That's a big wtf, Sophia (the second question, I mean. The first has to do with limited human perspective on travel through what we might call the fourth dimension and things like that)

Timelies all!

We saw the fireworks from the Capitol steps, despite the rain. (Riding the Metro home while still rather damp was not fun)

Today I'm going to investigate the new Rockville library.

Maybe it was an especially nice red wagon.

As many of you know,I kind of adore Atul Gawande. This article about a woman with a chronic itch is fascinating!

It starts by focusing on this woman who had such a chronic itch that she actually scratched through her skull to her brain. He goes on to analyze it and......

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

Such findings open up a fascinating prospect: perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car’s dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can’t find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.

So we get frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong,” we’ll insist. And, the next thing you know, we’re treating the driver instead of the problem. We prescribe tranquillizers, antidepressants, escalating doses of narcotics. And the drugs often do make it easier for people to ignore the sensors, even if they are wired right into the brain. The mirror treatment, by contrast, targets the deranged sensor system itself. It essentially takes a misfiring sensor—a warning system functioning under an illusion that something is terribly wrong out in the world it monitors—and feeds it an alternate set of signals that calm it down. The new signals may even reset the sensor.

I'm itching just thinking about it. SIGH

People who set their alarm to go off every morning but then when they're not there on the weekend and their alarm goes off and beeps and beeps and beeps ceaselessly, suck.

Theo, I read the article and scratched periodically. It's interesting, though.

Can you get at their circuit breakers?

A friend of mine had neighbors whose extremely loud parties would mysteriously get cut short by mysterious power outages in the wee hours of the morning. They never figured out they were not overloading the circuits....

Bob read that article to me and we had to hold hands during it to keep from scratching everywhere! Especially the forhead. I'm scratching right now.

OK, NOW I am itchy.

Also, we were late enough, due to the little red wagon, that I missed my transfer, which was annoying