I haven’t held a phone to my ear since before smartphones were a thing. Headsets existed for land lines. Speakerphone functions existed on land lines as well as early regular cell phones (as opposed to dumb phones which tend to have more functions than the ultra basic phones did back in the nineties).

I’m fairly confident that the last time I held a phone to my ear was before the turn of the century. I know it’s been that long at least since I would have while driving and/or at work. The cell I had at the time worked better by headset, and there were plenty of cheap and decent ones available

It really does require non scientific information to address.

Consciousness is not fully understood. Without that, anything regarding consciousness is still at least a little unanswerable. You can’t point to when and where consciousness ends if you don’t know what it is, what defines it in the first place. Death isn’t exactly at consensus either.

That means NDEs can’t be pinned down with 100% accuracy yet.

Here’s what I know. Nobody that has had the cells of their brain break down, as in begin decomposition, has ever come back.

So, based on that, I think the NDE experience is going to be based in some kind of brain activity. If the neurons are “melting”, they can’t function if enough of them aren’t melting and you can jump start things again, they weren’t dead at all. That, to me, is the definition of death that matters: if you can come back, it ain’t death.

Considering the general amount of precise experimentation in measuring the brain and body during the process of dying is extremely thin and limited by the very process, I don’t think we have the right tools to measure anything that would “prove” anything about NDEs, only indicate some probabilities.

But those probabilities lean much harder to it being a chemical and/or electrical event.

Now, if you want to bring souls into it, you aren’t dealing with science in the first place because it is currently impossible to even detect whether or not souls exist, it is a matter of faith. It’s essentially impossible to prove they don’t exist, but there’s absolutely nothing ever measured that points to anything resembling credible proof that they do. So souls just don’t matter for NDE discussions in a framework of science. You might as well factor in what granfaloon a person is mixed up with as a soul.

I’m not saying you can’t believe in souls and still attempt science regarding death, just that souls aren’t studyable with science.

Since nothing in any NDE has ever been unique to NDEs, it does make it harder to put faith in them as something other than a physical process. Everything anyone has ever described (at least in any useful setting) as happening has also happened with the influence of drugs, magnetic fields, meditation, or spiritual practices. Probably others my brain isn’t pulling up as well that aren’t under one of those headings, but I think it shows what I mean well enough.

And that point is that if the experiences aren’t different from things you can experience while alive, why would they be useful for determining if the person had died?

Amen to that

Have gloves, will travel reads the card of a man!

You sure? I’m told I have a reassuring voice that almost makes it an enjoyable process

Lmao! If only it could be improved.

I always hated doing them, not because of the nature of the job but because even when I was younger, my hands (and therefore fingers) were on the large side. Large hands means large fingers. I guess you can see where that would be a detrimental trait for impaction removal lol.

At one point, I wore a size 15 ring and my company had to special order gloves for me. And that was roughly around the same time as that patient. So the fingers I had to use were bigger than 15 by a good bit. Plus, I was still lifting some, but had taken up a casual practice of what’s called iron palm training. That’s where you repeatedly slam your hands into things to make them tougher. That’s an exaggeration, it isn’t all that harsh, but still.

So I ended up telling the one company I worked for that I really needed to not be doing them. The supervisor at the time was a pretty great lady, but she didn’t quite get the issue. I took a risk and just slapped my hand down on the desk with my index and middle fingers out and asked her if she’d like me to help her clear her bowels. It worked! I cleared her bowels and got a raise.

Nah, that last part is obviously a joke, but I did get her cooperation lol

Of course. Comes with a free skin though

I’ve been on the opposite side of that, with a human patient.

Was providing some care that required me to support the patient with one hand while doing some less than comfortable work (impaction removal). The patient’s daughter was rubbing his shoulder, only my hand was there, so she was actually rubbing my wrist.

She didn’t realize it until I had to shift my position with that hand and warned her I was going to be moving. Like you, she got embarrassed and apologized. I just shrugged and said it was no biggie, I would have said something but I was concentrating and needed the moral support. Which turned it into a mutually humorous thing, so we had a good laugh.

Yup, you’re misguided.

Be yourself, all the time, unless you’re a bigot.

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

See, that’s why you build a therapist in a box inside your head, so it can mediate between the other aspects of your inner processes

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

Preach! We should be way past the silliness of body hair choices being open for other’s opinions. It took my sasquatch looking ass a while to get there for myself, but there’s still social pushback that just pisses me off. I’m glad you found your balance :)

Just for the hell of it, I don’t know about OP, but I don’t even know how to.

I went to the relevant linked section and couldn’t find a way to raise an issue directly. I’m going to try again, and if I succeed I’ll return here and make a top level comment for anyone scrolling by and wondering. I’ve never tried to do this before, so I’ll see how it goes.

Edit: aha!

You have to go to the issues page and select the “new issue” button, where you’ll be directed to log in to github.

Which, for me, means I’m finished trying. No desire whatsoever to have another login for a one time thing. If I ever manage to learn enough code to do anything like this often enough, I’d do it, but it just isn’t worth it to satisfy my curiosity about the process.

People are fucking weird. There’s also prudes and morons that assume any contact at all has to be some kind of horror.

But we’re supposed to teach our kids how to clean and manage their bodies. That’s the job; we do it for them when they’re too young to do it themselves, or if something temporarily/permanently disables them from doing so.

It isn’t weird to help with genital care under those circumstances either. You gotta teach kids how to wash their junk, and if they want/need to change their pubic hair, it’s part of the job to discuss it, decide if it’s the right choice at that point, and if the mutually agreed answer is yes, to teach them how not to screw up.

For real, who else is supposed to? You gonna hire a nurse or nurse’s assistant to teach them? That’s weird, and there aren’t any specialists in aesthetics that are going to agree to it in most circumstances when the kid is under the local age of consent. Too much risk.

And even that assumes that the kid is going to be okay with a stranger helping them with their genitals. Not every kid would be. For me, there’s no way I’m going to have a total stranger fiddling with my kid’s junk for non medical reasons, even if the kid was alright with it.

You did the job, end of story.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.

Well, I don’t miss the kiddie porn being dropped into chat rooms and forums randomly like could happen back in the day. But I like having a decent chance of finding whatever product I want/need and a better than zero shot at finding whatever obscure thing I’m interested in on Wikipedia.

There’s tradeoffs. But the old net was a lot more fun.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)