Update [me, health, Patreon]
Dec. 12th, 2025 06:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidereaSo, I, uh, got my RSI/ergonomics debugged!* I then promptly lost two days to bad sleep due to another new mechanical failure of the balky meat mecha and also a medical appointment in re two previous malfunctions. But I seem back in business now. The new keyboard is great.
Patrons, I've got three Siderea Posts out so far this month and it's only the 12th. I have two more Posts I am hoping to get out in the next three days. Also about health insurance. We'll see if it actually happens, but it's not impossible. I have written a lot of words. (I really like my new keyboard.)
Anyways, if you weren't planning on sponsoring five posts (or – who knows? – even more) this month, adjust your pledge limits accordingly.
* It was my bra strap. It was doing something funky to how my shoulder blade moved or something. It is both surprising to me that so little pressure made so much ergonomic difference, and not surprising because previously an even lighter pressure on my kneecap from wearing long underwear made my knee malfunction spectacularly. Apparently this is how my body mechanics just are.
Patrons, I've got three Siderea Posts out so far this month and it's only the 12th. I have two more Posts I am hoping to get out in the next three days. Also about health insurance. We'll see if it actually happens, but it's not impossible. I have written a lot of words. (I really like my new keyboard.)
Anyways, if you weren't planning on sponsoring five posts (or – who knows? – even more) this month, adjust your pledge limits accordingly.
* It was my bra strap. It was doing something funky to how my shoulder blade moved or something. It is both surprising to me that so little pressure made so much ergonomic difference, and not surprising because previously an even lighter pressure on my kneecap from wearing long underwear made my knee malfunction spectacularly. Apparently this is how my body mechanics just are.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-01-01 02:06 am (UTC)One of the most interesting things I learned going to an engineering school was that biology seems to be the place logic goes to die.
I observed that in casual conversation, when the topic turned to anything that had to do with living organisms – psychology, medical science, animal ethology, social sciences –my peers would start using all sorts of logical fallacies and make all sorts of (to me quite shocking) reasoning errors. Excluded middles out the wazoo, unidirectional causality, naturalistic fallacy by the truckload, so much FAE you'd think we were in the Summerland, argumenti ad hominem et verecundiam etc. And the thing was, these were all people who were precocious in reasoning and wickid smaht – in the sciences. But when the topic changes from that which they think of a "hard science", their brains fall out.
At the time, I thought it was specific to discussions of minds and society/ies. But over the last three decades, especially since I became a medical professional, my nose has absolutely been ground in the fact: holy shit they think about bodies and biological processes like this too.
And this all culminated in the events of the first half of 2020.
I don't think anybody needs to be taught how to do the reasoning that goes, "SARS-COV-2 is a coronavirus. All previously known coronaviruses have been spread through the air, and to be contagious pre-symptomatically. Therefore, in the absence of more specific information it is reasonable to assume this coronavirus, too, will be spread through the air, and will spread during the pre-symptomatic stage of infection. Therefore it will not be possible to tell which people are infectious by whether or not they have symptoms. Therefore the only way to get masks on the faces of people who are contagious is to put masks on the faces of all people." This is not difficult logic. But people – including, shockingly, medical authorities who were not trying to downplay the pandemic – did not engage in it, and, famously, actively resisted it. To the point the aerosol physicists went WTF?! and revolted.
Step one in debugging one's body is starting with the assumption that it is possible and not letting one's brain fall out. That seems to be an emotional project as much as anything to do with cognition as usually conceptualized.