Settle down buddy

I didn't know i was 14 year old.

It's not about firefighter-specific tactics. It's highly practical philosophy that applies to all first responders.

Thanks for asking. The book is a collection of my most significant insights and quotes on how to keep firefighters fit and their inner fire lit.

It's for any firefighter looking to lead a healthy and honorable life. I hope you find value in reading it.

How firefighter specific is this? Could it apply to other first responders?

I think they want the job to be easier, better, and healthier.

But some are terrified of change and some just don't have the energy for it.

What’s the new book about?

Please see the following paper with many helpful refs (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd1468). Since it is behind a paywall, here's the relevant bit...

"Pfizer was seeking a drug for angina when it originally created sildenafil (Viagra) in the 1980s. As an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5), sildenafil was intended to relax coronary arteries and therefore allow greater coronary blood flow. The desired cardiovascular effects were not observed on the healthy volunteers tested at the Sandwich, England, R&D facility in 1991–1992. However, several volunteers reported in their questionnaires that they had had unusually strong and persistent erections. Pfizer researchers did not immediately realize that they had a blockbuster on their hands, but when a member of the team read a report that identified PDE5 as a key enzyme in the biochemical pathway mediating erections, a trial in impotent men was quickly set up. A large-scale study carried out on 3,700 men worldwide with erectile dysfunction between 1993 and 1995 confirmed that it was effective in 63% of men tested with the lowest dose level and in 82% of men tested with the highest dose. Of note, in many of these studies, Pfizer’s researchers had difficulties retrieving unused sample of the drug from many subjects in the experimental group as they did not want to give the pills back! By 2003, sildenafil had annual sales of US $1.88 billion and nearly 8 million men were taking sildenafil in the United States alone."

Sildenafil was approved for ED in the US in 1998, but was later approved for pulmonary hypertension in the US 2005.

Preventing burnout is easier than rekindling the flame. Reducing demands and fostering a healthy fire service culture are key.

If you are aware or suspect someone is struggling with emotional exhaustion, treating them with empathy can go a long way. When senior firefighters open up about their challenges and ask for assistance or guidance, it normalizes struggle and shows that seeking support is a source of strength, not a sign of weakness.

Celebrate having a life outside of work. Encourage exercise and napping at the firehouse. Stop glorifying sleep deprivation. Make mental health paramount. Use your vacation time.

If you feel that you are already burned out, try mentoring someone. This is a great way to reignite the inner flame.

> In my mind, biology isn’t even a biology problem as much as it is a particle physics problem.

Emergence is a thing, but 3.7 Billion years of emergent property evolution has created levels of complexity that are far FAR beyond the level of the simple software tools that can mimic the surface level complexity you see in "computer life" simulations.

The computer complexity you're talking about with wonky solutions and poorly documented code are, on average, about 40 years old.

The biological equivalence would be to continue building the same way for about 100,000,000x longer.

I don't dispute the analogy, but it's a bit of Dunning-Kruger, again. The level of complexity isn't going to be obvious to you until you start trying to solve the problems. 3.7 Billion years of wonky solutions layered on top of each other is a lot different than 40 years.

Poor diet just like the public. Chronic stress, chronic sleep deprivation, and Recliner Potato Syndrome just add to the problem.

We could eliminate obesity from the fire service by

- avoiding grains, sugars, alcohol, and seed oils

- prioritizing high quality protein at every meal

- eating more nutrient dense foods (meat, organs, eggs, fruit)

Follow up question, do you think firefighters and departments actually want to make the jobs easier or do you think they purposefully make their lives harder to avoid more people joining?

Great question. Poor sleep equals poor health. Moving to a 24/72-hour shift schedule and implementing later start times is the iron solution IMO. But if your department is thriving with the schedule you have than don't change a thing.

Poor sleep on duty is out of your control. But off duty, guard your sleep like you guard your nozzle. Make 7-8 hours a non-negotiable at home. I find that supplementing with magnesium glycinate or l-threonate can help a lot.

Take a daily nap. Not only should we allow napping on duty, but we should also encourage it.

Create a cool, dark, and quiet sleeping environment. Extra points for private sleeping quarters at the firehouse. Reduce blue light after dark. Use Night Shift mode on your phone and download justgetflux on computers and MDCs.

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I don’t know… to be honest, the way you are describing biological systems, the more I think of the way how real world software systems actually evolve in the wild, and the nightmare that is debugging large, complex, undocumented systems. But even if it seems chaotic, there are logical patterns that can be found, and understanding that can be developed.

Out in the real world, software programs rarely grow into the perfectly optimized and well organized logical constructs taught about in college. More often than not, they are full of extremely wonky solutions and poorly documented workarounds that have been duct taped together years ago by random people pasting code from stack overflow.

In my mind, biology isn’t even a biology problem as much as it is a particle physics problem.

For example - Particle Life: https://youtu.be/p4YirERTVF0

What can fire departments do to fight burnout culture?

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Absolutely. It means to correct a situation. If you're a firefighter and your physical or mental health is fu*ked, we can take corrective action to unfu*k your health.

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Maybe it's just in my town but I seem to see a lot of overweight Firefighters. What's up with that?

Any tips for combating firefighter sleep deprivation?

Thank you for doing this. What does your name mean? Are you promoting celibacy?

Why do you bother censoring the word "fuck" in your post when it's uncensored in your username and your username appears with everything you post?

Actually, I don't have a recommendation, unfortunately. There are many different fields in biology, and learning each one can be a few years of work, plus the common foundations - so the question isn't how do you learn but "How much do you need to know to do a specific job?"

Unfortunately, biology is the opposite of programming. Programming is a logical set of tools that build on each other. If you learn arrays, or dictionaries or data structures, you can go out and apply them logically. You can figure out which one will have the best performance in a given situation, and optimization is a logical extension of what you know. You can spend a life time learning, but the basics don't change.

In biology, EVERYTHING is an exception to something else. Learn the entire "biochemical pathway" chart, and then you'll discover than some animals do things differently, or short circuit pieces of it, or just get a specific chemical from their diet and don't need to do a certain part of it. It's all chaos. Biology is the mad hatter's perspective and there's no real guarantee that something is going to work the way you think it should, or the way you were taught. eg. Translation of RNA to protein always begins with a Methionine (AUG codon)... except that sometimes it doesn't. Sometime organisms have found a way to get things started with a missing base, or sometime just that things are wobbly.. or maybe sometimes it's just not at all what you think it's going to be.

That's the rambly way of saying that you'll never know what you need to know until it's too late and you discover something was wrong. For my Masters thesis, I worked on a really slow growing bacteria, and was trying to convince it to do something for months (take up a plasmid so I could knock out a gene). I worked on that system for about a year, and never got it to work. A couple years later, working on a different project, I discovered that the post-doc who set up the system had missed a critical detail: the half life of one of the antibiotics, to which the entire system had been build around, was shorter than the incubation time of the bacteria we were growing. The system could never have worked on that organism, and no amount of work would ever have changed it. I wasted months on that, and never once thought to validate the actual system that had been used by the guy for a year before I started. Who knows what to make of the data he'd recorded.... is it all garbage? I really don't know.

How deep would I have to have studied to know to look at the half life of Kanemycin? I haven't a clue. In biology, it's not what you know that gets you - it's what you don't know.

What a surprise a guy who's touting his ai based business is full of shit. Lol.