A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

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.

Do we all remember the story about the illness that the dogs were getting, that totally wasn't COVID, but seemingly, somehow, only responded to Paxlovid?

My wife would like to report that in her work group chat all of the people who are getting over holiday COVID have dogs with "allergies" now and they're having a very serious discussion about how much Benadryl you can give dogs at a time.

Seriously. This is happening right now and I keep checking back in with her to see if anyone's mentioned the fact that only people who are getting over COVID have dogs with sudden allergies, and the answer is always no.

I know no one wants to hear science when dunking on Tesla, because that's obviously fun, but, the fact that their cars won't charge when it's super cold is actually good engineering, not bad.

LiFePO4 batteries are basically destroyed when taking a charge at an internal temperature of less than 32F(0C). The fact that they're not charging below that indicates someone at Tesla understood that fact.

My younger son's talking to his teacher on Zoom right now and she asked him about his winter break and he said, "I'm not giving out personal information on Zoom" and I may have audibly snickered in the background 😂

She was just like "Uhhh, OK, moving on. No small talk today."

Just watched my wife try to hold her composure and stay positive talking on the phone to a friend who's 6 months pregnant when she said, "I just tested positive for COVID for the SECOND TIME during my pregnancy. Oh my god, so annoying!"

*sigh*

I'm hoping someone can ease my mind here and tell me if I'm being a paranoid weirdo, or if this is legitimately strange.

My wife works from home with a company issued laptop. She's a teacher and she's on Zoom with students for hours a day. We've never had any issues with our network over the last three years that she's been a virtual teacher.

There's a new tech support guy at her company who's issued new rules. She had a "tech check up" with him yesterday in which he said he's going to need:

Pictures of our cable modem and routers including serial numbers and MAC addresses.

Pictures of any hardware between the cable modem and routers, including serial numbers and MAC addresses.

Pictures of any hardware between router and company issued laptop, including serial numbers and MAC addresses. This is to include any other personal computers that may be on the same segment of the network.

Is this just good, preemptive tech support and I'm overthinking it?

My first thought was that I am not sending him the info on my own, personally owned cable modem, routers and hardware firewall, so he's getting photos of the old Spectrum equipment they dropped off that's been sitting in the closet for a decade, and we'll just tell him it's a VLAN all to itself(which it is). But after sleeping on it I thought that maybe I'm overreacting.

#CyberSecurity #WorkFromHome

I've had something on my mind for the last couple of weeks and I'm just going to throw it out there into the Mastodon hive mind and see if anyone knows anything. Sorry to the few people that I'm tagging here, just thought you would be the most likely to know.

I've had some 405nm LED light bulbs since before the pandemic. Long story short, I beta tested them for a company for HomeKit compatibility, but while I had them on hand my wife and I bought some Petri dishes, took some swabs from various places and did a science experiment with our kids. At the power and distance that I used them(in place of downlights at ceiling height) they did not kill 100% of the growth on the plates, but it was clear that they did have an effect.

With all of the talk around 222nm, I haven't really heard anyone talking about 405nm in a long time. There was a report from 2021 about 405 and COVID:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97797-0

Has anyone tried a test of 222 AND 405 together? I couldn't come up with any results, so I suspect not.

Does anyone know if anyone's producing products around 405nm currently? The company I have 4 bulbs from was bought out by another company since then, and when I inquired about them they said they still have a few in stock, but I don't think they're producing them any more. A search only produced a bunch of "rave" lights that include 405nm, but aren't centered around it, so I'm unsure if they'd be effective.

@jmcrookston
@masknerd
@joeyfox

The morning catch-up meeting at work today, virtually attended, thankfully, was 100% comprised of people complaining about how sick they were over the holidays, how bad "the cold" and "the flu" is this year for them and their families, how miserable it was being sick on holidays instead of celebrating, and how they're all too sick to get much work done today with just a couple of people chiming in that they were healthy enough to cover for other people today. After 90 minutes of this one of the organizers just pulled the plug and closed the Zoom room rather than trying to get any actual work business done.

Happy 2024 to all! It's off to a great start.

Learned a new long COVID manifestation, even for me, today. My wife was working with a high school kid today who was having problems speaking, with what sounded like a speech impediment. But this kid did not have a speech impediment earlier in the course.

The kid said that she was diagnosed with "COVID induced ventriculitis" and one of the outcomes is a speech impediment.

I was able to find just a couple of papers that mention this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8170868/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8653406/

Keep your damn kids safe out there people!

My son was just watching a sports reporter talking about the college football team he likes. He brought it to me when the guy said something to the effect of:

"I'm sorry if I'm a little off. The flu's really bad this year. I've had really heavy brain fog for a week now. No worry, though. A couple more Red Bulls and I'll be good."

It's just so cringey at this point, but, it also shows, again, that people really don't understand.

I honestly feel like I sometimes write down the COVID chronicles of the people around us just so that I can go back and look at them for my own sanity later when they tell me everything is fine. This person probably deserves their own thread, along side my wife's boss' ongoing health problems.

Last year I wrote this about a teacher my wife and I know:

"My wife's friend, also a teacher, has had an almost identical experience. Without belaboring the point, she is sick all of the time. Sadly, her little kid, now 2, has spent half of her life constantly sick. Just last week she was telling my wife that all she wanted was for them to be healthy for 2 weeks. Just 2 weeks and maybe they could have a good Christmas. They haven't managed 2 weeks once this semester. So what happened? This morning she was practically sobbing to my wife that they're sick, again, and she's far too sick to make it in to teach today."

I followed up with this 4 days ago:

"A year later I can tell you it's no different. They're in and out of the pediatrician's office constantly, just now with some ER and Urgent Care visits mixed in. The kid's been diagnosed with every viral illness you can think of, multiple times each."

To be clear, while she acknowledged COVID years ago, she's a constant it's-not-COVID-person since 2021 and they absolutely have been diagnosed with everything else. Such as strep throat, RSV, hand, foot and mouth disease, etc. in that time. I've begun to believe that their family doctor probably doesn't believe in COVID as he never gives them that diagnosis, at least that they've shared.

When she was still complaining to my wife about how sick she was this morning, it's been at least 9 days now, my wife brought up COVID, again, and was met with "Oh no, it's not that." My wife really pushed it, and much to my surprise she took a COVID test. I honestly think she did it just to "prove" to my wife that it wasn't COVID so she'd stop bringing it up.

Guess what? It's COVID. She was "beyond shocked" when the test "instantly" showed positive. She's truly mind-blown as she tried to wrap her head around what was probably her sincere believe of "it's over" and "I have a positive test in my hand" simultaneously.

For what it's worth it's "so much worse than any of the three times [she] had it years ago."

As my wife and I continue in our slow-motion move, today she got to a pile of paperwork from when she taught in brick and mortar school. It was shocking how much of it was about school shootings and what to do. When to run, when to fight, what to do with your students, how best to break out windows, what to do if someone's been shot, how to take on an active shooter with only your bare hands, etc. Reams of paper dedicated to it.

Honestly, if any teacher escapes uninjured, physically, it's kind of a miracle if they don't end up with PTSD. And this was true before a pandemic.

A lot of parents complain about weight gain once they start eating their kids' leftovers. I've discovered the next level. When they first get excited about learning how to cook completely on their own.

My kids have started finding recipes online that they want to try, and you know who gets to eat it all. Last week my 12yo saw a recipe for cheesecake brownie bars. They were way too good and I ate way too much. Today he's experimenting with two different shortbread recipes, after my 10yo jumped into bed our bed this morning and declared he was making bagels.

In a scientist work group chat this morning from a scientist with a chemistry degree from a top-20 US university:

"I know I've been doing this for years, but my brain's a little different this year. Haha! Please help?"

He's asking for help on a simple math problem, taking a percent of a number, that my 10yo could do in under 10 seconds. Not everything is COVID related, but, some things probably are.

Keep your brains safe people, please.

While scrolling through my timeline with a cup of tea this morning I had a minor revelation about a couple of things that I've posted about lately. Namely, people posting about something, but refusing to hear even *slightly* different viewpoints that mostly agree, and people confidently posting about something that I, or others, know is actually, blatantly, factually wrong.

Mastodon is, actually, pretty full of really smart people. Often, the type of people who either are actual experts in a subject, or, are experts on a more local-scale. They're simply not used to being wrong, or being told that they're wrong.

It's fine to opine on things, like, "I'm a(n) [insert title here, ie, astrophysicist] and here's my thoughts on something totally different [insert subject, ie, the inner workings of the Federal Court system]" when it's an invitation for comment and discussion. But there's far too much of "Well, I actually work in the [Federal Court System] and here's how it works." and instead of having a discussion it's just a "HOW DARE YOU. I'M BRILLIANT! *BLOCK*"

Someone pointing out that you don't know everything is not an attack on your intellect. Being intelligent and being an expert in one thing does not mean you know everything about all subjects. A little humility would go a long ways here.

I'm honestly shocked by how many really intelligent and well educated people that I see here doubling down on ridiculous statements well outside of their field. I see too much of it, and I even proactively block ANYONE that I see posting confidently but factually wrong information about anything that I know to be factually incorrect, no matter how small.

Anyway, make of it what you will, but, if you think that everything you believe is correct, across all subjects, and you're unwilling to listen to people who might, actually, know better than you, the problem probably isn't Mastodon or even the people replying to you. It's more likely that you prefer to live in an echo chamber where your beliefs are never challenged or questioned.

We had to have some roofing work done around a month ago now. We had put down a deposit on the work, and the job was completed, but we never heard back from the mid-to-late 20's year old guy who did the work afterward.

He was a really nice young guy and being the honest people that we are, we reached out to him today to ask when he would be billing us for the job. He responded that he "got really sick" some time after the job and "just can't remember stuff a lot of the time" now. He says he'll get to it when he feels up to it.

This is really the future we're building, isn't it?

Someone, very politely, DM'd me to say that they love the content of what I post, but I'm too wordy and so they have to mute me....and I'm sooooooo tempted to write them a 1000 word essay on my wordiness, it's origins, and why I'm OK with it and specifically chose a Mastodon instance that allows me over 65,000 characters per post.

My friends will get random 500 word texts about why Nikola Jokic is the greatest basketball player and Aaron Gordon is most complimentary player in the NBA for his skillset....at work in the middle of the day....there's no stopping the volume of my words!!!!

But, really, if my posts are too long, feel free not to read them 😂

https://time.com/6341027/what-is-healthspan-vs-lifespan/

Time got close. They figured out the idea behind what most of the COVID cautious folks I know are saying....they just failed to make the seemingly obvious connection to COVID. Maybe someday.

There's something that been on my mind lately, but I really want to be clear on part of it up front. This isn't a sub-toot of anyone, or even a single subject. It's about a conglomeration of things I've seen on Mastodon lately that have stuck in my mind. It's not aimed at anyone and I *do* think the climate(culture?) of Mastodon has been shifting and people's experiences of that can be all over the place.

That's kind of the nature of this place. No big deal for some, while traumatic for some. I'm not dismissing anyone's experience, but if I don't put this out there it'll just be stuck in my mind ruminating around forever, I'm afraid.

When I was 16 the first thing I did after buying an $800 car and getting my driver's license was travel. Why? Because I wanted to see different things and understand what about those places and experiences made people the way they were. By the time I was 18 I'd bummed around most of the country, almost every state, slept in a lot of shady motels, in the back of my car and on a lot of couches. When I was 18, around my full-time job and college, I got a passport and went everywhere else I could drive. Sorry Europe, I grew up poor and flying for pleasure was out of my financial means.

I see a rising number of people being upset that they aren't seeing what they want when they log into Mastodon. This seems to run the gamut from seemingly mild to Nazi's everywhere. The internet is nothing if not a mirror reflecting back on humankind. It's a big world out there. I've seen a lot and it's still a tiny fraction of what's out there. Pick any topic and people exist out there 180 degrees, exact opposite of what you think and every single fraction of a degree in between.

Thankfully, as far as I'm concerned, Mastodon has some pretty cool ways to deal with this. From talking to people I'm going to go ahead and say I'm probably in the top 1% in terms of using the mute and block functions.

But, wait, you say....you're the one saying you wanted to know all about all of these other people and what makes them tick.

Yes, and I know for a fact that you can't argue with people who are vehemently opposed to what you believe. Unfortunately, and I think here is the crux of what I'm getting at, I see a lot of people turning that into "I can't deal with Mastodon when it's not the echo chamber of my dreams."

You have to have a big tent people. That person who's 180 degrees opposite of you on whatever topic probably isn't going to listen. Me, personally, I give it a good try and if it turns into an argument I mash that block button and probably never look back. I follow over 1,600 accounts. I'm not afraid to mute them or block them when something comes up on my timeline that offends me. To me, that's what it's all about. Find out about other people and decide if you're compatible enough to have a discussion.

I see an awful lot of people lately bashing Mastodon in general, or bashing their followers, not because they're 180 degrees apart, but because they're a few degrees apart.

All of that to say, make Mastodon what you want. If you want a perfect echo chamber of yourself, those people exist out there somewhere. Find them, block everyone else and leave the rest of us alone. It's a big world with a lot of people and if you're going to limit yourself to only people who agree with you 100% of the way on whatever the issues, the problem isn't your choice of social media brand.

The public whining that people don't always agree with you is getting out of hand. At least on my timeline. Maybe not yours. And that's kind of the point, too.

Anecdotal, for sure, but, I was on the road driving across multiple states two weeks ago and again yesterday. Two weeks ago I didn't notice anything odd, but yesterday every single town I went through had absolutely packed doctor's office, family care center and hospital parking lots. It was really striking and obvious how few cars were anywhere *but* medical offices.

Stay safe out there people.