Month: November 2016

Enlarge / Huge lightning storm over Melbourne, Australia. (credit: Nigel Killeen/Getty Images)

At least four people have died and hundreds were sent to the hospital this week in Melbourne, Australia after an outbreak of "thunderstorm asthma" struck late Monday.

The rare condition is thought to occur when high levels of pollen become saturated by rain and disintegrate into teeny fragments that are easier to inhale. Those minuscule particles can invade the deep crevices of the lungs and get lodged there. In people who are allergic to pollen and/or already suffer from asthma, the scenario can easily become life-threatening.

On Monday, the city’s rye grass pollen count was reported to be double the level normally considered "high."

Enlarge / Ron is good at computer. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Perhaps you know someone, dear reader, who is what they call a "car person." This "car person" perhaps has many cars in various states of repair, or perhaps there is one "special" car the "car person" lovingly works on without ever actually driving it—changing out the "engine" or the "pistons," endlessly replacing the "tie rods," constantly benchmarking new "oil sumps," or...OK, I'm not actually a "car person" myself and so what that species does with cars is a mystery, but you get the idea: perhaps you know someone who tinkers on automobiles.

Well, many of us Ars Technica staffers are like that—except, perhaps unsurprisingly, instead of cars we tinker on computers. And usually not just with any one computer—the lure of getting your hands dirty and building something functional and performant and cool transcends any one personality or interest type, be it cars or computers. Much like the car person with the Datsun Fairlady Z-car small block V8 conversion perpetually under work in the garage, we geeks tend to have our own perpetually in-work projects—improving our workstations, building tools, or even crafting our own mad science laboratories in our homes. That those labs are most often used for things like "deploying a hundred virtual machines and then simulating multiple states of degraded network performance between each of them" and not "creating an undead monster" doesn't lessen the craziness of what we're doing—after all, much like Doctor Frankenstein, our motivations for tinkering at home are rarely monetary and often instead based on curiosity and a drive to create.

Not everyone on staff has a needlessly complex IT setup, of course—Andrew Cunningham responded to our request for input on this staffsource with an eye-roll so loud that I could actually hear it through email, and I'm pretty sure Jon Brodkin actually thinks "cat 5" refers to the fifth such animal in a group of felines. But the true nutters on staff stood tall and provided us some quality descriptions of their creations.