So. Much. Disinformation.
The worst of it is often commercial in nature.
A few weeks ago I evacuated a house that had a minor flood leading to a bloom of black mold. If you’ve ever been exposed, you know what this means - feels like being on the verge of a panic attack, you can’t think straight, it’s just awful.
I moved to another house in the remodeling queue, and while it’s in much better condition, I found troubles here as well. I described some of this in Maltego & Housewarming a couple days ago.
And I found a stupid amount of disinformation regarding ozone remediation …
Attention Conservation Notice:
I celebrated my birthday with a Lo-Carb Monster and I can’t sleep, so I’m researching clearing mold with ozone and getting progressively madder about all the marketing slop one has to wade through to get to legitimate facts.
Slop:
Google’s results on a search for “ozone mold spores” yields boundless commercial slop. Ozone is great! Unless of course one has some other solution to push. Trying to find factual links is just terrible, there are page after page of this back and forth crapola.
Google’s topline result is this and it’s fine:
The issue I’m having here is that I want to do some math on ozone production/decay rates, what temperature and humidity do to the steady state concentration, and the effect of having a HEPA filter.
ChatGPT To The Rescue:
I asked ChatGPT about mold and ozone and I think the results are sensible. The 500 cubic foot space mentioned here is my bathroom. My bedroom is 1,100 cubic feet and I have a full sized mattress on a fold out couch. I pulled the mattress, removed the cover, left a 25 watt UV-C bulb running with a 4600 CFM fan blowing under the bed, and my Allegra use dropped from four or five a day and being miserable to just a half AM/PM and feeling fine. I think the ozone steady state was around 1.6 ppm.
Experientially, ozone kicks ass.
The bedroom and bathroom are easy. Sealing up the leaky hot water heater exhaust has made a dramatic difference in the rest of the house. But once someone goes into the attic and completely fixes the exhaust stack, I want to do that space, too. I’m going to go outside, measure lengths and angles of roof pitch, which will lead to a volume estimate. This place is maybe 1,600 square feet, but the layout is complex and there are two peaked roofs with no connection between them. A 30’ x 40’ space with a peaked roof that has 6’ of vertical is about 3,600 cubic feet, unless I’ve completely forgotten trigonometry.
I asked ChatGPT about this starting fresh, but I’d exhausted my 4o time for the day. The older LLM produced utterly crazypants numbers, concentrations 100x higher for the same bulb. It’s math skills are badly lacking compared to the latest.
Doing My Own Research:
The 1.6 ppm in 1,100 cubic feet makes sense, the effect matches what I found on concentration versus effect on mold. Letting thing sit for four or five hours at that level basically wiped out the trouble in here. A level of under 1 ppm will inconvenience mold/mildew, not kill it. If I’m taking on a 3,600 cubic foot space I don’t want to run for a week and not get the job done. It’s worth it to get a much larger source to get this right, but the question is … what source? A 36 watt UVC bulb is $36, a pair of 25 watt are about the same. A 76 watt unit is $100.
The 76 watt has to be hung, unlike the standard screw type bulbs at 25 or 36 watts.
But I’m left puzzling over this, because there’s just too much marketing slop in the way of actual numbers on mold spore survival rate versus concentration.
Hopelessness At Scale:
I have a pretty solid grounding in chemistry and math. I don’t mind having to read a bunch of stuff and cobble together a spreadsheet to make decisions. I’ve been letting ChatGPT take the lead here and I’m not sure I actually CAN get the numbers I need to do this manually. I had computer science math and the required five credit chemistry class back in the day.
I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t get a technical education being able to do this - they’d have to wade through slop until they found something that resonated … not something accurate, mind you, just something they found pleasing.
And this is why we have chemtrails investigations and Secretary Brainworm violating the privacy of every autistic person in the country in his pursuit of anti-vax theories. People who have the education necessary to make quality assessments get overwhelmed by anti-science slop.
Bullshit like this is why we have two kids dead of measles, a disease we had ERADICATED in 2000. This is why global warming is a Chinese hoax. It’s why we have whacko religious based policies trying to reverse demographic choices our society started making two generations ago. We’re ignoring existential threats and focusing on magical thinking. Putin and Xi have to be wetting themselves laughing every time they discuss our imperial implosion.
Conclusion:
Mourning Mankind on February 4th was my personal declaration of defeat. The two things that mattered to me when I got involved in politics - climate change and energy security - are denied/ignored, and handled in the worst way possible, respectively.
I have two young adult children I think of every day, despite the fact that they don’t speak to me. My big motivation has been trying to leave them less of a mess than I found in 2007 when I seriously started looking at things. So much for that plan.
Large Language Models are going to kill jobs … and they’re getting intentionally poisoned. Much like the way music has been denatured this century, we’re going to end up with homogenized … slop. The only solution I can see at this time is combining an LLM with one’s own curated truth. I have a cache of half a million documents, mostly open records and FOIA stuff from the first Trump administration. I don’t have to Google or LLM in that area and put up with auto-generated junk, I’ve got originals.
The question is how to do this and I’m pretty sure the answer is GraphRAG. I can do this for myself, but that just makes me more of a point source expert than I already am. I enjoy this, but … the world needs to come back to reality, and only just so many people are going to read my rambling. There were a hundred of you a year ago and now you’ve expanded seven fold, thank you, but it feels inadequate in the face of a nation of 340 million skidding towards civil war.
I think I can do something within the bounds of Cicada 3301 that would help, but that’s an avocation at this point, not the job I so desperately need. Once gainful employment is resolved, there are a number of things I would do in my spare time, most likely involving ArangoDB’s knowledge graph, but these things remain purely theoretical until I find stable work.
So that’s another plea for help. I’m grateful for the support I get, but unless all 700 of you sign up for the $55/year plan, I need a …
JOB
So please take a minute to look around. Think about who you know that could use:
A Linux/networking guy with service provider and hosting background.
An intelligence analyst for loss prevention.
An investigation manager used to supporting expert witnesses.
A ghost writer with broad technical background.
A startup CTO with a track record in networking, energy, and sense-making.
We’re about to take a whopper hit due to tariffs and a lot of stuff is going to go sideways. I’m chaos tolerant and not risk averse, there are already Signal rooms for a couple media plays, an AI/finance startup, and a couple sense making NGOs. Just gotta get something going that evolves from a fine theory to a regular paycheck.
