Client Challenge

@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.

@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 🤷

@MsMerope @cvvhrn (correction, the "do not use gasoline" one was for ticks)
@ai6yr @MsMerope Sigh yeah we still on occasion see people using butter on full thickness burns so god help us all
@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
@MsMerope @cvvhrn @ai6yr There’s medicinal honey?

@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

@cvvhrn @MsMerope @ai6yr

Wow! N=105 is a really small study, but those numbers are amazing. I hope more studies at scale are planned. And we can wrest the patent away from whomever owns medihoney as a trademark. Cause, naw. Sterilizing honey doesn’t deserve profit camping.

@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

Google Scholar

@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope It's probably true of a lot of honeys, actually, just hasn't been studied.
@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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@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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@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.
@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? 🤣
@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 @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.