Director Detection at SecureBio in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
jefftk
Karma: 26,266
Live Music Without a Sound Person
Google Can’t Math Parsecs
Unchickenous Apricot Berry Cake
Solsong Chord Updates
High Dynamic Range DIY Air Testing
Contra Dance at LessOnline
Coming Around To Political Donations
Thanks for the reminder! “Check a box” cross posting is broken and I hadn’t done it manually yet.
SecureBio Detection is Hiring Software Engineers
Thanks for asking about this! I just did a little research, and while it looks like the frequency range at 222nm would likely be sufficient for this reaction, there are three reasons why it’s not a concern in practice:
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The UV light is not very strong: levels that would produce appreciable toxic gas would already be unsafe for human eyes and skin
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Cleaning products almost always contain stabilizers to absorb free radicals
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Human spaces have some ventilation (or we’d get too much CO2!) so any tiny amounts that were produced wouldn’t build up
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Running An Air Purifier on Batteries
Testing Best-Effort Solar
A Song About No
Tween Contra Dance
I know this isn’t what you’re getting at, but reading your story made me think about how it is often the other way around with parents as they grow old and their children grow up. Watching your children, and everyone’s children, carry forward what you no longer can, and feeling pride in their accomplishments. And the children, now adults, playing harder and better by knowing they’re playing for everyone who came before them.
Wall-Mounted Far-UVC
Yep! See paragraph 6.
Aww, thanks!
(I think of the “saint” framing as primarily being about sacrifice, but that’s not what we’re going for and someone looking over the material conditions of our life would probably conclude that we’re doing pretty well. Being able to give as described in the post is downstream from earning a lot of money as a software engineer in big tech and buying a house before the prices went up even more.)
Wouldn’t universities be even more incentivized to focus on fun over education? Students could take out loans, party for four years, declare bankruptcy, and then move on with their life. The bankruptcy falls off their credit history by 29.
I think it’s the other way: getting a loan to attend a primarily-fun school would be very hard, because the lender can see they’re unlikely to be repaid.
On June 6th Verizon sent me an email that I now have the option to use a new smartphone app for these watches, Verizon Family, instead of GizmoHub. Since GH has not been very good, that seems like potentially good news! Then on the 10th they told me that GH was being retired on July 6th, and I have to move over.
I tried to do this today, and got an error that my number is ineligible for Verizon Family. I talked with the virtual assistant for a while, and then an associate for half an hour. They were not able to resolve the problem, and said that Verizon Family does not yet support cases where you have Gizmos as your only Verizon lines of service. They are going to follow up with me by email when they sort this out.
The associate agreed with me that they should not deprecate the old app until the new app can handle this configuration. I asked them to raise up the chain that this means they need to push back the deprecation date.
EDIT 2026-06-19: I didn’t receive an email, and called back today. The rep said this was their third or fourth call today (!?) from someone who had a gizmo but not a Verizon smartphone. They said they’re working on fixing the problem, it will be at least 4-5 business days, and they won’t take down Gizmohub until Verizon Family is working.