Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2007 December 23

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December 23

A question for people who have used acid or know people who have/are

What does it do to you as a person mentally or physically?

Is it worth it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.79.10 (talk) 00:50, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

No wikipedia user will encourage you into experimenting with drugs and give you a personal point of view. Neutrally talking, you'll have a blast, if everything goes well that is. A whole lot of neurons will be gone, and you could get headaches and nauseas afterwards if you party to hard while on LSD. You have to be carefull, very carefull, you COULD buy dammaged stuff and you COULD overdose and DIE. If you can't find anyone in the real world that has already used and knows what they are doing then DON'T DO IT, it's very dangerous to experiment with amateurs. For more on how does being on acid feels like see this 1960 propaganda film that descrives the effects quite accurately. --Yamanbaiia^{(free hugs!)} 01:44, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Ha! Makes those meth commercials look tame. bibliomaniac15 01:49, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I remeber a film that showed the effect LSD has on soldiers. Funniest thing ever. If you can find it its a blast to watch BonesBrigade 02:53, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Is it worth it...? Not if you are a cat. Rockpocket 02:58, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not good if you're an elephant, either. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 17:26, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

On another hand, there's a series of pictures of webs made by spiders on various drugs, and the LSD web is the neatest of the bunch, including the no-drug web. —Tamfang (talk) 08:35, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Personal anecdote/POV time: Being on acid is like being schizophrenic and drunk at the same time. You have no control over yourself physically or mentally, and your brain plays constant unbelievable tricks on you (you see many things that are simply impossible). Most people become incomprehensibly stupid while on it too, though they usually think they are geniuses. Is it worth it? In the long run, I don't think so. Most drugs aren't. You'd probably be happier with yourself in the long run if you spent your time doing something else. I used to experiment with a number of things when I was in high school (including LSD); none of them really helped me out at all in the long run, and a few of them may have laid the seeds for future health problems. I came out of all of that relatively well (I have put that behind me and am reasonably successful) but I know a lot of people who didn't, some who ended up in jail, some who just ended up doing nothing with their lives, and one who ended up a semi-comatose invalid (don't, under any circumstance, try to operate a motor vehicle while under the influence!!!). If I could do it over again, I'd probably spend the time reading philosophy instead; doing the drugs didn't make me any cooler, didn't really "open my mind" to anything I couldn't have gotten by just educating myself more, and didn't improve my long-term self-esteem or prospects. Recreational, occasional drinking and even pot smoking—these things I think are pretty limited in their effects as long as you aren't the addictive type and don't get in trouble with the law. Hell, some pot brownies, some good music, a few good friends, a lot of spare time—that's one hell of a good way to spend an evening. But I'd avoid everything else, personally. Not worth it. A good book can give you better experiences, better ideas, and in the end make you a better person than any psychoactive chemicals. The one useful insight I took away from LSD was, "Shit, our brains are quite fragile; a few milligrams of some chemical and reality just falls apart. I should treat my brain better." But that was an insight that took me about 10 years to really understand. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 03:06, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Aldous Huxley writes about the sensations and impressions he experienced under the influence of mescalin in the Doors of Perception, from which you can read an excerpt here. SaundersW (talk) 11:01, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

This might help... -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 11:18, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I gather that my experience with LSD is typical: used it frequently for a year or so and gradually lost interest. (And atypical in that I was 32 years old the first time.) I had occasional visual distortions (imagine projecting a movie onto a bumpy wall), and complex thought was more difficult than usual; but I never saw anything that wasn't there, never did anything seriously stupid (so far as I know!), and never had a flashback. So the lesson I took from it was that the mind is more fallible, and more robust in some ways, than we generally think. Listening to music was loads of fun, as was watching the waves by the Cliff House. The most annoying thing about LSD was that I absolutely couldn't sleep until it wore off, and the second most annoying thing was a buzzing noise, like toy airplanes, that swirled around me for hours after the peak. The last time I did it was 1996 July 2. —Tamfang (talk) 08:35, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Reading

Is there any sort of reason why certain languages are read left-to-right and others are read right-to-left? Just curious. -- Sturgeonman (talk) 01:40, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Some languages are read top-to-bottom. Ancient Egyptian is read in different directions depending on the way the figures in the hieroglyphs are facing - that can vary from like to line in the text. There isn't a particular reason to favor one direction over the other - different writing styles evidently came about independently - so there is really no reason why they would operate the same way. One possible reason to favor top-to-bottom - or left-to-right for right-handed people - is that your hand doesn't drag over the wet ink as you write. A problem which left-handed people from an era when fountain-pens were popular are more than willing to testify to! SteveBaker (talk) 01:54, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Another reason which favors top-to-bottom - or left-to-right for right-handed people is that you can more easily see what you have just written. hydnjo talk 03:28, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Not only can you see what you've just written, but when using ink, it can dry before you move over it with your hand. Lova Falk (talk) 12:54, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

In early times both Latin and Greek could be written boustrophedon (as an ox ploughs) with alternating lines running left-to-right and right-to-left. (That is, the language was not written exclusively in either direction.) SaundersW (talk) 10:56, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Now that system seems sensible to me - you start in the left (or right) get to the end and then 'move down' and start reading the other way.

The quick brown fox
dog lazy the over jumped

Although having just typed that out it was incredibly hard work to figure out in my head (yes i'm that simple) so on second thoughts I likes left-to-right only. ny156uk (talk) 13:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

or perhaps?

the quick brown fox

god yzal eht revo depmuj

Furmanj (talk) 14:32, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The quick brown fox

.god yzal eht revo spumj

Would be better. DuncanHill (talk) 14:36, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Strangely that is easier to read to me. good work. I can't be alone in sometimes missing lines/re-reading the same line when my concentration is broken ny156uk (talk) 15:03, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

You'd really want to use 'full out' text alignment so that the right hand ends of all of the line ended at the same point on the page:

   The quick brown fox jumps
          .god yzal eht revo

But we need more text to show what it would look like 'for real'. Using the opening paragraph from our Hieroglyph article shows what I mean - sadly, you can see that while reading ".god yzal eht revo spmuj" is relatively do-able, for real text it's going to take a lot of re-learning of how to read!

A  hieroglyph is  a  character  of a  logographic  or partly  logographic
shpylgoreih naitpygE eht  ot derrefer yllanigiro mret ehT .metsys gnitirw
used by Ancient  Egyptians, but  is  also applied to the  ancient  Cretan
esenihC ot  osla  yllanoisacco  dna ,stpircs  qamk'iM dna  nayaM  ,naiwuL
characters. Ancient Egyptian writing consisted of over 2,000 hieroglyphic
hcaE  .62  ylno fo  stsisnoc  tebahpla  hsilgnE  eht  saerehw  sretcarahc
hieroglyphic character represents a common object from their day.

Without full-out justification, you'd really want to have the start of one line begin under the end of the previous one...but you can't do that without leaving big white gaps and in some cases, running out of page...

       A hieroglyph is a character of a logographic or partly logographic
shpylgoreih naitpygE eht  ot derrefer yllanigiro mret ehT .metsys gnitirw
used by Ancient Egyptians, but is also applied to the  ancient Cretan
  esenihC ot osla yllanoisacco dna ,stpircs qamk'iM dna nayaM ,naiwuL
  characters. Ancient Egyptian writing consisted of over 2,000 hieroglyphic
          hcaE .62 ylno fo stsisnoc tebahpla hsilgnE eht saerehw sretcarahc
          hieroglyphic character represents a common object from their day.

I think DuncanHill just inadvertently explained why alternating directions is OK for the ancient egyptian but bad for modern languages. In ancient egyptian, you have individual symbols that stand for entire words - hence you don't have to reverse the spelling on alternate lines - which hurts the brain's ability to 'grab' a single word with one snapshot because you have to be able to recognise the same word forwards and backwards which is obviously harder. If you don't reverse the words then as your eyes track along the 'backwards' lines, they can't move smoothely in one direction - they have to make big jumps from the end of one word to the start of the next. On the other hand, if you have hieroglyphs, using alternately reversed lines make sense because your eyes don't have to jump all the way over as they do with (say) English at the end of every line. So it makes perfect sense that zig-zag reading would be optimal for hieroglyphic languages but not for phonetically spelled languages. The interesting thing about Egyptian was that they made mirror-imaged hieroglyphs only for the figures and animals - but the direction that those symbols faced told you which direction to read each line...but there was no actual enforcement of alternating lines - you could write your text entirely left-to-right or entirely right-to-left - or mix them up to fit around a picture or some kind of architectural feature. Since they'd also write top-to-bottom in narrow columns of text just a few symbols wide, you also tend to end up reading them from top to bottom as well as left/right and you also needed to use these directional cues to tell you which order to read the columns in - which leaves room for a good deal of ambiguity. With over 2,000 symbols to memorize (some of them with little modifiers on them), the entire written language was a horrible mess. SteveBaker (talk) 16:30, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I hate you all. After that alternating stuff, I can't read english normally now >_< mattbuck (talk) 20:35, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry Steve, that argument fails for several reasons:

1. It is not true that boustrophedon was used only for Egyptian hieroglyphics: it was widely used for both Greek and Latin.
2. It is not true that hieroglyphics symbols stood for whole words. Some of them did, but most of the symbols in a text did not represent whole words, but single sounds or groups of sounds.
3. The practice of silent reading almost certainly does not go back to the period when boustrophedon was used (see http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html): until then, even practiced readers vocalised when reading, so the speed would have been limited by that process anyway.

The best answer for the OP is that for reasons which are not clear (though the practical matters mentioned by various posters above are probably factors) the original right-to-left has survived in several West Asian scripts, but been replaced by left-to-right for both European and South Asian derivatives. Like the answers to many 'why' questions, it is not really very satisfying. --ColinFine (talk) 01:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Steve, if you look at the image in boustrophedon of an ancient Latin text you will see that the letters are revered on the reverse lines, so the cues for the direction of reading are strong. This image illustrates the principle. SaundersW (talk) 17:17, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Cocaine for stuffy noses

Pleases note the following is purely curiosity: Stuffy nosees are caused by an inflammation of the nasal passages, which is in turn caused by inflamed blood vessel. Since cocaine is a vasoconstrictor, can it be used to help unblock stuffed noses of allergy-sufferers? Acceptable (talk) 02:33, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Hell no. Good way to end up in JAIL. Don't drop the soap while there. 65.163.112.128 (talk) 06:51, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

The best option is to see your doctor and have him/her prescribe some nasal decongestants for you. Cocaine is strictly regulated in many places; have a look at Legal status of cocaine. --Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 09:00, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

At above: oh boo, 65's answer is uninformative at worst and trollish at best, and the question was hypothetical so 'see doctor' isn't an appropriate response. I did a little research and apparently cocaine isn't used for anything anti-inflammatory, only as an analgesic and vasodilator for nasal surgery in about 4-10% of operations. Many former cocaine users report stuffy noses, which could mean a lot of things, but seems to run counter to your theory. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 09:33, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, the worst think about the Reference desk are these stupid replies. --Taraborn (talk) 13:07, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Nah, the worst thing about the Reference Desk are the people who insist on having metadiscussions about the Desk on the Desk rather than on the talk page. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 17:23, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Nah, the worst thing are people who complain about meta-discussions! And people who complain about them, too! ;-) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:02, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

For those worried about it as a illegal narcotic, remember that cocaine was (and still is, in some places) used for medical purposes long before it became known for its 1980s-doing-blow-off-a-stripper's-back aspects. If I recall Wilhelm Fleiss used cocaine to treat a number of nasal issues; not sure if a blocked nose was one of them. If your nasal passage was sufficiently blocked you wouldn't be able to "snort" it as people do when they do it recreationally, but you might be able to get it up there some other way. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:02, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

A study of Cocaine#Chronic is instructive. The key line for me is "Due to the absorption of the cocaine from cocaine hydrochloride, the remaining hydrochloride forms a dilute hydrochloric acid". Rephrasing the question as "Doctor, Doctor, I've got a cold. Would stuffing dilute hydrochloric acid up my nose be an effective way of reducing inflammation of the nasal passages?" provides for a more intuitive answer. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:08, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, no...a lot of drugs are formulated as hydrochlorides: [1]. As they say, 'the dose makes the poison'. It's not implausible on its face that the effects (and side effects) of snorting two grand worth of cocaine off a hooker's ass every day might be different from the effects of a small amount delivered occasionally for nasal congestion. Note that I'm not saying that cocaine actually does help with allergies, but it's conceivable that exposure to a small amount of dilute acid might be a reasonable tradeoff to deliver a potent and effective drug. To take one example, oxymetazoline hydrochloride is used as a decongestant in nasal sprays. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 22:44, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

As someone responsible for consuming a large proportion of Colombian exports from the crevices of sundry harlots, I vigorously vouch for the efficacy of cocaine as a vasoconstrictor. But why stop there? Amphetamines work just as well, even alcohol can have similar effects in high dosages! Of course there may be side-effects such as dependence, arrhythmia, and early death. Pseudoephedrine remains the preferred treatment for a stuffy nose, as it lasts longer and is considerably cheaper (it even comes as a hydrochloride salt!). ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 23:07, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Wouldn't this count as medical advice? Cryo921 (talk) 03:19, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

No.¹ ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 06:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

ThinkGeek for Canadians?

Are there any online stores that sell similar merchandise to what ThinkGeek sells, but have more reasonable shipping charges for Canadian customers? (At ThinkGeek, shipping charges increase the bill by around 50% even for an order of over $100.) NeonMerlin 16:12, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Other than http://www.amazon.ca/ i can't think of anything. I'll continue searching though. Cryo921 (talk) 03:31, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Spice girls and Pavarotti

In the live performance of "Viva Forever" by the Spice Girls featuring Pavarotti ([2]), what are the lyrics that Pavarotti is singing during the chorus? Thanks. NB: Video is work-safe. Acceptable (talk) 17:16, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Ti aspetterò, io ci sarò 
se questo mare può liberare 
sarà così
sì, e con te volerò.

Need translation? ^^ Bye 87.2.49.169 (talk) 22:30, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

The translation like as below---

• Ti aspetterò = I'll wait for you
• Io ci sarò = I'll be here (it is not letteral translation)
• Se questo mare può liberare = If this sea can get free
• Sarà così = It will be so
• Sì = Yes
• E con te volerò = And I'll fly with you---

Cheers, Hérman

Car accident statistics.

I'm trying to track down some statistics I found a long while ago relating the probability of having a car accident to the distance travelled. I believe it showed that your chances of having an accident were about the same whether you were taking a quick trip of just a few miles or a long trip of a hundred miles - presumably because most accidents happen at junctions and such like and the number of those that you take is similar on long freeway trips and short ones.

But I need the actual statistics.

SteveBaker (talk) 18:57, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

This may help [3], Haven't checked it though. Cryo921 (talk) 03:23, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

SS Tobruk - fictional ship or real one?

As a kid I became acquainted with SS Tobruk having read this this fiction(alized?) book. I thought it was fictional but recently I run into some data that suggests it might not have been. See: "CONVOY QP14... S Tobruk, loaded with apetite, left Murmansk on 8th September for Archangel and joined the convoy. She had been under repair for 6 months after damage sustained in bombing attacks."'; "Convoy SL.178/MKS.69: Reports of Proceedings, 15 December 1944... At 1417A 9th SS TOBRUK (PS) hauled out of line to bury a deceased seaman. "; model of the ship; this is quite convincing. Based on that now I am becoming convinced it was a real ship (or an elaborate hoax/mistake), but comments are appreciated (and any other pages related to this ship you can find; I may stub it if I have enough material).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 23:44, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

We have articles on a couple of Australian shipe HMAS Tobruk and we have a redlink to a polish ship of the same name on the Tobruk (disambiguation) page. SteveBaker (talk) 04:46, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Note, the ship in question was SS Tobruk. Mjroots (talk) 04:04, 30 December 2009 (UTC)