Salamander
- 51 Posts
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Looking through the archived history of the talk page, I can confirm that the claim on the wiki page is derived from the viral post, and not the other way around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gulf_of_Mexico/Archive_3#Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl
How did I miss that?!
My timeline is incorrect then. Since the post from sassymetischick.bsky predates the wiki edit, it is more likely that the wiki edit was made in response to this meme, and not the other way around. This pretty invalidates what I said above…
I still can’t find any evidence of this being an actual trend, but I no longer have a good guess about the origin.
Cuando quieras! 😁
Yes, but that version is in German. That website also has one in English: https://annas-archive.org/slow_download/24154814bfe1e676d79509c3db1f74a4/0/0
Let’s see…
Woah, interesting. The author is José López Portillo. I thought he shared the name with a former Mexican president, but, nope, the author is a former Mexican president.
The title of the English version is a bit different, but the text appears to be the same. It is a novel, and I can find no mention of the gulf of Mexico or of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl in this book. To me it looks like a mistake in the citation.
The claim appears to come from this text (citation 1): https://www.scribd.com/document/703207646/Dioses-prehispanicos-de-Mexico-mitos-y-deidades-del-panteon-Fernandez-Adela-1992-Mexico-D-F-Panorama-Editorial-9789683803061-cbee5
Unfortunately, that book does not contain references nor is it stated where this claim comes from.
EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.
Hah, sure, let’s investigate 🕵️♂️
The term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user ‘Mxn’.
The description of the edit is the following:
Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic
If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl
This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in September 16, 2018. I don’t have access to the citation so I don’t know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.
If you check the history you will find that the same ‘Mxn’ fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.
So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.
I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.
I find it highly unlikely that:
- User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago
AND
- This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media
More likely…
- Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
- Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme
And this concludes my little investigation 🧐
4·2 months agoAlways exciting to learn about new perspectives on consciousness!
I have searched for the “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)” theory and I do not personally find it very compelling. I appreciate that the hard problem of consciousness is very difficult to address using the scientific method, but I suspect that consciousness arises from a form of processing that requires computations of the kind performed by animal brains. I don’t think that the kind of biophysics that allows cells to sense and respond to the environment are enough to create a conscious experience.
About the: “third state”. Cells are alive, independently of the multi-cellular organism that they come from. I don’t agree that changing the way that the cells are organized constitutes some “third state”.
Despite my disagreements, it is still nice to read and think about. Thanks for sharing.
1·2 months agoI think it would be an interesting hypothesis to test.
I looked a bit more and extended my search into brines, and was able to find another set of data in the following paper:
Roupas, P., Keogh, J., Noakes, M., Margetts, C., & Taylor, P. (2010). Mushrooms and agaritine: A mini-review. Journal of Functional Foods, 2(2), 91-98.
This one is not freely available, but it is found in SciHub and I can also share the PDF if needed.
This relevant section discusses that mushrooms canned in liquid and in brine were measured to have less agaritine, which makes sense. I think that lactofermentation helps degrade even more due to the acid, additional metabolic activity, and possibly a bit more oxygen.
I agree that it would be nice to research. I am surprised that it hasn’t been (or at least it is not easy to find). I did find research on other methods such as heating and drying, but I could not find lacto fermentation…
Agaritine content of mushrooms
The agaritine content in fresh A. bisporus mushrooms in Swit- zerland has been reported to be in the range of 94–629 mg/kg fresh weight. Canned mushrooms contained 1–55 mg/kg drained weight with 3–103 mg/L in the liquid. The highest agaritine values were reported in dried commercial mush- rooms amounting to 2110–6905 mg/kg (Fischer et al., 1984). In Sweden, Andersson et al. (1999) measured agaritine in fresh mushrooms and 35 canned mushroom products (A. bisporus). Two fresh samples contained 212 and 229 mg/kg, respectively. Agaritine levels in brine were generally slightly lower than the levels detected in canned mushrooms. Canned whole mushrooms contained 14.9 ± 6.7 mg agaritine per kg product whereas cut mushrooms contained 18.1 ± 7.8 mg/kg. The wet canning process was shown to reduce the level of agaritine in A. bisporus by 10-fold resulting in lower levels in canned products. On a portion basis, somewhat higher amounts of agaritine may be found in some other food prod- ucts (mushroom soup and pasta sauce) containing A. bisporus (Andersson et al., 1999).
Yes, this is what I mean.
As for (3), this is how I am reasoning about this. The mushroom cells are surrounded by a soft cell membrane made out of lipids, and a hard cell wall made out of a network of sugar filaments (primarily chitin). The cell membrane serves as a chemical barrier that separates the chemistry outside of the cell from the chemistry inside of the cell, and it has many mechanisms to allow specific chemicals to flow from one side to the other. This cell membrane is very dynamic and it needs continuous maintenance to remain functioning as intended. When a cell dies, the cell membrane is no longer kept under maintenance, and it basically dissolves.
After the cell membrane disintegrates, the cell wall remains. This cell wall is much tougher and does not require constant maintenance. The wall also has its own filtering capacity as well the ability to absorb and retain chemicals, but it is a lot more porous and this porosity allows water, nutrients, and other water-soluble chemicals to move more freely.
So, my reasoning is: The mushroom dies. The cell wall disintegrates. The more permeable cell wall remains. Agaritine is soluble in water, and water and small water-soluble molecules can usually move freely through the cell wall. So, within a short period of time the water outside of the mushrooms will mix with the water inside of the mushrooms, and the agaritine will distribute throughout the whole volume. At this point, even if the mushroom’s environment had provided some form of protection, the now-mixed agaritine will experience an environment similar to the environments discussed in the papers I from the previous comments.
It is not as simple as I describe here, because the specific properties of the cell wall can be complex, and they can change due to chemical modifications. For example, some molecules can be absorbed into the sugar matrix such that they are protected from degradation - but I could not find any data to suggest that this likely a significant factor for agaritine. There are some recent articles that review the fungal cell wall, I will paste the citations below, in case you want to look at some of this in more detail.
My question has to do about the agaritine content in mushrooms that are subjected to fermentation. That agaritine might behave differently when contained in a mushroom. What answer to my question does the articles give you?
It is true. I am not sure, the articles do not address this specific question. It would depend on the process and the amount of time that you let it ferment. Over a period of weeks, it is likely that the mushrooms will have died, the cell membranes will have broken down, and the chemistry of degradation described in those papers will have taken place.
Fresh mushrooms are still alive at the beginning of the process. Until they die, the mushroom’s cells may continue to produce agaritine, and the chemistry inside of the cells is not necessarily going to be the same as in tap water. The amount of time that it will take for the cells to die depends on the process. If you are submerging the mushrooms into a brine, I don’t think that they will survive for long because of the osmotic pressure.
No problem! I searched “Agaritine degradation” in Google Scholar and selected to those two articles from the results page as they seemed relevant. I also searched for more specific fermentation based papers but did not find any - this is what I mean when I say quick search.
I did not use an LLM chat bot to formulate the answer, but I did copy and paste it to ChatGPT and asked whether it agreed. I often do this in case it catches some obvious mistake. But it did not suggest any corrections, and it did not affect my answer. So an LLM chatbot did assist me in validation.
If you want I can explain some of the reasoning in more detail. Figures 1 and 3 of the first paper have data on what happens when agaritine is dissolved in water in the presence of air (‘open vial’), no air (‘closed vial’), and at a low pH with a closed vial. I think that these two figures are the most relevant to this particular question, as they give you an estimate to how fast agaritine will break down due to conditions that are easy to control and measure. Other types of microbiological activity can have an effect, but in this case it is not essential to invoke these more complicated processes.
Short summary from a quick search in the literature: Agaritine in water degrades quickly if oxygen is present, so if you can have an extended amount of time during which the mixture of water and ground mushroom is exposed to fresh air, that will help. As the mixture becomes acidic, degradation speeds up again even if the the atmosphere becomes oxygen poor. If the fermentation is meant to take more than 3 weeks, the acidic environment will probably be enough. Enzymes from the microbes are likely to have a combined effect that ultimately speeds up degradation as well, but that is a more complicated process and so it is not so easy to estimate the rates.
Low pH, exposure to water, oxygen, and time will help. It seems like it degrades quite quickly in water if oxygen is present, but in lacto fermentation you do want to create an anaerobic environment so you might have a quick degradation followed by the formation of a protective atmosphere.
The lowering of the pH will then help speed up the degradation again, but not as much as oxygen does.
Have a look at the following paper to see curves of how agaritine degrades in water in the presence of fresh air, in a closed vial, at different pH levels:
Since you have a microbiologically active community, you also have access to the enzymatic pathways. I have not found a specific paper about agaritine during fermentation. I can find other articles describing enzymatic transformations and degradation. Some of these transformations can change the molecule into more toxic forms, and other enzymes move it towards a degraded product. What I expect that you will see is that the net effect of having a complex enzymatic mixture will be faster degradation, even if the pathways may cross the more active toxic intermediates (which would also probably form in your intestine), these will only form for a short time and degrade.
You can refer to the paper below for specific examples of the enzymatic transformations that I am referring to. In this paper, the enzymes come from mushrooms that are ground into a liquid, and so they are mushroom enzymes. In the context of fermentation the source of the enzymes would be excreted by the fermenters into the ferment. These enzymes would likely not be specifically evolved for agaritine but instead represent general classes of enzymes that affect functional groups that are present in agaritine. It is difficult to make specific predictions.
I have used XMPP for some time now and I tried Matrix for a bit, but have stuck with XMPP until now.
I found it practically very easy to set up a prosody XMPP server in a raspberry pi. In XMPP you have the core standard that is kept quite minimal and then you can extended your implementation using XMPP extension protocols (XEPs) in a highly modular fashion. This approach of building on top of a light core using well-documented extensions I like very much.
With Matrix, JSON is used instead of XML. I think that JSON is a nice format when trying to look under the hood at how the message data is structured. XML is a bit of a pain to look at in my opinion. And I think JSON might be more efficient in how it moves the data around. So, that is a big positive for me. But I Matrix appears to be more focused on being feature rich than on having a flexible modular structure. While it does have extensions, successful extensions do have a chance of being eventually integrated into the core protocol. This makes the core feel bloated to me, because I have very minimal requirements.
In terms of security, in XMPP you start with the core and then you select the type of encryption that you like (OpenPGP, OMEMO, etc). OMEMO encryption has plausible deniability built into its design, and for me, plausible deniability is a property that I consider important for messaging. The modular approach to XMPP also means that these are choices that one gets to make in an active manner, and the protocols are open protocols that come from outside of XMPP. With Matrix you get their encryption protocol as part of the core - it is a protocol that they designed and that you need to accept to use their tool with encryption. It is probably a good protocol, but I don’t think it has plausible deniability built in, and that’s a choice you did not get to make.
As for moderation, I don’t know. Do they mean moderation tools, or the actual absence of moderators and unmoderated communities? Because the latter is more a property of the people using the tool that the tool itself. You can have your own private communities.
If someone asks me, I could recommend Matrix but would rather recommend XMPP, depending on what they are looking for specifically.
791·2 months agoSomeone needs to explain to Musk how to debug with the JSON so that the ipv6 GUI does not overflow into the git API front-end
Even though:
These data are associative and do not establish a causal role for such particles affecting health
I still don’t feel so nonchalant about the idea of microplastics lodging on my brain. While the effect on human brains is very difficult to directly measure, we do have a lot of data on mice that suggest that having plastic in the brain is bad for the brain.
When quickly looking into EU food regulations it seems like microplastic content is not regulated in food, and the logic appears to be along the lines that not enough data is available to assess the actual risk. This makes some sense in that measurement, control, and enforcing limits is likely to be difficult, expensive, and might create some economic challenges, and so regulators might not want to go this route unless proven absolutely necessary.
At the same time, data does exist showing that the plastic levels are increasing in our brains, and we have very good reasons to believe that this is not a good thing. It is not that we are completely in the dark - I am sure some smart people would be able to come up with reasonable limits and methods of control by now.
My not-very-informed suspicion is that there is pressure from wealthy and powerful lobbyists that would significantly suffer from microplastics regulations, because ‘plastic in the brain’ has seemed like an obvious thing to address for some years now.
I have never been educated about how to avoid ingesting / breathing microplastics. Do any of you know some habits or diets that reduce or increase exposure to microplastics?
I think that panspermia is the most likely hypothesis to be eventually proven correct.
According to this hypothesis, very simple “living” structures can be found throughout space, scattered around planets, meteorites, and perhaps even in space dust. This dust can be thought of as fungal spores. When they land in a planet with suitable conditions, these systems can evolve into more complex life forms.
The alternatives to panspermia generally imply that Earth is a super special planet in which certain special conditions conspired at a point in time to allow an extremely unlikely event to happen. Panspermia suggests that, instead of a being a statistical anomaly, life is probably rather common throughout the universe.
I don’t have any recommendations, unfortunately. But this is very interesting! I have gotten into software-defined radio recently and radio astronomy seems like a good direction to continue learning. Hopefully someone has some good advice.
If they can send me over the second half of my thesis I would appreciate it enormously! 😀
The analytics tools that I am personally uncomfortable with involve dynamic, changing forms of data. I run GPSLogger on my phone (without a SIM card) and continuously log the GPS data to a text file. This data is then synced to my computer when WiFi is available. I can display this data on a map using gpx-viewer, and show very detailed tracking data of myself.
I have explored this map with some friends/family. They get to see a time-stamped movie of my life - my trips to work, to the shop, when I go out, if I go on a trip, etc. The data displayed in this manner is somewhat intimate, personal information. Anyone I have shown this to has said that they would not be so comfortable with such a map of their lives existing… Well, if they are carrying a active phone with a SIM card, it does.
To think that a company like Google can own such a map for a very large number of people makes me uncomfortable. On top of that, each of those map trajectories can be associated with an individual and their personality… They have the ability to pick out specific trajectories on the basis of the political ideologies or shopping behaviors of the personas behind them. This is extreme. I am of the opinion that the convenience afforded by a these technologies does not justify the allocation of that super-power to the companies that enable the technology.
A few years ago Facebook enabled a “Graph search” feature. This allowed users to create search queries such as"Friends of friends of X who like the page “X” and went to school near Z". That tool seemed super cool on the surface, but it quickly became obvious how something like that could be easily exploited. Later on in Snowden’s book I learned about XKeyscore from the NSA, which is like an extra-powerful no-consent-needed graph search that is available to some people. This is not just targeted ads.
I guess that what I am trying to convey is… For me, making the privacy-conscious choice is about not contributing to the ecosystem of very concrete tools that give super-powers to groups of people that may not have my best interest in mind. In my mind it is something very tangible and concrete, and I find many of those convenience tradeoffs to be clearly worth it.
I think the difference in time is too big. Also, in the talk page’s archive it is stated that the wikipedia was updated because of this meme, and not the other way around. This is from the talk page: