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.
- 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.
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 slide petri dish
you should really weigh the pros and cons of taking antibiotics if you’re considering using antibiotics.
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
Could you say something about why it’s bad to eat moldy food, and why it’s bad to kill the good bacteria in your body? I know your intestines can function less well, is there anything else?
Regarding moldy food, it’s because you’re taking a gamble on what exactly the mold is. There’s many types of mold, and some can produce very toxic compounds. Eating the mold can poison yourself. Of course, if you know that it’s a safe mold, then you can eat it (that’s how cheese making works). But as with all things in microbiology, things tend to be complicated very quickly, and it can be pretty hard for amateurs and even professional microbiologists to accurately distinguish between safe and unsafe molds.
With regards to killing helpful bacteria, you are correct that one of their uses is that they help improve the efficiency of digestion. This is a very young and growing field (and also not entirely in my field of expertise), so many things I say might be outdated. The second most obvious downside to killing helpful bacteria is that they prevent actual harmful bacteria from growing out of control. There are several bacteria (in particular, C. dificile) where taking antibiotics actually makes the infection worse, since the antibiotics kills off the helpful bacteria that were helping to contain the infection.
Scientists also have found semi-recently that bacteria in your intestines have an incredible amount of control over you as a person. Your body even has a sort of hotline that connects from your intestines directly to your brain, called the vagus nerve, and the bacteria in your intestines use this to communicate with your brain. For instance, scientists have found that the type of bacteria in your gut can influence the onset and severity of autism symptoms. One current hypothesis for autism is that the body, during development, somehow messes up the composition of bacteria in your intestines, and that in turn messes up the development of the brain. I seem to recall reading papers that linked bacteria to other neurological diseases and disorders, but I don’t remember completely.
Another is that the bacteria are known to be linked to obesity. Scientists have found that if you give 2 people the exact same foods in the exact same amounts, one can develop obesity and one won’t. Whether someone develops obesity or not is highly predictable based on the composition of the bacteria in their intestines. As a matter of fact, scientists have even found that if you replace an obese person’s bacteria with bacteria taken from a healthy person, then the obese person will begin to lose weight, even if that person hasn’t changed anything else.
The bacteria in your intestines are also known to be in constant communication with your immune system. I believe the immune system uses the bacteria in your intestines to train when you’re young. But this back-and-forth extends well into adulthood. Scientists found that bacteria can control the development and activity of white blood cells. That, of course, leads to differences in things like fighting off infections and killing cancers.
The bacteria in your intestines are incredibly important, and we’re only just now beginning to understand what they do for us. That’s why I say that you have to weigh pros and cons. If you think you’d be fine without it, I recommend not taking antibiotics. But if the infection is severe, then it’s worth dealing with the downsides. Talk to your doctor if you’re unsure - he probably knows more about what situations are severe and which aren’t. But what you definitely don’t want to do (which I know many people tend to do) is to pressure the doctor into prescribing antibiotics. Antibiotics aren’t a wonder drug, and people shouldn’t be immediately jumping to antibiotics as a solution to their infections
Thank you! That helped to give some more insights into why exactly it’s bad, I knew it was but not sure through which processes. My doctorate was in neuroscience, and around the time I left academia, the gut microbiome-brain axis research was really starting to ramp up. It was the big buzzword at the time. But since I left to work in the industry, I haven’t really kept up with the developments in the gut microbiome neuroscience field.
I really wish they’d find a better way to treat chronic cystitis than through antibiotics, but so far it’s the only treatment that really reliably helps.
I am not a Microbial Pathogensist, so I’ll just use the internet’s preferred method of saying something confidently that is probably wrong on some pedantic level and having actual experts climb out of the woodwork to correct me, but…
Mold isn’t a single organism, it’s actually a colony of many individual microbes that work together, most of the time; there are exceptions since the word “mold” is a lay term as much as it’s a scientific term, and the common usage doesn’t have the same rigor applied (“if it’s slimy/fuzzy, it’s mold” kinda reasoning).
The colony aspect is important, because you’re probably inhaling mold spores and eating tiny amounts of mold every day. The microbial aspect means that eating a whole colony has the potential to infect you even if your body kills off 99.9% of the microbes.
As to why an infection is dangerous depends on the type of mold. Some take up resisdence in specific organs and starve the organ cells of vital nutrients, others are carnivorous and eat your tissues/cells, others may eat beneficial bacteria or starve them of vital nutrients, some secrete toxins that are relatively harmless in small doses but deadly with a full-blown infection—penicillin is a great well-known example of this: it’s the chemical the mold uses to kill off bacteria competing for the same resources—, sometimes it’s just the immune system’s response that’s dangerous.
If you want an example of what such an infection does on our scale, look up everyone psychonaut’s favorite: Ergotism. The Ergot fungus grows primarily on cereals/grains and secretes chemicals that are psychoactive in humans (one of which is the precursor that Dr. Albert Hoffmann first derived LSD from). Unfortunately besides mind expanding insights into the nature of reality, it also comes with a nasty infection that can cause convulsions, painful burning/tingling/freezing sensations, diarrhea, vomiting, gangrene, psychosis, and more.
That all being said, if you accidentally swallow a bite of moldy bread, you probably don’t need to freak out and call poison control/EMS; just don’t regularly eat moldy food and expect to have your immune system stave off a full-blown infection for long.
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.
I’m constantly amazed at how many people don’t understand the concepts of basic finance and how compound interest works.
Years ago, I brought my laptop with me to buy a car so I could plug all the numbers into a quick amortization schedule. The sales person offered me a choice of $1,500 cash back or 1.9% financing instead of the typical rate a few percentage points higher.
I plugged the numbers into my spreadsheet and saw taking the cash back would cost me a couple grand more than the lower finance rate. When I told him I wanted the finance rate instead of the cash back, he mentioned that I was the only person he’d seen not take the cash back.
Maybe he was pulling my chain, but in my experience, the average person doesn’t know what compound interest is, let alone what an amortization schedule is.
Have you told this story before, possibly on reddit? I swear I’ve read this verbatim including the part about the laptop and “I was the only person who took the lower APR.”
With each year that passes since the re-telling it gets exponentially more interesting.
EDIT: Sorry didn’t mean to reply to your comment, I’m on mobile, can’t tell posts from comments.
I believe knowing a little bit on how a car works helps you understand why maintenance is important or from getting scammed at mechanics, I loved old commercials like these that explain in such an easy way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
Some skills I wanna pick up is how to micro solder, I deal with a lot of tech and sometimes you just need a type c port replaced and soldering iron is not the easiest tool for tiny pins.
Some skills I wanna pick up is how to micro solder, I deal with a lot of tech and sometimes you just need a type c port replaced and soldering iron is not the easiest tool for tiny pins.
Good news, the broken component is a common 2 dollar chip!
Bad news, it’s an SMD, and in the middle of a giant block of plastic and 2 more circuitboards.
Learning about cars, engines and motorbike maintenance at this stage in life really opened my eyes. I could have easily been a mechanic or an engineer if I had the access to this knowledge when I was younger.
Now I do as much of my own maintenance as I can, and I’m pretty sure my engine will hit 400K before I start getting serious issues. None of it is overly complicated or difficult, and saves me money in the short and long term.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
For microsoldering: you want the quick 861dw or one of the knockoffs and a bunch of tips. Sometimes you can get away without a microscope but usually you need one of those too. You need a swing arm mount for it because you often won’t be able to position your board under the objective of a tabletop mount.
You 100% cannot get away without a fume extractor. You’re gonna need low melt solder and flux, so you also need to be wearing disposable gloves.
You need a board holder because once all the solder in the area is liquified you don’t want the heavier parts sliding off the board because it’s propped up on a piece of wood at a ten degree angle.
If you wanna extend the amount of work you can do with just a decent iron: use flux and low melt to get everything on your usbc liquid at the same time so you can lift it off the board.
I found that using a soldering iron to be unweildy, which could either be a bad iron or my poor skills. I was thinking of maybe investing in future for one of those hakko hot air rework stations and see if it is any easier. Right now that’s on hold, but totally something I want to try in the future, maybe as a hobby.
You can also use an interest calculator or multiply the payment by the term length to see how much over the purchase price you’ll pay in interest.
This is why it’s important to haggle over the purchase price and not the monthly payment. Never ever negotiate over the monthly payment, or you’re likely to get stuck with a 96-month loan at 23% interest.
My mother in law bought a truck the same week I bought my car. I mentioned that I got a 1.9% interest rate. She got a 22% rate!!! I was absolutely floored when I found out what she did.
That’s wild. When I was getting a mortgage for my house, the lender was like “your interest rate is X, but if you pay $Y you can add a ‘point’”. I’m like “wtf is a point?” Turns out, it’s a roundabout way of saying, higher down payment = lower interest rate.
It already wasn’t obvious what their jargon meant, so for you to have a sales person offering the exact opposite of what my lender did, actively bribing customers to take a worse deal for themselves, it’s just…scummy.
Yeah, buying points is a bit different though and again is a great example of why everyone should at least have a basic understanding of how to make an amortization schedule.
Buying points isn’t exactly the same as a higher down payment, because that money doesn’t take any principal off your loan. It’s basically paying interest up front, giving the lender a lesser amount now rather than a greater amount later.
Shit gets complicated real quick, so plugging it into an Excel spreadsheet makes it much more clear.
What we need really is a skills tree for real life. Then it would be much easier to spot the things you’re level 1 in.
I work in IT and I need this. This field is vast and sometimes it’s hard to know what you don’t know, or how well you know what you know.
Sure, there’s certs, but they just show how well you’re familiar with that particular field (or worse yet, that you know how to pass that particular test).
I work in IT and I need this.
Basic computer competency starts with reading the error message.
I’ve worked in IT and you’d be amazed how many people are stuck with some problem that would be fixed if they just read the error message on their screen.
For example, it might say:
Error! The green button needs to be pressed. It’s on your keyboard. It’s green. It also has lettering on it that says PRESS HERE.
People will bring their computer in, at a total loss for what to do.
