If that’s something that regularly happens in the US, do you have any examples from the last decade, instead of three examples from 55-60 years ago?

I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.

LD50 is specifically a dose that kills 50% of the subjects.

Lower doses can kill, just less than 50% of people.

More than 1200 mg of pure THC, or 1200mg of cannabis leaves?

Those aren’t even remotely the same thing, in the same way that 12oz of beer and 12oz of everclear are very different, or 1g of pure nicotine is very different than 1g of tobacco leaves.

Not to mention, LD50 is about a single dose. There’s a big difference between taking one shot an hour for 16 hours straight, and chugging 16 shots in one go.

16.5 mg is 16500 μg. So a 70kg person would need over 1 million μg.

According to https://www.trippingly.net/lsd/the-lsd-dosage-guide, 25 μg is where visual effects start.

700 to 1000 μg. Full out-of-body experiences. Synesthesia more likely. Religious imagery often strong. Entire loss of rationality, lack of ability to walk or interact in any meaningful way.

1500 μgs+ Experiences may be similar to DMT but extended. Basic body functions are challenging. Vision is consumed by hallucinations. No sense of self remains. Audio hallucinations may be strong. Standard reality no longer applies. Merging with objects likely. No type of rational thought left.

A deadly dose is around 800x higher than that. You wouldn’t be as high as a kite. You’d be as high as Voyager one.

Also: notice the LD50 for vitamin D is 37mg/kg.

Based on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8709011/, a therapeutic regime for very low vitamin D levels is taking 6k IU per day for 3 months, or 50k IU once a week for 2 months.

1 IU is 0.025 μg, or 0.000025 mg. 50k IU is 1.25 mg.

I buy bottles of 5k IU vitamin D pills. Each bottle has 90 pills. That’s 11.25 mg of vitamin D per bottle. I’d need to take well over 200 bottles of these pills to have a 50% chance of dying.

Yes, an objectively small amount of purified vitamin D will kill you. But it’s quite safe in practice because the environment only has objectively tiny amounts of the stuff. Even high dose pills contain a tiny amount of the stuff.

Keep in mind: a single extra strength Tylenol is 500mg. A standard dose for a headache is 2 pills, or 1000mg.

Weed gummies come in doses of 1mg to 100mg. 1mg is a microdose people might take for mild pain or stress, while 50+mg is a dose for cancer patients often take. A standard dose for occasional recreational highs is 5mg; they recommend first timers start at 2.5mg.

LD50 compares things by weight, rather than dose. By weight, THC is slightly more toxic than acetaminophen. But in terms of the number of therapeutic doses it takes to kill you, it’s way, way safer.

LD50 is usually determined using rodent studies. How much Vitamin D causes an overdose in half of a population of mice?

The dose makes the poison.

And with drug safety, in practice LD50 is less important than how close a therapeutic dose is to a lethal one. If a drug takes 2g/kg to kill you but you need 1g/kg to work, that’s way more dangerous than one that takes .02g/kg to kill you but only needs .0002g/kg to work.

One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.

One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.

One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.

English definitely has rules.

It’s why you can’t say something like “girl the will boy the paid” to mean “the boy is paying the girl” and have people understand you.

Less vs fewer, though, isn’t really a rule. It’s more an 18th century style guideline some people took too seriously.

No.

There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.

For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.

Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.

It’s not that there’s anything unnatural about water. It’s just not a remedy for anything but dehydration.

If you’d like to look up more about the origins of PIE, look up the Kurgan Hypothesis, which suggests that Proto-Indoeuropean originated on the steppes.

Basically everything we know about PIE, we know from looking at its descendants. If a word appears in multiple unrelated branches, it’s probably from the common ancestor. Particularly if there’s consistent sound changes on one or more branches.

For example, it seems that a lot of PIE words with a p morphed into f in germanic languages. So, given the English father, Dutch Vader, Old Saxon fadar, Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita, etc. we can figure out that father goes back to some original PIE word which was probably something like pəter.

Similarly, we see similar words for salmon both in Germanic and Slavic. And in the extinct Tocharian language, the word for fish in general was laks. Lox originating only 1500 years ago means that the Slavic and Tocharian would be a pretty strange coincidence.

The Italian word for earth is la terra, while in Spanish it’s la tierra.

Does it make any sense to say that one language had it first? Both are directly from Latin terra.

English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. all descend from a common ancestor, Proto- Germanic. There’s a lot of vocabulary they all inherited from it.

8k years ago, the distant ancestor of English was spoken on the steppes of Ukraine.

Their word for salmon was laks.

That became the English lox, Swedish lax, German lachs, Lithuanian lašiša, Russian losos, and Polish łosoś.

Yes, English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Instead, there was a language called Proto-Indoeuropean spoken on the steppes of Ukraine. Just like how Latin spread and local dialects slowly became Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., PIE spread out and its descendants became Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, German, etc.

Part of what happened over time was sound shifts. For example, PIE p morphed into an f in Proto-Germanic. Father and the Latin word pater go back to the same PIE root word, but father exhibits the sound change of p -> f you saw in Germanic languages.

Similarly, Spanish has a sound change where f changed into h. So the Latin word fabulari (to chat) became hablar in Spanish and falar in Portuguese.

The point of the article is that the PIE word for salmon, laks, by random chance didn’t really morph much in Germanic languages. So you have lax, lox, lachs, etc.

Interestingly, the Old English word for salmon was leax, and that made its way into Middle English and early Modern English as lax. It died out in favor of the French-derived salmon, and then we borrowed lox back from Yiddish.

It’s like if beef entirely replaced cow, then we borrowed back koe or kuh from Dutch or German.

Ah, yes, that’s why the French still speak perfect Latin.

Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They’re useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.

But we generally haven’t been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.

Yep, 8,000 years ago laks meant any type of fish, living or prepared food.

Citation?

From what I’ve seen, 8000 years ago it meant salmon. Today, in English it means smoked salmon.

It’s a surprisingly minor shift for 8k years.

Which is why it’s one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn’t even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it’s a slang language.

Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?

Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They’ve basically always been tilting at windmills.

Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it’s something that’s been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.

According to etymonline,

Lax. Noun. “salmon,” from Old English leax (see lox). Cognate with Middle Dutch lacks, German Lachs, Danish laks, etc.; according to OED the English word was obsolete except in the north and Scotland from 17c., reintroduced in reference to Scottish or Norwegian salmon.

It’s weird in that lax died ~400 years ago, then was borrowed back ~100 years ago into American English from Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

It’s a weird loanword in that it was a loaned obsolete word that underwent some semantic narrowing in the loan.