Ed Suominen

Engineer, inventor, retired patent agent, ex-fundamentalist, amateur evolutionist, Covid-19 virgin. Old enough to remember Republicans believing in Democracy.

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Last Notes

2024-08-22 22:27:27

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(5) The #SARS_COV_2 virus.

2024-08-17 01:11:16

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12//Which is all to say, in summary, that walking around not wearing an #N95 during yet another surge of this #pandemic that quite obviously not over—unless you are a billionaire, business owner, politician, or political/media prostitute thereof, or your brain is already too far gone to change course—is an incredibly stupid thing to be doing.
Far dumber than taking a 5% chance of losing a foot out in the woods today.
Wake up. Thanks, Ted Talk etc. etc.
#CovidIsNotOver #NoToBrainInfections

2024-08-17 01:04:15

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11/ And this only partially overlaps the living hell that millions—yes, millions—of people in just this country alone are now experiencing from #LongCovid. Their old lives are gone. It would be false hope and toxic positivity to tell them it’ll be fine, they’ll be OK. They might not be, ever. It sucks. We don’t respect what they’re dealing with if we refuse to face that reality.
I know a guy on Twitter who goes by the handle D.Bone who has never healed. Nearly bedridden. Used to run a bar.

2024-08-17 01:01:46

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10/ …been ample studies showing that #Covid is significantly reducing one of the most well-known metrics we have of cognitive functioning, perhaps imperfect but still an excellent way to see relative changes.
Those changes point down. A loss of 3 IQ points per infections is not something you should just accept. But the more it happens, the more you’ll be inclined to accept it, because—speaking candidly here—you’ll be dumber than a box of hammers.
This of course serves the goals of the virus.

2024-08-17 00:58:31

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9/ Nobody is talking about this, I’ve known about it for two years now, but only because I used to read academic papers on #Covid. I saw what this little fucker does inside people’s brains, how it makes its way along nanotubes connecting neurons. That’s when I vowed my #N95 is not coming off for the foreseeable future.
Here’s a hard cold fact for you: Nothing I’ve seen in the two years since has in any way lessened that realization that Covid causes #brain #damage. To the contrary, there have…

2024-08-17 00:55:21

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8/ What this thing does when one (yes, just one is now enough) of those copies rides a microscopic water-ball into your nose along with the delicious aroma of fresh-ground coffee is not actually just a “cold.” It’s a vascular disease. It causes fucking #brain damage, and not just as some rare outcome, either. A lot of the people around you are a little bit slower now, a little bit more forgetful, a shorter fuse on their temper. Caring less about others.
That’s the result of dead neurons.

2024-08-17 00:47:39

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7/ Right now, probably 3-4% of the people around you at the Piggly-Wiggly have #Covid and are expelling zillions of copies of one of the most transmissible viruses of all time with every breath they take. They aren’t wearing masks, either. Nobody give a shit anymore about anyone else.
Let’s say there are 40 people in the store. Your chance of getting out of there without being in the same room as a disease vector are, generously, 0.97^40 = 30%.
Yes, that’s less than half.
We’re not done yet.

2024-08-17 00:43:15

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6/ Of course it was. I’d be a damn fool to take a 5% risk of being maimed for life when I could drop that to probably less than 0.1% risk (if the bottom of the tree got pushed out instead of it tipping away from me). It was a small inconvenience to hike back to where the tractor was and bring it to the site. For an excellent reason.
Now, you know what’s not at all logical? You walking around rooms full of people exhaling #SARS2 without filtering that shit out with an #n95
Want to talk risk?

2024-08-17 00:39:36

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5/ I probably could have kept going. I’ve been at this for a long time and know how to dance with my chainsaw. I can judge where trees are going to go, mostly.
I could probably get my feet away from where that trunk would come crashing down. Probably. Let’s say I’m 95% sure.
But you know what? I didn’t like that remaining 5%. So I got my tractor and lifted up the forks on the front to about 10 feet up and then pushed the damn tree over. Not entirely safe, but much safer.
Seems logical, right?

2024-08-17 00:36:44

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4/ And then another five feet, but now I was getting pretty nervous because the little bit of lean the trunk had to it was disappearing as what was left up there got more and more to the vertical part. The dead tree had been in a years-long embrace of branches with a bigger one that is thankfully healthy and going strong after a hundred years.
But cutting the dead one anymore meant it would come thudding down somewhere right around my feet. Not great.
Here’s where #Covid comes in. About risk.

2024-08-17 00:34:04

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3/ Today I made sure the space around my feet was nice and clear. Tidied things up and got to work. Let me also add that I am very grateful, after an injury left me unable to even sit up for long and took over a year for the #ChronicPain to finally stop, that it was fucking awesome to be able to hold fifteen pounds of engine and cutting chain over my shoulders for all the time it took to make that foot-thick trunk come crashing down at my feet. Not a twinge.
Anyhow, five feet of tree came down.

2024-08-17 00:30:07

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2/ A few years ago, I was in this same situation and it wound up being one of the closer calls I’ve had with something Very Bad happening. That particular thousand pounds of wood decided it would tip straight toward me. I got set to GTFO. Except I couldn’t move; my feet had gotten stuck in the slash I’d left at my feet just getting to that point with the tree. A network of interconnected branches was holding me fast, right there.
The tree left a small scratch on my head going down. Damn lucky.

2024-08-17 00:26:25

Today I cut down a dead tree to feed the stove this winter (haven’t needed to cut a live one for years) and was faced with the nerve-wracking situation of a thousand pounds of wood standing upright with no telling which way it wanted to go. Normally, I can aim the tree to within 20° or so of where I want it to fall but this one was caught up in the branches of the one next to it.
There’s a bit of a #forestry story here and also a point about #Covid at the end. 🧵

2024-08-14 07:37:24

I never imagined I’d have a front-row seat to one of the greatest mass delusions in human history, far surpassing the Salem Witch Trials and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple.
#CovidIsNotOver dammit. Grow up all of you and realize that we have been invaded by a worse enemy than a hundred Pearl Harbors put together. And no. I really don’t give a shit that you got sick if you weren’t wearing an #N95. Boo fucking hoo.

2024-08-06 22:06:33

Now that most people have been infected multiple times with a #virus that has been shown to cause #brain damage, with a significant and measurable decline in cognitive power, I’d be surprised if we weren’t seeing the effects on a society-wide basis.
Unfortunately, we are. And one of those effects, which serves #SARS2 very well in its mindless evolution-driven goal of genetic replication, is to make people unwilling or even unable to understand why it’s happening.
#NoToBrainInfections
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/916/854/597/394/998/original/ecb392fa16e0ada5.jpeg

2024-08-02 16:57:11

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2/2 …and also C in the form of Cython, which offers much of the performance gains of C without the hassle of allocating memory etc. It’s really a beautiful solution; all my tight high-performance objects are implemented with it.
By the way, I have a son your age! I’m in my 50s, and have been programming computers for approximately twice as long as you’ve been alive.
Please accept my apologies for my previous prejudices, and for my society unleashing the carbon that’s drowning your country.

2024-08-02 16:53:26

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I am a former Islamophobe who once had a prejudice against your religion but have since come to realize that the presence of fanatical fundamentalists is, sadly, not restricted to any one faith. (The U.S. has shown in recent years that it has more than its share of Christian fanatics.) I want to be honest about this past viewpoint of mine as a way of taking responsibility for it.
All of those things you list as being passionate about I am, too. I’ve spent hours per day with Python… (1/2)

2024-07-01 07:04:32

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7/ But the #Biden administration had other priorities than informing any of you ordinary schlubs about #Covid not actually being mild. And “breakthrough” cases not, as it happened, being all that rare.
The virus had a roadblock with our vaccines. But it did what mutating replicators do, especially ones that go through 1600 years of human evolution in a single month.
It found a way around it. The one virus that got its RNA code jiggled just a bit managed to get in someone’s nose.

2024-07-01 07:01:32

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6/ But it wasn’t long before the host decided to let it rip and now it was clear sailing. Up the nose, into some cool olfactory receptors, and then tunnel your way along these nanotube thingies that connect between the neurons that tell you what you’re smelling. A direct route into the brain.
I’m not making this shit up, by the way. I knew this two years ago, from reading a paper in Nature.
Two fucking years ago I knew this virus causes actual brain damage.
It’s criminal that you didn’t.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/709/470/354/096/024/original/c0e94f85f05fa612.jpeg

2024-07-01 06:58:15

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5/ The virus does its job brilliantly. Yes, reply guys, I am aware that it is not sentient. There’s nobody inside that spiky protein ball coming up with some master plan for world domination. No more than my code that does cool stuff without me, its creator, even knowing what the underlying equations are. It just works.
It found a host that walks and talks and flies around the world on airplanes. Initially, these were tough going for the virus. It was careful, denying it opportunities.

2024-07-01 06:54:44

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4/ These parameters specify what the spike protein looks like, how the virus manages to get past the defenses of its chosen host, and how it hijacks a cell to make copies of itself. That’s all it does. It take the only goal of evolution—gene replication—and trims out all the awkward dates, uncomfortable back seats of vehicles, weddings, etc., getting straight to the point of babies.
In one month, as many generations of #SARS_CoV2 as there have been of humans since the fall of the Roman Empire.

2024-07-01 06:49:17

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3/ The RNA code of the #SARS2 virus has a parameter space (dimensionality) of about the size of the simulation model for a small analog integrated circuit. Those are not much used anymore, but an #ElectricalEngineer can picture what a simple audio filter might look like, with an op-amp (operational amplifier) at its core.
You get enough parameters to do that, all encoded into the heart of the spiky protein ball small enough to float in the air for hours.
It’s a evolutionary marvel.

2024-07-01 06:43:42

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2/ It’s cool to see some result of your engineering work “come alive” and do what you selected but not specifically designed it to do. I programmed the underlying mutation, the loss (fitness) function that determines which hopeful monsters actually get to continue their “digital DNA” to the next generation. The silicon singles’ bar of crossover where parts of that DNA (the optimized parameters) get swapped between parents. And then watch as something amazing happens.
A #virus is amazing, too.

2024-06-22 03:23:17

By the mid-twenties, the cracks in the cognitive foundations become evident to one looking back, but of course they were invisible to those who brains had been hammered with repeated infections. First one variant, then another, and then yet another took its turn replicating inside the delicate networks of neurons that had given self-awareness to Homo sapiens, reversing two hundred thousand years of evolution with astonishing speed.
#NoToBrainInfections
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/657/649/786/572/970/original/f430405bd0d8cd4e.jpeg

2024-06-14 06:56:33

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I just wanted you to hear from someone who hasn’t even been infected and who believes you. It’s a terrible illness that represents the worst public health disaster in generations. It’s why I never set foot in a public indoor space without an #N95 respirator securely in place.
Thank you for sharing this personal story and reminding me why the risk just isn’t worth it. Very best wishes dealing with your body’s unwillingness to keep up with you.

2024-06-05 07:15:46

Don’t laugh, but my last-ditch #Covid prevalence indicator is the number of daily posts in the r/Covid19Positive subreddit. It’s gone up noticeably over the past couple of weeks, right along with that we’re seeing from the remnants of an increasingly gutted #wastewater surveillance system. Someone close to me got it, again, which also sucks. We haven’t breathed this person’s unfiltered air for years now, with good reason.
As the giant says in #TwinPeaks, “It is happening. Again.”

2024-05-24 05:34:07

To those who follow this account for #Covid rants and politely tolerate my posts about the wonderful and elegant #Python programming language I’ve used almost daily for over a decade: The #pycon2024 conference required masks because they apparently haven’t stopped caring about the people behind the keyboards.
Yes, masks. In 2024. At a tech conference. It’s a beautiful thing.