En réponse à Tristan McLeay :


>Yes, but who's to say you are who you say you are? You might really be a
>troll _pretending_ to be a human, stealing someone elses' identity!

Ever heard the word "paranoia"? ;))))

> >
> > If pica is defined as "the eating of non-nutritive substances"
>
>If you care enough, I have to borrow the DSM-IV tomorrow anyway :) (Well,
>don't have to, but it might help with a paper I'm writing).

Well, it was not a hypothetical "if" anyway. I trust this definition. I 
just wanted to give the consequences of it :)) .

> > (funny, I've always thought it meant "12 points" ;))))) ),
>
>That's what I thought to :)

LOL.


>Heh :) But I reckon there's probably always something at least remotely
>nutritive :) (Take a look at the nutritional info on a bottle of water,
>though: everything except the sodium is 0.

Do you mean sodium is considered nutritive? I thought what was considered 
nutritive was only what the human body could use as energy source (so that 
we need nutritive food, but not only. Candies are nutritive, and yet don't 
cover everything we need :) ). Because if sodium is considered nutritive, 
so is calcium (we need it) and chalk contains calcium that the body can 
process (not easily, but it can do it!), so according to such a definition, 
chalk is a nutritive substance, and eating chalk doesn't fall under the 
pica definition.

There's something fishy going on here. The fact that the article Padraic 
gave said that most pica was found in non-Western cultures should have been 
a clue. It seems that pica means more exactly "the eating of substances we 
Westerners don't find acceptable" :))) .

>  Why you'd buy bottled water
>(here at least---the tap water is often of a better quality, and gives
>you free fluoride to boot!), I don't know, though...)

Well, tap water is usually good in France as in the Netherlands, but it 
often contains things that some people just cannot take. Babies, people 
suffering from some diseases or allergies, people with anemia, those people 
need to drink a water which is more controlled than tap water. That's the 
purpose of bottled water to me. And of course, there are people who just 
don't like the taste of tap water and will only drink bottled water of a 
specific brand. My grandparents were like that until they moved to a place 
with a more acceptable tap water for them. And of course, you still have 
places where the tap water is not drinkable, even in France or in Holland 
(or times when tap water is undrinkable. For instance, after the floods 
France suffered, the tap water in those places was undrinkable for quite a 
while).

So there are many reasons to buy bottled water :))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.