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Matthew Oliver Profile picture
Matthew Oliver
@sameo416
Red River Métis ∞ Scotch-breed ∞ RCAF Veteran ∞ Feral theologian ∞ aerospace/electrical ∞ P.Eng. ∞ he/him ∞ lawful chaotic ∞ Disabled ∞ RRMC RMC sfu uec ∞ nd
3 subscribers
Nov 7 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I wonder if this time around it will start to click for people.

If you live life not giving a damn for those around you, who you vote for is mostly irrelevant.

It’s a broken system, not a broken political party.

And the way you fix it is by starting to give a damn about others At a panel discussion talking about transforming society to support effective climate advocacy.

I talked about relationally and responsibility in Métis cosmologies.

After a couple of hours of good presentation, one person says - this is supposed to be about climate action.
Oct 14 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Excellent thread as always.

One of the things I’m getting tired of saying - none of this should be a surprise. Colonial systems are built on violence and killing/silencing is just another tool in the bag.

Indigenous People’s know this all too well. We’ve lived in a society that actively seeks our death or elimination so it can continue unbridled consumption and extraction.

The difference now is that violence is turned on everyone who resists the ‘just a cold’ ‘get back to the office’ ‘dinner out to support the economy!’.
Sep 19 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
In the UK Covid Inquiry, some ? comments by infection control and public health voices (Ritchie and Hopkins) about respirators/'scientific evidence'. Hopkins says here, 'evidence is weak that FFP3s protected more than fluid resistant surgical masks (FRSM)'
Like Ritchie, Hopkins emphasizes the dichotomy between 'lab conditions' not being the same as 'clinical' reality. Counsel attempts to call out a contradiction, explained away with the same sort of IPC/PHE handwaving about discussion and consensus.
Aug 22 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
A word of explanation if exceptionalism and colonialism draw a puzzled look.

Exceptionalism, at least in my engineer’s definition, relates to a default assumption that your reality is/should be universal.

Someone who doesn’t conform to your reality is marked as dim/dumb. This is satirically (and in reality) reflected in the loud (white) visitor to another nation dealing with communication barriers by yelling.

I was in a line in Heidelberg, man behind me says “so nice to hear another American after nothing but German”. Polite exceptionalism.
Jul 30 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
A very balanced response to a commentary that uses pejorative descriptors to distance those of us who have repeatedly called out the systematic failures of PH.

My advocacy is neither ‘obsessive’ nor ‘fixated’ as the op characterized it. It is very difficult to take someone seriously when they use those sorts of descriptors to characterize a position they are critiquing.

They’re broad and undefined and hand waves intended to disparage the opposing position.

We’ve detailed many examples of failures to think.
Jul 28 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
OK. Had a major bathroom renovation, down to the studs. Started in April, finished 2 weeks ago. Both still covid-free. A series of notes on how we maintained safety over that period.

The company, Mode Build (Edmonton) did a super job.

1 Image Disclaimers. Not an HVAC engineer, this is not professional engineering advice. We did daily risk assessments and configured things according to our risk tolerance and using multiple layers of defense.

Others may find our approach highly risky - but that's the personal part.

2
Apr 27 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Agree fully we need an inquiry. Lots that needs documentation if only to aid another group of clean air advocates in 25 years.

But to be clear. Anyone who asserts that evidence is poor about N95 effectiveness versus bioaerosols, is confirming they are not conversant with science Image The CSA standard on respiratory protection has been in place for decades. It EXPRESSLY sets out what real science supports as needed for protection against bioaerosols.

Z94.4-18 it’s all there.

It’s even presented through control
banding, nice graphics so easy to understand.
Apr 7 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
One thing I've seen PH types not get is how difficult it is to draw firm conclusions from trend data involving very, very low levels of events.

Aviation is exceptionally safe, and you're not going to see a big trend shift over years. What you need to do is watch the weak signals Those weak signals are already there and recognized by bodies like the FAA, who are acting.

To throw out 'safest year ever' with what's going on in the aviation industry is absolute junk science.

It's very hard to determine causation with weak signals. As we've seen in the
Feb 7 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
A few words about the NTSB preliminary report into the Alaska Air door plug departure on 5 Jan 24, Boeing 737-9 Max, N704AL.

NTSB site if you want to read the report or review the photos: ntsb.gov/investigations… First, calling this 'rapid' decompression, so not technically 'explosive' decompression. The definition has to do with rate of change of pressure.

Missing door. Can see insulation (yellow) and the structural pads - 2 upper left, 1 upper right - of the door. 12 of those in total. Image
Jan 6 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Alaska Airlines flight out of Portland rapid decompression after mid-rear fuselage lifted door blows out. 737 Max-9

Made about 16,000 ft MSL so not as serious a pressure diff as it could have been.

kptv.com/2024/01/06/pla… This isn’t an exit. It’s a structural doorway that’s fixed closed and covered with an interior wall panel. Periodically inspected.

This is an unusual structural failure. Unusual^2. It looks like the frame is gone.
Dec 8, 2023 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
Some concerns starting with use of far uv "skin safe" lights. I expect the exposure limits will be increased again with research, but right now it's possible to blow through those limits with a light of any power (say 10 or 12 watts and up).

Calculating incident energy and exposure can be easy, but it can also be complicated.

I can't teach this in a thread, but will try to illuminate the complexities involved.

A simple light source that emits constant energy in all directions it illuminates can be treated as an isotropic source.
Nov 22, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Reflects how spectacularly poor we are at assessing risk.

When someone says I’m ok with the risk, it usually means they feel safe, not that they’ve performed a formal risk assessment.

No one I know has been disabled in an MVA, doesn’t lead me to conclude there’s no risk. This is the reason cvd is causing such widespread harm, the serious immediate impact is relatively low, and the longer term impacts aren’t usually immediate.

If 50% were dying while visibly hemorrhaging, there’d be more urgency broadly.

Think 1918 flu or the Plague.
Nov 17, 2023 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Bunch of comments about the “values before science” report just released.

Trying to satirize it and discovered I can’t. It’s a problem. Here’s why.

CW: colonial violence Setting up that ‘values before science’ is a problem requires the assumption that science itself contains an ethics/moral value system that stands alone.

I’m not sure that’s accurate.

And in cases where we ‘follow the science’ our cultural values allow grave harms without pause
Oct 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"For the pandemic, everyone looked to medical doctors and public health officials for guidance, and they certainly have expertise in what's happening with the virus when it's in your body and what we can do about it on a population scale. But I think they were not savvy to what we can do in the indoor environment to reduce the risk of transmission, because they weren't really aware of the mechanics of transmission.
Jun 8, 2023 • 22 tweets • 5 min read
There's a short Youtube video going around of an AME explaining why aircraft ventilation is so good and aircraft cabins are free of contaminants. I did some checking to get ready for @TheReSisters2 @MaryJoNabuurs @coopSpeak community tonight. Sharing my fact check here. AME = aircraft maintenance engineer, holder of a federal Transport Canada mechanics license.

I've done 3 threads looking at cabin ventilation and disease transmission from published literature. First is here:
Jun 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Listening to the radio today, heard Midnight Oil's song The Dead Heart. Listened to them since college, but I'd never really heard the lyrics of this song before.

I knew their hit "Beds are Burning" was about Indigenous rights. These lyrics really caught me today. We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken
May 21, 2023 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
A thread about the movement aka safety differently, and how this is another thing industry could teach public health and infectious disease physicians.

For decades the prevailing safety method was based on compliance. Cause if you reduced errors to zero, there’s be no accidents! This was loosely based on early research that said if you could reduce near miss or minor injury accidents to zero, you’d eliminate serious and fatality accidents.

Again, cause it’s all about eliminating errors.

But people noted that while the low impact incidents were reduced,
Apr 22, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
An addendum to that earlier thread on risk assessment.

First, our default as humans is to be very very poor at understanding risk. This is apparent in most people’s personal lives or while they’re driving.

One reason - we do things without getting bit and conclude they’re safe Normalization of deviance is the technical term. We do a particular thing repeatedly and conclude it’s safe because nothing happened, when the reality is the cheese holes just didn’t line up for us.

Classic example involving pilot ejection seat 🪂.
Apr 22, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Some comments popping up from people who aren’t denying LC and enduring impacts from c-vid, but are asking seemingly rationale questions about prevalence and endurance.

It reveals a basic misunderstanding about risk mitigation, something we’ve seen ++ in medical responses. If you have credible evidence of a potential risk, what you do not do is say, “we need to understand this risk better before we act”. This has been the primary medical policy response to c-vid in NA.

“We need high quality evidence”.

That’s not the way risk management works.
Apr 2, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Had the honour today of helping to obligate new graduates at the UofA.

This is the ritual calling of an engineer. A ceremony written by Rudyard Kipling originally, updated a lot to modernize language and content. The goal of the ritual is to reinforce the obligations engineers have to society and to ethical behaviour.

It reflects the high standards expected in protecting the public welfare, also captured in legally binding codes of ethics.
Mar 22, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I had the privilege to speak to an engineering class yesterday about Settler and Indigenous cosmologies. "Immiscible World Views" is the title.

When I first gave that talk a Dean of Engineering asked me if I really believed that these were "immiscible" (un-mixable) cosmologies. I do. I also see that many Indigenous are able to operate in bi-cosmic space, as we live immersed inside a different culture.

This is sort of like when I lived in Germany. I figured out how to navigate 'those curious German ways' quite well, and even to speak the language.