About the Irritated geek
| This is a site about allergy—mainly food allergy—and related topics. And maybe some random ones. Because I am an irritated geek and, for the purposes of this website, I am the irritated geek (but you can call me Tania). I am irritated by proteins, allergists-that-I’ve-seen and many other things, for I am also irritable. I am, however, not a doctor. What I am is a really good data analyst with a passion for facts, as well as an adult with a relatively rare version of Pollen Food Syndrome that causes me to have anaphylactic reactions when I eat something that my immune system doesn’t agree with and I get a faceful of birch pollen while dealing with communists in my funhouse at the same time. After an exasperating series of visits to disbelieving and, frankly, surprisingly uninformed doctors, I realised I’d have to figure things out for myself. ChatGPT does not do my homework. In fact, it’s probably stealing from me right now. As far as I’m concerned, AI is a rapacious thief built off the sweat of other people’s labour and googols of random comments ranted into the internetosphere. It’s also been programmed to be an incurable people-pleaser, which I guess makes it a sycophantic con artist. I know it has its uses, but reliable research is not one of them. This is not a site that patronises readers with superficial information and the generic statement to see a healthcare professional. It’s a site for curious people who appreciate facts. And lots of them. Or, at least, what we think are facts, until further research shows us otherwise. Does science provide a magic bullet that will solve everyone’s allergy problems? No. That’s why you’ll see statistics dotted around the pages of this site. But science still remains your best option for finding something that does work for you. I’ve read 99.9% of the studies that I reference (and many others that I don’t), although I have my limits—I’m looking at you, ‘Comparative proteomic analysis of egg white proteins during the rapid embryonic growth period by combinatorial peptide ligand libraries’. And most of the statements that I make are linked to specific studies, most of which you can read for yourself if you really want to. But it’s OK if you don’t, I already did that so you don’t have to. This website has been built and is maintained by my husband, Pieter—no, that’s not a typo, it is ‘Peter’ with an ‘i’, it’s a Dutch thing. We met a couple of Pieter is geekier than I am. You can tell because he has several computers and a desktop airco, and he’s more likely to be able to tell you what happened in programs like Umbrella Academy, whereas I’m more likely to not quite be able to tell you what happened in an episode of Star Trek, but I still get annoyed about the fact that Wil Wheaton wrote a book called ‘Memories of the Future Vol. 1’ and then never gave me a Vol. 2. That’s just rude. Also, if you make me squint through footnotes of footnotes in ‘Still Still Just a Geek’, Wil Wheaton, as they say in French, ‘You will find me’, by which I mean, I will find you and you won’t like it. But I digress. I was saying that I couldn’t have done this without Pieter, whose talent with tech is how this website exists and whose geeky job has kept me from ending up in a cardboard box under a bridge ranting at passing strangers and enables me to sit on the couch reading papers instead. If you get anything from this site, he’s as much to thank for that as I am. |   |