Time To Actually "Blog" - A Week With @lesshorrible #3

It has been a pretty funky week to be honest. First I got sick and was miserable, while being too broke to afford a doctor. Then this whole iodine thing happened. Well, let´s get started with rewinding this past week.

Previous Posts In This Series

Time To Actually "Blog" - A Week With @lesshorrible
Time To Actually "Blog" - A Week With @lesshorrible #2

Irony

If you have been following my blog, you know that I am writing a series about antibiotic resistance. I am an advocate for reduced usage of antibiotics. Furthermore, I am someone who avoids going to the doctor for every itch. Well, that kind of bit me in the ass this time. When I started posting on steemit I was sick. It was an upper respiratory infection. These are usually viral, and so there really is not much to do other than sitting it out and treating the symptoms. So, I got back to school, feeling a lot better (still some minor symptoms), and started working in the lab.

I totally ignored the minor symptoms and just kept working, while starting to working out playing basketball (I am a basketball enthusiats). At my school there is this thing called Step Sing. All of Greek life organises a 10 minute sing and dance show. Timing could not be worse because Alabama just declared a state of emergency due to the flu outbreak. After Step Sing, everybody gets sick. EVERYBODY. Well, I caught it. It got worse every day and at some point I knew this was not a viral but bacterial infection. Anyways, at the beginning of the week I had 55 Dollar in my bank account. My insurance here in the US is crap (welcome to America), so I could not go to the ER or any off campus clinic. This is important. Tuesday I could not bear it anymore (my head felt like it was exploading), so I went to see the doctor on campus. Because EVERYBODY gets sick after Step Sing, they were booked out pretty much all week. I signed up for a waitlist and got a call on Wednesday that I could see the doc on Thursday. I got some antibiotics and now I am on the way back.
So, the lesson learned here: do not act like you are a hero. SOMETIMES you do need medical attention and antibiotics. However, do not run to the doc for antibiotics for every little sneeze. If you are sick, take a time out and relax until you are healed.

Iodine Crisis

I will not talk about this too much, mainly because I am just done with it. Somebody wrote a post about how iodine is the single most important thing in your body and that 95% of Americans are deficient in it. If you care about this you can go and read my critical response to this post.

If you wonder why I am not responding to their responses anymore is because I decided to mute the people involved. Rather than telling you about iodine, or its implications in your health, I want you to do your own research. Here are links to some search engines and data bases you can use to find real scientific sources.
NCBI. This website is run by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. It offers a lot of different things to scientists (like protein amino acid sequences, etc). For you the search for scientifc articles would be more interesting. Just type in what you want to search for in the top field. Hit enter and then select "PubMed".
Google Scholar. It is a search engine for scientific articles run by Google. Some people (mainly people who never worked in a lab or research department) will say it is not legit and should only be used for high school science reports. Well, if a high school student is able to read and understand these research articles... Anyways, you can set several filters like publication age, etc. Click on the links and you will most likely be taken to an abstract of a study, which gives you a short summary.
ScienceDirect. I do not really know exactly who runs this website but it is a useful tool for research. They have themed sites where they reference several research articles (they provide links so if you find something useful you can go directly to the referenced study). It is a good platform from where you can branch out into more specialized areas of research withing a larger topic.
Wikipedia. I know, I know. Sometimes somebody writes a post about fluoridation of water and then about "Tholfdir - Crusher of Worlds" (not a real life example). However, Wikipedia can be a good starting point for your investigation. While not scientific, it is a good reflection of public opinion (some articles in Wikipedia are pretty good, though). Authors have to link references so if you find a statement that seems interesting, you can often find a link to some sort of scientific source.
Those are the main sources. If you are a student you may also have access to the American Chemical Society or other large publishers. While science is (or at least should be) an open good, you have to pay to get access to some research journals. It costs money to run the infrastructure (reviewers, testers, publication, running servers, spreading the journals, etc). Scientists are NOT PAID for publishing, and once something is published, the copyright goes to the publisher (the journal the study gets published in in most cases). This also means that scientists do not have to pay to get published. Anyways, the takeaway is that there are plenty of free resources for people who want to inform themselves.

STAY AWAY from creepy websites run by people who want you to sign up for a newsletter or who promise things like perfect health or fast weight loss. There are several doctors who run such websites. Those are not legitimate sources. They, like Wikipedia in most cases, can be useful to learn about public opinion. Use scientific sources to build your opinion. Those doctors are like the common press. They sell headlines, not information. Unlike scientists, they get paid for their publications on the web.
Ok... This part has gotten a lot longer than anticipated. But I hope I got my point across. Do not trust anybody claiming to know the truth (myself included). Do your own research!

School Stuff

Well, school is starting to get rough. Particularly this one class, Advanced Phsysical Chemistry. While I was really interested in the Spectroscopy part, I am dreading what we are about to do next. I heard horrible things about Statistical Thermodynamics. Well, no idea what it actually means yet, but we have started talking about it on Friday. Advanced Physical Chemistry is the reason why most people either avoiding becoming a chemistry major, or while they drop out and sign up for biochemistry or biology. In fact, I am the only chemistry major left in my year. Overall, I only know three other chemistry majors at my entire school. My average class size for my chemistry major this year was 3 (only because some classes was together with biochem majors). Last semester I had a course called Chemical Instrumentation were I was the only student (it was just a professor - still, he held a PhD and some 15 years of experience- and myself).
Anyways, while chemistry is very difficult, it is also very cool. I really enjoy it and I hope that more people will find a liking in chemistry too. It is a very important science, and links into basically everything that we encounter in our daily lives.

Projects

Well, I need to conclude two of my series pretty soon. I am planning two more posts in my "Nanotechnology" series and one-two more in my "Antibiotic Resistance" topic. I am currently also considering getting started in dTube with some tutorials about how to write scientific posts.
In real life, I am working hard on finishing my degree. I got 10 weeks left before I finally get my bachelor´s. This is one of the easiest semester I had in college so I do have some time to develop as a person and strengthen my CV. I did pick up drawing and I am reporting on my progress in my Uomo Universale series. Sadly I was not able to dedicate much time to this lately. I am also getting started with learning how to code.
As soon as I get my nanocellulose sent, I can start working on my very first, very own research project. I am so excited for this. It will be the first step I take to becoming a biosensor developer. Actually, this whole Iodine crisis has given me an idea to look into iodine biosensors. Maybe I will just develop a biosensor that can measure every micronutrient in the body on one chip with one drop of blood. If programming ever becomes a thing for me I could even program an app so you can use my biosensors at home on your phone. Be on the look out for BRG (name of my fictional company, based on the name of one of my professors who I call BroGreg, or beta rho Greg).

Steemit Stuff

I really love steemit. Everybody is always friendly to each other. I am very happy that steemit gets more and more users. Sadly, this also means that the post quality is suffering. Many people just come here for a quick buck. I have taken some of my rewards and invested in Litecoin and Ethereum. I also bought like 6000 Dogecoin (cause it was dirt cheap). The Dogecoin investment I do regret a little bit. However, with the crazy market development we see in cryptocurrencies, it may take off one day (I mean, it kind of did during December, before every damn currency crashed). Also I never invested any FIAT money into steemit, so if I lose money on my investments.... Who cares?
However, I decided that I want to stay here for a long time. So most of my rewards go into SP. I am hoping to crack 1000 SP in early March (I like setting goals for myself). This would mean that I almost doubled my SP in the month of February. I am still overwhelmed by the success I had on steemit. As a broke college student, I really appreciate it.
A lesson I learned from the Iodine crisis is, that there is no reasoning with people who have emotional attachement to something. Number will never overcome the feel-good of an idea. So, instead of writing "mythbusing" articles, I will just mute people. I do not know if you can see the list of people I muted, but if you want a compilation of anti-vaxxers and pseudoscientists, you should check it out.

Thank you for checking in. I hope this post was interesting as well as informative. This is a promise, I will get better at posting this every week, every Sunday. I also want to promise that I will improve the quality of my posts even more - another thing I took from the Iodine crisis. Anyways, thank you again. Leave an upvote if you enjoyed this post. I am also thinking about making a logo. Any thoughts on this?

As always,
Cheers @lesshorrible