Vegetarians Screwed - Plants Talk to each Other

[voluptuary_manque]

Will my mighty .450 Rigby really be enough to defend against the notorius Venus Cow Trap?

 

[Corylea]

I'm a vegetarian because I don't feel that it's ethical for me to end the consciousness of another being, just so I can eat. (Notice that I said "for me" -- I know that this is a question about which reasonable people can differ.) Plants may "communicate," but that doesn't prove to me that they're conscious, whereas anyone who's ever had a dog knows that other mammals can certainly be conscious. I extend my ban to the whole animal kingdom, just to be on the safe side. Plus, it's a handy way out of eating such things as ants.

Of course, not conscious doesn't equal not divine, but then the rocks and the water are divine, too. And so am I, so I get to eat something.

God you turn me on.

As far as I can tell, that IS his purpose in life.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

As far as I can tell, that IS his purpose in life.

I wish

How do you know carrots aren't conscious?

 

[Corylea]

How do you know carrots aren't conscious?

They've never behaved like conscious beings in my presence. Yep, that's fuzzy, but then, [Ob Lit] so is the definition of pornography.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

They've never behaved like conscious beings in my presence. Yep, that's fuzzy, but then, [Ob Lit] so is the definition of pornography.

As long as the carrots aren't fuzzy, you're good.

 

[Corylea]

As long as the carrots aren't fuzzy, you're good.

Fuzzy carrots are safe from me!

 

[voluptuary_manque]

But not seeing the conciousness of carrots (or sequoias) is merely the result of a narrow, mammalian mind, no? It's like we didn't know they felt pain until we could detect the chemical communication they use. Just because we can't smell the distress in no way negates its existance.

 

[impressive]

We're floating in a sea of chemicals that different organisms give off to communicate with each other. The air is just full of them. The soil too.

That fresh-mown lawn smell? Those are coumarins. The same things that are in strawberries that give them the strawberry taste. Flower aromas are screaming to bees and moths to come fuck them and fertilize them, and other plants are spewing chemical toxins into the air telling predators to stay away. Your apples and bananas and most fruits sitting in the kitchen are giving off ethylene to ripen each other, the same stuff we make polyethykene plastic out of, as well as nitrous oxides, the gas that helps give men erections.

Not only do plants signal one another through the air, but they engage in chemical warfare too. The horse chestnut secretes (or secreted. They're almost all gone now) a toxin that kills the roots of other plants that try to grow near it. Milkweed sap is toxic to most bugs except for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, and pyrethrum and fleabane are natural insecticides.

Mexican yam has a chemical in it that's very close to the steroid estrogen. What's it doing there? No one has any idea. Nor does anyone know why plants produce substances that make human beings high, what possible evolutionary purpose they serve, why a chemical produced by a plant should affect a mammal's brain. Except in the case of the coffee, tea, tobacco, poppy and coca, which obviously have been selectively cultivated by human beings just for their drug content.

Wait! Nitrous oxide is boner-inducing? Why did I not know this? I suppose it makes sense now that I think about it. *ponders those whippets in the kitchen*

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Wait! Nitrous oxide is boner-inducing? Why did I not know this? I suppose it makes sense now that I think about it. *ponders those whippets in the kitchen*

Gee, if that's the case, what's the big deal about Viagra? Instead of waiting an hour after taking a pill, a feller could just take a big sniff of Nit Ox and have at it?

 

[Lisa Denton]

There's a scientist, Cleve Backster, who hooked up plants to a polygraph starting back in the late '60s. When he thought about harming them (either cutting or burning them) their reaction registered on the polygraph. When they were subjected to other negative stimuli (cold, lack of water) they did the same and it was measured. A group of people who were growing marijuana heard of his research and hooked their plants up to polygraphs too. The polygraph reacted to the plants' stress minutes before the police came and raided the place. You can read more about Backster's research here:

http://www.primaryperception.com/bio/

Why was the marijuana plants stressed, wouldn't they rather be thrown in jail than burned to death?

 

[Lisa Denton]

We're floating in a sea of chemicals that different organisms give off to communicate with each other. The air is just full of them. The soil too.

That fresh-mown lawn smell? Those are coumarins. The same things that are in strawberries that give them the strawberry taste. Flower aromas are screaming to bees and moths to come fuck them and fertilize them, and other plants are spewing chemical toxins into the air telling predators to stay away. Your apples and bananas and most fruits sitting in the kitchen are giving off ethylene to ripen each other, the same stuff we make polyethykene plastic out of, as well as nitrous oxides, the gas that helps give men erections.

Bananas give men erections?

They make my lips hard.

 

[Safe_Bet]

Gee, if that's the case, what's the big deal about Viagra? Instead of waiting an hour after taking a pill, a feller could just take a big sniff of Nit Ox and have at it?

You do know that nitrous oxide is the gas that they use for whipped cream right? If I were a guy I would be lugging 10 - 12 cans of that stuff into the bedroom as we speak!

 

[impressive]

You do know that nitrous oxide is the gas that they use for whipped cream right? If I were a guy I would be lugging 10 - 12 cans of that stuff into the bedroom as we speak!

<-- Has a whole case of those things for the whipped cream maker.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

You can buy cans of nitrous oxide? Wow!

 

[Safe_Bet]

You can buy cans of nitrous oxide? Wow!

Here you go Link

I'd say "knock yourself out, but...

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I've seen whipped cream canisters in my various cooking utensil catalog but never imagined . . .

Just -- WOW, that's all.

 

[scheherazade_79]

I'm so keeping this from my girlfriend... She eats little enough as it is

 

[Corylea]

You guys are probably all kidding, but just in case....

From Wikipedia:

"Users typically inflate a balloon or a plastic bag with nitrous oxide from a tank or a one-use 'charger', and then inhale the gas for its effects. Nitrous oxide expelled directly from a tank or canister is extremely cold, and would severely damage the user's lungs. Recreational users typically do not mix it with air or oxygen and thus may risk injury, or death from anoxia."

If anybody's tempted to experiment, be careful.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I'm now wary of tearing up my basil leaves for the tomato salad, I wonder if I can stun them first?

Back in the 70's there was a thing called Kirlian Photography that was all the rage in the psychic community. It involved taking photographs of plants by putting their leaves against a photographic plate and sending a high-frequency current through them. When you took a Kirlian photograph of a torn leaf, the image was of the entire, untorn leaf. Proponents said that the Kirlian photograph showed the "aura" or bioenergy field of the healthy leaf as it was supposed to be. If you kept on taking pictures, you'd observe the aura slowly fading away over a matter of hours to eventually show the torn leaf, going from a bright gold to a kind of dingy white.

The problem of leaf shape is a classic in biology, an exemplar of the general problem of biological morphology. How does a leaf know when to stop growing so as to have the shape that it does, or, for that matter, how do your fingers know when to stop growing (or your head or your dick, or any other part of an organism) The Kirlian people hypothesized that organisms grew to the outlines of their auras, like fitting a pre-existing pattern, and then stopped, so the discovery of the Kirlian aura was a big deal for these fringe scientists. It was never accepted by mainstream science.

Of course, the discovery of an aura also had big implications for Spiritualism and psychics in general.

Unfortunately, the high frequency current you needed for Kirlian photography was lethal, so you couldn't try it on animals. No animal auras were ever observed, that i know of. Most of the research was done in the USSR.

Anyone know what ever happened to this theory or to Kirlian photography in general? I lost track of the whole phenomenon just when mainstream science was starting to investigate, but the whole thing was pretty fascinating.

 

[infinity706]

Gee, if that's the case, what's the big deal about Viagra? Instead of waiting an hour after taking a pill, a feller could just take a big sniff of Nit Ox and have at it?

That is how Viagra works.

 

[Safe_Bet]

From Wikipedia:

"Users typically inflate a balloon or a plastic bag with nitrous oxide from a tank or a one-use 'charger', and then inhale the gas for its effects. Nitrous oxide expelled directly from a tank or canister is extremely cold, and would severely damage the user's lungs. Recreational users typically do not mix it with air or oxygen and thus may risk injury, or death from anoxia."

If anybody's tempted to experiment, be careful.

No worries here. For me it's all about the whipped cream!

On the other hand, I'd sure like to hook up with Lisa & Imp. First to Lisa's to help burn some of her marijuana to death, then off to Imp's for strawberry shortcake when we get the munchies! Strictly in the interest of scientific research mind you.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

You do know that nitrous oxide is the gas that they use for whipped cream right? If I were a guy I would be lugging 10 - 12 cans of that stuff into the bedroom as we speak!

Yeah, if you can get the gas into the intercellular fluid where it has to be to do its work. They were amazed to find that Nitrous oxide is an intercellular communicator. Not only is it very short lived in the blood, but it's better known as laughing gas: inhaling it makes you high. It's a neurotransmitter as well. A nitrous-oxide mediated set of reactions is what causes the veins in the penis to dilate causing an erection, and ripening fruit gives off traces of nitrous.

Nitro-organics seem to dilate blood vessels in general. that's why they give you nitroglycerin for a heart attack, or amyl nitrite ("poppers") for heart trouble too.

The amino acid argenine is what your body uses to produce the nitrous in your bloodstream, though, so you're better off popping a hundred grams of argenine or so a couple hours before sex if you want to help sustain an erection. Unfortunately, it's not the argenine that's the rate-limiting step in the boner reaction, though, but the enzyme that converts the argenine into the nitrous oxide, and there's no easy way to increase that. Viagra and Cialis and those work by blocking the chemical that deactivates the Nitrous-creating enzyme, allowing more nitrous to build up.

 

[impressive]

From Wikipedia:

"Users typically inflate a balloon or a plastic bag with nitrous oxide from a tank or a one-use 'charger', and then inhale the gas for its effects. Nitrous oxide expelled directly from a tank or canister is extremely cold, and would severely damage the user's lungs. Recreational users typically do not mix it with air or oxygen and thus may risk injury, or death from anoxia."

If anybody's tempted to experiment, be careful.

Yeah, when you charge the whipped cream dispenser, it's almost too cold to touch for a few seconds.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

From Wikipedia:

"Users typically inflate a balloon or a plastic bag with nitrous oxide from a tank or a one-use 'charger', and then inhale the gas for its effects. Nitrous oxide expelled directly from a tank or canister is extremely cold, and would severely damage the user's lungs. Recreational users typically do not mix it with air or oxygen and thus may risk injury, or death from anoxia."

If anybody's tempted to experiment, be careful.

I've been to nitrous parties, and they're a a lot of fun. We used both a tank with a mask and regulator and the balloon method. You used to be able to get the gas from welding supply houses. The gas gets you very high, though, and you have to be careful. You can seriously hurt yourself by falling down or walking into a wall and not know it because you're pretty dead to pain. You have to be careful to mix the gas with air too, because inhaling pure nitrous will simply suffocate you, but that's really not that dangerous if you're using the balloon method, because you'd simply pass out from anoxyia and start breathing on your own. At least, that's the way we used to look at it. Someone has to stay straight and watch everyone though.

Even so, the nitrous doesn't stay in your bloodstream very long. Once you stop breathing it, in a minute or two you're stone cold sober again, which is good. No hangover, no lingering high. I certainly didn't notice any spontaneous erections or anything. But then, laughing and erections never did go together in my experience.

I've had Viagra too, and I can tell you that spontaneous erections don't happen with vitamin V either. You have to be engaged in erotic behavior.

A more dramatic example of the blood vessel-dilating power of organic nitro compounds is amyl nitrite (incorrectly called "amyl nitrate") or "poppers", which were popular with the gay crowd during the disco era. These were glass ampoules that were crushed in the fingers releasing the volatile chemical that then was inhaled and would cause a sudden, extreme, orgasmic rush. They opened up every vessel in the body and you felt like you were flying or the top of your head was coming off. I didn't care for these at all, but a lot of guys liked them during sex to heighten orgasm. They were super intense. I think they still sell them in the backs of magazines. The stuff is super easy to make.

 

[Corylea]

[teasing on]

Whoa, Doc, have you become undead or something? That new AV makes it look like you've got green mold growing on your face. When you've been dead long enough to grow mold, you're really dead!

[teasing off]