E2 started giving me 504 gateway not found messages on the seventeenth. It seems to be back but I didn't get any writing done on Monday. I could have done it offline but I've done write-ups for things that already existed but under slightly different names or spellings so without even the capacity to check if somethings been written it's hard to muster the will.

Instead I spent forty five minutes trying to find Ignaz Semmelweis without knowing his name. Germ theory brings up a lot about Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch but Semmelweis work was the set up for germ theory not germ theory itself. I think about Semmelweis's story when I'm down about the present and its institutional dysfunction. The galling thing about his story is not that the hospital had a abysmal rate of women dying of preventable infections because the staff that did the deliveries had their hands in corpses hours before; it's that the midwives had one ninth the death rate in the same building and none of the doctors thought that this discrepancy was worth investigating except Semmelweis. The constant resistance to the chlorinated hand washing after that is damning too. I'm actually not sure I can think of anything that makes me more ashamed of the human race. Genocides, self-aggrandizing fraud, and sadism are all awful but they each have there own internal logic. Medical researchers that see a one to nine ratio and don't investigate the cause make no sense. If you can't find it in you to care about the deaths of mothers and children can't you at least take a professional interest in that? The modern world has its problems but I think we have made significant progress. Actually, I know we've made significant progress since the child mortality rate has dropped by a factor of fifteen globally.

I'm a cautious optimist for the most part. A lot of that outlook comes from deliberately looking at history's ugliest features. During its highest levels smallpox is suspected to have killed one in ten people in the old world. That's not of the people who contracted it, that's the entire living population. It killed thirty percent of people who contracted it and blinded and disfigured a significant number of the survivors. We eliminated it in the 1970s. Like I said, I'm optimistic. Reading about the horrors of the past makes me like that. Ignaz Semmelweis suffer horribly for caring about others but we live in the world he wanted and his critics are reviled on the rare occasions that they aren't forgotten.

IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING

Still alive!! A general update with some emphasis on health

I take my blood pressure and heartrate every morning and record it. i have no intention of recording it here on the regular, but enough people have enquired about it that I felt it would be valuable to show the last four days:

                SYS    DIA      HR
                ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
15/11/24	129	84	71
16/11/24	125	75	89
17/11/24	101	69	88
18/11/24	100	62	101
19/11/24	99	67	97

I'll take that.

I also had a visit just now from a home nurse, who checked and approved my vitals, helped me set up my many, many meds for the coming week. I have a couple of upcoming doctor appointments, including a followup with the surgeon. Healing continues to happen, I'm reassured that in the next couple of months I will be slowly returning to normal. I've been taking i easy, not had any major pain, the incision scar is causing no trouble and things seem to be proceeding nominally. I'm still feeling a little impatient, my housemate too. We're both keen for me to return to "normal", able o fully function. I'm basically still housebound other than occasional trips to fetch groceries. But i am sill alive, and grateful.

I long to be able to drive again (that's currently forbidden until my sternum is healed) so I can get out and have a social life again. I can putter around outside (walking to take out garbage is actually a treat, as exercise feels really good!) I continue to plan for a visit to see Tess in December. I'll share more about that soon, but meanwhile, if you're in the Seattle area and would like to meet up, please let me know, I'd love to have a tiny nodermeet.

Iron Noder continues to give me pleasure, it was disappointing not to be able to be there for the first few days, but despite missing a few days I still intend to finish strong and complete the thirty writeups. I've begun the process of reading through all the other entries (I have promised to read and vote on everything).

Considering my heart and cardiovascular health, I have been avoiding reading the news as I want to avoid stress, anxiety and anything that is likely to bugger up my blood pressure. Am I concerned about the direction the world is taking? Yes, frankly. The swing toward authoritarian, nationalistic, antisocial and anti-environmental government in the US seems to be part of an overall trajectory worldwide. The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine worry me. Europe seems to be moving increasingly toward the right, I worry that government in the US is moving closer to the awful, inhumane Project 2025 goals; Trump seems intent on implementing a cabinet who don't give a fuck about reality, scientific truth or the overall health of society. I still hope that a sufficient number of Republican politicians have the integrity to resist having the likes of the alleged sex offender Matt Gaetz and anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy running anything important.

On the other hand, I'm excited to be currently watching a live stream of the latest SpaceX starship launch lead up, in the hopes that they achieve the dual goals of lighting he vacuum engines, and catching the booster again. I'm still as interested in spaceflight as I was at age seven, only this time I get to watch launches live, which is fun.

I'm slowly going through the gifts y'all have sent me, and will soon be posting my thanks to everyone individually. Meanwhile, thank you all for your best wishes, good thoughts and prayers. They are heard and always welcome ♥

Iron Noder 2024 #8

xclip -o | wc -w
597

This is welsh log number one.

So I decided to start learning Welsh. In my most recent writeup, I mentioned a desire to learn a celtic language, with a preference toward it being a dead language -- I did mention, however, that Welsh was on the table. Well, it is Welsh that I've settled on. There are a number of reasons for such a decision. Firstly, I wanted to learn something more ancient, because my "secret agenda" is to come to something closer to proto-celtic; the pre-Christian and even pre-Roman Celts interest me immensely. Which is why I wanted to learn Old Irish initially, because it's OLDER and thus COOLER. But I am really drawn to modern Welsh for some illogical picturesque reason, after hearing someone speak it I felt enchanted.

So I was chatting with a friend about it, and he told me that Welsh is really good for "unlocking" the Celtic languages, because there is a lot of cross-pollination between them all, and it's easier to learn than the other ones. This is what pushed me over the edge. So I downloaded a bunch of PDF books, I'm going to get the textbook "colloquial welsh", I'm going to study from them, do Duolingo for pronunciation and vocab, and try to immerse myself in welsh books. I know roughly how much effort it takes to learn a language. I should be able to do this, if I don't lose 

It sounds very beautiful, I think it sounds much prettier than English. There's something strangely hypnotic about it.

This is my third day of learning Welsh. I got through the first Duolingo unit, I've read up and listened to audio regarding pronunciation ofthe consonants, vowels, dipthongs. I am having a really really hard time with the letter "ll". I'll get it eventually, I'm sure, but I've watched pronunciation guides and I'm still just unable to do it without aspirating so hard my cheeks and lips flutter (which I imagine isn't the correct way to speak).

I think learning a language without noun declensions will be a breath of fresh air. I cannot tell you how deeply irritated I feel when I have to look at a sentence in Latin and piece out "yeah so that's either nominative or accusative, which means that this is dative, which means this and that, and so the sentence means this and blah blah blah" and after I'm done I find that I still translated it wrong after spending four minutes on a single sentence and it's like. Dude. How did anyone ever speak this bastard language.

Currently, my study plan looks like this: Read the books and pdfs thoroughly, listen to pronunciation guides, make flashcards of all the vocab, do duolingo when bored, and hope that I stay interested long enough to see this through. I know Welsh is scarcely spoken, but I think it would be a fun challenge to try to interact with Welsh speakers online. There's not very many places I can do that with Latin, and I don't really want to do it with Latin anyway.

This is my first Welsh daylog. More to come. Stay tuned.

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