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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

It's really scary how a tiny amount of a mineral can permanently damage the human mind. I have to admit there's a part of me that almost wants to be skeptical, that mg of a rock could overcome the wonderous self-aware human mind. Every so often I have to remind that skeptical piece of me that it's an idiot and that every human alive is wildly fragile to any number of elements and chemicals.

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Onto the article, if I ran a production software system, I'd be collecting data on the health of all my servers.

If I ran a country, I'd collect health data on all my towns (perhaps blood tests of 1% of the population each year).

Of course in malfunctioning environments, measurement is scary to leaders because it can give evidence that they aren't doing their job.

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Well as they say, an entire human body is just

> Water (35 L), Carbon (20 kg), Ammonia (4 L), Lime (1.5 kg), Phosphorous (800 g), Salt (250 g), Saltpeter (100 g), Sulfur (80 g), Fluorine (7.5 g), Iron (5 g), Silicon (3 g) and trace amounts of fifteen other elements.

(The amounts are off somewhat but you get the idea)

You got the recipe instructions or just ingredients?

1: Place 10e9 x ingredients on surface of habitable zone planet around young star.

2: Agitate water via tidal action, allow small amounts to dry and flood multiple times.

3: Add sunlight and electrical storms.

4: Wait 4 billion years.

You heathens do things so slowly. It takes a week and someone needs to find the apple snake. /s

For a given value of "week" ;)

You jest, but sometimes I wonder which is more likely.

Just reversed the downvote that was on yr comment because I interpreted it as not so much as saying the Bible story is what literally happened but that biogenesis feels very unlikely (even over billions of years). I feel similarly and my personal belief is that life has always existed and that it's fundamental to the universe.

https://mangadex.org/manga/dd8a907a-3850-4f95-ba03-ba201a839...

This list is a mix of chemical substances (e.g. water), categories of substances (e.g. salt) and elements (e.g. carbon), so it doesn't really make sense. It would make more sense to stick to elements, e.g. list hydrogen and oxygen instead of water.

Also, ammonia is very toxic and only exists in trace amounts in the body.

Apparently it's a quote from the manga series Fullmetal alchemist.

This. But compared to the fluorine, ammonia is not particularly toxic.

This leaves out the fact that attempting to make a human out of these just results in an abomination (and the ability to do alchemy without a transmutation circle).

Well yes and a processor is just a bunch of sand. It's the state and arrangement that matters.

Bags of mostly water, poking at rectangles of sand ... decorated with a bunch of information.

Ugly giant bags of mostly water!

You'd think the salt levels would be much higher.

> It's really scary how a tiny amount of a mineral can permanently damage the human mind.

It's scary how certain things in tiny amounts can have huge effects on humans:

- ricin (1mg or less can be lethal)

- insulin (.05 mL can easily put you in a coma if you don't eat enough sugar to cancel it out)

- countless other toxins, poisons, chemical compounds

- viruses or bacteria since they can multiply might be smallest things of all that can hurt humans

Also related: how much energy is stored in tiny amounts of matter. When fission bombs go off, only a tiny amount of matter is converted to pure energy.

Solutions to negative externalities are always hard. Testing is an inherent problem that can lead to accountability and demands for remediation or renumeration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Possible_solutions...

Wait until your realize botulinum toxin has an LD50 of just 3 ng/kg.

And that the spores are everywhere.

I have recently heard or read somewhere that 20mg of Botulinum Toxin is enough to kill the whole human population - multiple times.

Actually considering how functional humans can be with a little lead, we are quite robust.

I wonder why lead causes brain problems. I think it’s because lead in the brain affects electrons and neurons. Maybe lead is magnetic?

No, Lead is not magnetic to any significant degree.

What happens is that calcium is very important for your neurons to operate and signal each-other, and lead happens to be "close enough" that is competes/interferes with those mechanisms, gumming things up permanently.

This causes the cells and their connections to wither and die, or to fail to form properly at all.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/deadly-biology-lead-...

That is insightful

I know this always ventures into conspiracy territory, but this connection with aluminum’s affect on the brain is one of the most contentious issues around the topic of autism.

People have been asking for studies for over a decade and it’s been crickets.

Public Health agencies (at least in the US) collecting data about residents is a thing. People just get a little touchy about government programs collecting all this data ...

What? Public health agencies are "goverment programs."

Also: corporations lobby against funding / legislation / regulation for public health data collection - and then tell conservative voters it's about "their privacy."

Meanwhile, corporate America is selling literally every scrap of data it can to each other, LexisNexis, Palantir...

It's not just other corporations buying up that commercially available data; it's intelligence agencies and law enforcement, too.

Yes -- I wasn't implying that public health organzations != government.

And I know that (at least they're supposed to) government collected data has strict policies on handling + processing it, where as commercially available data is more "loosy-goosey". (Which, government has learned they can also use with little more than a polite word)

> If I ran a country, I'd collect health data on all my towns (perhaps blood tests of 1% of the population each year).

And maybe flag 0.1% of your population for lots of medical testing, for their whole lives. Partly to catch unsuspected stuff, partly to have really solid baseline statistics.

And if some of those those tests are widely know to be less-than-pleasant (bone marrow sampling, colonoscopy, etc.), and the busybodies & hypochondriacs find it easy to get on "the list" - that may increase citizen satisfaction with your heath care system. Both in those with more-is-better mindsets, and those too quick to imagine that the forbidden fruit is sweeter.

>and the busybodies & hypochondriacs find it easy to get on "the list"

If it's not a random sampling, is not nearly as useful.

True-ish. But:

- You're free to keep track of how each person ended up on the list

- Your supply of "random volunteers" for life-long medical testing may be limited

- The costs/benefits of being a health busybody or hypochondriac, in the context of a wide variety of diseases and maladies, is itself worth study

- At the "I run a country" level, ensuring long-term political support for good healthcare is as important as ensuring that your current healthcare system is good.

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