palmer1984

Analogy of the day: car reversing sensors. Warn of impending, potential tissue damage, as distinct from actual tissue damage. Sometimes panic about A Plant, or The Bike Rack. Sometimes totally fail to miss the six-inch tall bollard that makes things go crunch in a way you don't notice until later.

Book purchase of the day: The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, recced by a friend as popsci/popmed and one I'd nearly wound up buying yesterday anyway (... and a National Trust baking book to go with it).

Book purchase of the tomorrow, probably: Fitzgerald's Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience 7^th ed (2015), recommended via a NYU med student reading list (Cambridge's all appear to be paywalled and I'm sulking).

Links for further perusal: introductions to the nervous system on Biology LibreTexts and Health LibreTexts.

Reorganisation: possibly I am going to want to rewrite the introduction again (though the words do keep being useful), but crucially while murbling at A I think I have concluded that actually the reason the structure doesn't make sense is that neuroanatomy doesn't want to be the middle section, it wants to be an appendix. But I'll want to, er, know slightly more neuroanatomy before actually settling on that...

Pain associated with sensory hypersensitivity, e.g. light and sound: is this primarily nociceptive (i.e. nociceptors are firing at a lower threshold) or a feature of central processing (i.e. brain goes "NOPE DON'T LIKE THAT" about stimuli the peripheral nervous system isn't reporting as Harmful)? Or, slightly more comprehensibly to people who are not currently spending lots of time thinking about this particular niche area, when normal light levels cause me pain, is that the nerves that go "YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE SUN AND IT'S A BAD IDEA STOP THAT RIGHT NOW" that are initiating those signals, or a... central... processing... issue... yeah okay maybe I should go to bed instead of trying to words this. BUT a quick shakedown of the internet revealed it's only in the last decade or so that nociceptive signalling relating to Loud Noise Bad has been demonstrated so that's cool.

Wagamama have once again Done The Thing, by which I mean: the reliable Always Food For Alexes thing they've been doing for the last little while has rotated back off their menu.

The thing I tried instead today was sufficiently food for me to finish the rice but not sufficiently food for me to finish all of the toppings; I am suspicious of pho in "a clear yuzu broth" (which is not the same thing as "I won't try it").

(This is a Thing they have now done Twice, the first time about 15 years ago, and YES I AM HOLDING A GRUDGE.)

... have I done the "oh no, why has my pen stopped working, did I break it :(" dance only to realise that in fact, no, THE PEN IS EMPTY. (Once because my first attempt at filling it was apparently fairly inept unless I have massively misjudged how much ink it lays down, which given that it's a Pelikan is not totally implausible, but would still be... surprising.)

On the upside I think I might have worked out why a different pen seems particularly prone to evaporation and drying out. I am not sure how fixable it is, but I do at least have a workaround! (I think the inner cap is a bit reluctant to settle into place; it shouldn't be, but wiggling the pen a bit once capped seems to be helping...)

(This is such a ridiculous hobby.)

This evening we went to the plot so I could water things (and say hi to people). We wandered up past the woodpecker nest; there was a Great Yelling; we heard some wood being pecked; all seemed well.

In the vicinity of ten minutes later, someone heading home realised that Things Sounded Wrong, and established that one of the babies had launched itself out of the nest while really not remotely being fledged yet (it. does not have that many feathers.) by dint of hearing that the yelling was not all coming from up, and also some of it was Louder Than Usual. (I am pretty sure we didn't miss this when we were ambling up? I think it genuinely did go on an incredibly misguided adventure somewhere in that ten minutes.)

... I was delegated to stand guard for the purposes of Dissuading Foxes. Other people went to fetch A Ladder. I subsequently provided A Torch, and Part Of The Ladder Steadying.

The Errant Child was delicately posted back into its hole.

The tenor of the yelling from the hole... changed.

An adult popped its head out, all "what the fuck just happened???" Paused. Quite clearly thought, upon Observing the Assembled, something along the lines of "... right then." Retracted.

And then everyone settled down apparently to sleep.

I was perhaps not in fact The Fae, but I did get to be at least fae-adjacent, and I got to see a shit tiny dinosaur that really I ought not to have but in a way that was minimally bad for the poor thing.

Fascinated by the evolutionary strategy of "screaming incessantly might get me eaten or might get me The Fae, but there's no good outcome from not screaming, so... screm?" Evidently in this case it worked!

(It had the start of its little red hat! It was simultaneously Tiny and Lorge, and definitely Distinctly Round! It was a BABY. I am so glad friend human realised Something Was Wrong.)