Page 1 of 1

becoming stupid

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 12:43 am
by Tahrey1043
i dont like this, i think my mind is breaking down, like suffering little strokes or cjd or something thick like that.

just noticing it a bit in my typing - words are coming out wrong and i'm only noticing later. like "collect" becomes "college", innumerate S's become D's and the other way round, and plenty other 'confused' words.

didn't used to happen. i wonder if i've got any in this post that i'm not realising. almost spelt "any" as "eny" there.

ed psych i saw recently said there was nothing wrong with my raw mental ability, but my command of recall from long term memory and expression in writing was pretty damn poor... it was perfectly fine in schooldays however.

roll on stem cell medicine to regenerate those ol' nerves.


yeah i know this post hasnt really got a point, but in case im no longer able to communicate tomorrow i'd like to get this sh*t down.

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 2:13 am
by Babe RuthLess
I guess that happens with all of us after a certain age (and a certain amount of time being part of the 'drinking population').

Also, maybe computers and the internet have something to do with loss of cognitive capacity (if that's the right name!).

I've been noticing (from my posts here and on other forums - or is that in other forums? "On" sounds better I guess) that I'm forgetting the English language - even though I read in English every bloody day, from the internet as well as proper books.

I know this is natural - since I'm not living in an English-speaking country and all - but I thought this was supposed to be a slow process.

It's been 9 years since I lived in an "English" country (Australia) and five years since I've visited one (the U.S.) though.

I meet english-speaking tourists and students all the time, but I feel this extreme lazyness when it comes to speaking a foreign language with foreing tourists while I'm in Brazil. Maybe that's a sign. I'm afraid I might scare them with an increasingly poor accent.

Anyway, this process has been speeding up recently. I'm afraid I won't be able to post in few months if this goes on (a reason for celebration maybe).

Still, Tahrey, don't feel alone in your brain damage.

We're all either losing skill we used to have, or maturing into the realization that we never possessed them in the first place (in spite of evidence to the contrary, as is the case with my once-famed capacity to pick up girls. Maybe it was all an illusion cause by alcohol and my friends' own inadequacy. I did enjoy it while it lasted tho).

Don't despair, and avoid laboratory chemicals as much as your profession allows! :D

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:55 am
by ste mk1lx
Tahrey it may be that you post late and are thus tired or your just mis-hitting the keyboard s & d are pritty close to each other :lol: . then again how many burgers do you eat? if it's a lot then you may have gone slightly :x

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 10:05 am
by 13twelve
i wouldnt worry about it mate


so what typing into the text boxes on a message board has now become a concious effort


or it might just be you post messages to here in a chatty informal, as you would to your mates, kinda fashion - where you speak by type as you would in dialect and slang by aural means.


i certainly have "client email mode" and "mates email mode"

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 3:29 pm
by dub envy
persoannly I blame cannabis for my lack of concentration and crap typing.

My left hand always wants to type 'a' randomly in words. I have to edit my posts soooo many times it's stupid.

My spelling is becoming worse with age.

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 11:41 am
by Tahrey1043
i was thinking along those lines, but its more of a constant thing - it happens when doing reports throughout the day at work etc (luckily i re-read it and use a spell checker). plus an educational psychologist telling me that my writing skill in that area is in the bottom 1% is worrying when i managed a GCSE B grade in english at 16, which is basically the same thing in a large part.

not many burgers ...... but i suppose there HAS been quite a lot of dangerous chemicals in my life upto and including yesterday! Chemistry and biology lessons... excess alcohol and (small amounts of) very very poor quality pot at uni... more chemistry lessons and 6 months of doing a plant experiment in a lab with all kinds of nasty smelling toxic things... and a job where lots of radiation is involved
all the tesco value / asda smartprice / Lidl 'n' Aldi munch cant have helped neither ;)

its not really a concious effort, just like talking (which IS an effort half the time) should be it normally just flows out. its when its flowing out wrong on a regular basis when you've been typing perfectly fine for >10 years it becomes a concern

:D wow managed to write that without spotting anything wrong (still plent of backspacing) ... wonder what i missed

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 4:39 pm
by Babe RuthLess
I wouldn't worry about the radiation. It's the chemicals that can cause the sort of brain damage we're talking about. :D

And since radiation was mentioned, here's an interesting site (which may or may not be of urban legend extraction): http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 11:20 pm
by Tahrey1043
Interesting how Chernobyl means Wormwood... which is associated with the book of revelations. People really should do their biblical research before deciding where to locate dangerous things!

And how you can drive through it relatively safely already... so long as you straddle the centre line.

and of course, just how much radiation it actually does take to kill you. a page like that would pretty much kill all mobile phone emissions arguments dead in the water.
(an average mobile is less dangerous emissions wise than an aging tube television... guess which of those most parents get upset about?)

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 12:03 am
by Babe RuthLess
Tahrey1043 wrote:Interesting how Chernobyl means Wormwood... which is associated with the book of revelations. People really should do their biblical research before deciding where to locate dangerous things!
Actually, that was a wrong translation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl

Still, it's a dangerous place.

As for the dangers, I've found an interesting (scientific) take on the subject: http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/chernobyl/wildlifepreserve.htm

All in all, I'd avoid chemicals rather than small doses of radiation. Well, perhaps both if I can (better buy an LCD monitor for the PC then! :D )

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:18 am
by Tahrey1043
wikipaedia, ah, is there nothing you dont know :D

wow, that nuclear "accident" (looting) in Goiânia was pretty wild... what kind of nob jockey nuclear clinician goes and leaves that kind of stuff around in a hospital that's being shut down?

lesson to be learnt there - anything so radioactive that it actually glows, apart from the miniscule slivers of paint on a watch face, is something you really don't want to see, let alone touch. jeez. glad that X-ray depts are almost completely moved over from cobalt-60 "bomb" sources to on-demand linear accelerators now... otherwise there could be a lot more of that going on ... and every hospital (in the UK and US anyway) would have an armed guard around it's Xray and Radiotherapy departments.

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:28 am
by dxg
Tahrey,

Now I know what to buy you for Christmas...
http://www.boysstuff.co.uk/product.asp?id=10705&cid=2 :wink:

Deek.

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 2:32 am
by Babe RuthLess
Tahrey1043 wrote:wow, that nuclear "accident" (looting) in Goiânia was pretty wild... what kind of nob jockey nuclear clinician goes and leaves that kind of stuff around in a hospital that's being shut down?
Hehe, I was just a kid when that Goiânia thing happened but it appears that the clinic went bankrupt and nobody wanted to pay for the removal of the X-ray equipment (or was it radiotherapy equipent? I wouldn't know, I was 8 at the time!), including the government. Since then they've become very strict with radiation sources (or so we're told). And as you said, technology has moved on.

Anyway, soon after the accident one of my friends moved to Goiânia and we still joke to this day that he's suffered mutations. Mind you, he's doing his maters degreen in Japan now (Godzilla country), and it's about 4G cell phones or something. So he's still on the subject of radiation. :D

The whole Goiânia thing happened just a year after Chernobyl, and to this day I wonder if the people involved were indeed from this planet, because radiation, Chernobyl, glowing stuff and the like were all over the news back then. So if people found a radioactive capsule, or if they just as much as thought you saw something glowing, chances were they'd run off screaming and someone would blame "the communists" for it (we'd just come out of a bloody, anti-communist 20-year-long right-wing dictatorship in 1985).

Heck, my dad is a biologist and back then people would ask him (for some unknown reason, maybe because they just included biologists in a generic "scientist" class) if Chernobyl would affect us on the other side of world!

As for wikipaedia, its articles kept coming up on my google searches. Now there's no urban legend I don't know :D

I try to keep off from it though, since I innocently tried to join a discussion about the "Portuguese Language" entry and had to endure several foreign-born idiots trying to convince me I didn't speak Portuguese, but "Brazilian" (which is the same as telling an American that they speak "American", etc.). Silly stuff.

BTW, joining that sort of discussion is another indication is a cognitive deficit. I really am becoming stupid. :(

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 2:39 am
by Babe RuthLess
dxg wrote:Tahrey,

Now I know what to buy you for Christmas...
http://www.boysstuff.co.uk/product.asp?id=10705&cid=2 :wink:

Deek.
Blimey!: "Please note: Unfortunately we cannot sell Glowrings to customers outside of the UK. This is because laws governing the use of radioactive materials differ dramatically from country to country."

No wonder they call it serious fun.

Oh well. As long as the importer pays all import duties and taxes (which is what the Brazilian goverment is interested in) I think you can import an ICBM into the country and nobody would care. Wouldn't be used here anyway, you see.

(You wouldn't want to turn into a nuclear wasteland the country you escape to if you did something wrong)

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 5:51 am
by Tahrey1043
christ almighty beware of wiki, it will kill your brain