Had someone contact me because a browser interface was ‘down’ and it was actually a cert issue. It surprised me that in an IT context, this person didn’t have a basic understanding of SSL certs. They didn’t even know how to add a cert exception.
It got me thinking, what basic ubiquitous things am I a dumbass about outside of IT?
Ive seen lots of ‘fun facts’ compilations, but it would be better to get a wide range of subject suggestions that I can spend 30 minutes each or less on, and become a more capable human.
Like what subjects would plumbers consider basic knowledge? Chemical interactions between cleaning products and PVC pipes?
What would an accountant or a landscaper consider to be so basic its shocking people can live their lives without knowing any of it?
For most areas of expertise, its difficult to know even what the basics are to start with.
Microbial pathogenesis here. This one’s a fun one for me, especially since COVID revealed just how illiterate the average person is about diseases. Here’s a couple that I think should be common sense
Not all bacteria cause disease. In fact, very few bacteria cause disease. Many bacteria are even helpful to us, so you should really weigh the pros and cons of taking antibiotics if you’re considering using antibiotics.
Antibiotics don’t work against viral infections. You’re getting all the downsides of killing helpful bacteria and getting none of the benefits
Do not blindly trust your immune system. Your immune system works 100% of 50% of the time. Many white blood cells take the philosophy of murdering everything in sight just to be safe. This can and often does include killing important cells in your body that just happen to be nearby the site of infection. Even if you survive the infection, you will be weakened as a result. If you can avoid getting sick in the first place, avoid getting sick.
Vaccines work. I don’t really know what else to say about this one.
Viruses and bacteria aren’t hard to kill. There’s many compounds that can kill viruses and bacteria. But humans aren’t hard to kill either. The tricky part is figuring out how to kill viruses and bacteria while also keeping the human alive. Basically: don’t drink bleach. It will kill your bacteria or virus but it’ll kill you too
E. coli isn’t a usually bad bacteria. Actually, it’s a very important bacteria that helps us digest food. The reason it gets such a bad reputation is because it’s relatively hard to kill, which makes them a very good way to quickly check if there’s a possible food/water contamination. In other words, the presence of E. coli itself isn’t bad, but finding E. coli does suggest that there might be other, more dangerous bacteria.
DO NOT EAT MOLDY FOOD. The fuzzy part that you see is just the fruiting body of the mold, analogous to a flower on a plant. The real body of the mold is an invisible network of roots that tunnel through the core of the food. Even if you cut off the fuzzy portion, you’re still eating most of the mold.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1217/
I don’t even have to click it to see the stick figure pointing a gun at a
microscope slidepetri dishWe usually refer to petri dishes as being for bacteria. We do grow cancer cells in dishes, but these ones are specifically made to grow mammalian cells. We just call them dishes
Fuck you, Bleu cheese 4ever!
Is that a choice you can make where you’re from? Here in Germany, that is entirely the physician’s choice to make. You cannot get them without a prescription. Although I guess you can ignore the doctor if they tell you to take them. But if you don’t trust your doctor, get another doctor.
Hello neighbor! I’ve had them prescribed, but when asked if it was really necessary or if I could give it a bit longer to see if my body could deal with it on its own, my doctor got a big smile and told me he could. Then he said that the dominant demographic in my area is very persistent and pushy in demanding antibiotics for the slightest thing so he’s gotten a bit too used to prescribing them.
Can you explain the E. coli point a little more?
Is it that because it’s hard to kill, it’s a good indicator of the initial contamination, meaning it’s essentially stickier than other bacteria and leaves a longer record that there was contamination?
Because otherwise being hard to kill makes it seem like it would be a bad indicator to me, in that it would return a lot of false positives (though maybe that’s the goal in this case).
With regards to food and water safety (really, this applies to all safety regulations), you would rather get false positives than false negatives. It’s better to be overly cautious than to be under-cautious. Because if we’re under-cautious, then someone might get sick. So we actually want to pick a common, hardy bacteria that’s easy to grow. There’s several other reasons why E. coli is such a good indicator bacteria, such as:
it grows quickly, so we can get test results quickly
it’s remarkably easy to distinguish E. coli from other bacteria, so much so that you don’t really even need a microscope. The less technical expertise is required for water testing, the better.
they’re usually safe, which lowers the amount of training required for water testers, and also lowers the risk of disease in case a test gets mishandled
they’re generally more resistant to water treatment than other bacteria, typically being the last to die. So if we killed E. coli, that’s a good indicator that we’ve also killed the other bacteria
I think false positives are preferable in that context. I’d rather have a lot of false positives than any false negatives at all when it comes to poop water
I’ve read that on hard cheeses I can cut off the visible mold.
You can, it’s fine
I’ll confess I do this with some regularity. If I unwrap a piece of cheese and see it’s moldy, well I’m not tossing a nice hunk of aged gouda in the trash! I’ll slice the mold off, then do a sniff and nibble test. If it still tastes moldy, keep slicing until it doesn’t.
I’ve done this since I was a kid, so who knows if it’s actually safe, or if I’ve just spent decades rolling the dice and getting lucky.
Not worth the risk, to be honest. You don’t know how deep the mold has penetrated into the cheese, and without a microscope, you will never know if you’ve shaved off enough to fully remove the mold.
Also, mold spores are all over the place. They float around in the air. You breathe them in all the time. If you got visible mold growing on a cheese, there’s a good chance that there’s not-yet-visible mold growing in other spots, too.
What?!
I never knew this about mold and tunneling. You convinced me to just say no to mold.