Negative Swab Test and Other Matters

I talked at stupid o'clock about being bamboozled into thinking that Animorphs Series: The Discovery as being ``self-contained'' and speculated it was at least a two-parter.

I was not wrong. It was at least a two-parter. Because that arc spanned three books instead. And the arc ended in a rather satisfying sort of way for the added complication that the eponymous found themselves in. I could, in theory, write out the spoilers since this book series has been concluded since May 2001 (or Sep 2012 is we are looking at the re-issue), but I won't.

In other news, the results from the voluntary COVID-19 swab test that I took yesterday has returned negative results. I'm not jaded, but I remain unfazed, simply because it was to be expected. I don't take unnecessary risks, have been quite fastidious with the masking up, and am generally asocial in general. It would have been either a false positive or a true fluke to actually have a virus load of SARS-CoV-2; it's not about bragging after the fact, it's just the way how risk management works in general. The idea is that there is always an unknown number of the population that can transmit the disease, and as long as we condition the probabilities carefully (i.e. via limiting the sample population we are attempting to calculate the probabilities from), we can reduce the actual probability of a true positive down to nearly zero in this case, especially when the baseline probability of meeting a person with COVID-19 without any conditioning is less than 60k/5.7M or around 1% (it's an upper bound based on the order of magnitude estimate total known cases so far divided by the total population of SIN).

I still feel bloody hot though. The weather has been nasty, and the short rain in the morning did not provide much respite. Such is the life in SIN city without any form of air-conditioning. I have been binge-eating for the past few weeks out of quasi-boredom, and it is has been showing up on the scales as I regain all the mass that I had lost previously. Not to the level of hitting the original starting point of 85 kg, but it is getting close.

Damn man. I need better motivation to get back on the bandwagon.

Incidentally, I found another interesting YouTube channel: Caitlin Doughty---Ask a Mortician. I've always wanted to learn more about how people deal with death. I mean, yes I have read stuff, but it's different compared to hearing what a funeral industry professional has to say. Death isn't really much of a taboo to me; I mean, Death of the Endless is basically my phone/tablet wallpaper in forever:

But artistic cuteness aside, death really isn't that much of a taboo to me. Everything that has life must have it end at some point---none of is are God after all, and so are mortal. Spiritual life is one thing that I cannot prove/disprove beyond my own personal belief system, so I will not attempt to talk about it here; but as for physical life, everyone's more or less in agreement that death ends it.

There's usually enough evidence about physical death in the form of putrescence that can convince even the die-hard crank to begrudgingly accept that there is some threshold that causes a change from living to not living---for simplicity, let's just call it ``death''.

Death isn't pretty. There are a lot of chemical processes and associated antagonistic chemical processes in our bodies that ensure that we are able to operate [while still alive]. Calling our bodies a walking bag of chemical reactions is not an incorrect description---yes, some might want to add the electrical system as well, but considering that they are largely chemically induced, it is still not wrong to term them as being chemical in nature. These chemical processes are usually in some form of carefully balanced equilibrium that we loosely call homeostasis---on death, the chemical processes are no longer kept within the narrow band of operation that supports life and thus end up going haywire. There are many very reactive chemical processes that go on in our bodies, mostly because we operate at very short time scales (this is a hypothesis of mine), hence the breakdown of our bodies from these reactive processes can come very quickly when we die.

As a result, instead of looking like a sleeping person at death, we end up with someone who has most likely loosened his/her bowels, soiling themselves, and given enough time, may have all kinds of bloating from excess gases from runaway chemical reactions from both internal enzymatic reactions and gut flora digesting the host body due to a non-functioning immune system, strange bruises from blood clots due to non-moving blood and general haemoglobin breakdown, muscle stiffness from imbalanced ions that screw up the looseness of the muscle fibres... well you get the idea.

Death really isn't pretty.

Yet there is still the business of dealing with death. And this is where it gets into taboo land. Because people really dislike talking about death. Part of it is visceral in nature---death has its own set of sights and smells that have been evolutionary ingrained as being alarming and anxiety inducing to warn our ancestors away from the dead, and part of it is the entire mythos built around a concept that does not have information readily available to dispel any misconceptions.

And Doughty's YouTube channel seems to provide that information to explain how a select group of people help deal with the other [unspoken] waste problem in any society---dealing with the dead.

Anyway, that's about all I have for now. I'm kind of debating internally whether I should take yet another shower (the third for the day) and then head straight off to sleep, or chill for another hour doing something else first.

That'll be for future-me to think about. I will let future-me handle that in a bit.

Till the next update then.