This video about how to wash off poison ivy changed my life. The key is that urushiol acts a lot like invisible motor oil in terms of how it sticks to your skin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oyoDRHpQK0
The answer in the video is Dawn liquid dishwashing soap and strong scrubbing with a cloth.
I want a product that can show me where the oil is on my skin. I'm strongly affected by poison ivy. I sweat a lot, so I'm constantly touching my face. I've had bad rashes on my nose, eyebrows, and ears, amongst other places.
I use a soapy cloth every time I think I've been in contact and I still miss places.
That would be ideal, but in its absence I have had success (mostly) using a barrier cream to keep the oils from reaching my skin in the first place. I buy it from a marine equipment store, where it is sold for people working with glass fiber and resins.
Even worse, it is almost impossible to find these days. The brand was acquired and the company that bought it is still ramping up production and distribution. Source: I emailed the company.
Actually just bought some Zote (also now owned by the same company), just yesterday, to test it out... but from what I hear, I don't think it is as good.
My grandparents always swear by using "brown soap" if you think you've been exposed to poison ivy. aka Fels-Naptha. It's a pretty strong soap, but I don't think it contains naphtha anymore.
Strong detergents like Dawn can trigger eczema -- they destroy the tight junctions between skin cells and let foreign materials through your skin that your immune system reacts to. I've had great luck switching to milder traditional soap made from lye and fat, which isn't strong enough chemically to do this.
Discovering this site was a godsend for my son, who had severe eczema as a baby: https://www.solveeczema.org I would also get itchy skin hands after washing dishes, now, my skin feels great.
I've not tried using traditional soap for washing off poison ivy, though it does work for other kinds of grease, so I would expect it's ok as long as you scrub well enough with a cloth or something.
The video says that the most important thing to do is wash every possible surface with friction (wet wash cloth or luffa) and to be exceedingly thorough in it. Additives didn't seem as important, though it probably is good to use some kind of soap.
This video was a game changer for sure. It's amazing to see it racked up 8M views over the years.
There was a scientist at UC Santa Cruz who patented a chemical that could be used to detect urushiol under a blacklight. I contacted them years ago to see if they were going to turn it into a commercial product, but AFAIK, it hasn't made it to market yet.
The idea is intriguing... a special light or cream to make urushiol visible on the skin to aid in scrubbing it off. Now that would be truly life changing!
A friend sent me that video a couple years ago, after seeing how much time I spend in the woods. Changed my life too!
He's right that scrubbing hard with a cloth is the most important part. For spot exposures mid-hike, a hard scrub with plain water in a stream or river, even without soap, has worked for me. A stone or a piece of bark can work as your scrubber. Better than your hand or your shirt. I swear that guy's saved me weeks of agony. Thanks for sharing.
I used to end up at the doctor every time I got poison Ivy, becuase it was so out of hand. That is until I took the time to understand urishol, and invest in "extreme green power hand scrub" which used to be called mean green soap, but they got in a trademark dispute with a bigger company.
extreme green power hand scrub is the same ingredients as zanfel, which is like $40 for a tiny tube. I keep tub of it in my shower and any time I see it starting, or think I may have come in contact I scrub the crap out of it, and it goes away in a few days. I haven't had a major breakout in well over a decade, and I reccommend it to everyone whenever the topic of poison ivy oak sumac or cashews comes up.
I have tons of it in my yard, and I'm genetically incapable of recognizing it by sight. I've gotten it 3 or 4 times in the past 10 years, and it's really annoying. I have some other type of vine, it's maybe kudzu but I'm not sure, that has completely enveloped trees, fences, climbing up my house. It's certainly intertwining with poison ivy and all the other plants and could very well pick up the oil from it.
There's an old movie called The Day of The Triffids, about walking/ambulatory plants, and you could shoot a remake of that in my yard and probably not need special effects. Kudzu can grow so fast you can almost see it in real time.
For us, we moved into a house that has about an acre of forest land. We’ve been trying to clear it out so the kids don’t come in contact with it while playing back there.
> AI can experience the same rabbit-hole effect as your idiot cousin who has watched too many of the algorithmically suggested videos on Youtube and now believes that aliens conspired with a time travelling Elvis to kill Hitler using a bullet made of Yeti teeth. And they only went online looking for TellyTubbies videos.
Even funnier: ~all humans suffer from the phenomenon, and are similarly unaware of their own personal ignorance. People view reality through a relative lens, the view is more pleasant than an absolute lens.
When I looked into this a little bit, I found Copilot for Business states they do not record any of the info you send them. Though obviously you are still sending out code to a third party. I could not find any info about their policies for “normal” Copilot which I assume means they are recording all the code sent to it and using our code to further train the model.
Still hard to trust. Many companies save info for training/qa purposes and hide details in obscure language. Voice assistants for example. Didn't Roomba get in trouble recently regarding photos uploaded and then shared with contractors for qa that ultimately shared the embarrasing photos more publicly.
As Chomsky points out, the AIs understand syntax not semantics. Code is all (or almost all) syntax whereas human language has both syntax and meaning. Meaning is not something ChatGPT understands.
