Unsolicited Advice

Here's something cute, following along the language talk the other day. See if you can read this: Hint: The plaintext is in English. You don't need to know Chinese to read it, but knowing something about how Chinese works might help. Priming not required, although depending on how flexible your recognition vocabulary is, it might be faster to guess some chunks from context rather than reading them explicitly.

Today is a food-based holiday for USians, so naturally I am celebrating it with RAT. This year, Yuki is thankful she's still around for Giant Meal For No Reason Day -- three rounds of any given holiday is a pretty good run for a tiny furry ball of genetic defects. She's lost both sisters, but seems to be doing fine as an only rat. As usually happens with only-rats, she's gotten a lot more pushy about climbing the cage door to let me know it is Time For Rat-Tending NOW, but mainly, Yuki seems to be enjoying being able to nom all of the new holes in her nest box herself . In addition to her customary new box to shred and new bedding to roll around in, Yuki is also getting her own tiny Ratsgiving dinner. Observe: Salad with dressing and buttered crust of bread, rosemary chicken stew with mashed potatoes and peas, and for dessert, egg nog porridge with a dab of jam. No, I never have much to do over the holiday weekend, why do you ask? She is actually getting this over ...

I have realized in the past few years that I am not really kidding when I talk about having a 'magic language sense'. There is something about the time-worn repetition about true language that catches my attention when I see it, even if it's not a language I speak, or it's disguised as something else. There is a limit; blocks of Enigma text don't trip it, for instance, although intellectually I've inhaled enough about cryptography to recognize that's what it (probably) is. The format typically used by numbers stations says to me that there is a message there, although since it's probably an arbitrary correspondence code I have no idea what it says, or that it's not all padding and gibberish. A big tip off that I'm actually noticing something , even if I don't precisely know what it is, is that the language sense works better when I have context, and generally best when I have large amounts of text to look at. Perhaps an equally big clue i...

Halfway through On Megrim . Liveing has gotten no less astonishing. I am finding it difficult to plow through the book at my normal speed. He keeps sort of casually making connections that make me stop and stare into space for a while as I think through the implications -- which, since I'm reading this in 2015, probably involve a lot more math than he had in mind when he originally wrote this. About half of his observations are connections I had not made myself yet, mainly because I am not technically a neurologist and do not have access to the same materials Liveing did, never mind a modern neurology student. The other half are things I have been saying for years, including to actual doctors, which have mostly been ignored because, again, not technically a neurologist. Most of the relevant ones have been comparisons of the course of migranous misery to things like epileptiform seizures. The boundaries between various disorders were drawn differently in the 19th century -- whic...

Well, hell. I finally managed to sit down and get past the Preface in Liveing's On Megrim , and ho- lee mackerel, I think I know exactly why this got Sacks' attention. The very first chapter is "Illustrative Cases" -- a few case studies, both Liveing's own patients and those of a few other neurological writers of his time. He covers, in brief, Du Bois Reymond's case of a man with classic hemicranial cephalgia accompanied by nausea, erythema of the face, and blood pressure changes; his own patient, a young woman with severe headache and general 'sea sickness', whose attacks are terminated by sleep; another of his patients, a man who suffered pure ocular migraine with various fun scintillating scotomata in his central vision; a man whose migraine attacks could be brought on by either a violent emotional or physical effort or gastric upset, and comes on with a burst of flickering scotomatous lights; and mentions of patients belonging to Parry and Wolla...

I've just finished a book, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives . I recommend it highly, especially if you like pop-sci rambles through history and mathematics, salted with useful knowledge about how statistics intersect with reality, and sprinkled with wiseass parentheticals. I was actually asked for an evaluation by a friend who was unfamiliar with Mlodinow, outside of his work as a script editor for ST:TNG, and I thought I might as well try pretending to be a serious media person for a little bit and type up a review for all of you. It's a bit different writing for a blog audience than for a single person you know; you need to take into account the sorts of things people who read you would have in common, and how those things would affect their reaction to the whatzit you're trying to describe for them. I mulled it over for a while and decided it would probably suffice to say that if you enjoy the tone of my snark, you'll a...

I get the whirlies whenever I stand up too fast, and every so often it comes with a wallop of cracking head pain right at the base of my skull. I got fed up with it today and did the thing doctors always tell you not to do, which was Google my symptoms to see what came up. The verdict, after skimming several web sites and discarding the one that appears to be run by the same grade of loony who believes that not only does Morgellons exist, but that it is a secret government plot, is thus: It's probably nothing. Although there is a near-infinitesimal chance it might kill me. This is a pretty fair assessment of any non-emergency medical annoyance, so I'm not worried. 'Not dangerous' is not the same thing as 'not objectionable', so I picked a couple of the more reputable-looking sites and poked around to see if there was any consensus on how to cope with the symptoms.  Most of the advice on treating postural orthostatic hypotensive headaches centere...

Minor life mysteries: Solved! I've never been especially fond of grapes. I'll eat them, but I'll pick just about any other fruit (or artificial froot-flavor) first. It turns out that this is because I've been eating supermarket seedless grapes all my life. Those are flavored mostly fructose, with a touch of tannin. Someone brought several pounds of Concord grapes to the PMRP green room during the show run this time, and now a lot of things make a lot more sense. Firstly, I am still flummoxed by the idea that food plants grow randomly in suburban yards here. I grew up in Arizona, a place where nature tries so hard to kill you the Australians would feel right at home. Food comes from stores, and yards are covered in Bermuda grass, which looks kind of lawn-y from a distance, but is in reality made up of tiny unripe punji stakes, and not to be walked on barefoot. All the plants look like they come from Mars and eating them is a bad idea 99% of the time. Prickly pear f...

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton (and anyone who has ever been assigned a term paper on a weird topic) The library has finally coughed up my 19th c. loan book about migraines. On Megrim, Sick-Headache, & some allied disorders , by Edward Liveing. It is a rather more substantial book than I expected, especially in library-style case binding, and I did not have much fun hauling it all over town for the afternoon. I have learnt that I have to make my library run on the way into work at 1pm rather than on the way out of it at 6, if I want to have any chance at all of getting back on the Green when I come out. I've only flipped through it, but I'm pretty sure I know where Sacks got his chronic case of hyperannotatia. Liveing doesn't get quite as ambitious with the length of his footnotes, but to make up for it, a good proportion of them are in untranslated French. The fact that this book exists at all is rather...

I bought a book today. I don't usually buy books. There's not much point. I finish them too fast. I read most things out of an idle curiosity; I seldom re-read things, and especially with dead-tree format, there's no point in purchasing and storing and moving an object I'm not likely to use for its intended purpose ever again. I have cheaper, lighter junk I can use to prop up wobbly tables. One roommate has developed some highly unrealistic expectations, and the other one says she agrees with me that they're unrealistic but so far as I know has not done anything about it. I assume there are reasons for this that I'm not privy to, and I like to have some faith in humanity, so I further assume they're good ones. It doesn't stop me from feeling like a polite robo-voice has broken through the shitty phone Musak to tell me that my call is very important to them before demonstrating how much they mean that by putting me back on hold for another 45 minutes....

I've had a lot of sewing to do lately. Sewing requires my hands and my eyeballs, preventing me from reading actual books. BPL cards come with a complimentary Overdrive account, so I raided their mp3 audiobook catalog. Their recommendations algorithm is either a bit squiffy or has an interesting sense of humor, I thought, as it showed me Lena Dunham's autobio (cannot stand  her), a load of inspirational "spiritual" titles, and a bunch of stuff by Bill O'Reilly. I'm still not touching his political stuff, because I don't want to remember half a second after I throw the book at the wall that I was actually reading that on my Kindle, but he's also written a bunch of historical things that didn't look terrifyingly Republican. And you know what? They're really fun. Well, if you think reading about assassinations is fun. He does talk a lot about murder. I'm undecided on whether I should be worried about that. The point is, O'Reilly...

When Oliver Sacks first published Awakenings in 1973, he was largely ignored by his fellow neurologists. The reason often given to him was prosaic: Neurological case studies were not in the first person, did not involve the clinician's feelings, and were full of numbers and graphs. What he wrote wasn't clinical research, so it was beneath their notice. The reason slightly less often given to him was that nobody believed him. Most of the patients first given L-DOPA had a conventional form of Parkinson's disease. PD is caused by a decline in dopaminergic neurons in a small region of the brain called the substantia nigra, and the body is so good at compensating for this that you don't even see symptoms until the substantia nigra is about 80% gone. It is progressive, and the course varies; it takes a good goddamn long time for most Parkinson's patients to degenerate to the state in which Sacks' encephalitis lethargica victims were when he first tried L-DOPA, and m...