A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

Alright, so, I was not calling them out, but, I didn't want to do business with Home Depot, so we ordered our appliances from AJ Madison. They've now cancelled our delivery AGAIN tomorrow. They'll "try sometime in the next week" they say, as if they can just tell people that they need to be home all day, every day for weeks on end waiting for them to finally show up.

On top of that, the missing 3rd appliance is actually missing. After a little back and forth they called to say that they should have had "about $100,000 worth of them in stock" but they're apparently all "missing from their warehouse" and that's why it hasn't been shipped out. They're going to try reaching out to Rheem to see if they can get my hot water heater.

I'm seriously doubting we're ever getting our appliances at this point, but, they can be sure I'll be back on the phone with them first thing tomorrow morning again until I get an answer. At some point I'm just going to initiate a charge back on my card and drive back to Florida.

Strange but true. I've noticed across dozens of virtual classes my kids have taken now that it's always the Computer Science teachers who don't know how to use the Zoom room.

A few days ago I posted this from my other account, which I would just link to, but due to the dark and mysterious magic of the fediverse I actually can't see my other account from this account, even though there's no current moderation policies(silences/blocks) in place between the two instances.

"I understand that incompetence is just a way of life these days, but, I'm still pretty frustrated.

Drove 10 hours overnight to be where our new appliances for our move were supposed to be delivered. Just spent an hour on the phone to figure out that the delivery company has "no idea where they are." Awesome. Guess I'll cancel that plumber visit that I had to schedule 3 months in advance for Monday.

Spent some time on the phone with my kid's former pediatrician to get their immunization records sent to our new state. The lady insists that they are required to get typhoid shots before she can print it out. I can find zero reference to them needing typhoid shots anywhere on the CDC's website, nor the link she sent me to the state of Florida's required vaccinations. In a state full of anti-vaxxers I can't get her to send me a piece of paper showing that my kids are immunized. I'm just going to wait and see if someone else is in the office tomorrow..."

Followed by:

"Waited until the office was long since closed and left a message with the messaging service so that the pediatrician would have to call me back. Felt kind of bad about it, but, they wouldn't let me talk to anyone else at his office when they were open.

Guess what? He thought it was funny that his office thought we needed typhoid shots. I didn't, but, whatever. She apparently meant "tetanus" even though she said it at least 5 times and even argued with me about it, and it's not even due until his birthday in the fall. I feel sorry for all of the people who need this woman's guidance for their children's health."

@undefined @compost@regenerate.social I'm a big fan of your knowledge that you've shared here on Mastodon and I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, could answer a question about vermiculture for us.

Both of our kids, in preparation for our move to the homestead, have chosen some "homestead skills" that they'd like to learn. My older boy really wants to do vermiculture, and I can tell there's a lot of different ways to get started, right down to just a bin.

What I'm wondering is if something like this, that we could theoretically keep either in or by our greenhouse, would be a good way for him to get started?

https://unclejimswormfarm.com/product/outdoor-compost-bin/hungry-bin-free-shipping-free-500-composting-worms/

Notification on my phone about a Time article:

"How Long Should You Isolate With COVID-19? Experts Are Split"

Do I want to read this? No, but I did anyway. So maybe I'll save you the blood pressure spike.

Expert #1 is Osterholm. Who would have suspected? He, as he is prone to do, says that we should stop isolating because "people’s tolerance for public-health precautions has plummeted" and "many people in the U.S. haven’t paid attention to COVID-19 guidance in a long time" along with my Osterholm favorite "You have to face reality."

Let me tell you something. I only hear this "face reality" refrain from him and a certain "VP analyst" on Mastodon who blocks a lot of COVID cautious people while building a faux-COVID cautious brand here and on LinkedIn. When someone tells you this, they're basically saying, "People don't wear condoms and they love to drive drunk. Let's meet them in the middle and let them have their fun!"

Expert #2 - Lucky Tran! @luckytran says this plan would be “a reckless anti-public-health policy that goes against science, encourages disease spread, and puts everyone at risk. The bare minimum we should have learned from this devastating pandemic that has killed and disabled millions is that we should stay home when sick.” Thank you Dr Tran!

Expert #3 - Elanor Murray. I honestly have no idea who she is, but I was glad to read that she thinks "it would be “really strange” for the CDC to relax its current guidance, given that even a five-day isolation period isn’t always long enough to stop the spread." Good job!

Expert #4 - Dr. Tara Bouton who would like you to believe that ending isolation would be reasonable at this stage of the pandemic "when fewer people who get infected die or become hospitalized."

Dr Bouton, I'm not *really* worried I'm going to die during the acute phase of COVID. This isn't the reality of a mass disabling event. Let's face reality here! Oops. Too soon?

Interestingly, Dr Bouton, while thinking it's great that *you* should go back to work, says that "she says she would stay home around that long because she’s able to—and because working as an infectious-disease doctor puts her in contact with lots of immunocompromised patients, who remain at increased risk of severe disease if they get infected."

The new west coast liberal refrain of "I can afford to, you can't, and I wear a mask for others." OK. I'm getting tired of hearing this one. I admit it.

Murray then nails it again. "She would stay home until her symptoms cleared up and wait until she’d gotten two consecutive negative test results, spaced out by at least a day, before exiting isolation."

Who is this person and how can we get her to start posting on Mastodon?

Dr Tran, again, awesome. "Tran says he’d go even further: he’d stay home for 10 days, self-test multiple times before ending isolation, and wear a mask—as he usually does anyway—upon returning to public spaces."

Finally, Osterholm weighs in that he'd also stay home for 5 days, and then wear an N95 in the "immediate aftermath" of his infection. Funny how the people all about relaxing protocols would follow them in their own lives, isn't it? Almost like you don't deserve them?

https://time.com/6695102/covid-19-isolation-guidelines-experts/

Does anyone know what it means when I keep getting notifications, but they're just three dots "..." when I go look? I use the web interface most of the time if that matters.

Is it that someone commented or mentioned me, and then deleted it or is in the process of editing it?

Is it a comment from someone I've muted? I used to have a process in which I muted people, and then went back to see later if they deserved a full block, but I haven't followed up with that second part in a while...I have a lot of muted people, to be honest.

Or is this possibly related to the fediblock drama, of which I was blissfully unaware until today, involving this instance recently?

Happy Valentine's Day for any who celebrate.

My wife and I have had about 20 of them now, so it's not a big deal. We thought about what we wanted to do earlier in the week and didn't come up with anything, so I made sourdough English muffins this morning. I made two of them in a heart shape and delivered them to her desk, freshly cooked with a little butter and honey. Then we ordered a couple appliances for our move.

Old people's Valentine's Day complete.

Reminder for anyone reading MSN's article this morning titled "Should CDC cut the 5-day COVID isolation guidelines? Experts weigh in" that the first "expert" they platform is Dr Celine Grounder. Personally, she's one I will never forget.

I distinctly remember her on NPR in 2021 saying that we should not give people COVID boosters, because if it were done too much "your blood would literally turn into a sludge of antibodies to all the infections and vaccinations you got over a lifetime." Just let that ruminate in your brain a little bit.

With that all said, here's her reasoning today. "People have not been following the [previous] guidance, let's be real."

Yes, please, let's be real.

I've seen multiple people "in healthcare" or "in public health" get bent out of shape about the #CDCsays content. I have two things to say:

One, get over it. Everyone needs a laugh sometimes.

Two, if you, or your friends in public health are such great people, how about you speak out, publicly, about the current CDC insanity?

That's it. Get over it and then do something about it. Otherwise, keep it to yourself. No one wants to hear it.

#CDCsays is my new favorite hashtag.

After posting this morning that "chemists know how to use PPE" and then reading a separate thread about BSL-3 precautions, a memory came back out of nowhere.

I used to work at a national laboratory, in a nuclear laboratory. There was a certain lab that required full, head to toe PPE to enter, and then after you took it all off you had to use a dosimeter to scan yourself before leaving.

There would always be this subset of people who were in a hurry, or whatever, and didn't want to be "bothered" with the full precautions. If you forgot to do even the tiniest of things when you were in there it was a whole procedure to get back in and out again. Therefore, some people would occasionally try to sneak in and out. Inevitably then you'd see someone *else* see that, and think *they* could get away with it themselves.

Because of this, there would be safety officers running around with dosimeters trying to make sure that idiots didn't spread nuclear materials around. At the end of the day everyone would have to single-file walk though a huge portal-dosimeter and god forbid that thing went off, because then everyone would have to wait to see if they needed to be decontaminated, or their offices decontaminated, because some idiot wandered around with radioactive dust on their shoes or something.

Anyway, this is now forever a story about COVID in my mind, except the idiots got rid of the dosimeters so they could do whatever they wanted without thinking about it.

I had a string of realizations this morning that are probably severely delayed compared to most people who pay attention to politics these days.

One, I used to actually kind of enjoy politics. At least enough that I went and earned a degree in it as a double major. But if occurred to me today, while reading about this Jon Stewart kerfuffle, that I guess I kind of avoid it anymore. I mean, I'm sure I'm more politically in touch than 99% of people, but definitely not to the extent that I used to be.

Two, this whole Jon Stewart kerfuffle is really just liberals being mad that he pointed out that Biden's old? Like, we can all see that, right? I remember all the way back to a few years back when people first decided that MAGA was a cult because they wouldn't say anything negative about dear leader, even when it was obvious. I guess liberals have adopted that standpoint now? It's not like it's untrue. It doesn't take much more than a quick search on whatever your favorite search engine is to figure out that he's old, even for Presidents.

I guess I intended, when I first signed up for Mastodon, to spend more time discussing politics, but I just don't want to deal with it anymore. I'll vote when the time comes and leave the arguing up to the rest of you.

One of my favorite parts of working from home is that my boys and I do an Apple Fitness workout together mid-day almost every day. Today I wasn't feeling it and told my younger boy that gravity increases the older you get, so scientifically I couldn't do it. Unfortunately I already taught him too much science and he wasn't buying it. Guess I have to get up from my desk now.

In all seriousness, I was working from home before the pandemic, but my boys were in school all day and we only saw each other a couple hours a day. I'm so grateful that they're home, and that they're both happy to be here with me. It's family time I wouldn't have gotten without the pandemic, as awful as the pandemic's been.

I've seen a lot of this science discussed around here lately, and I've discussed some of it, too. Here's today's brief piece by Anthony Leonardi about B cells, T cells and immunomodulation in SARS-Cov-2.

https://www.easychair.info/p/the-intrinsic-severity-of-sars-cov

Has anyone else noticed the zero follower, zero following accounts that are suddenly popping up during this wave of COVID cases across the globe, seemingly just to tell COVID cautious people that they're "overreacting" or to "stop being afraid" etc.? I know mastodon.social is the "front door" to mastodon, but they're always from there and I'm seriously considering blocking the whole thing rather than a half dozen bot/trolls every day.

No surprise, I have been tasked with making focaccia again today. I'll whip up the recipe, let it rest overnight in the refrigerator and cook it up tomorrow. My older boy's getting pretty good at it, too, so I always have a helper.

However, my wife, whom I love dearly, is in charge of feeding the sourdough starter, and I'm starting to think these little "mistakes" where she feeds it too much and we have more sourdough to use than I was planning on are all about getting me to make more baked goods. As my kids would say, it's pretty sus that this keeps happening.

So, last week for the kid's cooking club they did paninis and in doing so it inspired me to look for a way to make softer bread that would hold up through baking, cutting, sandwich making and grilling all without crumbling at all. To do this, I made my first tangzhong bread, with the kids, and it came out really well for a first attempt. I converted a honey whole wheat bread machine recipe that I've been using for years into a tangzhong recipe.

If you're unfamiliar with tangzhong, it's essentially starting with a roux, which gelatinizes some of the flour, and then you put that into the bread. It helps keep moisture in and also allows it to rise more. Here's an explainer:

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2018/03/26/tangzhong

Today's task? I'm going to take this "totally a mistake too much sourdough starter that needs to be used today" and try turning the bread machine sourdough that I make into a tangzhong. Honestly, it's no artisan sourdough to begin with, but, when you just want to throw some sourdough starter into a bread machine and get some bread out of it, it totally works and it's plenty tasty.

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/bread-machine-sourdough-bread-recipe

Supposedly you want about 75% hydration for a tangzhong, but the honey whole wheat, while plenty flexible and tasty, was a little wet for my liking. I'm going to try this one at 70% hydration and see how it turns out.

Wish me luck and I'll update this afternoon after it comes out of the bread machine!

I hate that I have to play this game and constantly wonder, but, is this someone else's COVID brain fog, or something else going on here? Your guess is as good as mine.

Way back two whole years ago, one morning I started getting e-mails that I at first thought were fishing attempts, but they were all coming from businesses in the same town in Texas. I started reading them a little more carefully and realized that someone was shopping around some pretty important business, but for some reason was using my address. One of them came with his phone number, so I texted the person and explained I was getting a bunch of their, seemingly important, e-mail.

At first the guy goes "No, that's my e-mail address." So I try and explain that, no, they're all in my inbox and I've used this e-mail address for 20 years. A few minutes later he replies with a "OH CRAP! There's an underscore in my e-mail. That IS your e-mail address!"

Case settled, right? No.

I continued to get his e-mail regularly. For a while I forwarded every one of them onto him like some mail service. After a while I realized he wasn't catching on. They just kept coming. Stuff he would probably really want. His car dealer account. His PayPal info. His car registration. His new mortgage paperwork that needed to be signed.

Obviously, this guy should be really glad that I'm a nice person. I have received, at one point or another, literally every piece of personal info about him. I've forwarded on the really important stuff and "forgotten" to, and deleted, a bunch of his concert and movie tickets, etc. and left him logged out of a bunch of accounts in the hope that he'd eventually wrap his head around it all and stop. I'm not his secretary, and each time I've sent something to him I've explained *directly to him* that he's using MY e-mail address again. When I e-mail or text him he doesn't seem to have any problem understanding what I'm saying.

This week I've received some really important legal stuff, I realized he's now given a lawyer my e-mail address, and I sent them to him again. But I've finally decided I'm done. I'm abandoning the e-mail address I've used for 22 years because I don't want to feel responsible for some brain addled dude's important info any longer, and I really don't want to sort through my e-mail every day trying to decide if it's for me or him.

If anyone's wondering why unemployment's low but productivity's down, crap like this is why. There's a lot of people out there who really don't seem to be functioning at a particularly high level.

I just had a really great interaction after someone DM'd me and asked about scientific communication and I thought I'd turn it into a post, largely because it's been kicking around in my head recently anyway.

This person started with "Do you expect people who read your posts to read every paper you link to?" The answer is no! If it helps you to read it yourself, then please do, but, I link to so many papers(hundreds in 2023, I'm sure) so that you know I'm not full of crap, to be blunt. You don't know me, and please don't trust every rando you run into on the internet who says they're a scientist. I've had a couple of interactions here on Mastodon recently where people who claim to be scientists confidently tell me that they're "following the science" by completely ignoring COVID. One was a self-proclaimed physicist, and one was a microbiologist. Neither one, to date, would provide me any papers or studies suggesting that their belief was factual. Hopefully, after you read one of my science posts, you come away from it with some knowledge *and* the belief that at least I can point to something to back that knowledge up.

As the discussion unfolded with this person who DM'd me they wanted to know whether I was OK with being called out publicly if they disagreed with me or if I blocked everyone, because they didn't want to lose the discussion by being blocked. YES! Big yes. Please do, if you're willing to go about it one of a couple of ways:

One, being "Hey, I read that article that you linked to and I don't think it says what you believe. Here's why..." I'm just another human being. I make mistakes. I read things while doing other things. I'm just as tired as you are. It happens.

Two, "I read that paper and I think it's wrong. Here's some evidence it's wrong" either with another paper(remember, not all papers are created equally and maybe I linked to one that sucked for one reason or another) or even some strong anecdotal evidence, or a forthcoming study, etc. If I can't back up something I said, then I shouldn't have said it. Further, if I can't have a conversation about it, then I'm too thin skinned to be posting about it to begin with.

This led me to another interaction I had recently which involved yet another person claiming to be a scientist, this time telling me that my reading of a paper was wrong. No discussion or anything. Just, basically, "You're wrong." When I quoted directly from the paper they deleted their post and blocked me. I'm never afraid of a discussion when I have the time and energy. Yes, there are scientists on here who make posts and link to science and wouldn't respond to you if your life depended on it. That's not me.

So, in short(haha):

Don't believe someone who won't post anything to back up their scientific belief.

Read papers if you're willing and able, but if you're not, read what people say about it. We're probably ALL a little too eager to re-toot that one paper that reinforces exactly what we believe without any other evidence.

Engage! I'm certainly not here to tell you that you don't understand and therefore suck. If you're not being confrontational with me I won't be with you, even if we disagree. As long as we're discussing facts and not *just* opinions I enjoy the discussions.

Last night my wife kind of blew my mind. We were discussing COVID and how certain people around us don't seem to notice, at all, their physical and/or mental declines over the last few years. She said, "Didn't your appendix burst shortly after you had mono?"

It took me until this morning to fully wrap my head around this and do some research. It's rare, but known in scientific literature for appendicitis to occur after mononucleosis.

Slight aside, but relevant to COVID nonetheless. I went to my doctor with terrible stomach pain before my appendix actually burst and was told "There's a viral stomach flu going around. Go home until it passes." He never even saw me. He had the lady at the front desk tell me that. I only survived it because I had a roommate at the time who found me, in a puddle of my own blood-vomit(sorry for the TMI), in our shared bathroom who rushed me to the hospital. I blacked out in a bathroom and woke up in a hospital room without an appendix.

I've also mentioned previously that I had what would now be described as brain fog after mono, and I literally didn't have the vocabulary or understanding to discuss it with anyone I knew at the time. I was a young, intelligent scientist who was suddenly struggling and I just faked it. Maybe bounced around different jobs a little more than I would have otherwise, and pretended I was fine for a long time. At least until I was, actually, well enough.

Be kind to the people who don't see it, even if it's hard sometimes. Noticing these things in yourself can be difficult. Sometimes you don't even notice for 30 years, apparently.