My profession: Secundum Artem. Family motto: Asperas Non Spernit. Japanese name: 風間 野兎. (Nousagi Kazama). Hobbies: Gaming, SW, D&D, Comics, Music, Books, Anime.
NW PA, U.S.
Joined February 2016
- Tweets26.5K
- Following2.4K
- Followers695
- Likes69.1K
Pinned Tweet
Glock G19 finished product after grip plug install and Slide Cover Plate swap. Total cost: $30 including Punch tool.
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
Be Jacob Misiorowski
- High school senior season canceled by COVID
- Tore his meniscus 2 games into his freshman year
- Came back, 10-0, 136 Ks in 76 innings
- Drafted 63rd overall
- Scouts doubted he'd throw enough strikes to start
- But started his MLB career with 11 straight no-hit innings
- All-Star selection after just 5 career starts
- Got swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS
- Next year: MLB-best 1.80 ERA and 252 strikeouts
- Threw the fastest pitch ever tracked by a starter (103.7 mph) then kept breaking his own record
- Swept the Dodgers right back
- Opened the World Series with the fastest pitch in WS history
- 5 scoreless innings in the clincher
- Won the first ever World Series for the Brewers at age 24 in his Cy Young year
- Loves Jesus
- Not afraid to cry on camera
He’s a legend already.
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
Robert Downey Jr. asked to spend time with Elon Musk before filming the first Iron Man movie because the director, Jon Favreau, had modeled Tony Stark partially on Elon. Downey wanted to understand the man he was playing. What he described seeing during those meetings says more about Elon than any biography.
Favreau has confirmed that Elon was one of the primary inspirations for the cinematic version of Tony Stark. Not the comic book version, which had been around since 1963, but the film version: the billionaire engineer who builds things with his own hands in his own workshop, whose personal relationships collapse under the weight of his obsession, and whose genius is inseparable from his self destruction.
Downey visited the SpaceX factory. He watched Elon walk the floor. He observed the way Elon interacted with engineers, not as a CEO delegating from above but as an engineer arguing about valve specifications and weld geometries from the middle of the room. Downey later described Elon's energy as "the most focused and simultaneously the most scattered person I've ever been around. The focus is total when it's on you. Then it leaves. And you realize you were one of 40 things being processed simultaneously."
The detail that Downey brought into the performance: the way Tony Stark interacts with objects rather than people. Picking things up. Manipulating screens. Building while talking. The physical restlessness that masks the emotional unavailability. Downey has said that observation came directly from watching Elon during those sessions. The man was never still. The hands were always doing something. The mouth was talking about something else. The brain was somewhere else entirely.
In exchange for the research access, Elon was given a cameo in Iron Man 2. He appears briefly at a party scene. The man who inspired the character appears inside the story the character inhabits. The fiction and the reality met on a film set in 2009 and neither has fully separated since.
Iron Man became the most popular superhero of the 21st century. The performance that launched a $30 billion franchise was built on observations made in a rocket factory by an actor watching a man who couldn't sit still, couldn't maintain eye contact for more than 8 seconds, and couldn't stop building long enough to have a conversation that wasn't about the thing he was building.
The character is fictional. The man who inspired it is not. And the thing that made Tony Stark believable to a global audience, the obsessive genius who cannot connect with the people around him, is the thing that every person in Elon's life has described as both his greatest asset and his deepest cost.
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
How did I figure out that natron dissolves granite?
With difficulty. First I had to forget what school taught me about stone.
Granite isn't some sacred, eternal material. Roughly three quarters of it is SiO₂, quartz. The rest is metal oxides: aluminium, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron.
(Just like wood ash. Remember that, it matters later.)
A Mohs hardness of 6–7 isn't a verdict, just a physical state. The real question is what breaks down quartz.
Glassmakers have known the answer for centuries: molten natron (Na₂CO₃) takes SiO₂ apart at 851 °C.
SiO₂ + Na₂CO₃ → Na₂SiO₃ + CO₂
What's created in the reaction is a strong glue, called waterglass. The main ingredient of artificial stone. Oops!
I tried dismantling a piece of red granite with charcoal embers, a tin can and washing soda (=natron). The result is in the photo, after removing the dry waterglass with a plastic(!) tooth brush.
Later, in my garden, I etched granite with NaOH and KOH separately, at around 360–400 °C.
This year, with a NaOH–KOH eutectic mix, 168 °C was enough. That's all it takes for the "invincible" stone.
I discovered nothing. Glassmakers, ceramicists and recyclers all know this.
Nobody had just connected it to the scoop marks on ancient stones. Let’s connect the dots, archeologists!
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
this might be my last normal tweet before biotech goes vertical
i'm not a whistleblower. I don't work at Lilly, Novo or any of the big labs
but there is a massive shift happening in human biology right now.
it's sitting in press releases and almost nobody reads them
the last 6 months alone:
- a once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer (13.2 vs 6.6 months)
- a one-time gene editing infusion cut hereditary angioedema attacks 87%, and 62% of patients stayed attack-free and off all other prevention for 6 months
- a one-time gene edit for cholesterol dropped LDL up to 62%, and it held for over a year
- a personalized mrna vaccine beat keytruda alone in a 1,137 patient melanoma phase 3
- retatrutide hit ~28% weight loss in a phase 3
- an ai-designed drug entered phase 3
- a pill that regrows hair passed its second phase 3
- an immunotherapy that could let some rectal cancer patients skip surgery, chemo and radiation just got fda approved
- a man lived 271 days off dialysis on a pig kidney
- human cells were caught passing chromosome-sized chunks of DNA to their neighbors, and it changes how the neighbors behave
we are on the verge of an era where the human body is a software problem and the update cycle gets shorter everyday
stick around, it's going to get weird
bio/acc
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
🚨 This could be the end of Type 2 diabetes.
Researchers at ETH Zurich led by Martin Fussenegger built a small wireless implant that uses electricity to break down extra sugar in the blood.
It switches off when levels are normal — and means people won’t need diabetes drugs anymore.
Inside is a catalyst made of graphite felt coated with tiny gold and platinum particles, with no living cells or drugs. A glucose sensor worn on the arm watches sugar levels. When they climb after a meal, it signals a phone or smartwatch, which switches on the implant.
The catalyst then turns glucose into gluconate, a harmless compound the body flushes out in urine, and the system shuts off once sugar is back on target.
In diabetic mice, the device kept blood sugar under tight control for six weeks, the animals lost weight, and it caused no sign of tissue damage.
Because less sugar ends up stored as fat, the team sees it as a possible tool for both type 2 diabetes and obesity, without daily pills or injections. So far it has only been tested in mice, and human trials are still ahead.
source: Maity, D., et al. (2026). Wireless electrocatalytic closed-loop system for drug-free management of diabesity. Science.
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
My wife teaches English at a high school in Japan.
Last week, she gave her students a writing prompt:
"If you could be American for one day, what would you do?"
She read me the answers at dinner. She had to stop three times because she was laughing too hard.
"Own a pickup truck. I don't need a truck. I just want to say, 'Don't worry, I'll grab the truck.'"
"Have a garage. Not for a car. For 'stuff.'"
"Buy 48 rolls of toilet paper at Costco. I live with my parents. I want them anyway."
"Get a free refill. Then another one. Then another one. Until they ask me to leave. They won't ask me to leave."
"Water my lawn at 6 a.m. in a bathrobe and wave at my neighbor."
"Call my teacher 'dude.'" (My wife underlined this one. Twice.)
"Hang a flag on my house for no reason. Just because it's Tuesday."
And a lot of them wrote some version of this:
"Tell my dad I love him. Out loud. At the dinner table."
Then she had the class vote for the best answer.
The winner wasn't funny. It came from the funniest kid in the class. The truck kid.
"Stand up when the anthem plays, put my hand on my heart, and look around and see everybody else doing it too."
My wife asked him why he picked that one.
He shrugged.
"Because then you're never proud alone."
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
Interesting IRS data out today. Allegheny County continues to shrink. PA as a whole continues to lose people and money to other states. I was surprised that there is some rural growth going on which I did not expect.
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
I'm old enough to remember when you could buy something without creating an account.
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
It’s October 26, 2026– and still hardly anyone with a medical degree is raising the issue of how ludicrous it is that a 26-year old and 86-year old are expected to have the same “ideal blood pressure” of 120/80
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
a couple weeks ago I posted about how bone grows into titanium implants because cells can't find the boundary
turns out there's a catch engineers have been trying to solve for years:
titanium is too stiff (~110 GPa vs spongy bone's 0.02–3.7 GPa)
so the metal takes all the load, and the real bone around it actually weakens because physics says "why maintain structure that isn't carrying stress?" (stress shielding)
enter selective laser melted Zn-1Mg-0.1Sr gyroid scaffolds:
→ mathematically generated TPMS gyroid lattice (70% porous, 550 μm pores)
→ elastic modulus tuned right down to 2.3 GPa so it flexes like real cancellous bone
→ alloying zinc with 1% Mg + 0.1% Sr precipitates Mg2Zn11 & SrZn13 intermetallics, more than doubling strength over pure zinc (33.7 MPa)
→ degrades at 0.36 mm/year with zero hydrogen gas pockets
and the wildest part
as it dissolves, it turns its own surface into calcium-phosphate & zinc-phosphate minerals while feeding Zn2+ and Sr2+ ions that make bone-forming cells grow faster
titanium tricks the skeleton into adopting permanent metal
this thing holds the load, feeds the bone to rebuild itself, and vanishes when the job is done.
radical engineering.
today while talkin to my friend (who’s a doctor) I learned something really crazy
That the titanium implants don't just sit in bone they actually bone grows into them
the oxide layer on titanium surface is chemically close enough to biological tissue that cells can't find the boundary so they erase it
osseointegration isn't the implant holding on it's biology deciding the metal belongs there
the skeleton adopts the foreign object as its own
Cyborg vibes
Odinfjodi, Backcount Comptroller Extraordinaire retweeted
Which common ANTIBIOTIC can disrupt your heart’s electrical rhythm and triggers FATAL arrhythmia even at prescribed dose?
A) Amoxicillin
B) Doxycycline
C) Cefixime
D) Azithromycin
