still a thing).
They are very often the more responsive, and very caring and polite, quick to admit they are at fault ... and lure complainers into sharing personal info on DM on promises of speedy resolution.
This was a problem before Twitter became X. The blue tick mark was the only indicator of genuine accounts. Then X started selling tick marks to whoever pasy 8 dollars.
Now it's wild west.
I've tried reporting these and Meta really does not care. Report as scam, nope looks fine to us. Report as fake name, nope looks fine to us. I don't think I've ever seen their report system work.
Not that it got me anywhere in the long run.
I think those days are over.
I once had an insurance problem that was resolved only after I posted about it .. on Livejournal. They'd namesearched themselves and assigned a special team of super-customer service "fixers" (maybe just one person!) to look at complaints on social media.
We all understand that the only customer support channel for Google for things like unjust account cancellations is to post and hope a Google employee reads it, yes?
I recently had a problem with FedEx that wasn't resolved with multiple phone calls and emails.
I messaged them on Twitter and had the problem resolved in minutes.
I've had the same luck when I had a problem with a collections department calling my phone daily for 2+ years. They were looking for an individual that must have owned my phone number prior to me.
I told the caller to remove my number from their list every time they called. I sent multiple emails.
I finally had luck by reaching out to their Twitter account and politely threatening to alert my attorney general. The issue was resolved that same day.
Mid last year, I just offered to pay the debt. Conversation looked like this:
Them: “Can I speak to Joshua?”
Me: “No, he’s not here, and I think he’s dead. But I’ll write you a check right now for the debt amount to stop you calling me. How much is it?”
Them: “So you are Joshua?”
Me: “No, I’m just irritated and you’ve won, I’ll solve this by paying you”
Them: “What is your social security number?”
Me: “Doesn’t matter. How much do I write this check for?”
Them: “We can’t tell you the debt amount without verifying you are Joshua”
Me: “Well, I guess we’re at an impasse then.”
And they haven’t called me again for nine glorious months.
Evolution. Sometimes it's the only way to get support; people migrate to what works.
German here. Raising a stink on social media is the only thing that helps even for large national companies (cough telco providers cough).
The reason is simple, the callcenters are either absolute doofuses barely capable of following a script or they're artificially restricted by the script. People with access to the corp social media account are more carefully vetted to have brains (because you don't want them to like some pr0n on the official account by accident) and social media criticism always has the potential to go viral, so the agents have a lot of leeway to deal with enraged customers.
You mean the cartel ruining (running) the telecommunication services? And then running ads on the radio gaslighting potential customers about how "cheap" they are? Yeah..
Fun fact, it's often cheaper to use a foreign European data plan in Germany than to get a local contract. (Of course your mileage my vary. Some providers forbid it.)
This was in Spain, so no, not only USA. I have not deleted my X user, even though I never use it, just in case I need to ever go in and contact some company that I can't contact otherwise.
> To be fair, I hadn’t really expected anyone in the company to get back to me
They apologized and sent the dude back later the same day.
Public shaming used to be a very effective tool
Which is to day: It'd be good for bags you don't want to handle very much.
- 6 of the tokens were within the top 10 predictions - 8 of the tokens were in the #10-100 range - 3 of the tokens were in the #100-1000 range - 3 of the tokens weren't in any of the top 1000 predictions
The specific top_k counts were:
I(4) tasted(927) Honda(5363)'s(0) spicy(327) rodent(11589)-(0)re(202)pelling(1) tape(5202) and(6) I(1) will(67) do(29) it(3) again(0)
So we can conclude that the LLM doesn’t think much of “tasted Honda” or “repelling tape”, and was very surprised by “Honda’s spicy rodent”, but it knows enough about human nature that “and I will do it again” came as almost no surprise whatsoever.
Also, doesn't glamorizing this behavior, in a "lol im so random" way, encourage other people to do reckless stunts?
So I'd say:
- Your children shouldn't be reading her blog.
- Adults reading her blog shouldn't imitate her behavior, and instead, take it as a bit of humor.
I bet in reality she did a little bit more fact-checking than she shows on her blog post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFvoCCRZWyI
Its semi-common in chemists. Unrelated note: concentrated formic acid does indeed kind of smell like an ant sting, and dear god does it hurt.
Love the writing style.
They also illustrate the evolution of this protein: birds have no receptors for capsaicin, while mammals do. Birds eat seeds mostly intactly. Their digestive systems are capable of breaking them down - but it's stochastic and some seeds make it through the bird undigested, being redistributed elsewhere. Obviously, having an agent sow your seeds widely is a fitness advantage, and so seedy plants are ultimately served well even if 90+% of their caloric investment into seeds goes into the birds.
Mammals, on the other hand, have teeth - particularly molars. Mammals that eat seeds grind them apart orally before even swallowing. As a result, any seeds ingested by mammals are very likely to be completely destroyed. Plants - peppers, anyway - found a chemical irritant that repels the mammals without even being sensed by birds.
I've used one such treatment (with an amusing logo illustrataion - https://i.imgur.com/JAl8vyW.png) to good effect to discourage squirrels at my feeder, so that they stick to my dedicated squirrel bungee with a log of compressed corn instead.
Edit: DERP duh you mean humans. :D Literally made the comparison without recognizing it, too. /Edit
Not challenging you, just curious and not immediately finding the answer myself with a quick search.
The capsaicin receptor is TRPV1, which is a critical protein for thermoregulation and detection of being burned. In other words, it's not just a quick and easy evolutionary path to have a mutation break the receptor for capsaicin and now be immune to the taste. Obviously the animals could evolve behavior or even simply learn as juveniles to tolerate or even enjoy the taste (as many humans do).
There are some other interesting things that happen with avian carriers, like reductions in fungal infection and attractiveness to other predators (ants). https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/06/21/airborne-gut-acti...
https://youtu.be/dutpBSKj8JY?t=196
It looks at a couple non-competing (iirc) theories
You see a long time ago, someone at a tomato. Could've been a slice in a cold sandwich. Could've been a fresh one, maybe with A little cheese and pepper. But chili just won't do. Neither would spaghetti.
Then, before we had such regulations as we do today, they deposited that tomato seed, post digestion, in the train lavatory toilet. Being back then as it was, the tomato seed and associated fertilizer was dropped from the train car to the track ballast below where it germinated.
It's the same process where researchers deposit tomatoes on new volcanic islands.
You know what they say: when you gotta go, you gotta go.
After writing all that I did a search about people with low TRPV1 receptors and found an interesting study done on a couple people lacking functional TRPV1 channels. They were insensitive to the application of capsaicin to the mouth and skin. Furthermore they had an elevated heat pain threshold as well as an elevated cold pain threshold. Why I found this interesting is because my same son who barely reacted to this insanely hot pepper I can never get to wear a jacket to school. He does not mind the cold at all. He will if we were up a mountain or something but he always complains the car is too hot when I am cold. Anyways not sure he lacks function TRPV1 receptors but still interesting to think about. Article linked below.
https://www.jci.org/articles/view/153558
Capsaicin is a nonpolar molecule that is fat soluble and hydrophobic, so running water over your tongue either has no impact on the problem or makes it worse.
You want to consume anything with fat like milk or sour cream or even pure olive oil which will dissolve the capsaicin and carry it down your digestive tract. For something as strong as a reaper challenge, you’ll want to gargle olive oil because the mechanical action of the bubbles helps break up anything coated on your tongue like soap does when washing your hands. Alcohol based mouth wash also works as does ethanol (Everclear) in general. Edible surfactants and emulsifiers work best but unless you like drinking blended raw eggs or mustard, that might not work for you.
To help when it comes out the other end: drink lots of dairy because the casein helps and eat a bunch of starch (rice, potatoes, bread, etc) and bananas, and stay well hydrated.
If you go extreme enough humans can even walk barefoot through the snow without a problem all day without a real problem, where as someone who wears socks and shoes when it is freezing cold will get serious frostbite on their feet in like 30 minutes or less if they tried it without adapting themselves over time.
For a direct application of this, ice climbers will soak their hands in ice water for 45 minutes every day in the weeks leading up to a climb so that their hands don't freeze and maintain blood flow when on an ice climb, because obviously you can't just stop and warm up your hands by a fire when you are halfway up a frozen waterfall and having stiff or frostbitten fingers makes climbing more difficult/dangerous.
What else?
EDIT: and morphine!
side note: It kills you by making all your muscles tense so strongly that you can't breath any more. The muscles in your face tense in a way that it gives you whats called a "Strychnine Smile".
Can also be caused by Tetanus
Now thats a party!
(and as I said in another reply) Strychnine
So what kills some animals will have mind altering effects on others.
Cathinone, from khat (Catha edulis)
(Dear god, I'm showing my age there, aren't I?)
Whatever it is, I'm absolutely certain that it can be launched in a few seconds on archive.org, with no special software requirements besides the JavaScript interpreter that a web browser already has, and that all of this can happen even on your standard-issue pocket supercomputer.
(Every couple of years I fire up an Apple ][ version of Oregon Trail on archive.org because even though we had a PC at home way back when, that's the version I remember playing in school. That game is still hard and I'm not sure exactly what it is that it is supposed to teach except that dysentery is evil.)
Apple][ in my case. Very early 80s, definitely before 83.
(My peppers ferment just find using microbes.)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4643145/
https://www.ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR1944311.pdf
Antimicrobial doesn't necessarily mean it literally kills everything.
Same for corn (maize). There is no naturally occurring plant that looks like what we’ve turned it into.
Also I had lots of wild berries (of various species) in forests, and they look pretty much like the berries you can find in a garden. (Though probably not like the berries you can get in a supermarket?)
Wild grass also looks pretty much like some of the domesticated variety. (Well, some varieties do.)
Wheat still generally looks like wild grasses, but like maize its seeds are much larger than you’ll find on wild grasses.
In Mexico, our ancestors cultivated corn despite not knowing fungicides to prevent mycotoxin contamination. Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. Guess they really loved corn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
that one always amazes me. How did they figure it out? it's not exactly intuitive, especially when they wouldn't have known about the chemistry underneath.
It would probably take weeks or months to notice if doing A instead of B was making people sick or not
In particular, lots of civilizations learned to strengthen the basic clay pot by the addition of lime-y things, eg burnt mussel shells. If all your pots are made in this manner then you dont so much discover nixtamalization as experience it only by its absence when you meet settlers that have pellagra and dont use your style of pot.
See [0] for a technical write up on this and many other pot themes.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/arcm.12986
There are other animals humans can observe instead of impulsively risking their lives.
> Nine young backpackers were rushed to hospital in the west Australian city of Perth after snorting a drug they mistook for cocaine. Three remain in critical condition after *ingesting the mystery white powder which arrived in the post addressed to someone else*
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42563523
> The bystander states that the older man is a “death with dignity” patient who invited loved ones to be present while he consumed the [Medical Aid in Dying] medication. After his first swallow, he remarked, “Man that burns!” The younger man said, “Let me see,” and then also took a swallow.
https://www.jems.com/patient-care/emergency-medical-care/dea...
> She remarks that the older man “should be dead” and the younger one “should be alive.”
Great storytelling.
Some places are iron poor, some even resort to eating dirt, especially when pregnant when you need more iron. Some areas are salt poor and animals will go to extreme measures to get to salt. Some areas have poor bioavailability and require crushing, special cooking, soaking, or a narrow range of acidity to be available, which of course becomes the norm for cooking in those areas. Some even become religious standards, things like fish on fridays or avoiding pork (before trichinosis was controlled).
When we came out, we were initially incredulous but they clarified that the flesh of the berry was sweet, but the seed was disgustingly bitter. Which prompted the rest of us to quickly do some research on what this plant was. The mood was initially somewhat light-hearted, however articles with titles like “Why is the Yew Berry sometimes called the Death Berry?” had us on the phone with poison control pretty quickly.
Poison control was very professional, and once they confirmed that it was indeed a Yew Berry that had been ingested, things got pretty serious. Apparently even small doses can quickly cause irreversible heart failure, with death the earliest “symptom” in some cases.
My friend didn’t die— just experienced some terror and gastric distress— the latter likely exacerbated by the terror). No drugs or alcohol or involved, just an impulsive decision, and a sobering reminder about the fragility of life.
One of the other replies in this thread mentions mushrooms. Which reminds of the aphorism: _There are old mushroom foragers, and bold mushroom foragers, but there are no old AND bold mushroom foragers._
My friend has a running joke calling Yew poison berries, but I never looked up the effects before. Great that you called poison control.
The route that my kids walk to school took us underneath a large yew tree, and the road underneath is often covered in hundreds of delicious-looking pink berries. Since they were tiny they have had to know all about how yew berries look lovely but even one can kill you. What I didn't ever tell them is how apparently the flesh is actually not toxic and is tasty, and it's the seed that will kill you.
Apparently, there are others in North America, but mostly not in the Southwest. I lived in the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago which also has a yew (Taxus brevifolia) but I don’t recall if I ever saw the berries.
That said, most folks I know were raised with a baseline of “don’t eat random berries you don’t recognize.”
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
I think it's understandable. I live in a city suburb and the foliage around me is pretty much all non-toxic.
I was raised in a rural community and went camping often so we had the lessons of "don't eat random shit, you'll die" drummed into us.
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.
>I was in Cape Cod
it give me the chance to tell you, "we say on Cape Cod". There are a number of towns on Cape Cod that you could be in.
Fun fact: The danger in eating raw cookie-dough isn't primarily from fresh eggs (though they can have problems too) but rather from the raw flour, which before cooking may have a bunch of bacterial nastiness in it.
The eggs are a far more likely vector for illness unless you're making the cookies yourself from scratch.
At least where I live, only a minority are advertised as "ready to eat". It's more common to see the opposite, an explicit warning that it must be cooked.
* with the right equipment
Don't know about eggs, but some recipe sites claim it works for them too.
Perhaps on a low setting?
This isn't the default assumption?
("This cardboard is unlikely to kill me, sooooo...")
Yeah, but it ain't much fun to eat, either?
(Spiders have a special deal: Just stay out of sight while inside and we're gucci. But I'll just move them outside because I see them as allies against the insects.)
If you must use traps, use snap traps and take the responsibility for cleanup.
https://www.evergreenseeds.com/do-mint-plants-keep-mice-away...
I was told that Irish Spring soap is minty enough to repel mice. Based on the scratch/tooth marks in the bar I left in the glovebox, it apparently isn't.
Next summer, I'll try something with peppermint oil. Assuming I can get the transmission fixed for a reasonable price. Not having reverse is proving to be a hassle.
But we are specifically discussing ingestion of non-recommended substances here.
To correct a minor misconception that could arise from your comment: essential oils do not contain active ingredients. They are, generally speaking, the active ingredient. Some, like oil of wintergreen, are an almost pure compound, while others, like oil of peppermint, are mixtures, but generally they do not contain inert or nontoxic components.
One specific way that a fatal dose could be ingested is if the person ingesting it had previously obtained adulterated essential oils from an irresponsible drug dealer, containing an active ingredient but consisting mostly of something like canola oil, and then switched to a pure essential oil without realizing it.
It really doesn’t matter how you classify the active ingredient (and there is absolutely an active ingredient). It’s not getting absorbed in five gram quantities unless you snort it, drink it, or apply a stupid homeopathic topical with DMSO that penetrates the skin.
Edit: you’ve edited your post several times since I’ve made mine and I’m just not going to bother. There a dozen everpresent household chemicals that are deadlier than essential oils by a long shot. Nobody seems to have a problem except the kids who eat Tide pods, and they solved that with a zipper.
However, it is worth noting that most household chemicals have a much larger lethal dose (are much less toxic) than commonplace essential oils! Such less-toxic chemicals include not only Tide Pods, but also everything else commonly used for laundry (even liquid bleach), window-cleaning ammonia, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, hair-bleaching-concentration hydrogen peroxide, most paint thinners, and even industrial degreasers like trisodium phosphate. I thought bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) was an exception, but I just looked up its LD50, and it's 850mg/kg orl-rat. So the lethal dose for an adult human is probably about 50 grams, which is an order of magnitude less toxic than oil of peppermint.
(Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough. But in reasonably concentrated forms they're corrosive enough to cause fatal injuries if ingested, even, potentially, at the teaspoon quantities we're talking about. Your mileage may vary, though, and you may just end up permanently maimed.)
It is possible that you don't appreciate just how small a quantity five grams is, or you have a vastly exaggerated idea of how dangerous commonplace household chemicals are. I have no idea how you could get to a dozen. Are you poisoning your rats with strychnine and sodium cyanide? There are much safer options now, you know. Most people stopped keeping those in their houses decades ago, even in poor countries.
(Yes, I edited my comment, just as you did, because I think it's important to make it a high-quality comment so that people who read it are not misinformed.)
Essential oils aren’t obviously caustic like bleach and since it’s food product someone might think that getting a little in their mouth or food they’ll eat is no big deal.
Right. Decades ago when I was in highschool and learning chemistry the chem teacher brought out reagent bottles of HCl, HNO3, H2SO4 and NaOH (in soln.) which he intended us students to smell and taste. He also had boxes of brand new test tubes and he issued everyone with four thereof for the demonstration/experiment which he insisted that we wash thoroughly under running water despite them being brand new.
His stated reasons were that as chemists that (a) we needed to become familiar with these common reagents as they were ubiquitous in chemistry labs and industry, and (b) we needed to know and experience the acidity of acids and to clearly distinguish them from the soapy character of the alkali. He also had a more important motive that I'll come to in a moment.
He then diluted the reagents to a safe level (I think it was about 1/40 Normal but I can't remember for sure). Then we students all lined up and he poured a few ml of each of the reagents into our test tubes for us to first smell then taste, which we all did.
Afterwards when we were all back in the tiered seats of the demonstration lab he made a statement in the sternest tone that shocked the wits out of lot of us:
"You're all dead!"
—long silent pause—
"Don't you ever do that again. You don't know whether the reagents are true to label, for all you know I could have given you poison and you'd be none the wiser until it was too late. And even if the bottles are true to label then you've still no idea how pure they are—they may contain impurities that are highly toxic."
He then went on to point out that these bottles of reagents were new and that he'd unsealed them in front of us and asked if anyone of us had noticed that.
He then pointed to print on the label that said BP—British Pharmacopeia grade and then to the assay list of impurities which were many decimal places below one percent (the minutest of a trace).
This chemistry lesson was by far the most important one we ever learned—nothing at university was ever the equal of it.
It's a great tragedy that these days health and safety rules preclude students from ever participating in such a demonstration. Students must be taught not to fear chemicals but nevertheless to treat them with care and great respect lest they bite.
These days much of society has an almost irrational fear of chemicals despite the widespread teaching of chemistry. That tells me there's something terribly wrong with the way we teach the subject—a matter that I've covered on HN previously.
Essential oils are generally not at high risk of deadly impurities, for three reasons. First, they are mostly intended for human consumption (whether BP grade or not), except for turpentine; second, their production process is just steam distillation and so doesn't normally involve any highly-toxic impurities; third, because the essential oils themselves are sufficiently deadly that most potential impurities would have to be present at very high levels before they were a concern.
Agreed. Whilst the lesson played out almost to the letter as I described it (I well remember the experience) some of the fine minutiae/details may be a bit unclear (after all, that lesson was in the 1960s). Thus, it's possible the 'odd-man-out' in the lineup wasn't HNO3 but rather H3PO4, but don't think so.
Remember, the amount the teacher put in the test tubes was at most only a couple of ml and most just barely tasted the samples (you can imagine, there was much ooing and arring at the bitter taste) so the amount tasted was actually minuscule). Incidentally, there was general agreement that the most objectionable reagent to the taste was NaOH, 'yucky' was the most common description.
Whilst I said the dilutions were about 1/40 N. that was almost certainly so for HCl but not necessarily so for the others which may have been more highly diluted (HCl's dilution specifically comes to mind because the teacher mentioned it in connection with stomach acid).
The reason I don't think it was H3PO4 is that we didn't do much chemistry with it although I do remember it being discussed in connection with Coca-Cola in that we shined up pennies with it.
I'd also point out there were other 'safety' lessons of a similar nature. Ones that come to mind Immediately include the need to take great care when handling aqua regia and H2SO4, especially so if heated in a retort, another was the preparation of H2S in a Kipp's generator/apparatus—the mandatory use of the ventiated fume cupboard and that H2S is particularly dangerous as it desensitizes one's sense of smell in even quite small concentrations. Then there were the strict rules surrounding the use of Hg (of which the lab had many litres thereof).
It's interesting you mention turpentine as an exception. I occasionally do a bit of woodworking and I know others who are more avid woodworkers than I am. One thing that characterizes a small subset of them is that they insist on using real oil/spirit of turpentine rather than the mineral (white spirit) variety for no other reason than it's 'natural' whereas the mineral stuff is 'unnatural' as it comes from the petroleum industry.
Frankly this horrifies me. As you'd know oil of turpentine is a catch-all name for any number of terpenes—of which there are hundreds if not thousands—all mixed in ill-defined ratios, what you get depends on where it's sourced.
There's no telling these guys that many terpenes are both irritating to the skin and quite toxic—and that some are known carcinogens. What surprises me is that woodworking suppliers are actually allowed to stock and sell the stuff.
If I had my way I'd ban it for that purpose (there might be some excuse for its availability if mineral turpentine was actually inferior in this application but that's not the case).
As for turpentine, it depends on the person and the particular turpentine, but generally turpentine on your skin isn't particularly irritating and may even be therapeutically beneficial. Like many other essential oils, it's a broad-spectrum fungicide, bactericide, and antiviral, but isn't absorbed particularly well through the stratum corneum, and it's a pretty decent solvent for removing other chemicals that may be more toxic and are commonly used in woodworking.
I think there are two good reasons for preferring natural turpentine, despite its variability, to mineral spirits:
- as with cyanide, the humans evolved with frequent exposure to small amounts of plant terpenes, from chewing pine needles and other leaves and from dermal exposure to broken and crushed plant matter and to pine resin. So you'd expect them to have reasonable ways of clearing out the terpenes that occur naturally, and in fact they do. Mineral spirits might just contain the same compounds (and other well-tolerated ones like octane and xylene) but they also might have novel compounds humans don't tolerate as well. And you can't usually tell from the label; just as with turpentine, what you get depends on where it comes from. Typically the MSDS will tell you the major components, but not the impurities thought to be harmless.
- culturally, there are millennia of traditions about how to use turpentine safely, due to its extensive use in shipbuilding, painting, and woodworking, so we can be reasonably sure that the health risks are small when handled in traditional ways. Mineral spirits are only 200 years old or less, and the processes for producing them today aren't the same as the processes used 50 years ago. So it's much more plausible for them to contain impurities that turn out to be dangerous. Indeed, many such novel nonpolar solvents widely used in the past turned out to be unexpectedly dangerous, such as benzene, carbon disulfide, polychlorinated biphenyls (used as solvents for woodworking in old Fabulon; see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2267460/), and "cleaning fluid" (carbon tetrachloride). It would be much less surprising to find some novel hazard in mineral spirits than in turpentine.
I used mineral spirits last month to clean oil off my immersion blender. They're probably pretty harmless. But we can have a lot more confidence in the exact degree of harmlessness of turpentine.
Right, I agree. It's necessary to say where I am and that's Australia. It's important because I've lived and worked in both the US and in Europe and from experience nomenclatures and formulations of these substances vary substantially from country to country.
The term 'mineral spirit' for mineral turpentine (aka mineral turps) is rarely used here. If one went to any hardware store and asked for mineral spirit the person serving would likely be quite confused and ask for clarification 'do you mean Shellite?', or whatever.
BTW, Shellite† is our version (concoction) of naphtha, it's much more flammable ('explosively' so) than turps.
Here, labels on containers of mineral turps are always titled with the name 'Mineral Turpentine' followed by its UN number and description, ie: UN-1300, Turpentine substitute. The UN-1300 MSDS is: https://advancechemicals.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/0....
As with all SDSs, almost every warning possible is described but for mineral turps two particularly relevant points stand out which are 'Mutagenicity: Not mutagenic' and 'Carcinogenicity: Limited evidence…'.
Despite the usual danger warnings to not inhale it, to avoid skin contact and avoid long exposure to it etc., the facts are that in practice there's little evidence of any serious harm coming to those who are exposed to it on a regular basis—so long as they take reasonable safety precautions. Here, painters use it as their primary most-used solvent for linseed oil-based paints. Go to any hardware shop and you'll see 1, 4 and 20-litre containers of it everywhere. Paint shops stock mineral turps along with acetone and DCM. At a guess, for every litre of DCM there'd be 5 litres of acetone and 20-50 litres of mineral turpentine.
I'd always have several litres of mineral turps at home. Today, I used about 300ml to wash out dirt from an old clock, here it's a household solvent with a multitude of uses. I've a range of pre-mixed solutions—mixed with Shellite, with ~5℅ EtOH and trace H2O, etc; they're used for degreasing, stain removal, etc.
EtOH is the safest chemical I use on a day-to-day basis (I've always about 10 litres of 95% available—unlike the US, denatured EtOH is readily available here). The next safest solvent I use is mineral turps, yes I avoid deliberately sniffing it or getting it on my skin but I take no other special precautions (that's the procedure most here would adopt).
It's worth noting that mineral turpentine that's available here is very consistent in its formulation, benzene and other toxic impurities never exceed 0.1%, and I'm reliably informed levels are usually much lower. I cannot speak for stuff that's called mineral spirits that I've seen in the US and in Europe. I've not done an assay but I know they differ significantly to our local product, for starters they have quite dissimilar odors (here, all brands have an identical odor).
I'm in no way trying to whitewash the dangers of mineral turps but in this highly regulated country it comes in as one of the solvents of least concern. On past evidence it draws pretty much the least attention.
I say that as someone who considers ALL aromatic hydrocarbons as potentially dangerous, especially so if they've benzene rings. DCM is considered significantly m...
They do that in any case
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dutpBSKj8JY
https://order.wbu.com/shop/bird-food/hot-pepper
It's a game changer, it's the only bird food that I use now.
they have no heat receptors?? capsaicin literally triggers the ion channel for thermosensing.
Capsaicin isn’t just effective on mammals, it also has an effect on some fungi and insects, though mostly through metabolic disruption.
Granted - the older areas have more mature oak, pecan, and other nut producing trees too. But there should be some squirrels out in the exurbs and I never see any. I've spent some significant time out there too. They have more rabbits than I see intown, which I imagine is the coyotes main food source.
We eventually took our feeder down after birds kept crashing into our windows near the feeder.
I can only assume they were trying to get to "the other bird feeder".
It was great while it lasted, though. We -- and our cats -- loved watching them crowd around the feeder to enjoy some seed.
I smeared some Last Dab on the bird feeder support and cayenne on the furniture and railings and haven’t seen a squirrel since.
Probably.
True. I suspect it is only placental mammals. Brush-tailed possums (a marsupial mammal) do not seem repelled by it at all. I've had my birds eyes and Carolina Reaper chilly plants and fruit eaten by them.
I'm getting so frustrated anymore trying to use google, bing, brave search, startpage, etc for finding anything except reddit or quora answers and business pages. If you find any more info on marsupials and peppers, I'd love to see it. It's a super interesting question.
Chewing is also an imperfect process. Mammals, and I can tell you this personally and with some disdain, sometimes pass seeds as well.
> found a chemical irritant that repels the mammals
Deer, and I can tell you this personally and with some disdain, seem to love peppers as much as we do. They're also harder to keep out of your yard.
That's how you get poop coffee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak
One of my pet-peeves: Certain science fiction writers (often amateur) posit that humans will greatly impress aliens with our willingness--no, zeal--to consume capsaicin, a terrible death substance all sentient races flee from etc.
This is nonsense since it's basically an narrowly targeted false-alarm trick between relatively closely related creatures. It's not acidic, caustic, corrosive, etc.
> this protein
Just to head off the ambiguous phrasing here: Capsaicin itself is not a protein, but a much simpler kind of chemical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylpropanoid
What brand? I've been wanting to figure out a squirrel deterrant for my bird feeder, and personal recommendations are always greatly preferred to ads.
One one hand, some seeds must survive passing through the bird's digestive system intact to later grow into a plant, on the other hand, some seeds must be digested in order to keep the birds interested in consuming that seed... Alternatively, a bird species interested in eating indigestible seeds may become extinct due to malnutrition.
Contrary to what the internets want you to believe, there are bird murder machines called "cats", which seems to skip most of the "learning" and the "headache" part.
https://youtu.be/Ao6T-atMSYU
As for spicy peppers funny to me story. I grew a Carolina Reaper plant last summer and the plant did well and I got something like 200 peppers from it. Of course I had to know what it felt like so me my dad and my 13 year old son tried them. We all threw a big chunk in our mouths chewed for about 5 seconds and spat it out.
The pain was basically instant. It was at about 2 seconds I knew this was not going to be good. It was insanely hot which lasted about half an hour, the entire time me running my mouth under the tap or putting ice on it, trying crackers and milk, even tried to wash my tongue. Some how my son after about 5 minutes very calmly says can I go have a shower. He was hardly bothered by the pepper.
Funny thing happened couple weeks later. I was telling my friend how insane these peppers were. He then asks if he can have some as he has a bear knocking over his garbage every night and wants to leave some for the bear to eat and hopefully encourage it to stop. So he makes a burrito and fills it with 5 or 6 nice sized reapers and leaves it out before bed. Well middle of the night his phone dings and his outside camera detected motion. Fires up the video and what does he see, not the bear but some stray dog walking the neighborhood run up and down the thing in a couple bites. Oh man I hope that dog didn't suffer too bad when it came out the other end.
Of that list, we have a Metasequoia / Dawn Redwood tree in our yard, it's great fast-growing shade tree with deciduous leaves that are so small you don't need to rake them. Thought to be extinct, re-discovered in China in 1944, availability in nurseries is pretty good.
not really true, mastication isn't practiced to perfection in the wild, which is why you might often see seeds right on the poop. a portion of them get distributed intact.
The ones that were repulsive to birds but tasty to mammals got eaten by something that grinds up their seed, and so they are extinct. Or, (after humans invented agriculture), possibly got domesticated and became extremely numerous since we'd intentionally save some seeds to plant despite eating the rest.
But there was no awareness and no plan, just chance and history and whatever happened to work.
Rodents love chewing on the electrical harnesses in these vehicles.
When I ran an import repair shop, my clients owned over 100 Jaguar sedans, and every single one of them was towed in at some point due to rodent-damaged wiring. While the problem wasn’t as severe with Land Rovers, we still had more than 40 of them towed in each year for the same issue.
I didn't know about chillies but it might have helped.
Of course, nothing will beat having a rodent die somewhere in the engine, and not noticing it until exiting the car after a 45 minute highway ride and making my in-laws neighborhood smell like someone barbecued rotten meat.
I found this spray at the feed store that looked to be a sort of small outfit based on the label. It was hot pepper extract, diesel, glycerin, a few other ingredients. Worked really well. But then it disappeared so I made my own.
I bought a few bags of dried cayenne peppers, crushed them and soaked them in acetone (no I didn't care if the mice got cancer at that point). Then filtered and discarded the remaining pepper chunks and let the acetone evaporate in a pan outside. I then got a few glycerin suppositories from the pharmacy and mixed with kerosene, the pepper extract and a little peppermint oil and had my own spray. A few times a year I spray down the engine blocks and wiring harnesses and we haven't had an issue since.
Love it!
Just someone having fun doing something stupid and sharing it with the world.
The article does say that car owners and mechanics have noted a large increase in rodent damage to car wiring with the new soy-based insulation while manufacturers have denied any connection. Likely because they are fighting several class-action lawsuits over it.
The shop removed the mangled bodies, replaced all the air filter components, etc. It took a few months for traces of the scent to finally dissipate. Or maybe we got used to it?
Regardless, the car sold a couple years later. My next car was new.
I'm also inspired to use capsaicin to fight my personal fight with some squirrels that feel the _need_ to live in my garage. They ignore all my humane traps and are chill with all the light and sound disruptions I put in there.
10/10
You can't prevent your engine from being warm (assuming you need to use your vehicles), but you can make it less appealing to gnaw on the nice chewy parts of it.
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a21933466/does-your-car-ha...