Dr. Kacy TillmanI sat by an election denier on the airplane and he started poking me in the arm to be emphatic about his views on people stealing ballots secretly and the airplane was full and I couldn’t move anywhere so I started explaining the yellow fever in very great detail, all the way down to telling him about the bloody vomit that looks like coffee grounds and it worked. He stopped talking to me. The moral of this story is you can’t out-weird an academic; our toolset is too vast. #vastearlyamerica
Gigawatt121@kacytillman I love this story so much. And that is brilliant. I guess I'd have to opt for explaining the molecular mechanism of smell in such detail as to bore him to death
Aphrodite (recharging)Don’t forget to mention the olfactory markers emitted by those with certain conditions.. and act quizzical after mentioning them.
“5-α-trifluorophosphene is a reliable indicator of..”
(sniff)
“Hmm. Thought I smelled it..”
(sniff)
“wait - there’s that weird tingle… Um, nevermind.”
(sniff)
“oh f… Completely unrelated, do you have your affairs in order?”
@kacytillman @Aphrodite Even that might be too interesting. I’m talking molecular minutiae that melts the brain with its blandness.
“So the olfactory receptor identified in the main olfactory system is a 7-transmembrane G-protein coupled receptor. Each one has a broad tuning curve for the ligands that they can bind which results in overlapping sensitivities to various molecules.Now, the G-protein associated with …… sir? Sir? Are you falling asleep? There’s more….”
if said person is going to have performative anxiety over imagined threats, said person should at least be kind enough to keep those performative anxieties to themselves in public
nothing focuses the mind inwards as swiftly as the implication of imminent mortality (don’t ask why i know this first hand several times over)