Monks who live up in the mountains are high.

[El Calico Loco]

Forgive the bad pun.

After having a fair bit of experience with nitrous, trying out different methods of administration and breathing techniques, Swim wondered if perhaps the Buddhist monks who meditate for hours up in the mountains with highly-specialized breathing techniques might be accumulating nitrous oxide in their lungs.

He asked me about this, but I didn't know how to respond. Nitrous is a natural part of our atmosphere, less than one part-per-million if I recall correctly. It's is heavier than air, so it's possible that one could keep some in one's lungs while still breathing enough oxygen. On the other hand, this same fact seems to make it likely that there is less N2O up in the mountains than down in the valleys.

Still...I wonder. Could nirvana be nothing more than a talented person attaining full dissociation via a combination of mental discipline, immobility, and nitrous oxide?


ECL

[Smuv]

1 ppm is .0001%. It is completely imossible I am sorry. If the fact that nitrous oxide is denser than air actually meant anything, people would be dying right and left durring surgery from oxygen deprivation. On top of that, there is no way to store nitrous in the lungs because it would just diffuse out of the alvioli into the blood stream.

And finally, if extraction of nitrous from air were viable, that would probably be the main manufacturing method, instead of other (relatively) more drawn out and costly methods than simply seperating that meesly .0001% from air.

[Nagognog2]

I concur. That is far less than the amount of Xenon in the atmosphere. Have you ever priced a cylinder of pure Xenon? WooHoo! That would price N2O right out of reach. Your dentist's office would be surrounded by armed-guards and resemble Fort Knox.

[Smuv]

I've always wanted to try the helium baloon trick with xenon, it makes your voice deeper though. Since nitrous oxide is denser than air does it change the way your voice sounds?

[El Calico Loco]

Damn. I guess it's just discipline. But you gotta admit... it was an amusing idea.

Nitrous does change the way a Swimmer's voice sounds. Helium changes one's voice because the speed of sound in He is faster than the speed of sound in air. The speed of sound in N2O is slower, so it changes it in the opposite direction.


ECL

[fnord]

quote:I've always wanted to try the helium baloon trick with xenon,

why?

[Nagognog2]

Argon(Ar) will do about the same thing as it's far more expensive sibling - Xenon(Xe). Fill a balloon with Argon and drop it: THUD. And, yes, it does make your voice deeper. Much more so than N2O.

The way I read it explained for He(lium)'s action of making you talk funny: It causes your vocal-cords to vibrate faster due to it's being lighter. Helium is about 1/7th the weight of regular air. The lightest one of all is H2 - Hydrogen - at 1/14th that of air. As an aside, Hydrogen was first isolated by the French chemist Lavoissier. He discover the effect it had on his voice by inhaling it. Unfortunately, he also discovered Hydrogen's flammability when he exhaled into an open flame.

His journal entry about these discoveries was written from his hospital bed.

[darkglobe]

^Very Nice! Lol.

I was recently consuming whipped cream (with no intention of inhaling the N2O) but must've put the can at a funny angle, and got a gobful of Nitrous. Naturally, I inhaled it, and my voice did indeed sound slightly different. Couldn't quite put my finger on it, though.