AI6YR BenSFGate: Mendocino Co.: Redwood Valley Woman Dies From Snake Bites
https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/mendocino-co-redwood-valley-woman-dies-from-22217389.php
FreddyB Aviation Photography@ai6yr 3 this year.
@cvvhrn Yeah, and so many bites in my county. Will see if that continues, or if things will get better. I have to work an event this Sunday in a grassy overgrown area and am seriously considering taking a weed whacker to clear a little bit of trail so I can see the critters, lol.
@ai6yr not a bad idea. I mean they are not actively hunting humans and seems like they will eschew a clear section
@cvvhrn There will be hundreds of runners to scare them off, but at least it will be clear for the first wave, lol. I'll pack my battery operated one with spare batteries and blades and do a little clearing... apparently I have two hours of wait time at that location before runners show up.
MsMerope@ai6yr @cvvhrn
Yikes, we have an event on the parkway on Saturday it ends by noon though so I’m hoping that the temperatures will not be warm enough for snakes to even be interested in being out
Anybody have access to like a one page data sheet on snake bite treatment ?
I don’t know how many times I have to tell old people that you don’t suck the venom out of the wound.… Seriously 🤷
@cvvhrn @ai6yr the Red Cross in their latest R 25 update for first aid is teaching that you can put honey on burns and our medical director about had a stroke because they felt there wasn’t a clear distinction being made between medicinal honey and other honey that great grandma’s had in the back of the cabinet for 150 years
MissConstrue@MissConstrue @MsMerope @ai6yr
yes and highly effective in a study looking at it for wounds. We use it in peds
"The median time to healing in the honey group was 100 days compared with 140 days in the control group. The healing rate at 12 weeks was equal to 46·2% in the honey group compared with 34·0% in the conventional group,"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04923.x
@MissConstrue @MsMerope @ai6yr I don't think the patent is an issue as there are multiple makers and you can buy it online from major retailers
As far as the study goes spot on it was a smalls ample but there is tons of other studies as well since 2025
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2025&q=medical+honey&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope It's probably true of a lot of honeys, actually, just hasn't been studied.
Rich Stein (he/him)@ai6yr @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope
Gazillion years ago (that's the size of the DoD budget ask, right? 🙄), I did a science fair (go ahead, laugh) project — antibacterial effects of honey on S. aureus, B. subtilis & E. coli (bio experiments were as wild as chemistry & geology sets w/ radioactive elements/ingredients back in the day). Details that matter: it was mid-70s, jr. h.s. & I had supervision — local USDA field office (I used their SEM!) & Academy of Natural Science. Real science.
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Gazillion years ago (that's the size of the DoD budget ask, right? 🙄), I did a science fair (go ahead, laugh) project — antibacterial effects of honey on S. aureus, B. subtilis & E. coli (bio experiments were as wild as chemistry & geology sets w/ radioactive elements/ingredients back in the day). Details that matter: it was mid-70s, jr. h.s. & I had supervision — local USDA field office (I used their SEM!) & Academy of Natural Science. Real science.
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@ai6yr @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope
Everything was analog. The lit review — from their libraries — turned up not many but a couple of articles discussing honey's properties — it's acidic and seemed to lyse bacteria cells. There wasn't much out there, but its use for wounds went back at least as far as leeches.
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Everything was analog. The lit review — from their libraries — turned up not many but a couple of articles discussing honey's properties — it's acidic and seemed to lyse bacteria cells. There wasn't much out there, but its use for wounds went back at least as far as leeches.
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@RunRichRun @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
That’s so cool. I’ve done a lot of digging into medieval remedies and poisons (poisons mostly the work of Giulia Tofana), because at one point I thought about basing my ethics PhD around the topic, but went with the less controversial postmortem prenatal ventilation. (Narrator: it was not less controversial.)
Anyway, babble aside, now that you remind me, there are medieval and renaissance texts that mention boiled honey, or a tincture made with boiled honey syrup and herbs for burns and skin ailments. I wish I had cites handy, but it’s been 30+ years, and I’ve only just had that memory revived, sorry.
@MissConstrue @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
That's the problem with old citations that predate everything being online/digital. And yet — too many people today don't know how to do a lit search in a library, and sometimes old, non-digitized sources are where the answers hide.
That's the problem with old citations that predate everything being online/digital. And yet — too many people today don't know how to do a lit search in a library, and sometimes old, non-digitized sources are where the answers hide.
@RunRichRun @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
I’m fairly sure these were all microfiche, that’s how long ago it was. 🤣🤷🏻♀️
I’m fairly sure these were all microfiche, that’s how long ago it was. 🤣🤷🏻♀️
@RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope There's plenty of stuff within my lifetime which doesn't exist ANYWHERE on the Internet. Not a single mention.
@ai6yr @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope
Yep. Ditto. But we're old and history is written by the winners — see, e.g., Whiskey Pete and the 🍊 🤡. #SoMuchWinning 🙄
Anyway, I have to grift on the prediction markets — all that matters now. 😜
Yep. Ditto. But we're old and history is written by the winners — see, e.g., Whiskey Pete and the 🍊 🤡. #SoMuchWinning 🙄
Anyway, I have to grift on the prediction markets — all that matters now. 😜
Joan Combs Durso@ai6yr @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope I’d bet if anyone can find it, Tara @researchbuzz has invented a search tool for an obscure source of scanned catalog cards and readers’ guides.
Calishat@econoprof @ai6yr @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope
I'm not 100% on what you're looking for, y'all have been talking about so much.
If you're referring to the medieval honey remedies, there are at least three medieval medicine manuscript digitizing projects that I know of. The Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine launched last year.
This was not found via my search tools but rather a tag search on the RB Firehose:
You're a rockstar!
@MissConstrue @econoprof I believe you deserve easy paths to useful information in the same way you deserve clean food and water. And I think a lot about making them! 👍
@researchbuzz And the fact that you do it pretty much for free and the love of useful tools is astonishing.
@econoprof It would be nice to have a job. Sadly there is not a great demand for sixtyish female autistic high school dropouts.
So I do SOMETHING to contribute. It's not much, but it's >0.
@researchbuzz @ai6yr @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope I knew you would have something useful, Tara!
@RunRichRun @MissConstrue @ai6yr @MsMerope
Don't get me started on macrofiche
@RunRichRun @MissConstrue @ai6yr @MsMerope Ah I can remember cranking out the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature
@cvvhrn @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @MsMerope One mention of the word "microfiche" and I feel ill. The smell of hot microfiche always made me kinda feel like I needed to barf.
@RunRichRun @ai6yr @MissConstrue @MsMerope Oh god yes and It is immortalized in Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Fast Times Paper Sniff
@ai6yr @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @MsMerope
Hot Microfiche? Sounds like a Rule 34 kind of thing
@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @ai6yr @MsMerope
OMG! But did you ever have a distraught programmer (does anybody even know what programming is other than for VCRs... wait, they're gone!) throw bricks of punch cards at you and you didn't know whether to duck or catch them so the rubber bands didn't break? 🤣
OMG! But did you ever have a distraught programmer (does anybody even know what programming is other than for VCRs... wait, they're gone!) throw bricks of punch cards at you and you didn't know whether to duck or catch them so the rubber bands didn't break? 🤣
@RunRichRun @MissConstrue @ai6yr @MsMerope By programing you mean getting the clock to do something other than blink 12:00? cause I never could figure that one out
@cvvhrn @RunRichRun @ai6yr @MsMerope
My very first programming class was punchcards! I was about 15, and taking a class at the university, and though the systems were being deprecated, they still taught it as a fundamental, and honestly, I'm glad I took it. I may still have 5 or 10 cards somewhere in the museum of tech that is my studio closet. Probably under the 20 pound 10 MB hard drive that had every program I needed to put out full color tangible magazines every month.
I'm so old, I remember when code was good, fast and small.
@MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr @MsMerope
Very cool!!!!! I remember punch cards. I also remember my Atari/TR-80/ and Apple II basic and still have the Atari Book
10 print "Fred";
20 GOTO 10
@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @ai6yr @MsMerope
My first home computer was a Sinclair. Lived near Commodore (Pennsauken, NJ) , and could buy "rejects" (cosmetic issues) directly from them. They got sued by Apple and had bad upper management, also — so that ended. Shared a Radio Shack TRS-80 with my brother. We bought it with paper route money.
I'm old — that stuff seemed so much more fun and engaging than anything kids do with phones today. Definitely a better hobby than doomscrolling.
John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr @MsMerope
Lately at one of my monthly dinner groups we're joined by Paul Laughton, who programmed Atari BASIC, which I've enjoyed since I was in grade school (and still play with using the atari800 emulator on Linux).
@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr
lol that's how we registered for classes in college.
You went to the gym and picked up your punchcard with your info on it then walked around to all the department tables set up in the gym and collected the punchcard for the class[es] you wanted and then exited the gym and turned your cards in at a registration table and paid your fees.
W6KME@W6KME @MsMerope @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @ai6yr
It wasn't broken, just less efficient than other systems, right?
It wasn't broken, just less efficient than other systems, right?
@W6KME @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr
HOW OLD DO YOU THINK I AM?!?!?
I'm talking late 80's early 90's here buddy...
HOW OLD DO YOU THINK I AM?!?!?
I'm talking late 80's early 90's here buddy...
@MsMerope @W6KME @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @ai6yr
To be clear, that's way younger than me ("older than mummy dust," one of the nurses at the pediatricians' offices used to say — years ago). College was late 70s-early 80s. I remember the Bicentennial — good old days.
To be clear, that's way younger than me ("older than mummy dust," one of the nurses at the pediatricians' offices used to say — years ago). College was late 70s-early 80s. I remember the Bicentennial — good old days.
Peter McDonald@W6KME @MsMerope @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr I stood in those lines (and later in my freshman year fed cards coded in PL/I into the mainframe). A year later, UCLA had terminals in the engineering school and the cards were mostly gone.
Jim Hubbell@MsMerope @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr
And then the class section you wanted was sold out, you had to scramble to rearrange everything because some classes were not available every quarter.
And then the class section you wanted was sold out, you had to scramble to rearrange everything because some classes were not available every quarter.
@Dougfir @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr
so very much yes
it's why I ended up doing "liberal studies" I couldn't get classes and I couldn't take on even more debt so i sat down with the catalog and sussed out which major would graduate me fastest.
@Dougfir @MsMerope @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @ai6yr
I never thought about it: we did course selection and drop-add on paper, then submitted the paperwork. There were many people scrambling — and pulling their hair out — behind the scenes. It was never seamless for the reasons, but I never thought about how complicated it really was — last comment on the NYCTA work that I mentioned earlier in the thread: a big piece was automating crew schedules to optimize (haha) getting drivers back to depots
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I never thought about it: we did course selection and drop-add on paper, then submitted the paperwork. There were many people scrambling — and pulling their hair out — behind the scenes. It was never seamless for the reasons, but I never thought about how complicated it really was — last comment on the NYCTA work that I mentioned earlier in the thread: a big piece was automating crew schedules to optimize (haha) getting drivers back to depots
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@Dougfir @MsMerope @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @ai6yr
... so they weren't left stranded at the end of a shift — and also didn't go into overtime (which the transit agency did not like to pay for deadheading). Schedules changed quarterly (city busses and also used to serve school children). Before computer installation, the schedulers had figured out how to do it on paper — taped sheets of ledger paper that visually blocked out locations and times. They were like ancient scrolls — but they worked!
... so they weren't left stranded at the end of a shift — and also didn't go into overtime (which the transit agency did not like to pay for deadheading). Schedules changed quarterly (city busses and also used to serve school children). Before computer installation, the schedulers had figured out how to do it on paper — taped sheets of ledger paper that visually blocked out locations and times. They were like ancient scrolls — but they worked!
Casey Jenningsh@[email protected] @cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
After college I was working in NYC as a consultant for NYCTA installing minicomputers (Micro/mini thing strikes again!) There was a mainframe outside Princeton involved and a lone programmer for that, who had a tiny office — looked like a closet — underground at Rockefeller Center. And there was an entrepreneurial knitting group turned keypunch operators in Pomona, NJ, near what had been NAFEC and is now FAATC. They bought at discount...
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After college I was working in NYC as a consultant for NYCTA installing minicomputers (Micro/mini thing strikes again!) There was a mainframe outside Princeton involved and a lone programmer for that, who had a tiny office — looked like a closet — underground at Rockefeller Center. And there was an entrepreneurial knitting group turned keypunch operators in Pomona, NJ, near what had been NAFEC and is now FAATC. They bought at discount...
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@cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
...a bunch of old key punch machines from one of the NAFEC contractors. Instead of knitting some days, they punched cards. I forget the specific cycle — pretty sure that I took program sheets from Rockefeller Center to Port Authority Bus Terminal each evening, where the prime contractor (what a way to run a business) had deals with bus drivers shuttling gamblers to Atlantic City. The drivers would stop at one lady's rural delivery mailbox in Pomona, to leave the code.
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...a bunch of old key punch machines from one of the NAFEC contractors. Instead of knitting some days, they punched cards. I forget the specific cycle — pretty sure that I took program sheets from Rockefeller Center to Port Authority Bus Terminal each evening, where the prime contractor (what a way to run a business) had deals with bus drivers shuttling gamblers to Atlantic City. The drivers would stop at one lady's rural delivery mailbox in Pomona, to leave the code.
2/
@cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
In the morning, a different bus driver would pick up boxes of punched cards, and I would get them at Port Authority, drop them off at Rockefeller Center, and head to a bus or subway depot for the day (great ethnic food in many of those neighborhoods 😋). During the day the coded cards were read in NYC (modems) and transmitted to the Princeton mainframe — 24-hr+ turnaround to see if the code worked or not! Repeat the entire sequence until program finally worked.
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In the morning, a different bus driver would pick up boxes of punched cards, and I would get them at Port Authority, drop them off at Rockefeller Center, and head to a bus or subway depot for the day (great ethnic food in many of those neighborhoods 😋). During the day the coded cards were read in NYC (modems) and transmitted to the Princeton mainframe — 24-hr+ turnaround to see if the code worked or not! Repeat the entire sequence until program finally worked.
3/
@cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
I taught myself Fortran before I headed to NYC, using one of those discounted/discarded punch machines — a few ended up at the local college, where I'd use a friend's account. Our turnaround from program writeup to punched cards to run job was only a couple of hours, not overnight. Had to be patient to program.
I taught myself Fortran before I headed to NYC, using one of those discounted/discarded punch machines — a few ended up at the local college, where I'd use a friend's account. Our turnaround from program writeup to punched cards to run job was only a couple of hours, not overnight. Had to be patient to program.
zl2todAt school we had Portran which was Fortran using pre-scored punched cards from which we would use an un-folded paperclip to remove chads.
The cards were thus twenty columns, and we were allowed twenty lines of code.
We would take the decks to the bank and in a week collect the results.
@zl2tod @cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
That's wild! Never heard of "Portran." This is the only thing I could find. Cool idea!
"'Portapunch' cards. In the 1970s computers were still expensive and restricted to central sites. To offer the experience of computing to secondary school students, Neil James at the University of Otago developed the Portran system that allowed programs to be written using pre-punched cards in which the student would remove chads using a paper-clip!"
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/historydisplays/FirstFloor/PunchedCardDataProcessing/PunchedCardDataProcessingMain.php
That's wild! Never heard of "Portran." This is the only thing I could find. Cool idea!
"'Portapunch' cards. In the 1970s computers were still expensive and restricted to central sites. To offer the experience of computing to secondary school students, Neil James at the University of Otago developed the Portran system that allowed programs to be written using pre-punched cards in which the student would remove chads using a paper-clip!"
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/historydisplays/FirstFloor/PunchedCardDataProcessing/PunchedCardDataProcessingMain.php
bigblen@RunRichRun @zl2tod @cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
🙏 Wow I've been looking for information about those cards for ages. We used those pre-punched cards when I was at high school in the Hutt Valley (early '80s) in Applied Maths class.
Amazingly we managed to create and run programs that produced the correct results
see also https://en.everybodywiki.com/Portran_-_portable_Fortran
@bigblen @RunRichRun @cvvhrn @ai6yr @MsMerope
The technique went something like
- lie card flat
- place pokey end of paperclip on the undesired rectangle
- peel card upwards leaving young Chad pinioned to the table by the paperclip
Is that how they do elections in the USA?
These flash devices pictured were unheard of.
@MissConstrue @cvvhrn @RunRichRun @ai6yr @MsMerope
Cal Poly Pomona had three punch cards machines for the engineering students learning Fortran. Programs ran overnight if they ran. Mine usually had at least one typo.
Cal Poly Pomona had three punch cards machines for the engineering students learning Fortran. Programs ran overnight if they ran. Mine usually had at least one typo.
@Dougfir @cvvhrn @RunRichRun @ai6yr @MsMerope
Gods, fortran...a beautiful, elegant bit of code.
Paul_IPv6@MissConstrue @RunRichRun @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
how did i miss the Giulia Tofana story?
just checked out "poisoner's tale" from the library