A man of knowledge, I see.
I rented a small boat in Greece and the guy in the harbor showed me a map of the islands I could go to and there was a red line marking how far you were allowed to go. The guy put his hand on my shoulder and very seriously explained that the red like was not visible on the surface of the sea it was just for reference on the map. And told me about this British couple who got on the boat and drove straight on until the fuel ran out. They were lucky they still had phone signal and they called for the guy to come get them. When asked why they did that they said they couldn’t see the red line so they thought it was ok…
It’s incredible that humanity has done this well
I think about that guy very often lately…
Consider the mere fact that Doctors exist, and have been a thing for thousands of years. I think this tells us that for every person that is incapable of keeping themselves alive, there’s at least a hundred more just like that, and just one person smart enough to keep them all going.
I mean, there was a good chunk of that time where the doctors thought that bleeding someone to balance their humors was a valid treatment for a variety of things. Some things were treated with amputation with only alcohol as an anesthetic (and disinfectant, if they happened to splash some on the wound).
And God forbid they even washed hands before an operation
This reminds me of this letter published in spider-man 12:
Reference:
The world could use some yellow paint
The Darwin award ladies and gentlemen
Definitely contenders, but they’d need to have killed themselves and/or their offspring in the process to win the prize (or caused their own infertility before having kids, but those are really rare).
Sadly I don’t think they are eligible. That award is for when you remove yourself from the gene pool or you remove the ability to contribute to the gene pool.
They did give it a good try I give them that!
I never understood people being gleerfuly happy to see someone off themselves like that.
The same people who say eugenics is wrong, will cheer to see the gene-pool “purified”.
I don’t cheer. But it happens and there is nothing to be done. We have enough systems in place to prevent such instances but people seem to work very hard to circumvent these systems… Just think of all the warning labels and all the rules we have in place and yet when an idiot tells people raw milk is perfectly safe they just go do it… What more can any society do to prevent this? At some point it is not happiness but relief because after all the progress and all the energy that was put in pushing the civilisation to where it is now, there are people out there that are willing and they do die on hills like flat earth, raw milk, antivax and on and on…
I also disagree with the purification part. There is nothing to purify because I don’t believe that stupidity is genetic. It is educated. And education is the cure. And by that I don’t just mean school! Education doesn’t end when school ends. It is lifelong. It is a constant observation of what goes on around you and learning from the small mistakes to avoid bigger ones. It is much to discuss on this subject
Intelligence has a significant genetic component, it follows that stupidity does too
I am not sure about this one… I see it like this: the tribes in the Amazon and the engineers who can build rockets have different types of intelligence. First ones can’t build rockets but can survive and navigate the jungle where the rocket guys will die almost immediately. But a stupid person from both groups will look almost the same because it will ignore basic knowledge and will fail to apply simple logic in a situation that will lead to harm or some other disaster.
If I was some sort of world dictator, I would make taking a test once a year mandatory, and send people back to school, like a prison/institution for the uneducated, medical interventions added as necessary (everyone gets screened, no excepts).
Seeing this post made me physically cringe. I am “The Public.”
In my late 20s, my ear started hurting. I was utterly convinced it was just a stubborn clump of earwax. I went to the pharmacy and bought one of those bulb syringes for rinsing ears. The pharmacist calmly and explicitly instructed me: “Make sure you only use lukewarm water.” I went home, washed my ear canal, and nothing happened. I figured I’d just give it a few days to loosen up.
Over the next couple of days, the pain escalated to an excruciating level. I’m talking find-chair, put-my-head-in-my-lap kinda pain. And as my son had just been born, I was operating on a good mix of extreme pain and severe sleep deprivation.
Eventually, i came to the conclusion that hotter water = more wax melting, and if lukewarm water didn’t work, maybe it just needs more heat. The hotter the water, the better chance it has of melting the wax, right? So, I boiled some water. And with zero hesitation, I injected boiling hot water directly into my ear canal.
It was not earwax.
I ended up at the doctor, where I learned that the initial agony was actually a severe case of otitis media (a middle ear infection). And thanks to my brilliant home remedy, I had managed to add a scorched ear canal and a secondary outer ear infection right on top of it.
So yeah. When that optometrist said, “Look at me. I want you to understand that I mean water that has been boiled and has since cooled down,” he was talking to me. I am the guy.
I’m so happy you’re still with us. Stay safe friend. And keep up on your sleep.
Thanks for the kind words, I am glad that you are here as well!
Ear infections definitely are some of the worst pain I’ve experienced. I would put them up there with really bad burns.
Any pain localized in the head is really the worst. Tooth infections, ear infections, migraines…
As someone who has them quite often: the weird thing is the pain level varies wildly between each infection. One time the doc had to tell me I had an ear infection as it was painless - another time it felt like someone was ramming a dagger into my skull at a 5 second intervall.
Sleep deprivation will make you do some crazy things
Not my proudest moment…
Those bulb syringes can be a nightmare too, read that the cause of someone’s problem was mold growing the bulb and getting sent straight into the ear.
Gross and terrifying. If you can’t see what’s inside, don’t trust it’s clean.
On the bright side, your boiling water probably did a good job of disinfecting it.
they have the kits with the plastic bottle sprayers attached with a hose, easier to clean and less messy.
I’ve got one of those bulbs but it comes apart so you can see and clean the inside. It’s also transparent so you can see inside it even if you decide to be lazy.
my family has one of these that’s like clear
my ear started hurting. I was utterly convinced it was just a stubborn clump of earwax.
I am lucky enough to be one of those people who simply never builds up any serious amounts of ear wax. It’s oily and not crumbly, so a gentle swish of a Q-tip after a shower and it all comes out. my doc checks my ears twice a year and has never had cause to complain.
But IIRC ear wax is soft enough to never be particularly painful unless you pack it down with something like a Q-tip. Like, so long as you know you have one of those ear wax types for whom Q-tips in any usage capacity is a bad idea (it’s usually the crumbly ear wax), the most it will do is accumulate until your hearing is affected.
Now granted, it’ll plug up the ear canal until you have trouble hearing things. But all you need then is some professional irrigation by a doctor a few times a year, and as long as you aren’t in a third-world country like America, that should be 100% free.
i have to lavage my ears out every 6month-year due to massively increased shedding from atopic dermatitis, the indication is when sounds get muffled in one ear. getting the ear lavage kits from online has been very useful.
Ear wax has never been an issue for me either, I had a friend who had just had their ear canal rinsed by a doctor. And their explanation kinda fit the bill…
So with a new born, new house that I was renovating, and stubbornness that I can handle everything myself, I managed to convince myself that this was the root cause
I suffer from impaction occasionally and used to irrigate with 2% hydrogen peroxide. The H2O2 reacts with the wax and helps break it up. It is one of the strangest sensations though, bubbles forming and popping en masse inside of your ear canal. Eventually I bought an ear cleaning otoscope and scoop out the wax manually every few months.
i just use warm water and a ear lavage, the ones with the spray bottle attached to a tube to squeeze into the eary. before that i used a ear syringe which was much more time consuming and annoying to use.
Somehow I’m in a similar but weirdly opposite boat to you. Like I’ll ignore pain until it is either too annoying or on the edge of debilitating, which given my pain tolerance is fucking absurd. I’ve had multiple docs and nurses say shit like “how are you even functioning” while I sit bored trying to not scratch at my swollen and infected ear. Upside is I don’t need anesthesia for root canal!
Story time.
My wife is an optometrist.
One day a patient called the office because he had foreign body in his eye. No big deal. They had equipment for removing a foreign body from the eye safely. The patient asked how much the exam was. They told him (I think it was around $70) and he said he’d think about it.
He called up a little while later and said he got it out. He asked if he still needed to come in, and they explained that he still should have his eye checked to make sure it wasn’t injured.
When he got there, my wife asked him how he got it out.
He said he used the edge of a razor blade to pick it out of his eye. He said he does it all the time.
If the thought of putting the edge of a razor blade against your eye is not horrifying enough, remember that when you’re working on your own eye, you don’t have depth perception.
What the actual fuck 😱
“all the time” excuse me… I perform surgery on my self all the time but I can’t even put eye drops in without my eyes locking down the second the drop falls from the bottle.
Eye drop tip:
Pull your lower eyelid down to create a little pocket and put the drop in your eyelid.
Yooooo
I go for the corner and then blink it around. This pocket thing does not work for me.
This story made me physically cringe, oh hell that sounds awful.
remember that when you’re working on your own eye, you don’t have depth perception.
Every year or five I’ll get a “sclera blister” that feels like a honking grain of sand in my eye. Sure, I’ve thought about taking a pair of tweezers to tear the dome of that blister off, but I have always been squicked like crazy because I can’t properly judge distances that close to the cornea. Corner of my eye or on the rim of the eye lid itself is difficult enough, but anywhere directly on the sclera that’s close to the cornea is definitely no-go land for me.
Every warning up there is in place because someone tried to do exactly what the warning tells you not to.
Around 2005 my dad was working for a small air cargo company, the owner did him a favor and gave me a part time job in the evening while I was going to the local community college. Dad did double duty as accounting and HR and when I hired in I had to meet with him to go over the company’s employee handbook.
We went over bit by bit until I asked who would do that? to one of the items. He looked me straight in the eyes and said each of these rules come from actual incidents. He then calmly grabbed a tab and flipped to a section and said and we call this chapter Dennis.
Fun fact 20 years later and Dennis is the chief pilot of the company and one of only two people there I would blindly get in a plane with.
“Rules are written in blood”
Once had a teacher explain to our class all the things you were not aloud to do with the school DSLR cameras. It was mostly what you’d expect: don’t leave it in your car, get it wet, etc., but when ‘don’t set it on fire’ got everyone’s curiosity the teacher explained that they had a student return a scorched camera with the excuse that they “wanted the audience to be able to feel the fire.”
I am a dentist and any oddly specific instructions I give are usually because some turd has tried it before:
“Prepare your nightguard by running it under warm water. This means a few seconds under the warm water from your tap - do not boil your nightguard in a pot for half an hour, it will be destroyed”
“Do not place a tiny crab fork in your extraction site to remove food debris”
“If you require an adjustment, please return. Your garage power tools are not safe to use on your teeth”
My dentist asked me how I floss and asked me to do it gently and not yank it with force. I was very confused at the moment, but now it makes sense that someone did that.
Your garage power tools are not safe to use on your teeth
Bob Mortimer has entered the chat
Fuji nine!
If you have Fuji9, you are a dentist.
?
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“Do not place a tiny crab fork in your extraction site to remove food debris”
I JUST PUT THE BRAIN BLEACH BACK INTO LONG-TERM STORAGE, FFS.
That last one, dear god…
see, the problem with that last statement is that it’s too broad. I can think of a few tools that are definitely safe to use on my teeth, therefore what else are you wrong about?
Jokes on them, I don’t even own a garage. My power tools live in the craft room and the utility closet.
exactly! too vague and too specific!
I wasn’t told anything about my indoor power tools, or my unpowered tools!
Well, a dremel can seem like a good idea to many people. However, they have a nasty habit of skipping and chattering off hard enamel. If it rebounds into the soft tissue of the cheek, it doesn’t simply make a cut - it rolls itself into the cheek tissue like it’s twisted up in a sheet and gets stuck.
Now I’m intrigued! What power tools do you have that could be deemed safe?
im guessing something like an air blower
any low speed (<2000rpm) handheld rotary tool with a buffing wheel ain’t gonna do much. i.e. drills
a palm sander with a soft attachment is basically just an electric toothbrush
compressed air isn’t going to hurt your teeth. and leaf blower low pressure air certainly isn’t. like the other guy said. same for vacuums.
that’s really about it. I was exaggerating a bit for comedic effect when I said “a few”, because tbh I didn’t think much about it.
oh and of course you can always stick your head in a lathe, lathes are like the super safest tool there is
When coming across an unfamiliar problem, does anyone else feel themselves be possessed by the “problem solver”? It’s like the rational part of your brain doesn’t think it needs to be there so it delegates to your lizard brain and your lizard brain decides to “solve” the problem itself.
It’s so jarring how much can “seem like a good idea at the time”.
Sort of, but not the lizard brain part. My rationality stays intact except I become too stubborn to reasonably decide if it’s worth the time and effort to solve this problem (spoiler: usually not). If it seems solvable then dammit I wanna figure it out, to hell with other considerations.
Tell me more about this feeling.
It’s like a step above autopilot. It feels like the rational parts of your brain are locked off to you and the world is briefly as confusing to you as when you were a kid.
Obviously you can shake out of it and think harder about your scenario, but usually you just want the thing over and done with and that leaves you fumbling about long enough to make a bad decision.
I experience the opposite even when I’m under time pressure (running late for something). When I discover some small, unrelated problem my brain will switch to problem solving mode and focus on this new task instead. This way I totally loose track of time, even though I was totally stressed out about it a second ago. This can happen with stuff like a broken tool but also if I happen to look at a sudoku.
sounds like burnout :(
Not at all, no.
I used to work in a college computer lab. One night, a girl waved me over and said “the foot pedal isn’t working.” I said “foot pedal?”
Sure enough, she had the mouse on the floor, and was trying to work it with her bare foot.
She probably had been taught to use a sewing machine, they use for pedals to operate
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To be fair, and balanced, and Cody, there are actual foot pedals for computers.
They are mostly used for driving games, but they are pretty useful for other stuff, like push to talk, or additional ctrl alt and shift.
EMN reference in the wild! Don’t forget to tune in to the livestream tonight at 6 PDT!
You’re about 20 years late with this advice but damn that push to talk pedal would’ve been super handy in my ventrilo days…
We used purpose made floor pedals on the sociology research office to control a transcription software. It allowed precise control over a voice recording so any of us lowly students could quickly transcribe interviews and focus groups without removing the hands from the home row of the keyboard. It was already 30 years old technology by the time I got to college. It was apparently first invented for work with actual tape players.
I work at a MSP with several law firms and several medical companies along with other types. Multiple lawyers and a few doctors we’ve worked with had foot pedals and something like Dragon Naturally Speaking doing dictation for them. With the use of VDIs this was sometimes a pin because of USB redirection and all, but they absolutely needed to have it working.
Must be in the US
Those points used to be straight…
just like the frogs!
damnit, you beat me to it.
I figure in the last four billion years or so all water has been previously boiled…
Atoms cannot be easily created or destroyed.
However molecules can and often are easily assembled.
Water is one of those molecules which are easy to create, and easy to break back apart into its constituent atoms. So yes, there is likely plenty of water that has never been boiled because it was created so recently (cosmologically speaking).
I thought this was going to be about the glare of a white background.
I’ve come to realize that most of us are just smart enough to fuck things up.
