Aspartame is bad for you...

[deknow]

howard, i hope this isn't bad feelings (there are none on my side). i've been frustrated, but not mad. i've persued this because it is important, and this was a valuable discussion to take place.

imho, i think there is too much editing allowed on this forum as it is. the discussions speak for themselves and tell a story that can't be better told by changing the text. it sometimes makes it confusing to follow a line of reasoning when someone changes their story after the fact (and it can make people look bad unfairly). one can always make another posting correcting themselves, i don't see a good reason to change the original...it reminds me of 1984 where old newspapers are editited so as not to contradict what is happening (or being claimed to happen) in the present.

deknow (i know this emoticon doesn't fit anything in the post, but i've been dying to use it)

[mosc]

OK, Deknow. Good input. I'm not changing the first topic, just posting a notice in case someone reads it and doesn't bother with the rest of the posts.

It's amazing how we pass along things without verifying them. I am obviously guilty of this.

In an open forum like this there is a form of democratic oversight going on; there is some chance that erronious information gets identified. In more personal one-on-one communications (email and talking) these things can spead unchecked.

[Dovdimus Prime]

Wow! I hang around with grown-ups!

One day, I might see if I can osmose some of that.

[Ponk]

Well, that'll be the day.

[Dovdimus Prime]

Immaturity and optimism go hand-in-hand I guess...

[dmosc]

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/klaxon.htm

you know, it really is a disease more than a virus. There is quite a long history of people deciding it upon themselves that "the world is coming to an end" or "rapure is upon us" or "aliens have landed". The causes range from individuals refusing to accept fact to confused attempts at humor. Either way, they seem to spread through the human desire to "put the word out". The more shocking and horrific the story the better.

Michael Moore is right about one thing. One of the sillyiest things you'll hear on the nightly news has got to be:
"stay tuned, what you don't know might kill you"

from "jungle music" to "killer bees", there's nothing that gets us going like a scientifically unsubstantiated life threatening hoax with dramatic flair.

[Dovdimus Prime]

What's the 'jungle music' hoax?

[Ponk]

[Dovdimus Prime]

I feel I would be slighting Mosc somehow if I didn't go OT from time to time. Arbitrary threads are another one of my ways of honouring The Big Bleep.

[mosc]

[Agnes]

Speaking of bees...

This little blurb was on the local 11PM news on Sun night. I got the station to send me the text.

A HOUSTON NEIGHBORHOOD WAS BUZZING YESTERDAY -- LITERALLY!
80 THOUSAND BEES WERE SWARMING AN ENTIRE 2 BLOCK AREA!
THE BEES ESCAPED FROM THE WALLS OF A HOME, AFTER BEEKEEPERS ARRIVED TO REMOVE A NEST.
BUT IT WASN'T AN ORDINARY NEST!
IT WAS HUGE -- AT LEAST 4 FEET WIDE.
AND, WORKERS REMOVED 1-HUNDRED-60 POUNDS OF HONEY!
FAMILIES IN A HALF-MILE RADIUS WERE TOLD TO STAY INDOORS -- AND ROADS WERE BLOCKED OFF.
THE BEEKEEPERS SAY THE HIVE HAD BEEN IN THE HOME FOR AT LEAST 2 YEARS!

They had a video clip with it and one of beekeepers said something about killer bees...

[deknow]

this is not an unusal number of bees (in fact, i expect that at least 1/2 the colony already swarmed to make a new hive if there were only 80,000 bees), and we generally leave about 60-80lbs of honey for winter in the hives....so 160lbs is not unusal for a colony that isn't having it's honey taken by people.

an interesting side note. langstroth (who devised the modern hive where the bees don't have to be killed to take the honey) went a little crazy on the bee thing. he became obsessed, and eventually not only had to give up beekeeping, but also reading (as the letter "b" fueled his obsession). this always reminded me of schubert (or schuman...i can never keep them straight) being obsessed by one note.

deknow

[mosc]

Bees Rookie of the Year Returns


HIDALGO, TX: July 26, 2005  The Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees of the Central Hockey League welcomed another returning player to their 2005-2006 roster with the re-signing of forward Daymen Bencharski.

see: http://www.killerbeehockey.com/kb_news.cfm?sid=306

(This one is really for Seraph.)

[seraph]

[mosc]

Au contraire, mon ami. You are just very special at finding different ways to look at a topic.

[deknow]

here is a link to the (self published, non peer reviewed) italian study, i finally found it.

http://www.dorway.com/aspartame_study_14july2005.pdf

i see several problems with the study, including that although the feed consumption per rat was fairly steady (and the aspartame concentrtion in the feed was constant), the mg of aspartame/kg body weight was calculated based on the average weight of the individual rats from 8 weeks to death. this seems to mean that when they started to consume the aspartame, they were about 1/2 the weight of their lifetime average...meaning that at 8 weeks of age, they were consuming twice the stated (average) mg/kg of body weight. perhaps this is standard for such tests (i have no idea), but it seems weird to me.

deknow

[Dovdimus Prime]

Deknow, I am simply dying to know. What kind of life leads one to know so much about pharmaceuticals and bees?!

Please don't leave me in ignorance!!

[deknow]

the bees are easy to explain...in 2000, my gf (ramona) read a book called "the world of bees", and said that's what she wanted for her birthday. she did a little reasearch and discoverd that the local bee club had "bee school". it was 10 sessions and cost $30. being the pessimist i am, i assumed it was $30/session (and i was hoping that we didn't have to each pay). nervously, we went on the first day (i with $300/cash in my pocket..which was more than i wanted to spend)...when we arrived, i realized that it was $10 for all the session for both of us (as a familly...actually there were 3 of us, our dachshund came as well). i couldn't believe (and still can't) what a good deal this is (the program director is a 5th generation bee keeper who coincedently was a high school chemistry student of ramona's father, and most of the "students" were retired, and experienced bee keepers themselves). as with many passions, "ask 10 beekeepers how to do something and you will get 15 opinions" is about right, so talking and learning from a large group of people is really importnat...there is no set way to do things...there is much of an art to it. it took a couple of years before i was really comfortable around the bees (and i still really don't like getting stung...unlike the oldtimers, i'm chicken). there are several bee diseases that have been really difficult for everyone to deal with (mostly because all of the "research" is conducted in universitys and funded by "industry" designed to maximize honey production and pollination, with little thought given to what is good for the bees until they die from chemical resistent pests...not unlike other agracultural areas).

a couple of years ago, ramona attended a biodynamic beekeeping course (rudolph steiner gave many lectures on bees specifically, and predicted many of the problems that now exist). i'm not much for many of the biodynamic farming things (planting by the moon, using variouse mixtures of dried bood, powdered bone, etc in the soil), but the beekeeping stuff makes sense to me. it used to be (20 years ago) that people collected wild swarms, and without any special attention hives were about 85% likely to survive the winter...with the mites (both varroa and trachial), this is no longer the case, and many beekeepers have quit keeping bees because the losses over the winter are staggering (some very smart commercail outfits with thousands of hives have lost 85-90% over the winter in recent years), and for pollination purposes, there is a shortage, and pallets of hives are being reported stolen because those with fruit crops must have them, and the people they contract with just don't have the bees. feral hives have all but died out (with some evedence they are starting to recover), and the number of beekeepers is dwindling because it is so hard to keep them alive.

we now have 4 hives in the backyard, and i have volunteered to help out at a local organic farm that is run mostly by volunteers (and kids who get into legal trouble and want to stay out of "system" who are given the oppurtunity to work on the farm instead)...the food grown goes to the local foodbanks and soup kitchens (the quality of the vegtables is amazing). the director (who is a friend, and who had been managing the bees) has just moved to colorado with his familly to buy their own farm, and no one else there really knows very much about how to manage the bees. as the pollination is important for growing things (although honey bees are not native to the americas, they have displaced many of the native pollinators to the point where they are not really around anymore, and any farming gets hugely increased yeilds when bees are present), i expect being able to keep bees might be a (financially) valuble skill in the years to come. most farmers used to keep their own bees, but since the mites and other diseases, they simply require too much attention at exactly the same time the farm needs attention, so this has fallen out of fashon. i'm looking into various ways to make this more than a hobby (besides by managing and trucking around hundreds or thousands of hives)....maintaining hives in peoples gardens or farms for them, teaching, breeding, inventing beekeeping products, etc are all things i'm interested in.

anyone who is near boston (or visiting) is more than welcome to come and put on a veil and go inside, or even just have some coffee while wathcing them do their thing...it's facinating (at least to me). if anyone is interested in keeping bees themselves (you can do so almost anywhere...even in cities) please let me know, i'll help out in any way i can.


as for the pharmicuticals, i did spend my first year at college as a biology major...but realized that i really didn't want to go to grad school, and a bio undergrad degree really doesn't get you much more than any other liberal arts degree does (at least in the states)...so i switched to music, as almost all of the required course load i wanted to fit in as electives anyways. interestingly, there was an electronic music studio (this is in 87) with a kurzweil 250, emulator, and various other goodies that i never took advantage of...i was studying saxophone, and working at flute factories in the summers (boston is the center of handmade flutes). making instruments was my goal (and i made high end piccolos for 4 years after college). then, like a scene from "joes garage", i started going to raves (where most of my musicaian friends would not go). i started going durring the week as well as the weekends, and decided that the piccolo businsess was kind of irrelevant to modern music (i became somewhat obsessed by the idea that very few of these $4,000 piccolos would ever play anything written by someone that was alive...and the piccolo music being written by alive people generally sucked...the techno i was hearing was "what is relevant now in music"). also, besides smoking pot and drinking some mushroom tea once (not very much), i had avoided drugs up until this point....i had my burst of experementation from the age of 27 to 30something (this is differant than doing all this stuff in college or highschool, or junior high...where most of the ravers i was hanging out with were at). wanting to be informed about what i was taking, and being a new convert to the internet, i did a lot of reading online and in books....i was just dumb enough to try just about everything i could get my hands on (dust is not recomended), and just smart enough to keep my head about me and to stay informed about what i was doing.

as far as the aspartame study goes, i was just willing to read it (not an easy read), and see what the glaring strange things were (like that the mg/kg figure was based on an average), and look at the data to realize that the rats ate about the same ammount regardless of their weight, and that the concentration of aspartame was constant....my brain just seems able to pinpoint these thise things quickly.

well....that's probably more than you wanted to hear, but it's my story...and i'm sticking to it!

deknow

[Dovdimus Prime]

Wow! Thanks for the info! You have approximately 000'ed my knowledge of bees. Despite knowing (at least previously) very little about them, I think bees are bloody great. I have a soft spot for all social insects really, them's some damn interesting little buggers. Watching streams of ants pouring out from a nest, working in lines, or bees floating in clouds around a hive or nest is cool.

I know very little about pharmacology, which is kind of ironic really considering I enrolled on a pharmacology degree. Three years later and it seemed I had kind of avoided the pharmacology stuff and leant more towards the genetics/protein side of biology, so my degree title changed to suit. I could probably just about hold my own in a conversation about that side of things.

I've only dabbled in drugs myself, I found I never really got on with them that well. I still get really sentimental about the pleasure of stuffing my face when really stoned though. Nowt like it!

So are you still a bit of a raver then? If you produce music, are you at the techno end of things?

Sorry if this seems like a private conversation... dive in people!

[dmosc]

[mosc]

[Agnes]

Bees, wasps, yellow jackets-Whats the diff? They all sting!

I find watching social insects fascinating too, as long as they are not in my house!

I had an interesting experience last year.

For some unknown reason, one day, both wasps and yellow jackets decided that the space between my front door and the storm door was an ideal place to be. I also discovered that my storm door was locked and the only way I could avoid having the wasps and yellow jackets get into my house, was to have a neighbor (I live alone) open the storm door after I dropped the key out the window. A few enterprising wasps managed to find there way into my house via the mail slot!

We later found a small wasp nest on the door frame, but why the yellow jackets were there too, we never found out.

[mosc]

My wife, Juli, got stung by a yellow jacket on a trip to California. Here face was swollen up for several weeks. She looked dreadful. Since then, I've been worried about her getting stung again. Will the next bite (G-d forbid) be more or less serious?

[deknow]

a few stinging insect facts:

1. unlike yellowjackets and wasps (who are likely to sting aggresively), honeybees have barbed stingers (except the queen, and she rarely stings humans, and is only out of the hive for one mating flight in her lifetime of up to 3-4 years), and almost always when they sting, the stinger is lodged in the "singee", and the bee pulls it's own entrails out when flying off...leaving the stinger in and killing the bee. it is best to both get the stinger out quickly (as 80% of the venom is released in the first few seconds), and to do so without squeezing the venom sac (which you can see pumping venom into you for at least 30sec....i've had old time beekeeers show me this up close on their own arms...i think they are crazy!). the best way to do this is with a fingernail or credit card, scraping along the skin under the stinger. since bees die when they sting, they are very reluctant to do so (only to protect themselves or their hives)...of course your idea of what is legitimate self defense might be differant from theirs, but in general, "don't bother them, and they won't sting you" is pretty accurate. ramona and i often drink our morning coffee only a few feet from the hive entrance. yellow jackets are often confused with honeybees (the coloring is similar, but honeybees have "fur", and yellowjackets are shiny all over).

2. an intense localized reaction is generally not very dangerous (even if it looks scary...when ramona gets stung on the arm, her arm looks like a sausage for days,and her hand a big mitten. my stings stop hurting in a day, but a couple of days later come back as an intense itch). if you swell up somewhere other than adjacent to the sting, or if it is a "centralized" reaction (your throat if you are not stung near there), then there is a danger of anaphaxisis. there are aparantly ways for allergists to reduce reactions (with small ammounts of bee venom injected repeatedly), but i have no experience with this. if you are afraid of anaphaxisis, you can carry an epi-pen (prescription in the states) which is epinephrin injection that you can do yourself. this should always be as part of going to the hospital, and is not a cure in itself. julie might want to get tested to see what kind of allergy she has so she can be prepared. (and bee and wasp venom are differant). all that said, if the inflamation from a local reaction is sever, you should see a doctor for a prednisone injection (something to avoid in general, but not if you need it).

i do have a frame in which i mounted an xy microphone pair, but i haven't had it in the hives for a while...i'll try to get it in there soon and post some recordings (it's great with headphones....like having your head in the hive).

deknow

[mosc]

Thanks, Deknow. Juli's was fortunately a local reaction - apparently a good thing. I would like to hear recordings of the bees.