Well, you are already dying. Your brain and muscles can function for a very brief time because of the oxygen they already have. I don't know if coughing would help though, probably not, it takes a lot of external pressure on the heart to move blood around the body. Maybe you would have enough to dial 911 on your cell phone. Even if you can't talk, that would tell the dispatcher that something is wrong and most cell phones nowadays are GPS equipped so responders would have a good chance of finding you, though that would take time.

Here's an article showing what polio did:
https://www.ksl.com/article/50950784/man-who-lived-decades-on-iron-lung-dies

[quote=Burkley]Chicken Pox infections are usually no big deal until you get shingles as an adult from latent viruses.

Partly true. Chicken pox in children can cause permanent scaring from scratching. In adults it is a really nasty disease, had a co-worker get it. Most unpleasant.

Reminds me of our second daughter who had a good friend. One Saturday morning her friend called to say she had chicken pox. Probably no more than an hour later our daughter said, "my back itches." Two little girls spent a lot of time in the bathtub with baking soda in the water.

There are risks either way, vaccinated or not vaccinated. That was most apparent with the covid vaccines rushed to market. It is useful to consider two types of risk:

Alpha (sometimes called type one) risk is the risk that you do something and it causes a problem, eg. the vaccine has bad side effects.

Beta (sometimes called type two) risk is that by not doing something, you forego the benefits that would have come from it, eg. immunity to covid.

We should consider both types of risk in all major decisions, including vaccination

I was raised in the time before vaccinations for mumps and measles were available. I remember an athletic trip to another city when a teammate came down with mumps. That was in high school so he was past puberty. He was on the way home in one big hurry.

I also remember when mothers often wouldn't let kids go swimming for fear of polio, and I remember being vaccinated for small pox, a now extinct disease. The anti-vaxers really are ignoring history and their children will pay the price. So will others as diseases spread. I think we could wipe out polio if people would just go along with the vaccine. Sadly, some third world countries believe that vaccine is a western attempt to poison them.

I have to wonder if those flat-earthers are serious or just having fun. Anyway, there are a couple of easy evidence of it being spherical. Why do we have time zones all around the world? It is because sunrise depends on where on that sphere we are. Or get a good sextant, measure the elevation of the north star. Then go a few hundred miles north and measure that elevation from that point. That changes because you are measuring from different places on the spherical earth.

Interesting tidbit from a history of physics class I once took. Not only did the Greeks know the earth was spherical, they knew pretty well how big around it was.

I was taught in grade and secondary school that Columbus had to argue with people who thought the earth was flat to get the ships to go west. That was nonsense, flat vs spherical earth was not the question. By the time Columbus came along, educated people knew the distance from Europe to China going east and could calculate the distance from Europe to China going west. They knew how much potable water the ships of the day could carry and easily determined that those ships could not carry enough drinking water to reach China. Ironically, Columbus was wrong and his opponents were right. But he actually had a vision in which he was told to sail west. Had the Americas not been here, he and all his crew would have been lost.

If there's a live person on the call, I'll ask them to hold a bit while I finish a task. You can guess how long before I return to the call.

The party line days! Read the account of a young woman who went off to off to college. Word got back to the home town that she had a beau. Summer vacation rolled around and one day the phone rang in her home. "I'll be there, here's the train number and time."

As a result of that phone call, every gossip in town was at the train station when, as previously arranged, he drove up to her house in his car.

Well, the LL in Villareal and Tortilla is not really silent, in Spanish that is considered one letter and pronounced like our Y.

One of our search and rescue deputies told about a case here of a guy fishing who came across a body about 8am. Being a good citizen, he reported it, about 5pm that day when he got done fishing.

People joke about fanatic golfers, but fishermen can be just as fanatic.

For a long time I want to get on a jury just to see what it was like. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. I was on a jury for an attempted rape case and was afraid we might turn a rapist loose, or on the other hand that we might send an innocent man to prison. Ironically, it was the prosecutions case that convinced me to vote not guilty, they presented some video that contradicted the testimony of the alleged victim.

Interesting story, from the Readers' Digest if I remember right. A man was asking to be excused from jury duty and explained to the judge that he couldn't be there because his wife was about to conceive a baby.

"You mean deliver a baby don't you?" the judge said.

"That's what I said, she is going to conceive a baby."

"Well, in either case, I think you should be there, you are excused."

[quote=Scruples]Playing the system seems to be the norm. Actually, criminals go to jail not to be rehabilitated. They learn how to commit other crimes from other inmates and how to attempt to convince others of their innocence.

And they forget that the people they are learning from are, guess where! In jail because their methods of getting away with crime didn't work. Probably not the best teachers of the subject.

A bull moose thinks he owns the woods. Usually he's right. A cow moose isn't much safer, maybe more dangerous if she has a calf nearby.

While I was logging they told me about a case of someone operating a bulldozer, D6 Cat if I remember right. A bull moose decided he didn't like that noisy thing in his territory and hit it head on, knocking it 6 inches backwards. That was on ice, but still a tremendous impact. It killed the moose, but think what it would do if he hit your soft body.

Or take a class in rock climbing or mountaineering and learn how to use a rope and something called a Prussick hitch to lean over the edge safely. Of course then it would also help to be a person of unsound mind such as myself so that looking down from such heights doesn't bother you.