Lackeys

In the olden days, as I remember them, the Soviet propagandists used to go on about lackeys. Perhaps lackeys of the imperialist powers, perhaps lackeys of evil capitalists - I forget exactly.

So it is ironic that the company with a website at reference 1, run by a nephew of the Duchess of Cornwall - inter alia the name of a public house in which we stay from time to time in Poundbury, the heir to the throne's pet housing estate in Dorset - who also facilitates big donations from rich Russians to the Conservative Party, makes a good part of its living by fawning on said rich Russians and pandering to their various needs. Lackeys indeed.

I was also amused that part of the offering was advice on the best cigar experiences to be had in our increasingly smoke free world. Even in the world of Brexit. It seems that the place to go is Bordeaux, where they have fine wines, fine cigars and a climate well adapted to enjoying both on the terrace of a busy and cheerful café. Or perhaps, if you are really rich, in some more exclusive facility up in the hills, away from the prying eyes of the bureaucrats.

But what is their relationship with the Wealth-X people noticed at reference 2? With both of them being very much into the extraction business. A close and meaningful partnership or something more competitive?

PS: from where I associated to an older meaning of the word 'pander'. Shakespearian meaning even. Do the Quintessentially people manage that side of things themselves, or do they have an arms' length relationship with some more shadowy operation. Perhaps mediated by invisible bank accounts in the British Virgin Islands?

References

Reference 1: https://www.quintessentially.com/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/shenanigans.html.

Springfield

A week or so ago to Tooting to investigate kabanosi capability at the shop just north of Tooting Bec tube station.

A cool but bright morning. No trolleys visible on Station Approach at Epsom. Some mask wearing at the station and on the train - which was still pretty quiet when we got to Sutton. From there, I headed south towards Tooting Bec, a road I used to know well in the days when my route to Tooting ran through Balham rather than through Earlsfield. Lots of interesting goings on and the White Eagle club still appeared to be going strong, although, sadly, it was a bit early for lunch.

Delight turned out to have a substantial cured meat department, but without the sort of kabanosi that I was looking for. The lady behind the counter understood about my not wanting them to involve either cheese or chicken (in the way of the Austrian kabanosi from Waitrose), but she only had thin and dry, not my favourite. Supplemented with a couple of decent looking white rolls.

A long time since London had a good scattering of delicatessens run by Central Europeans who had washed up over here at the time of the Second World War and could usually be relied on to sell fat and moist kabanosi. About as fat as my middle finger, mid brown rather than dark brown and soft rather than brittle. There used, for example, to be one such in Streatham High Street, next to the Odeon cinema. I haven't been to Streatham for quite a while now, but I imagine that both are long gone.

Before the off, I had noticed a Springfield Hospital on the other side of the High Street, a large sprawling place on the map, also to be found at references 1 and 2. Now I have a memory of my elder brother, who had TB as a boy, being sent to a place called Springfield Hospital for a few months, and that we visited for a sports day or some such one summer's afternoon, having driven there from Cambridge. The visiting families sat around the perimeter of a roughly circular sports field with their picnics and the patients did their sports in the middle. A correspondent has since told me that visits would indeed have been non-contact in those days, as isolation was part of the treatment for this infectious and once often fatal disease. So I thought I would take a look.

Promising start in the form of a skip containing a lot of just the right sort of clean, second hand bricks for my collection back at Epsom. Sadly too far away to be carrying even one or two bricks.

On into a mixture of housing estate, building sites and hospital. With this house having what appeared to be an Isle of Wight Echium pininana, a plant which is native to the Canary Islands, but which seems to do well in Ventnor. And, since we first came across it there, it does seem to have spread into the home counties, to places, for example, like Hampton Court Palace. Maybe another case of global warming.

A mixture of old and new. What looks like a porter's lodge left, an administration block right and new flats between. I wondered how many of the staff of what is still a large mental hospital could afford to live in the new flats. From where I associated to the hospital houses once clustered around the similar hospital in Exminster, where BH spent a good chunk of her childhood. Houses which were let out cheap to staff, at what I suppose then was the sort of rent you might otherwise have paid for a council house. From where I associated to my father getting cross about an older lady moaning about having to pay so much rent for her council house, of which she was the sole occupant, rent which I now remember as having been 5/6, otherwise 25p or so, an especially low rent for widows. Pretty low even for then, perhaps sixty years ago. But maybe I have got the 5/6 bit wrong.

More of the same.

Maybe once the laundry chimney, in the days when these places were vertically integrated, if that is the right bit of management jargon. Laundries, kitchens, farms, building departments, workshops, the works.

A place which was built to a good standard, by the standards of its day. Quite a lot of this crenellation to be seen.

Possibly once the central block, now mainly an exclusive collection of 1, 2 & 3 bedroom conversion apartments from City & Country. Quite a few mature conifers of one sort or another, but no Wellingtonia. Perhaps that was a Surrey thing.

The conversion apartments are the grey bit in the middle, but the rest of it looks to be up and running, even if the green bottom left is now a building site. Just at the moment, I cannot think of another such place which is still up and running on such a large scale: the ones I know are pretty much all housing.

What appeared to be a combination of occupational therapy and garden centre, perhaps the same sort of arrangement as our own Old Moat Garden Centre, also in the margins of a (former) mental hospital.

A rather stressed turret in the curtain wall, to go along with the crenellations above.

And so into Burntwood Lane, which would lead me to Garratt Lane and Earlsfield.

I had intended to go to the restaurant we tried last November and noticed at reference 4, but that was shut (although not, I think, dead), so I settled for the place opposite, a place which had probably once been a public house. If you approach it on Street View from Earlsfield, the 'Hallowed Belly', as snapped above, From the other way the 'Open Page'; presumably a wrinkle in the clever database which patches up all the regular images into what you see on the screen. And I think it has been through various other names over the years.

A foodie's take on a bacon sandwich. They remembered to omit the avocado which was good, but they made up for it with the mayo. Then it was posh bacon rather than café streaky and sour dough bread rather than factory thick white. It tasted better than it looks, but if I ever have occasion to take another, I will ask for the mayo on the side, like gravy at Wetherspoon's.

Water was provided on the table, without having to ask for it, just like in North America. Topped up with a spot of a decent Vinho Verde, with just a touch of fizz about it, giving both a pleasing appearance and a pleasing taste. It came in a bottle with an orange label which included a couple of fish symbols. According to Bing, possibly a '2020 Trajarinho Vinho Verde, Adega de Moncao: A bright lemon colour with notes of peach and apricot on the nose. There's a lovely pettience on the palate with lifted notes of lemon zest on the finish'. Neither Webster's, Bing nor Google recognise the word 'pettience', so perhaps it is a wine buff's cod French, taken from 'pétiller' which does, indeed, mean to sparkle or fizz.

And so onto Raynes Park, where it was cold, overcast and windy. No record of any aeroplanes at either Earlsfield or Raynes Park.

The day's haul. Kabanosi dry and over spiced, as I had suspected. Rolls fine. And BH was pleased with her two books from the Raynes Park Platform Library, both good complements to things she still reads - that is to say books about childhoods in the wilds of Scotland and bumming around the Pacific. 'Spawn' involved at least two serious actors - Martin Sheen and Nicol Williamson (a gentleman I once saw do a one man show somewhere near Piccadilly Circus, the night after he had walked off-stage, something of a no-no for a luvvie, be he ever so talented) - but was, on the evidence of the first ten minutes, complete tripe. A collage of tripe from the 1960's and 1970's, perhaps of more interest to a film buff than to ourselves. Put in the box in the garage for the upcoming book fair run by the local Methodists.

While all this had been going on, BH had been busy in the kitchen, with the cakes that were left by 15:00 or so snapped above. A recipe which was new to both of us, cakes with a layered mix of textures which was new to me. Plums on top, not apples. Rather good, but also substantial and one was enough at a time. Or perhaps one and a half.

At this point I set about checking the Springfield business. Item 1, there are plenty of places about called Springfield. Item 2, this Springfield is clearly a mental hospital and it says nothing at reference 2 about diseases of the chest or TB. Item 3, my elder brother was a gifted but unusual child and is it not impossible that a stay at this Springfield was thought to be the way forward. Item 4, a correspondent, a relative, has no memory of this place or of any picnic, but does have a memory about a place at Margate, which did indeed once sport the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital of reference 5, which had eased off on the sea bathing by the time in question and did do TB. But a long way for a day out from Cambridge, at a time when motorways were only just being thought of. I think it most likely that my memory has just got hopelessly confused.

PS 1: Peleton and Brindisa seem to be holding onto the (advertising) top spot in my gmail account. Despite my not having mentioned them or visited their websites for some weeks now.

PS 2: The secret police: Cops built a shadowy surveillance machine in Minnesota after George Floyd’s murder: An investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals a sprawling, technologically sophisticated system in Minnesota designed for closely monitoring protesters -Tate Ryan-Mosley, Sam Richards, MIT Technology Review - 2022. This came up in the margins of this post. And while one can understand how something like 'Operation Safety Net' came to be, it does seem rather heavy handed and does not encourage belief that the police are there to help. At least not if you are black and live in Minnesota.

References

Reference 1: https://www.swlstg.nhs.uk/. Not particularly helpful to me, although I dare say it does well enough as an entry point if you are a customer rather than a tourist.

Reference 2: https://www.swlstg.nhs.uk/about-the-trust/striving-for-better-quality-mental-health/new-hospitals/springfield-redevelopment/springfield-hospital-history. Better, if not particularly detailed. Not the work of a local history enthusiast.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/07/echium-pininana.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/cross-dressed-hamlet.html.

Reference 5: https://historic-hospitals.com/2017/12/27/margates-sea-bathing-hospital/.

Dementia is coming?

Bread batch No.644 ran into trouble earlier in the week.

The dough weighed in normally at nearly six pounds. The first knead, first rise, second knead and second rise were all normal, with the dough finishing just about level with the rims of the two tins, which is presently where it is thought that it should be on entry to the oven. The more rise the merrier is no longer the tune I bake to and too much rise is now considered to be a bad thing, likely to result in large unsightly bubbles or, worse still, total collapse. Into the oven, pre-heated to 200°C.

45 minutes later, nothing much seemed to have happened, beyond a crust starting to form over the collapsed dough. I then noticed that the oven had been turned off, and thinking that I had nothing much to lose, turned it back on, and left the loaves for another 50 minutes, the extra 5 minutes being allowance for the oven coming back to heat. Had the brain wobbled and got me to turn the oven off when I put the loaves in?

45 minutes later, nothing much seemed to have happened. At this point I started to think that maybe there was something wrong with the oven. First thought was to chuck the lot, but BH dissuaded me and I moved one loaf to the much smaller top oven and tried cooking it there, with an overhead heating element (which doubles as the grill) and no fan. Not very optimistic.

But while it did not rise again, it did cook - and so I cooked the second loaf.

The crumb was rather odd, rather like an albino pumpernickel. A bit chewy, but it went down well enough, flavoured with a spot of Lincolnshire Poacher.

Further inspection confirmed that the bottom oven was not getting hot, although it did seem that some heat was getting through. And it had been working that very morning. So buy new or repair? DIY or cooker man? This all seemed terribly complicated at 19:00 and further consideration was postponed to the following morning. But BH did hunt out her copy of the very last Argos catalogue, perhaps to become a collectible in years to come.

The cooker was a Zanussi electric, model ZCV66000WA. Cheap enough from John Lewis, but it has served well for seven years or so, for which see refence 2. Then poking around on the Zanussi website, we found that what we thought was the right heating element  - we had a choice of three - cost around £30. It didn't look that complicated to fit the thing oneself: remove the cover plate at the back of the oven and off you go. Might even be a 5 minute job.

But then we discovered that Zanussi offer a fixed price repair service, complete with an online booking system and the trimmings one expects from a large company, now owned, as it happens, by Electrolux, who had snapped it up at a time when Zanussi in particular and Italy in general were having a spot of economic and financial trouble. So for £150 or so I could book a slot and they would send someone to fix it. Which I did. It might be a touch dear at around a third of the current purchase price, but it does save one all the bother and risk of plucking a cooker man off the wall. A cooker man who might or might not answer his phone, who might or might not turn up.

So far so good, with the only fly so far in this particular ointment being gmail finding the confirmatory email from the cooker man in Chelmsford to be suspect. Yellow warning bars! Do not click on anything!

We will have to ask him how many miles he expects to do in the average day, with this laptop saying that it is around 40 miles from Chelmsford to Epsom.

In the meantime I fret about how long it took me to work out that the heating element had gone. Or worse still, that it hasn't gone at all...

Three quarters of the first loaf now tucked away. Next batch pencilled in for Tuesday.

PS: can't tell from gmaps whether the overgrown house noticed at reference 2 has been redeveloped. Clearly time for a return visit.

References

Reference 1: https://www.zanussi.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/zanussi-or-bust.html.

Shenanigans

Interested to read this morning of more shenanigans at Credit Suisse concerning what threatens to become a sub-prime problem. Where the sub-prime assets in questions are the yachts of very rich Russians rather than houses on affordable estates in the middle of the US. It seems that loans secured on said yachts have been parcelled up and sold on, just as those on those houses were.

From there I got to an outfit called Wealth-X which, inter alia, offers guidance on how best to cosy up to the ultra rich so that you can sell them services. I tried to download it, but Microsoft smells a rat and declares the guidance to be insecure and refuses to execute the download. All very mysterious.

More mundanely, I have been looking into the word 'portemine' which turned up in Maigret this morning. Larousse tells me that this is what the French, who have to be different, call a propelling pencil.

Another meaning is that of what is properly spelt mien.

Another meaning is the mineral sort of mine, as in coal mine, plus the various military and exploding varieties. Recognised by Webster's.

Another is the lead in a lead pencil. Not recognised by Webster's.

Another is a unit of currency in ancient Greece, snapped above from some Bible people. What would buy a hundred man days' worth of semi-skilled labour. Not recognised by Webster's.

But Webster's does include using mine as a possessive adjective and as a possessive pronoun. Which the French decline.

PS: I associate to the concept of 'schismogenesis', brought to me by reference 1, previously noticed. All about the need that societies (or countries) seem to have to clearly distinguish themselves from their neighbours. To exaggerate the differences to make sure there is no mistake. A word which is new to me but which is clearly not new to Wikipedia.

References

Reference 1: The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity – David Wengrow, David Graeber – 2021.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis.

Reference 3: https://www.wealthx.com/. 'Maximize your relationships with the wealthy: Intelligent solutions to help you uncover, understand, and engage with the world’s wealthiest individuals'. Otherwise, recycling excess wealth. You don't tax but you do recycle.

Reminder

I was reminded this afternoon that you do not have to go back to the Vietnam war for a large scale invasion launched by western powers. There is the much more recent war in Iraq of 2003-2011 (reference 1), led by the US, abetted by the UK, and followed by something more like a civil war 2013-2017 (reference 2).

Excess deaths of Iraqi's 2003-2011 in the hundreds of thousands.

That is not to say that two wrongs make a right. But it does perhaps say that we should not forget our own track record of invasions - as I had.

PS: there is also the rather different Gulf War of 1990-1991.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Iraq_(2013%E2%80%932017).

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-second-war-with-iraq.html. Previous notice.

On plants, bacteria and anaesthetics

Figure 1

Damasio’s short book at reference 1 cover a lot of ground and, of necessity, needs to encapsulate various complicated affairs in very few words. So after observing that plants and bacteria can be anaesthetised using much the same anaesthetics that might be used on humans, he goes on to say on pages 43-44: ‘… I propose that what anaesthetics cause – thanks to a perturbation of the ion channels in the bilayer properties of cell membranes – is a radical and basic disruption of the sensing function we have just described. Anaesthetics do not target minds specifically – minds are no longer possible once sensing is blocked. And anaesthetics do not target consciousness either, because, as we will propose, consciousness is a particular state of mind and it cannot occur in the absence of mind…’.

This against a background of Damasio building consciousness on the dichotomy between sensing the interior self and sensing the exterior other. It is the bringing of these things together as images in a mind which generate feelings in the first instance – and then full blown consciousness. Which might involve drawing interior self up from the brain stem and exterior other down from the cerebral cortex. With more or less anything that is alive doing sensing, but with only larger animals doing mind. And while, at the margins, one might argue about what plants and bacteria get up to, as Baluška and Levin do at reference 3, doing mind mostly means having neurons and usually means having a brain at the top of the heap.

I thought the proposal quoted above worth poking around a bit. Some preliminaries have already been sketched out at reference 2.

I start by observing that both sleeping and general anaesthetics involve reversible loss of consciousness and transitions to and from a conscious state – and that their study should help us to understand the enigma of consciousness.

Anaesthetics

Poking the Internet suggests that we more or less know how local anaesthetics work. They simply block the passing of pain signals up to the brain, whether via the spinal cord or otherwise. Blocked more or less at source.

Contrariwise, the impression that I have got is that while we know a good deal about how general anaesthetics work and about how to make effective use of them, we are some way off a detailed understanding of how they work at a cellular level. How exactly it is, for example, that they turn consciousness off, while leaving basic life support functions like breathing to carry on? The answer presumably being more complicated than saying that the former needs the cerebral cortex up above, while the latter is managed from the brain stem down below. Above and below in both evolution and development, as well as in simple location.

That said, general anaesthetics do appear to act primarily on the cardio-vascular, respiratory and central nervous systems. With something called the triad of anaesthesia being hypnotics (for unconsciousness), analgesic (for pain relief, both in the conscious and unconscious patient) and muscle relaxants. Some anaesthetics are toxic as well as being useful, in which case they are used with particular care.

A lot of general anaesthetics are administered as gas through the lungs. So they have to get across the blood barrier into the blood stream and get carried up to the head where one supposes that they cross the blood barrier in the other direction and go about their business in the brain’s interstitial system  - that is to say the spaces, the gaps between all the neurons and their supporting cells – and presumably they do something of the sort in most other parts of the body too. While some general anaesthetics are injected directly as liquids into the blood stream. With my understanding being that general anaesthesia usually involves a cocktail of chemicals to get everything right during the three stages of induction, maintenance and emergence.

And, as Damasio suggests, they do their business by interfering, from the outside, with the lipid bilayers which envelope all cells. And which all contain the ion channels which are particularly important in the case of those cells which are neurons. Given the assumption that consciousness rests on appropriate firing of neurons in and around the brain, such interference clearly has the potential to make the subject unconscious. But how exactly this is done, without all sorts of unwanted side effects in other parts of the body, is another matter.

Concerning which, there is a suggestive section B in Figure 2 of reference 6, reproduced below

Figure 2

The relevant part of the caption reads: ‘Effect of sevoflurane anaesthesia on functional connectivity. Top: widespread reduction in fMRI thalamocortical connectivity, especially with frontal cortex at all concentrations of sevoflurane. Bottom: changes in directed connectivity as measured by EEG symbolic transfer entropy. Decreases from frontal to parietal, temporal and occipital cortex and from temporal to parietal cortex are evident. Color encodes the direction of information flow (red: rostro-caudal, blue: caudo-rostral)’.

So the top line shows a fairly consistent reduction in connectivity between the thalamus and the cortex with increasing doses of an anaesthetic and the bottom line tells a more complicated story, but certainly involving a weakening of the information flow from front (rostro or face, right) to back (caudo or tail, left).

Figure 3

For the convenience of readers who have trouble, like me, with the names of the lobes of the brain.

Functionality during sleep and under anaesthesia

Figure 4

The figure above being a trace from a long operation in Japan - a robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy – which involved unexpected haemorrhage, some of the consequences of which can be seen in the third quarter. The steady blue line is about blood oxygen levels. Pneumoperitoneum is inflation of the abdominal cavity to make room for the work and was part of the reason why it took a while to notice the haemorrhage. Luckily, the team knew what it was about, and the patient made a complete recovery.

Breathing and the heart clearly carry on under anaesthesia and during sleep, as does the heart – while consciousness is mostly turned off. So what else gets turned off? What are the differences between sleep and anaesthesia? What – if anything – do those differences tell us about the nature of consciousness?

Figure 5

According to the sleep foundation: ‘muscles gradually relax during each stage of non-REM sleep, and the body’s total energy expenditure drops. During the REM stage, most muscles are paralyzed in a condition known as atonia. This keeps the legs and arms from flailing in response to dream content. Respiratory and eye muscles stay active, though, and the darting of the eyes behind closed eyelids is the inspiration for the name rapid eye movement sleep’.

Thermoregulation changes during sleep, but changes appearing to amount to something more complicated than just turning it off, the fairly widespread instinct to nest during sleep notwithstanding. In small animals, in places which can get cold, this may be more to do with energy conservation than anything else.

Thermoregulation is weakened during anaesthesia, and changes in subject temperature during and after anaesthesia can be a problem.

Digestion carries on during sleep. The liver and kidneys carry on.

A sleeping person can take some pain without waking up, although chronic pain is associated with difficulty sleeping properly.

Particularly but not only during REM sleep, a sleeping person often dreams, with triggers for such dreams sometimes including sensations from the body or beyond, dreams which may be remembered afterwards. While an anaesthetised person is sometimes aware, possibly of pain, possibly of chatter in the operating theatre, and sometimes remembers either or both afterwards. Matters touched on, last year, at reference 9.

Very much work in progress.

Lipid bilayers

Figure 6

I have learned that lipid bilayers are what envelopes more or less all cells and what controls what goes in and what comes out, at least to the extent of opening and shutting the necessary gates, one of which is shown left in the figure above and a lot of which are called ion channels. With neurons being a particular kind of cell and which have lots of ion – and other – kinds of channels. 

A lot of these ion channels, closed by default, are opened for a short while by binding the right molecule to them – with the choice running, I think, to hundreds, and locked shut by binding some other molecule to them. The agonists and the antagonists. The ligands. Which makes getting the right molecule to the right place at the right time important – something that can be helped with medicines and hindered with toxins. And I dare say the process will also be affected by temperature and pressure.

Watching these goings on in-vivo can be difficult, in part because they happen very quickly, but it seems that computer simulations have got to the point where they can do it in-silico. One might use something like the CHARMM computer package, already mentioned at reference 2. 

Figure 7

An appealing story as all this seems to be more or less universal, but it is not the whole story, not least because at the next level up, in larger plants and animals anyway, the cells are built up into larger structures, like veins, kidneys and intestines, which might have boundary layers of their own, something rather grander than a lipid layer.

The snap above, turned up by Bing but originating, I think, from reference 4, shows a boundary layer of the intestine of a fish, mainly made up of a single layer of cells, mostly tightly bound together, but with some gaps. Suggesting traffic both through the epithelial cells, that is to say through their lipid bilayers, and past them.

Oddments

Regarding vegetables and managing without neurons, from reference 3 I got to reference 8, from which I learn that chemical soups, properly constituted and considered, are Turing complete, that is to say that can be made to perform all kinds of computations, although such computation is likely to be slow and to be constrained by the lack of suitable chemicals to function as memory. Vegetables are not as dumb as they might look.

As it happened reference 5 turned up while all this was going on, citing Damasio and his work on a Mr Eliot and a Mr Gage, two men who, for different reasons, lost the ability to feel much, if anything, in the way of emotions. Which meant that they were unable to get on with anything and otherwise lead a normal life. But there is no suggestion that either of these men was anything other than fully conscious. Which seems to be something by way of a counter example to the proposal introduced above.

And reference 6, where I read that: ‘… similarly, the fact that general anaesthetics do not seem to grossly impair primary sensory networks … supports the earlier proposition of Crick and Koch that primary sensory processing is not sufficient for consciousness…’. Which does not seem to support the first part of the proposal.

Conclusions

While it is reasonable to draw attention to the emerging facts that life manages lots of computing without neurons and that ion channels are to be found in lipid bilayers in most cellular life – animal, plant and bacterial – and while it is true that anaesthetics do what they do by interfering with the ion channels in lipid bilayers, I do not find the Damasio proposal that consciousness is turned off by turning off sensory input convincing: ion channels do a lot more than look after sensory input and I am not convinced that messing about with certain ion channels in plants is very comparable to messing about with some other ion channels in animals. But I shall carry on with my second reading of his book notwithstanding.

References

Reference 1: Feeling and knowing: Making minds conscious – Antonio Damasio – 2021.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/02/on-doors.html. 

Reference 3: On having no head: Cognition throughout biological systems – František Baluška and Michael Levin – 2016. 

Reference 4: Transcriptomic responses in the fish intestine – Samuel Martin, Carola Dehler, Elzbieta Krol – 2016.

Reference 5: What We Owe Our Fellow Animals: Can we develop a theory of justice that encompasses nonhuman animals? – Martha C. Nussbaum, NYRB – 2021.

Reference 6: Neural Correlates of Unconsciousness in Large-Scale Brain Networks - Mashour GA and Hudetz AG – 2018. 

Reference 7: An introduction to anaesthesia – Ciara Donohue, Ben Hobson, Robert Stephens – 2013. A study aid from UCL, turned up by Bing. The source for Figure 1.

Reference 8: Evolution of associative learning in chemical networks - McGregor S, Vasas V, Husbands P, Fernando C – 2012.

Reference 9: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/bayne-and-howhy-revisited.html. 

Debris

Various debris from the recent storm carried home. With this piece of mistletoe having come down from one of the infestations in the Longmead Road. A plant of curious colour and with unusual arrangements for buds and branching.

I wondered how different a mistletoe living with its host was from the budding of a fruit tree, where the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree started out as different individuals. At least the top is a bud from one tree, while the bottom is a root stock of another. Mistletoe has specialised sticky seeds which, with luck, land on a suitable branch and take root, but I have no idea whether it has other specialities.

This small lump was taken from the fallen leylandii first noticed at reference 1. Counting tree rings did not attract many takers, but there was a bit of interest in the sap, perhaps an infantile verison of amber. Very sticky, but removed from hands and fingers with water & washing up liquid easily enough.

The residue on the tray. I was reminded of the business of tapping sap from birch and maple trees, with a mature maple tree producing something of the order of 10 gallons US a season. One might have thought extraction on this scale would stunt growth, but I have not seen anything on that side of things. While birch wine was noticed at reference 2, and I have a memory of investigating the stuff at the heavily stocked booze shop in Old Compton Street, but I don't think that I ever bought any. At least not for personal consumption.

While collecting this piece was a more serious business, involving the wheel barrow and several stops on the way home. The days when I could spend quality time wheeling barrows of wet concrete about are clearly over.

In its permanent home, a complement to Polly's picnic table, for which see reference 3. Pity about the tear in the bark, but all too easily done, so I must not complain. And I dare say it will calm down over the weeks to the point where I only rarely notice it. I dare say it will last for a good many years, being short and stumpy without a lot of weight above to pull it over.

The split chestnut paling behind, a type of fencing I much prefer to the brown fencing panels common in suburbia - and common enough, even in the Surrey countryside where one might have thought that privacy was not a big deal - must be around thirty years old now. Split chestnut holding up well, while the supporting posts are starting to go over, despite treatment with something green.

Starting to fade a bit, but it has provided a bit of interest in the kitchen. Not least by lots of the buds starting to turn into small yellow flowers.

PS: checking the archive reveals that I did indeed go to Old Compton Street, but they could only manage the vodka at £30, rather than the wine, and I passed.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/02/trolley-476.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/04/twittering.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/series-3-episode-ix.html.