they are not intended to prevent spread of pathogens. they exist solely to protect the wearer. they are intended for e.g. building sites or industrial settings where there may be dust & particles etc. in the air – i.e. they do a great job at filtering what comes in through the mask (hence the high stats), but they have a handy vent that opens when you breathe out. there is absolutely no filtering on the air coming out through that vent (because in the setting they’re designed for, there’s no need for it). do not wear these masks, they are almost useless in terms of preventing the spread of the virus.
Protecting yourself is still protecting others because you cannot spread it if you don’t catch it. Pathogens that can only reproduce in living humans are a rare area of life where the interests of the individual and the interests of the collective are in near perfect alignment. Obviously, if everyone inhaled only highly filtered air, the virus would have a hard time regardless of what happens to the exhalation.
Even putting that aside, there’s nothing wrong with protecting yourself.
All that aside, masks by definition (per OSHA) do not provide an air-tight seal around the face. Get an elastomeric respirator and some P100 filters instead. They’re available again for the general public and have been for a while now.
@ people who think that valved PPE shouldn’t be worn at all no matter how good its anti-ingress protection is:
As the saying goes [link], have you tried sitting down and thinking about the problem for five minutes?
[Apparently Tumblr, in its hellsiteishness, does not allow descriptive alt text on images. For anyone unable to see it: that is a picture of a valved P100 respirator whose valve has been taped over with cloth.]
Tags:
#covid19 #reply via reblog #illness tw #discourse cw?
“When I put it on before work (so, more time-sensitive than the previous occasions), I *felt* like this time there was a little bit of leakage at the top of my nose, yet it still passed the plug-the-exhalation-valve test. Nocebo?“
I’ve had this apparently phantom sensation of air flow over the nose while still passing seal tests as well. ¯\_(ᐛ)_/¯
“Most importantly, I need to practice attaching the filters and making sure I can properly click them into place, because one of them fucking *fell off mid-task*.“
The filters don’t click into place, they’re twist-lock. This particular model of respirator, in my experience, has particularity tight connections, so I’d recommend installing them while not wearing it. It seems to me implausible that they would fall off if properly twisted into place, without simply ripping the rest of the filter from the plastic coupling.
>>they’re twist-lock
That’s what I meant, yeah.
—
>>It seems to me implausible that they would fall off if properly twisted into place
Yeah, I’m assuming it was some sort of newbie mistake, since there’s no way it’s even *remotely* normal for them to fall off during use. People trust their lives to these things in situations where one minute of masklessness will fuck you the hell up *even if you’re lucky*.
(I called it a “live-fire exercise”, but that was somewhat of an exaggeration: it’s more like an exercise where 99% of darts are blank and 1% contain *some* poison but not enough for a single dart to poison you. It’s just that there are a lot of darts flying around in a crowded restaurant, and you don’t know which ones are which.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #covid19 #illness tw #in which Brin has a job
I’ve been reading worm discourse for what, 5 years? 6? 7? and anyway I’ve only just figured out that Taylor and Skitter are supposed to be the same person
I’ve been reading worm discourse for what, 5 years? 6? 7? and anyway I’ve only just figured out that Taylor and Skitter are supposed to be the same person
There’s a particular aesthetic that I associate with radical self-expression. It’s like, sparkly and glitter-on-face-y and colorful and impractical and frankly it makes me a little uncomfortable but whatever, that’s on me.
The thing I’m not sure about is, how suspicious should I be of just that first sentence? Like you’d think radical self-expression would be diverse enough not to have an associated aesthetic. But that’s not necessarily true, there’s all sorts of ways it could do, and anyway I might be wrong to associate it with radical self-expression at all.
But still, I can’t help but suspect that at least some of the time, people who claim to be going for radical self-expression are actually just trying to look like the sort of person whose radical self-expression makes them look like the sort of person who fits in here.
Which, when I put it in words, yes, obviously that happens. I just don’t know how much.
I do think that shininess, colorfulness, and impracticality are all things you should expect from humans focusing more on doing stuff-they-want with dress, even if these specific people look weirdly close to each other.
When you look at examples in nature of entities showing off to entities with humanlike vision, shininess and colorfulness play a big role, and the same is true in human fashion unless you’re countersignaling. And practicality is a huge constraint on dress. People looking for dress fulfilling specific artistic criteria that aren’t about practicality are almost never going to land on something more practical than average.
What incarnation-issues said. But also, from my perspective, when I wear sparkly colorful impractical clothing, it’s not about radical self-expression. It’s about colors and sparkles as ends in themselves. Trying to be different from everyone else is like running up the down escalator, so I don’t try to do it anymore. I’m a weirdo like all the other weirdos, but the way I am, aesthetically and otherwise, is a good way to be no matter how many people are doing it. I’m just another normal anomaly.
I acknowledge that the above is true for many people, but I personally associate wearing shiny/colourful/impractical/showy clothing with *coercion*. “Oh come *on*, we’re going somewhere *fancy*, you have to look *nice*!”
Sometimes radical self-expression is utility belts and hiking boots and wearing the same few Lands’ End outfits all the time.
(for people unaware, Lands’ End is a clothing store that sells very plain and practical and comfy clothes [link]: I highly recommend them)
Tags:
#clothing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog
I thought it would be interesting to try to write my review of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly in my head without setting pen to paper until the end, and to convey at least some of it by blinking, since I find the fact that the author wrote the whole book in this way astonishing. Perhaps experiencing that process myself would improve my understanding of things, such that I wouldn’t be astonished.
I think trying to do this was an even better exercise than I expected, though by the end I was frustrated to the point of tears, and I’m still feeling kind of annoyed, having just put it up.
(Hopefully this was also a vivid and enlightening experience of signing up for annoying projects, which I do often, but usually the annoyance is months later than the agreeing, so I’m not sure that my intuitive anticipations make the connection.)
Before I go and do something anti-annoying, I figure I should write some notes on the experience, while it is fresh.
Some notes:
It did feel fairly encumbering. There were nascent sentences that I might have tried to poke in somewhere, then play around with, then look at and move or get rid of, where the prospect of trying to do some equivalent of all that in my head while keeping hold of the broader paragraph was too intimidating, and I watched them go by. And the sentences I did write felt like half my attention was on something like balancing them on the end of a stick and not having them fall on the floor, and really sculpting them would have required too much dexterity.
Though I think in some sense they were much more sculpted than usual, because I did think about each one for longer, and often hone it into something more succinct and memorable instead of writing down the first ramble that entered my mind. I’m not sure how that fits with the above observation.
It felt mentally strength-building – as if I was exercising a capability that would improve, which was exciting, and I briefly fantasized about a stronger and defter inner world.
I started out looking at things around me as I composed, like my resting computer, and the table, and the sea. But after a while, I realized that I was staring intently at a long rug with about as many Persian whorls as paragraphs in my prospective post, and that as I envisaged the current sentence, I was mentally weaving it around some well-placed sub-curls of its paragraph-whorl. Looking away from it, it was harder to remember what I had been saying. (I have noticed before that thinking in the world, I end up appropriating the scenery as some kind of scratch paper – you can’t write on it, but you can actually do a lot with reinterpreting whatever it already contains.)
For words with lots of synonyms, I kept selecting one, then forgetting which and having to select again (e.g. ‘lively’ or ‘energetic’ or ‘vigorous’?)
I originally set out to compose the whole thing before writing it, but this was fairly hard and seemed somewhat arbitrary, so after composing the basic outline and a few paragraphs, somewhat discouraged by the likelihood of forgetting them again imminently, I decided that I could instead compose chunks at a time rather than having to do it all at once. In the end I did it in paragraph chunks. Which is probably a much easier task than Bauby had, since if someone was coming to transcribe stuff for hours, one probably wants more than one paragraph relatively well prepared.
Thinking lots of thoughts without saying or writing them can feel a particular kind of agitating.
It took about 20 minutes for my boyfriend and I to transcribe a single sentence using roughly the winking method described in the book, for a speed of around 1 word per minute. The scheme was for him to run his finger over an alphabet reorganized by letter frequency, then for me to wink when he reached the desired letter. We added some punctuation, and a ‘pause! let me think!’ signal, and ‘yes’, and ‘no’. These last three got a lot of use. It basically worked as expected, though one time we made an error, and I didn’t know what to do, so I continued from the beginning of the word again, which made the sentence nonsensical, which confused him for a while, but he figured it out.
I wondered why Bauby and his assistant didn’t use Morse code, or something more efficient. We didn’t try this, but some forum users also wonder this, and one claims that he can wink out about 20 words per minute in Morse code, but that the large amount of blinking involved is ‘pretty tiring’.
We made a huge amount of use of my boyfriend guessing the rest of the word, from context and the first few letters. In the book, Bauby describes how people frequently mess that up, or fail to check that they have guessed correctly, or refuse to guess and conscientiously coax forth every letter. This all sounds terrible.
I’m aware that some people probably compose things entirely in their heads all the time (people have all kinds of mental situations – some people can also reliably imagine a triangle without it being more like the feeling of a triangle laid out in a kind of triangle-like space, or breaking apart and becoming a volcano full of red and white flowers), and my notes here probably sound to them like a person saying ‘for a bizarro experience, I tried to walk across the room without holding on to things, but it was obviously a total disaster – knees bending every which way, and imagine balancing a whole floppy and joint-strewn human body on top of two of those things, while moving! Such sympathy I have for those who have lost their walking frames.’ I’m curious to hear from them whether this is what it sounds like.
(I will tentatively put this comment here, but let me know if you would prefer I comment through worldspiritsockpuppet.com in order to have a central comment collection point. I’m a bit wary of Disqus because of its fragility (Disqus widgets don’t preserve successfully in the Wayback Machine), but it’s not a dealbreaker.)
—
I do compose posts in my head sometimes (though not always, and not this one). The post mostly doesn’t strike me as overtly odd (in an absence-of-ability-I-take-for-granted way), but I think that’s because it all traces back to this bullet point:
“I originally set out to compose the whole thing before writing it, but this was fairly hard and seemed somewhat arbitrary, so after composing the basic outline and a few paragraphs, somewhat discouraged by the likelihood of forgetting them again imminently, I decided that I could instead compose chunks at a time rather than having to do it all at once. In the end I did it in paragraph chunks. Which is probably a much easier task than Bauby had, since if someone was coming to transcribe stuff for hours, one probably wants more than one paragraph relatively well prepared.”
Left to my own devices, I would interpret having to write-by-blinking *as you go* to be a *handicap* relative to composing the post in advance, and the rest of your post feels sense-making in large part *because* you were operating under that handicap.
(I didn’t read the review until afterward, and as such didn’t initially realise that you only blinked for the first sentence.)
Composing mentally, in my experience, is a form of memorisation. While I am walking or performing janitorial duties at my restaurant job or what-have-you, I run through the post in my mind over and over, musing on it, perhaps tweaking it, but also just repeating the words I have already chosen.
(And then, after I’ve written them down and made any final tweaks and–if applicable–posted them, I’ll usually re-read them a few more times over the following couple of days for good measure. I also occasionally archive-binge my own blog. Some of my posts I can *still* recite mostly or entirely from memory, and I almost always have at least enough sense of [what else I’ve posted] to know what things would be useful to link to in order to provide context to my current posts.)
The Wikipedia article says he wrote about half a word per minute in four-hour sessions, which would mean his sessions were around 120 words each. Given a day to think over how I’m going to use 120 words (and not a great deal *else* to think about, comparatively), I think I could probably wear the groove of that memory deep enough to rattle the words off when the time came.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #paralysis #writing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw
is there anything more awkward than looking back at your childhood at innocent interactions you had with other kids and thinking “oh…. wow. that was uhhh definitely their early exploration of a fetish, wasn’t it?”
I’m also remembering a lot of games with one particular friend who always found reasons why her character should be tied up. I didn’t mind, because it meant I got to play the Noble Knight Who Rescues The Princess™️ AND the mustache-twirling villain, but it always pissed me off when we paused the game and she would still pretend that she was actually stuck and would fake-struggle for like ten minutes against the most half-hearted jump rope tied in a bow around her arms. Please, knock it off, I just want to go to lunch.
Villain: “Can you PLEASE just ride off into the sunset together already?”
Knight: “You’re just letting us go? What’s the catch, blackguard?”
Villain: “No catch. Kidnapping the princess was just supposed to be a distraction while I executed my REAL plan. I did not expect this to take so long and now the window of opportunity has closed… a whole day, wasted.”
Hero: “Look. I am TRYING to rescue her. She just… well.”
Princess: “Ha ha oh nooo it looks like these ropes just wrapped around me somehow… I’m hopelessly trapped…”
Villain: “Ma’am. Your Highness. That’s the power cord to my Xbox.”
Princess: “And it’s getting tighter! Oh no!”
Knight: “I’m sort of uncomfortable. Are you uncomfortable?”
Villain: “Yeah… I know I technically initiated this entire scenario but I’m starting to feel… used, somehow. Like. It doesn’t feel professional.”
Princess: [sarcastically] “Is someone baking a cake?”
Knight: “No?”
Princess: “Huh. Weird. ‘Cause I could swear I smell the overpowering aroma of vanillain this room.”
The games themselves (probably? hopefully?) weren’t recognizably sexual—just early fixations upon things or ideas that seemed maybe a little weird or exasperating at the time if you didn’t share that fascination, but which in retrospect were almost certainly the unrealized roots of your playmate’s later sexual preferences.
It is a bit disturbing to realize that you had some kind of role in developing their, uh, proclivities, but it’s not like Little Jimmy could have meaningfully articulated why he always insisted on the rule that everyone had to take off their shoes to play tag, or known that it would creep his friends out ten years later once he realized he had a foot fetish. It’s awkward but—so long as the games didn’t result in something traumatic—ultimately sort of an unavoidable embarrassment of youth to look back and go, “Oh, that’s what that was…. 😬”
I was reading Perv by Jesse Bering (which in general is only so-so; not enough discussion of the research IMO), and he points out that, where kinks can be traced to a formative experience in childhood, this formative experience often comes well before puberty, like anywhere from five to ten–which is super awkward, because for many reasons our culture likes to draw a bright, clear dividing line between childhood and adulthood, and where that’s not possible, at least between childhood and adolescence. But that’s not always possible! And given how much of human psychology is dominated by romance and physical attraction, it would be weird if that system of the brain didn’t exist some unformed, incipient manner, but sprang into existence suddenly on our 13th birthday or w/e.
I have spoken to a lot of kinky people about this. In my experience, about 50% are like “yeah, in retrospect I was an extremely kinky eight-year-old, not that I had any understanding of any of this at the time.” In other words, I am the playmate here and I apologize to my cub scout troop.
Did the many kinky people you’ve talked to fall into distinct camps of “yeah, in retrospect my insistence on getting my acquaintances to play with me in certain very particular ways was Meaningful” vs “yeah, in retrospect my insistence on *freaking the fuck out* at acquaintances who happened to play in certain very particular ways in my presence was Meaningful”? If so, are there other clear distinctions between said camps?
Whenever I hear stories about childhood selves who don’t know they’re kinky and unwittingly erotic games, the young kinksters are always the ones *instigating* the games. But I was the exact opposite of this! Long before I had any idea why, I knew down in my bones that this was something *important* and *profound* and *private*, and I couldn’t stand to see people taking it lightly and without regard for whether anyone was watching.
(“It’s just a game,” said the girls confused about why I was upset by one of them pretending to hypnotise the other, and they were more confused when that only upset me further. It isn’t *just* anything.)
Don’t get me wrong, I played plenty of in-hindsight-sexual games as a child. But they were always, *always* alone and in private (to the extent that a child can arrange for privacy). (…and would you look at that, I grew up into an asexual adult who finds casual sex extremely unappealing. I feel like these facts might be related, but I have so little data.)
—
(I worry about the people who think that the senses of importance and privacy people have around sex are invariably *learned*, that they are a collective trauma that we as a society should work to grow past.
I know some people actually do feel deep down like it’s not a big deal, even in spite of having been taught otherwise. And I know vanilla people can’t control for knowledge, can’t see into what “a version of themselves who hadn’t been taught anything at all about how to interpret their desires” would be like. But I can, and I know that I could never have been good enough for them.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #my childhood #embarrassment squick #rape tw
The worst part of human adulthood is being your own zookeeper
I want to stuff a pumpkin full of raw meat and roll it around my enclosure, but I also know that I’ll have to be the one to clean up afterwards :-(
Take steps to minimize the mess! Put a cheap, disposable plastic tarp down in the area you’ll be rolling it around. And.. Maybe recognize your species-specific needs and cook the meat first
Actually, if we’re going for species-specific enrichment, a pumpkin may not be the best solution. We’re not built for pouncing on prey or batting it around. We’re distinguished by our persistence hunting and tool use
What you should do is put a pack of jerky on top of a roomba, go in another room and count to ten like you’re playing hide and seek – or use this time to find a tool to use – and when you come back, try to catch it by setting a trap or by pinning it down with a stick
When you want a greater challenge, have a friend drive an RC car full of jerky around the park, and chase it until it runs out of battery
One time when I was a kid my parents took a bunch of hollow plastic Easter eggs, filled them with chocolates, and hid them around the house for the kids to find, and it is dawning on me that this was the gathering equivalent of the above hunting enrichment.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #evolution #games #food #my childhood
is2020over.com is the most important website of the year.
(Answer: no. Just today left. Could be more disasters to track, who knows.)
So anyway, the guy it’s “reluctantly made & maintained by” is speaking on the Jan. 5 about how 2020 is, finally, over.
You can register here, assuming we make it another week.
I get why people are saying this, but I disagree. Much like how “the ‘60′s” ended in 1974, “2020″ will not end until the vaccine rollout.
For the purposes of mass coordination “the end of 2020″ is probably when the pandemic is declared officially over, but I personally will be making a Happy New Year post one week after my second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech, or on the equivalent day-of-full-effect if I end up with a different manufacturer’s vaccine.
(Tonight I’m still gonna eat traditional New Year foods and play “Auld Lang Syne” and maybe watch the Times Square ball drop if the stream doesn’t crash again, but I’m thinking I might also do it (sans ball drop) then.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #New Years #illness tw #covid19 #apocalypse cw?
They’re only 16 feet above sea level, they already have issues with salt water incursion into the freshwater supply, and there’s a Superfund site 750 feet away from the water supply for all of Miami.
And I wasn’t joking about the storm surge either. Tampa is 80 feet above sea level, Miami averages 16.
The only advantage of Miami is that the mayor of Miami has explicitly said “Fuck those Commies who ruined SF”.
/There’s some personal reasons for this as well, but I really don’t want to have to move to Miami.
I respect you and your weird outlooks and choices but “Let’s all the rich people go move somewhere teetering on the brink of absolute infrastructure catastrophe where the mayor PROMISES not to tax anybody” has possibly the highest entertainment value yet
I know right!
This was 1992, when FL’s population was 2/3rds what it is now.
The South is a couple of strategic ports, a series of *inland* cities because hurricanes… and Florida, 20 Million people sitting out on a stick. It’s already a 2-day drive to evacuate from Tampa to the state border when a hurricane hits. Everyone who moves there is crazy, but all the people who want to employ me are *moving there*.
Aren’t a bunch of tech companies moving to Austin? I’ve certainly heard more mumbling about Austin than Miami on twitter, but maybe that’s just my bubble.
I know everybody thinks us tech workers are rootless, atomized yuppies who are only in San Francisco etc. because that’s where the jobs are, but I actually like Seattle, and I know plenty of people who feel the same way about the Bay Area (housing costs aside).
(That said, everyone else should take OP’s advice and move to Miami so I can get a cheaper condo here)
I mean, I liked NYC before my knee blew out and I was no longer capable of standing on moving trains right as the local Armenians started having nightly gunfights and my entire industry evacced the dying, collapsing, suddenly crime-ridden city.
/NYC used to have a crime rate less than the national average.
In the year of our Lord 2021, a material-enough-to-have-to-upend-your-life-for percentage of tech/finance companies are *still* planning to make you live in the same state as them if you want to work for them? That’s fucked up.
(My dad worked tech in San Francisco for a while, but that didn’t mean he *lived* there, *god* no. He lived in *Canada* like a *sensible* person.)
((no offense to my friends in San Francisco, I assume you’re making the best of a bad situation))
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I mean, I guess if you’re used to California even Miami might seem like an improvement danger-wise? Like, on a scale of 1 to California, Miami is what, a 9?
“Arranging for rich people to live in incredibly disaster-prone environments” doesn’t sound like an anti-communist position at all. That’s just using hurricanes/earthquakes/wildfires instead of guillotines.
Tags:
#getting an IFRS-based accounting designation is increasingly seeming #like a kind of precommitment against the San Francisco Gravitational Field and its descendants #”nope‚ my credentials don’t transfer to the States‚ you’ll just have to go on without me‚ so sorry‚ byeeee” #(renouncing my U.S. citizenship would be an even stronger oath to never move there but I’m still not sure if I’m willing to go *that* far) #((a few years back my dad refused a job offer from Google that was conditional on moving to SF)) #((better to work at Uber Eats here than to work at Google there)) #(((well at the time it was ”better to be unemployed” etc: Uber Eats came later))) #on a scale of 1 to California my area is maybe a 2 #there’s occasional ice storms you have to watch out for and that’s basically it #(*knocks on wood*) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #reply via reblog #apocalypse cw #death tw? #murder cw?
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