Tuesday, March 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 March 2020

Don't Eat The Yellow Snow Edition

Tech News

  • Yes, chloroquine phosphate is available from pet stores for treating fish parasites.  That doesn't mean you should eat spoonfuls of it.




  • I'm getting a 24 core Threadripper server to play with - I mean, to offload key background processing from expensive cloud services - at my day job.  Intel also has workstation CPUs.  (Serve the Home)

    An 18 core Xeon W-2295 costs about the same as a 24 core Threadripper and gets stomped on every benchmark except possibly one that uses AVX-512.  It does have an advantage in memory support - the Xeon can use registered modules, so it can go up to 1TB of RAM vs. 256GB on Threadripper.

    That is a shortcoming for AMD because high-end workstations these days tend to start at 256GB.


  • Twitter is removing tweets that misinform people about Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague or at least that's what they say they're doing.  (ZDNet)

    What they are actually doing - as I learned personally - is shadowbanning people for jokes, or honest and accurate comments.




  • It is literally impossible for speech recognition software to identify the colour of your skin.  (New York Times)




  • Relative is, well, relative.  (The Guardian)

    This 555 million-year-old fossil is one of the earliest ever found with bilateral symmetry, so it might conceivably be a direct ancestor.


Video of the Day



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/CoronaLego.jpg?size=720x&q=95



Disclaimer: Twitter is not an unbiased sample.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:35 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 245 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Spoonfuls of chloroquine phosphate, no. Tens to hundreds of milligrams? That's okay—chloroquine phosphate tablets are still a first-line anti-malarial in Africa. Hydroxychloroquine is a fellow member of the 4-aminoquinoline family.

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, March 25 2020 05:15 AM (vuQH5)

2 Supposedly, the dosage in the prescription drug with hydroxychloroquine is 200mg/tablet and a dangerous or lethal dose (I'm not sure which) is 2g or 2000mg.

I looked at the picture of one of those fish cleaners.  It said to use "40mg/gallon (~1/8 tsp / 10g)" to treat your tank.

1/8 tsp--a small amount--would be 400mg if "10g" means "ten gallons" and I did my math right.  It's probably not unreasonable to think the guy who died might've had as much as a teaspoon or more (3200mg per teaspoon undiluted if, again, I did my math right), and I haven't heard any discussion of what else might have been in that tank cleaner.  It sure sounds like the guy may have ODed.
I guess the moral is, the media shouldn't say stuff like "the medicine, similar to an additive in fish tank cleaner", and people should be calling their doctors[1], not grabbing stuff from the cleaning supply cabinet.
[1] and it appears this stuff isn't something you take to prevent the disease, but to make it go away faster once you've got it.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 25 2020 05:52 AM (Iwkd4)

3 Yes, it sounds like they would have ingested 3000 to 4000mg, which is up to 10x the normal dose and enough to cause serious problems.  Even if it had no other harmful ingredients, which it probably didn't since fish die very easily.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 25 2020 07:59 AM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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