On Violet's very sensible advocacy for Far-UVC in government buildings (shelters, jails, detention centers etc)-

One of the few places GUV- specifically Upper-Room GUV is widely used in the US is shelters and corrections.

The efficacy of this is supported by the largest study of GUV ever done- the Tuberculosis Ultraviolet Shelter Study (TUSS)-

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC20…

It was spectacularly unethical, but it showed that GUV is incredibly safe and effective at scale in these settings. It should not require mathematical justification to show basic human empathy and not deliberately infect a portion of your population that are helpless to protect themselves. But if you need to argue with sociopaths on those terms- the above study is a good start.

It is a rational choice in the self-interest of even the most callous.

The cost of GUV in corrections is less than the associated healthcare costs of the infections it is proven to prevent, which are borne by the state.

The unhoused- at least for the time being (camps aren't far off at this rate😓), are not segregated from the rest of the population. Many have jobs, prepare or deliver food, take mass transit, seek medical care at the same places anyone else would.

If they are forced every evening into conditions conducive to infection, when they go about their daily lives, they become unwitting vectors- which affects even those who despise them and wish them harm for the "crime" of poverty.

Most of these facilities would not require Far-UVC- and it would be difficult to convince them to budget for it, no matter what the ROI.

Upper-Room GUV had already proven extremely effective. There is an explainer on it here:
nukit222.com/blogs/info/upp…

And its close relation, egg-crate GUV:
nukit222.com/blogs/info/int…

There are numerous issues pertaining to safety and effectiveness in the Far-UVC industry that we've called out- loudly and repeatedly. I hope that gives us some credibility when we say Far-UVC ozone release really seems to be a fabricated problem.

The NIOSH Recommended Exposure Limit (REL) for ozone is 0.1 ppm (parts per million) or 100 ppb (parts per billion) as a time-weighted average (TWA) over 10 hours.

The U.S. EPA 8-hour National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) limit is 70 ppb.

World Health Organization (WHO) guideline is under 50.96 ppb.

Urban/suburban areas (moderate pollution) are commonly 30–70 ppb during the day. (Levels are higher in summer because sunlight drives ozone formation.)

Shenzhen is typically under 22ppb (our air is not as bad as you'd think)
aqi.in/dashboard/chin…
(I've verified this, don't have to trust government stats). NYC and LA are usually under 20ppb.

With the Lantern emitter in a small, sealed, air-tight PET bag, I can't get levels over 20ppb with a $12,000 ozone meter.

In a small room- even with all the doors closed, and half a dozen Lanterns running for an hour, I can't even get ozone levels to go over ambient. While not a proper independent lab ozone certification (but we of course have those for the Lantern), what we have is a sealed PET bag with two sampling ports. There's an ozone catalyst on one port for intake, and the other port is connected to the ozone meter (2btech.io/items/ambient-…) which pulls air through and samples it.

This means the inside of the bag is as close to 0 ozone as we can make it- because ambient ozone is being removed before it enters the bag- because if we don't, we can't measure anything. This gets us down from Shenzhen's ambient 20ppb to about 5.4ppb.

(Again, just a rough benchtop test to illustrate the issue, in addition to the proper independent lab ones.)

Since the people who are receiving grants to promote and educate the public about Far-UVC are too busy giving lap dances to the Far-UVC companies whose products they are supposed to be researching without bias and in general trying to "get their beak's wet", while those same companies openly commit fraud, we'll continue our humble efforts at STEM-Ed here.

Yesterday we talked about the issues with using CADR as a measurement for Far-UVC effectiveness. Another metric we can look at is the fixture's radiant power output. The Nukit Lantern has a radiant power output of 30.5mW (cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0552…)

That means the entirety of all the power coming out of the fixture, in every direction, is 30.5 mW.

A device called a goniophotometer is used to measure the light from every angle, and that gives us a picture of the three-dimensional power output- which can be shown on a polar plot.
A lot of people tend to confuse this for Irradiance at Nadir- which measures power at just one point, not total power output. Radiant Power Output tells us how many watts are being pumped into the air so is a much more number.

Nadir is important when we are calculating safe eye and skin limits. An emitter manufactuer who is only giving you a single Irradiance at Nadir number is telling you nothing about the effectiveness of the product.

Here we can see that at 75cm away, the Nukit Lantern emits 4.6µW/cm² of 222nm light(µW is pronounced microwatts) of 222nm light. So 4.6 microwatts of Far-UVC light, are hitting each square centimeter (cm²), at 75cm distance. Now that gives us power- but exposure risk is measured by power and time- joules in this case.

The ACGIH limit for eye exposure is 160.7mJ/cm². 4.6µW/cm² takes 9.7 hours to reach that limit. That means you are safe, looking at the Lantern, for about 9.7 hours if you are 75cm away. If you are 100cm away that gives you 17.17 hours. But at 50 cm- tabletop level, you only get 4.34 hours.

That might be ok-ish but one Lantern is not enough to have an effect outside a small bathroom, and two Lanterns on a tabletop can halve your exposure time. If you aren't very careful with minimum distance, they could quickly exceed safe eye limits if they were on your desk at work, or even a long dinner or a few drinks with friends.

That's why we didn't make the Lantern emitter a portable battery powered device and instead made it for fixed installs and ask it be mounted high up. If you are sitting next to it and rolling the dice with precise distances, probably sooner or later you are going to get photokeratitis. It won't kill you, but it's like getting sand in your eye for a few days- not fun.

So you knew the Sterilray Saber was unsafe at under three meters, you knew they didn't disclose this, and their marketing material shows it being used at an unsafe distance, but you decided to say nothing to the public because you "got to know them"? WTF?

How about it, Sterilray Saber owners, would it have been nice to know that you and your family were supposed to stay 3 meters away?

Sorry- too bad OSLUV "got to know them" and it would have been super rude to their new friends to mention the whole, well-documented cancer risk thing.

Sterilray was tested, and it definitively caused damage to human skin:
The effect of 222-nm UVC phototesting on healthy volunteer skin: a pilot study
sci-hub.ru/10.1111/phpp.1…

That this damage was due to Sterilray being unfiltered was confirmed by Isla Rose Mary Barnard, Ewan Eadie, and Kenneth Wood:

Extreme Exposure to Filtered Far-UVC: A Case Study
sci-hub.ru/10.1111/php.13…

Further evidence that far-UVC for disinfection is unlikely to cause erythema or pre-mutagenic DNA lesions in skin
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ph…

OSLUV tested it and by their own admission, verified it was unsafe at the distance people were using it at AND DECIDED NOT TO SAY ANYTHING because they "got to know" the owners.

So basically, you only call out the supposed deficiencies of companies whose owners you don't like with products that compete directly with your colleagues?

It's not as if it's part of OSLUV's mandate as a Far-UVC non-profit to prioritize public safety, especially when they can pivot to selling what they are supposed to be impartially evaluating and educating the public about.

Nah, I'm sure when @VitalikButerin funded all that testing, what he had in mind is for you to keep it to yourselves until you could profit off it and stay silent on stuff that was a risk to public health and could potentially discredit Far-UVC if it continued. But hey, it worked right? So who can blame you?

Actually giving a shit about public health and trying to get an honest product into the hands of people that could not otherwise afford it is for fools- Nukit is proof it that. We're hated for it.

You win, this is what people want and will reward and celebrate. Give it a month, and you'll be written up in tech-media as the "revolutionary startup" that was the "first to lower the cost of Far-UVC".


"wHy dON'T pEOPle TRusT sICenTIsts anD EnginEErs?"

If you are an engineer and researcher, and you see a company advertising a device YOU KNOW TO BE UNSAFE UNDER THREE METERS WITH A CHILD STARING INTO IT AND SAY NOTHING- you are a POS.

And here we go. I guess the reason @VitalikButerin funded @TheOSLUVProject is so they could conceal Far-UVC test results for years until they could establish their own company, take IP we shared with them, intended to be Open-Sourced, deny credit to the creater, pass it off to their colleague's closed-source product, and then cite test results that magically only occurred "in-house".

I think this is worth the risk of starting up my old channel again, just to walk everyone through the emails step by step so they can see how a couple of grifters ripped off a crypto billionaire and lied their way into a Far-UVC startup under the claim they were a "non-profit Far-UVC startup".

Stay tuned for all the tea folks! Hey @TheOSLUVProject, tell everyone how you refused to release test results of KNOWN dangerous products that you KNEW were harming the public when we BEGGED you to speak up- because you wanted to sit on those results until you could financially benefit from releasing them.

How many people will end up with lesions or worse in a few years from Sterilray's cancer rods, because you wanted to sit on that for YEARS so you could profit?

I’m going to try this again because it’s quite important.

Hypochlorous acid (HOCl) has become a very popular cleaning agent with a variety of uses.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC73…

HOCL can be made in a few ways; one popular way is with electricity, water, salt, and vinegar (5% acetic acid, aka. CH₃COOH).

You can use distilled or tap water to make it, many people use tap water.

Tap water has different levels of acidity depending on where you live.
healthline.com/health/ph-of-d…

USEPA guidelines for pH are 6.5 to 8.5; NY guidelines are 7.5 to 8.5
nyc.gov/assets/dep/dow…

Here is a map of the UK and Europe showing the pH of the water in various places. As you can see, many places are over 7.5. docs.google.com/document/d/1Ws…

This widely shared document offers the following formula for HOCL:
1 tsp vinegar
⅛ tsp table salt
1 liter of tap / filtered water /distilled water.

When you produce HOCL with electricity, salt, and water, NaOCl (sodium hypochlorite, household bleach) is also produced.

The balance between hypochlorous acid (HOCl-😊) and sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl-☹️) depends strongly on pH. The more alkaline the solution, the more NaOCl, and the less HOCL is generated.

(For those who want to check for themselves- the equilibrium formula for HOCl (hypochlorous acid) and NaOCl (sodium hypochlorite) in water is: OCl- (aq) + H2O (l) ⇌ HOCl (aq) + OH- (aq); where OCl- is the hypochlorite ion from NaOCl, and the equilibrium represents the hydrolysis reaction where the hypochlorite ion can accept a hydrogen ion from water to form HOCl and hydroxide ions.)

If we have typical tap water with a pH of 7.5 I can follow the above instructions, add our 1 tsp of vinegar, and it will bring it to pH 7.2–7.4.

In this mixture, at pH 7.2–7.4, the resulting solution will consist of approximately:

60–70% Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl)
30–40% Sodium Hypochlorite (NaOCl)

If we start at pH 8.5 (very common in the US and Europe), and add our 1 tsp vinegar, we would bring the pH down to around pH of 8.0–8.3.

The resulting solution will consist of approximately:

15–25% Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl)
75–85% Sodium Hypochlorite (NaOCl)

I think this is why they are upset🤔

I was working on a low-cost digital HOCL meter which would make it easier to verify the purity of home brew preparations but set it aside to work on Far-UVC.

Making inhaling or not inhaling bleach a matter of a laypersons ability to accurately read the slight changes in the hue of a pH test strip is somethings I'm not comfortable with- but if others are, go right ahead. I have spoken highly of your work in the past and I'd really rather not question it in front of people we both know want to find fault in it. Email or DM would be best.

I wish I knew specifically what I did to convince you I was somehow against you when we need more people doing what you do.

https://x.com/NukitToBeSure/status/1838008416138318058?t=Xtxozjpovni8bl28lqARsA&s=19

Once again folks, blue accent lighting is not GUV.

Breathless misinformation about what specific mitigations are in place in any given location isn't helpful when we are trying to educate the public. This is the amount of visible light you get from a powerful 60w KrCl excimer lamp placed against a wall.

To clarify a few things- no real-world Far-UVC installation has ever been found to exceed NIOSH or OSHA ozone limits. Those limits have been in place for decades, and if they are unsafe- that is not a Far-UVC issue. That is an issue that will require a massive overhaul of the industry to accommodate new standards- starting with basically a complete ban on photocopiers and laser printers.

Next, respiratory infections are the fourth leading cause of death in the world- ozone, isn’t.

.

There are few interventions without downsides, not vaccines, not antivirals. In the hundred-year history of GUV, the same number of people have been permanently harmed by GUV as have been by masks- exactly none. There is no real-world evidence to date that GUV causes any long-term harm.

There are countless industries that rely on GUV, and workers spend decades working around it- there is no “violet lung” that corresponds to what we see workers in other professions who chronically inhale dangerous compounds. Even kitchen workers- we now see from the lung damage they suffer that we need to be more careful in our homes. There are no corresponding respiratory issues with workers who spend decades around GUV.

That does not mean there is no need for caution- just that there is little indication of imminent danger from real-world data that hasn’t been ginned up in a laboratory to achieve a predetermined outcome.

Is more research needed? Absolutely, but jumping to discredit one of the most powerful tools we have based on studies that share the same questionable methodologies that anti-mask and anti-filtration studies have used is irresponsible.

We all know there are huge financial incentives to discredit costly infrastructure-based mitigations. When studies with dubious methodologies emerge declaring IAQ measures that would cost companies and landlords thousands of dollars per room conveniently come under attack- some skepticism is in order.

*For the record, I donated the Far-UVC lamps and ozone meters for the Pang et al. study but sell none of the products supplied.who.int/news/item/09-1… >The studies above suggest that Far-UVC devices produce ozone at a rate that exceeds safe levels even in a lab

The “lab” in question is a hermetically sealed chamber- a giant plastic bag:

A ∼21 m3 Teflon reaction chamber (approximately 3 × 3 × 2 m, L × W × H) is constructed of 50-μm-thick FEP Teflon film

So, if you live in a plastic bag, Far-UVC is not for you.

Next the "office":

..the windows, gaps around utility penetrations, and supply/return vents were sealed with plastic sheeting or tape..

Is your office sealed with plastic sheeting and tape? So, how is this a realistic experiment and not one configured to achieve a predetermined result? Why have no similar measurements been taken at any of the countless places where Far-UVC is installed in the real world?

Next, secondary compounds:

..and via introduction of various components to simulate a realistic indoor environment..

This is the key sentence that should bother people- because they take really important research, and then simply rigged the test to get the result they wanted.

We know that many common cleaning compounds break down into harmful secondary compounds on exposure to UV. They introduced similar compounds, knowing they would break down into harmful secondary compounds, and they could say, “Ah ha! Far-UVC bad!”.

A lie by omission is still a lie- what they don't tell you is that "Goldilocks" mix of precursor compounds and regular old sunlight has the same effect-

Photolysis-Driven Indoor Air Chemistry Following Cleaning of Hospital Wards:


Of course, they also don’t tell you that the problem is addressed by simply using low VOC materials and cleaning compounds- as industry is moving towards, because the problem isn’t specific to Far-UVC. They are just bad news in general, and Far-UVC has nothing to do with that.

A modeling study of the impact of photolysis on indoor air quality


So if you put *any* UV source, including sunlight, in a room with compounds known to emit VOCs in response to UV, you have a problem. Even with no light and some of those same chemicals, you get VOCs.

But they really, really want you to believe that Far-UVC light is the problem that needs to be addressed not the VOC-releasing compounds? Why? Oh, right, because it's a massive potential expenditure that certain parties desperately want to avoid.

Unsurprisingly, the same business interests that have been pushing "personal measures" like handwashing so they aren't held liable for failing to pay for filtration and ventilation upgrades also don't want to pay for Far-UVC- and desperately need everyone to know how bad this really expensive intervention is. So, we get well-timed anti-GUV studies like this one to go with the recent anti-filtration studies designed to achieve the same objectives.

Participating in this is, unfortunately, sufficiently dishonest to call the author's entire body of work into question.sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

This is one of those simultaneously interesting and horrifying developments that Long-COVID has brought us- comrades unable to leave their beds but gamely taking the bull by the horns, flipping LC off, and cooking from there.

There's actually some potential for improvement since this is a huge, huge class of product here in China. This is because so many of us live in dormitories where, technically, cooking isn't permitted. But of course food from the canteen is not always from our region, to our taste, or available when we want to snack- and most of us don't consider anything but a hot meal to be a meal.

Usually, they are shown as camping or outdoor products- but basically, they are used almost exclusively in personal sleeping areas and designed to be safe there. Below is a pressure cooker for making rice and stews that runs off inexpensive self-heating chemical packs (they come with instant meals here) so that it doesn't flip cheap circuit breakers. It's also insulated so it doesn't cause burns.

If this (bed cookware?) is a class of product you are using, and there are problems- tag me, I might be able to find something better and cheaper for everyone. It sucks that we have to, but best to accept that and make sure people have access to better tools. I know it can seem odd- the way Nukit solicits problems instead of going out and finding problems to solve, but this is a really important part of the design for marginalized communities.

The process has to be the marginalized community pulling- asking, for what it needs. Not push- you as an outsider, deciding what they need for them. As an engineer and designer- you make what you are asked to make, and only what you are asked to make. Even if that's not cool or interesting. Cool and interesting is about you getting a write-up in tech media- not them.

Bad design- vanity design that promotes the personal brand of the designer or their institution instead of making scalable, affordable, practical solutions, can quickly make a problem that a marginalized community is facing significantly worse.

Many people want to believe that the problems a given marginalized community faces are trivial or easily surmountable- so any product that plausibly claims to solve one of those problems can quickly receive a tremendous amount of publicity. If these theoretical solutions exist, people can comfort themselves that those marginalized who don’t avail themselves of those solutions are, in part, to blame.
Discussion of systemic obstacles- e.g. the unhoused being unable to receive mail, receive a fraction of the publicity and media coverage over yet another completely impractical $10,000 extra special cardboard sleeping pod.

Design and engineering for marginalized communities are, more often than not, spectacularly racist, ableist, and sexist. African engineers apparently do not exist- special white guys in their second year at MIT need to solve the problems for an entire continent. Likewise with indigenous groups, the disabled- there is a near conviction that professional eyes do not exist in these communities, have never examined these problems in detail before and that able, Western engineers, with a casual glance, can do better than any within those groups has managed in decades, often with far more training, and first-hand experience with the problem.

If folks in a marginalized community think you bring something special to the table- let them know you are available, and trust them to utilize that how they see fit. The assumption they are not competent to source assistance as they need it when it is offered is bizarre narcissism.

A vanity engineering project, which purports to solve a problem no one in that community asked anyone to solve, can easily draw attention bandwidth and scant resources away from problems they really do need to be solved. If you are not a member of that community, you don't know what the pain points and priorities are.

As a non-marginalized person, or even just someone marginalized differently, you may have resources that enable you to gain trust and raise funds in ways the community you want to help cannot. It’s not for you to raise funds for your fun project that solves a problem you find interesting at the expense of more important challenges that the community is facing. Those clumsy efforts, once they fail, can be held up as evidence the problems being faced are unsolvable or that the community is unable to handle funds. You can easily end up burning the bridges others desperately need- while yours remain intact.

Lastly “I was just trying to help” is the most cowardly of excuses and should never, ever come up. It blames the marginalized for your clumsy efforts and casts them as ungrateful for not submitting to further harm for the sake of your vanity and desire to feel good about yourself.

Say what you can do, do only what you are asked, involve community members in every aspect of the design cycle, do not expect good intentions to substitute for competence, and make sure the nature of distribution does not do economic harm.

Anything else, treat them like a focus group providing feedback on your product that you want to bring to market, and pay them accordingly- because you aren't doing anyone any favors, and they should not be asked to indulge you for free.

Well, I don't really have the option of not meticulously accounting for any donations I receive for that kind of thing- and the time I spent on the extra bookkeeping would be time I could not spend solving problems.
So I'm better off just trying to keep the business profitable enough to find the special projects. Although huge thanks🙏🏻

That said- I do have some ideas for stuff that people could be doing- other than being the last remaining COVID-Aware people in the world screaming at each other on Twitter for COVID heresy, as seems to be so popular😣 A lot of the problem with educating the public is that most people are basing their idea of "the science" on half-remembered lessons from middle school decades ago.

Unfortunately, very little is going to change because for both classrooms or homeschoolers, there are nearly no lesson plans- particularly Creative Commons licensed, that teach the best modern science knows of fighting respiratory infection.

Kids are mostly learning the same garbage they did a decade ago- and parents who see their textbooks and help them with their homework are having those old, out-of-date notions reinforced. This is going to really, really undermine efforts if we are saying something when "even kids" know "better". Someone needs to provide an updated curriculum- even if they can't widely deploy it, yet.

Now, US textbook politics being what I've heard they are, getting the best science about this in your average US school seems like it's going to be a nightmare- but more and more parents are home-schooling, and you can't fight for a better curriculum if you don't have it to offer.

A working group is needed for:
Lesson plans
Artwork
Workbooks and tests
Lab classes. (Ballons and N95s, showing how electrostatic attraction traps particles smaller than the hole in a mask, that kind of thing)

And above all- it needs to be absolutely, fully Open Source so anyone can use it. CC-BY-SA is the license I like for this kind of thing. You don't have to be "sciencey" just being a good artist or good at explaining stuff to kids would be huge.

Thanks Joey!

https://twitter.com/joeyfox85/status/1740792138730819966

A few comments on design choices-

This was the first product Nukit has made where it’s really designed with the adversarial mindset that we discussed earlier. Designing for residential use is easy- designing for all the issues that can come up in a commercial setting is something else. The Tempest draws from cyber and premise security so the design far more paranoid than you’d think an air purifier warrants, but the stakes are every bit as high as as data theft or a facility breech. A refused or disabled device means infectious air, potential disability and death- so why not build on a foundation of excess caution so we don’t have to go back later and patch weak points in response to stakeholder objections?

So, as part of the design cycle, when looking at @Vailima1’s initial template, we tried to see what could go wrong. How would we, as attackers- or simply detractors, exploit and abuse this machine? What would be even a remotely plausible justification not to have this machine installed in a government office, or a bank, or a school?

https://twitter.com/NukitToBeSure/status/1737425836637352067

So we do a fair amount of R&D and most of it actually comes to nothing- but sometimes kind of interesting nothing.
Recently we did a deep dive on CLO2, aka Chlorine Dioxide, a popular, kind of scammy product that was pushed in various products as a mitigation early in the pandemic, to see if there was a tiny bit of science at the root of it all and if anything might come of it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_… We’re only going to talk about CLO2 gas as an airborne mitigation- but some people were ingesting it, which is a horribly bad idea. There is zero evidence if ingested, injected, etc., it will do anything but harm you and then eventually kill you in a really painful way.





Which frankly is a pretty good reason not to have the stuff too easy to access.fda.gov/news-events/pr…
cbsnews.com/news/argentina…