mellowtigger: (the more you know)

Here's a good example of where my curiosity takes me.

  1. It started with a pun on Mastodon, "Murder, She Roti".
  2. What is roti? Oh, it's an unleavened bread.
  3. What does that leave out? Various leavening agents.
  4. Wait, there's a salt-leavened bread? No, that's a bad name, because there's no salt. It used to be stored in hot salt.
  5. Wait, there's a bread that rises because of hydrogen instead of carbon dioxide? Yes, that bacterium is Clostridium perfringens.
  6. Wait, that bacterium can cause a necrotizing disease, but people put it in their food?! Yes, but cooking destroys the bacteria to safe levels. Apparently. :/
  7. If it's "safe", then how does it cause disease? It affects people who are protein deprived, which inhibits their trypsin production, which apparently deprives them of even more protein.
    1. Wait, eating sweet potatoes does that too? Apparently so, unless you cook them well.
  8. Why is trypsin important in the human body? Because trypsin begins the digestion process of protein molecules in the small intestine.
  9. And... wait, what?! "Human trypsin has an optimal operating temperature of about 37 °C."?
    1. That's the temperature for people living in the civilized world. For people in the USA, that's exactly 98.6 Fahrenheit.

So, I looked around and eventually found this publication.

Most hydrolyses have been reported at trypsin (EC 3.4.21.4) optimum conditions (pH 7.8 and 37 °C).

So... the obvious questions (and I haven't found any answers yet):

  1. Is this molecule why humans evolved a body temperature of 37C/98.6F? If we deviate, then poor nutrition leaves us disadvantaged and subject to evolutionary culling?
  2. What does this mean for our falling body temperature?
  3. Other animals have different body temperatures (scroll upward to see the chart). Do they rely on some other process to kickstart their protein digestion?
    1. I know humans have a weird intestinal digestion process, which is why we can't make use of the vitamin B12-producing bacteria that live in our gut. Other animals, however can use their own internally-hosted bacteria, so we eat their muscles, eggs, and livers to steal their bacteria-produced B12.
  4. Are there some animals with the same temperature as humans, and do they have the same small intestine digestive process that we do?

Inquiring minds want to know.

mellowtigger: (mst3k)
Just in time for folk going to CONvergence to have trivia for dazzling the natives! And how appropriate that their webpage shows the MST:3K profile. *laugh* Suppose there was a government experiment in which a person born right now was forced to watch television every single day for the rest of their lives. Is there already enough Hollywood content to meet the need?

Short answer: Yes, but only if you require the subject to also view non-English films.

I've pondered this matter before, but then I said it out loud at Bear Coffee last week that I was thinking about downloading IMDB data and determining for myself if there was already more video/film content than a person could ever watch. I finally got around to following through on the commitment. :)

It turns out that IMDB is a huge mess that somehow, somehow continues to work. It is a collection of flat text files (yes, that's right), each devoted to a particular set of data. Records do not have key fields (yes, really). The primary field is just the name of the movie, which the end user can enter with any combination of double and single quotes that they'd like. (really, such a headache for a programmer trying to do string processing.) The other two fields in the "running-times" table are supposed to indicate the number of minutes and the number of episodes, respectively. But there is no data validation because users can enter anything they want, just like a wiki. Minutes might be listed as a whole number "60", or minutes and seconds "20:47", or a range "28-29", or might contain whatever text notes a person thought to be useful information. (Yes, the internet movie so-called database really is this bad.)  Oh, and the field that's supposed to name how long a movie is in minutes, well that's also the place where they dump in the country-of-origin information.  *boggle*

Nevertheless, I managed to import it to an OpenOffice database. I produced the following stats:
890,100 KB memory needed by OpenOffice to import the data using my OOBasic macro
466,181 records processed
 19,926 records that I was unable to clean up well enough to determine the minutes
446,255 records left with countable data

29,506,703 minutes total
491,778 hours total
35,127 days total (allowing 14 hours per day for continuous viewing)
96 years total (which exceeds average lifespan for both males and females)
If I limit consideration only to entries that either do not specify the country of origin or mention specifically USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, then I assume I'm looking mostly just at the English movies. Those results are as follows:
22,427,409 minutes English
373,790 hours English
26,699 days English (at 14 hours per day)
73 years total English
Which becomes doable, but just barely squeaking by within the average lifespan. For Americans, the current average male lives 75 years and female lives 80 years.  All of my numbers are underestimates, I should point out.  I'm not convinced that my macro for cleaning up the episode-count data did a very good job.  It looks like most everything was counted as a movie with only 1 episode rather than allowing for tv series which may have had multiple episodes.  My totals may revise upwards if I ever decide to further clean up the awful IMDB table.

Where's Joel when you need him?
mellowtigger: (Default)
Instead of new science articles as I'm wont to post, how about some old science every once in a while? Sort of a "The More You Know" kind of effort. (I really like those public service/education spots.)

You know that familiar odor that wafts from your urine after eating asparagus? Well, although everyone can smell it at high enough concentrations, it turns out that some people are actually hypersensitive to it and can smell the chemicals at much lower concentrations than the typical person. According to a 1980 study:
It would appear that the ability to excrete (a) characteristic pungent substance(s)
in the urine after eating asparagus is universal, since those familiar with the odour
could detect it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus (whether or not
that person was able to detect it himself). Thus the excretion of the odorous
substance(s) cannot be due to an inborn error of metabolism.
...
"'Taste blindness' for various substances in the minority of a population is well known,
and there are reports of 'smell blindness' or specific anosmia for certain odours
as well."
...
If confirmed, this would be the first instance of a specific smell hypersensitivity.
The more you know.... the weirder the world gets.   You may thank me later.  :)

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