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 @MissConstrue @ai6yr @MsMerope Ah I can remember cranking out the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature
@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.
h@[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...
1/
@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.
