Monthly Archives: January 2022

Covid or seasonal allergies?

Slightly odd data-point. A little while ago, my son came down with something that was something like a cross between a cold and normal seasonal allergies. Not bad, just inconvenient and a lot of snot. Something was going around at school (lots of over-the-top coronavirus fears, even though way to many people are vaxxed) and so they went to all-remote teaching for a couple of weeks, so he didn’t miss any school. About the time he started getting better (after a week or so) my wife, and then my daughter, came down with something similar but not the same symptom set. Considering the wife-unit has a history if sinus problems that’s not surprising. a little bit achy, but nothing to write home about.

Then I came down with something. No loss of taste or other normal Covid symptoms, just more like something between a typical sinus infection and a seasonal allergy. Sinus pressure and drainage, sore throat, a bit of coughing and congestion, lots of snot, hard to sleep because when you lay down the angle makes all the snot production make it feel like you are drowning, low energy. No loss of apatite or fever or chills of note.

After a couple of days of that I figure “what the heck, doesn’t feel or sound like any covid case I’ve heard of, but there is no downside to treating it as if it were.” So I bumped the vitamins and NAC, and started a course of Ivermectin. somewhat better in 24 hours, 80% better in 2 days, slept fine and only residual congestion and mucus, and occasional coughing by day 3. Energy more or less normal. Wife and daughter recovering much more slowly. They still have not gotten their covid tests back. from a couple of days ago.

I suspect they will be positive, and I had it. If not, then whatever I had was either nearly identical in symptoms to them but I recovered a lot faster because of the “vitamin I” for something not covid…. In any case, it’s an interesting data-point.

In witch the fiziks are rong

In my story The Stars Came Back faster-than-light travel and anti-gravity was accomplished by some general hand-waving and techno-babble about physics implied to be more advanced than what we have today here on earth. But what if… what if our fundamental understanding of physics is wrong? Not just in the way that General and Special relativity  supposedly updated and refined Newtonian physics, but that the basic underlying principled about the universe, including the math in Einstein’s theories, are flat-out wrong?  What if all the string-theory research, phycisists looking for dark matter, scientists trying to perfect nuclear fusion, etc., are all barking up the wrong tree in terms of the basic nature of the problems they are working with? Here are some things for the science and engineering sorts to geek out on. It is looking more and more likely that they are. Continue reading In witch the fiziks are rong