• 0 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle


  • Prion diseases. In order to work properly, proteins have to be folded in a certain way. Misfolded proteins typically don’t work as they should. Prions are misfolded proteins that cause other healthy proteins to misfold when they come into contact with each other. This causes all sorts of medical issues.

    Mad Cow Disease is one of the more infamous prion diseases. In humans, it manifests as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It basically causes your brain to melt, as the proteins holding it together all get misfolded. It has a 100% fatality rate, typically within 1 year of initial diagnosis. Fatal Insomnia is another prion disease, where the area of the brain that controls sleep is affected, but the body’s need for sleep still persists. You just become totally unable to fall asleep, until you fucking die from sleep deprivation.

    The big issue with prion diseases is that they’re totally 100% incurable and untreatable. Once you have come into contact with the prion, you have a death timer. Prions are also extremely resilient. They aren’t destroyed by time, decomposition, fire, or even caustic chemicals. So they’ll just sit there, waiting for someone to come into contact with them.



  • My coworker once had a paramedic push adenosine when he started having heart arrhythmia. The main side effect for adenosine is an overwhelming feeling of impending doom. Apparently it’s to help hit the reset button on your heart… But it also just happens to make you think you’re 100% going to die in the next two seconds. Apparently it was a full blown transformative experience for him.



  • I have similar feelings about my partner. They’re constantly in and out of the doctor’s office for a variety of medical issues. It would be nice if there were at least some sort of diagnosis. Like we have family and friends say “oh it’s good that the tests for all of those things came back negative” like it somehow means her symptoms will stop since she wasn’t diagnosed. Every time I hear it, the voice in the back of my head goes “how is not knowing the best case scenario?” At least if you have a diagnosis, you can work on treating the root cause.


  • Honestly, as long as you can just coast across, you’ll be fine. The people who get into trouble are the ones who intentionally stop (like maybe a red light across the tracks) and then can’t start again. Even with the giant “do not stop on tracks” signs, people are just stupid and park across them anyways.

    So just make sure you stop before the tracks, or that you have enough speed to get clear of them. There shouldn’t ever really be a scenario where you’re forced to actually stop on the tracks.


  • The most gnarly scar I’ve ever seen was from a Skil saw. He was a former roofer. Roofers would get tired of dealing with the blade guard; They don’t typically have a place to put sawhorses up on a slanted roof, and they don’t want to constantly be passing sheets of plywood up and down the ladders to make cuts on the ground… So they want to be able to do things like make plunge-cuts (which the blade guard gets in the way of) with only one hand, while holding the plywood with their other hand. So it became standard practice (not best safety practice, but still standard practice) to wire the blade guard open.

    So he had his guard wired open. He made his cut, and then set the saw down. The issue is that his trigger was stuck, so the saw didn’t stop. And without the blade guard to protect it, it was just the bare saw blade spinning against the wood roof. The saw quickly ran away at like 70MPH, with the blade acting as a sort of wheel. His foot snagged the power cord, it whipped back around, and the saw came back at him.

    It hit his left ankle, ran all the way up his left leg, went all the way up and across his torso, and exited via his right shoulder. It apparently peeled him open like a can opener, right before he fell off the roof and dislocated his shoulder from the fall. He didn’t bother taking off his pants to confirm it, but I saw the scar starting at his ankle, and it ran all the way up his chest to his shoulder.

    So yeah, Skil saws are fucking terrifying. The only thing scarier is the table saw, because that’s where the vast majority of lost fingers happen.


  • Yeah, my “Public Transit” option on google maps is entirely greyed out. This is my daily commute to work:

    It’s always entertaining to see the Europeans go “lol just ditch your car, it has to start somewhere” like it wouldn’t require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…) Like I don’t even have the option of taking public transit, because there are no connecting lines between my home and my job. Literally none. The nearest bus stop is almost as far away as my job, and it’s in the opposite direction.

    And to be clear, that 2+ hour walk would be on a highway with no sidewalk. I’d be dead on day 1. If I wanted to avoid the highway, the walk would be closer to 4.5 hours; The highway is the only direct path.