Mastodawn

You ever think about how wild it is that modern humans have existed for like 300k+ years, and for approximately all of that time precisely zero of them had any idea how chemistry actually worked, but meanwhile your body is made of literally trillions of cells that somehow understand and remember everything you eat, so they're able to translate a weird very specific micronutrient deficiency into a food craving without you consciously being any the wiser?

Fabian Giesen Feb 4

E.g. a story my mom often tells is that when she was pregnant, she suddenly had a craving for pickled herring, despite ordinarily not liking fish.

On the surface this is just a random anecdote but the implications about how your body works are kinda staggering

Per Vognsen Feb 4

@rygorous Also, pregnancy is really fucked up. The developing fetus is constantly fucking with the host's biochemistry to get what they want.

Per Vognsen Feb 4

@rygorous I guess what I'm saying is, the fetus clearly wanted some pickled herring that day. :)

Fabian Giesen Feb 4

@pervognsen *blows lock of hair up* just parasite things... :P

Per Vognsen Feb 4

@rygorous It must be hard once you're born and you can no longer use biochemical Uber Eats to order delivery food and instead you're reduced to crying in a non-specific way.

Wolf480pl Feb 4

@pervognsen
gives you motivation to learn to speak
@rygorous

Per Vognsen Feb 4

@wolf480pl @rygorous The 2 year old telling the 0 year old to "git gud" and "skill issue tbh".

@rygorous every day I crave coffee for multiple hours, indicating my body's curious inability to procure coffee ahead of time

Fabian Giesen Feb 4

@flacs auto brewery syndrome but for coffee #VPofIdeas

@rygorous along similar lines I used to take some vitamin C supplements, and I swear they'd taste better sometimes (despite they were just artificial sweetener and orange flavour).

I can only imagine it's partially because I needed it more when it tasted better.

Chris Siebenmann Feb 4

@nroach44 @rygorous There are a ton of anecdotes about various sports drinks to the effect of "this tasted like crap until one day I was out going really hard and then ...". And I'm a recreational cyclist and on hot days one of my warning markers is "mm this salt tastes really good".

(Not all sports drinks, especially these days; I think many are now loaded with extra sugar to be appealing to non-athletes, who are a much bigger market.)

@rygorous the gut is often undervalued as a part of the body's entire computational system. theres a reason it has half a billion neurons, its own major nerves to the brain, and deep connections with the immune system.

@rygorous i just remembered a little detail from high school chemistry where one of the first things they taught us was under no circumstances do you taste the chemistry, so that might have something to do with why it took so long for humans to figure out chemistry

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@aeva My favorite tidbit is how everything we have ever learned about fluorine chemistry acts as a stark warning not to engage in fluorine chemistry, and yet somehow you can go on Wikipedia and read sentences such as "Los Alamos National Laboratory used [dioxygen difluoride] to synthesize plutonium hexafluoride at unprecedentedly low temperatures"

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@aeva It just raises SO MANY questions:

Why do you have dioxygen difluoride?
Who would ever willingly synthesize that?
Why are you checking out some of that plutonium?
Holy shit, you want to have FOOF and plutonium in the same room?
Who approved that?
Oh you want to use both in the same process?
WHY?
To make plutonium hexafluoride?!
WHYYYYY?

@aeva @rygorous surprisingly, it is to make things less explosive

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@mym @aeva yeah any wiki walk into that general area is just a non-stop horror show of "excuse me, you did WHAT?"

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@aeva [NB these are rhetorical questions. I know the answers. They're in the same Wikipedia articles I've been reading. But it still seems like the kind of chemistry you do if BASE jumping just doesn't do it for you anymore.]

@rygorous i'm reminded that someone climbed Taipei 101 without any safety equipment recently

@aeva @rygorous the pioneers of chemistry absolutely did taste the chemistry, and wrote down what it was like (and in some cases, what it was like as it killed them).

so yes, we dont need students tasting the chemistry anymore.

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@vfig @aeva in fact, one could argue that past experience of pioneers of chemistry tasting and smelling all the compounds is precisely why we now tell students to not do that anymore

@vfig @rygorous every sign is a story

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@aeva @vfig sometimes, even the skeletal formula is.

for example, when it reads FFF NO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoronitrosomethane

Trifluoronitrosomethane - Wikipedia

Fabian Giesen Feb 6

@aeva @vfig (granted, AFAICT, as far as fluorine chemistry gets, this stuff is relatively tame. But that's a big qualifier.)

@rygorous @aeva "somewhat more kinetically stable than expected due to its fluorine"

@rygorous is this proven? i always thought this is the case but if it were, that would be swell.

earlier today i explored taste memory, hit upon yoghurt and was like "oh yes please"