Today has been largely taken up by my first visit to the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP...

... or at least, my first visit in something like twenty years, because it's the old Cottenham racecourse and I absolutely went to one (1) race there in My Misspent Youth. Sudden wave of déjà vu on the final approach to the grandstand, as the perspective shifted to YEP, THIS IS A PLACE I'VE BEEN.

There was Make Tent go Up. There was meeting. There was Make Tent Go Down. There was being given Objects. And there was A BAT that did some beautifully ostentatious swooping against the darkening dusk, and I am delighted.

I supplied knives and fine motor control; the toddler supplied art direction; the toddler's resident adults supplied outlines for me to cut around (and candles, and matches, and in fact all of the cutting of the tiny pumpkin).

I have, in the latest book, got to The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes, but this one makes a point of describing it as a "reductionistic approach".

The Thing Is, of course, that much like the Bohr model (for all that's 250 years younger, give or take), for many and indeed quite plausibly most purposes, The Cartesian Model Of Pain is, for most people and for most purposes, good enough: if you've got to GCSE level then you'll have met the Bohr model; if you get to A-level, you'll start learning about atomic orbitals; and then by the time I was starting my PhD I had to throw out the approximation of atomic nuclei as volumeless points (the reason you get measurable and interpretable stable isotope fractionations of thallium is -- mostly! -- down to the nuclear field shift effect).

Similarly, most of the time you don't actually need to know anything beyond the lie-to-children first-approximation of "if you're experiencing pain, that means something is damaging you, so work out what it is and stop doing that". The Bohr model is good enough for a general understanding of atomic bonds and chemical reactions; specificity theory is good enough for day-to-day encounters with acute pain.

The problem with specificity theory isn't actually that it's wrong (although it is); it's that it gets misapplied in cases where Something More Complicated is going on in ways that obscure even the possibility of Something More Complicated. The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that it doesn't get presented with the footnote of "this isn't the whole story, and for understanding anything beyond very short-term acute pain you need to go into considerably more detail". But most people aren't in more complex pain than that! Estimates run at ~20% of the population living with chronic pain, but even if we accept the 43% that sometimes gets quoted about the UK, most people do not live with chronic pain.

There's probably an analogy here with the "Migraine Is Not Just A Bad Headache" line (and indeed I'm getting increasingly irritated with all of these books discussing migraine as though the problem is solely and entirely the pain, as opposed to, you know, the rest of the disabling neurological symptoms) but I'm upping my amitriptyline again and it's past my bedtime so I'm not going to work all the details of that out now, but, like, Pain Is Not Just A Tissue Damage, style of thing.

Anyway. The point is that I still haven't actually read Descartes (I've got the posthumously published and much more posthumously translated Treatise on Man in PDF, I just haven't got to it yet) and nonetheless I am bristling at people describing him as reductionist (derogatory). Just. We aren't going to do better if we also persist in wilful misunderstandings and misrepresentations for the sake of slagging off someone who has been dead for three hundred and seventy-five years instead of recognising the actual value inherent in "good enough for most people most of the time", and how that value complicates attempts at more nuance! How about we actually acknowledge the reasons the idea is so compelling, huh, and discuss the circumstances under which the approximation holds versus breaks down? How about that for an idea.

Sarah Russell of The Ostomy Studio, the person who made such an enormous difference to my general State Of Being just over a year ago via the medium of a private Pilates lesson pre-surgery, has just announced publication of the new Exercise and Physical Activity after Stoma Surgery best practice guidelines that she's been working on for literal years along with some amazing collaborators!

The principles here are the bedrock for the private lesson I had before surgery, and are also what I used as my foundation for rehab despite not after all needing to work with a stoma; I've not read them in full, but if you know folk they might be of interest to then please do pass the link on <3

Reading. Two things finished, various things picked up and put down again.

Ouch!, Kerr & McRobbie: the subtitle is Why pain hurts, and why it doesn't have to; it's indicative of my current preoccupations that I was actively surprised that it is not, in fact, about chronic pain, except in passing, in that it's mentioned in the introduction in the context of pains the authors have experienced, and then it just sort of... vanishes again. What it actually is is more-or-less a tour of the sociology of acute pain, from a variety of perspectives and contexts, and an invitation to reshape your relationship with pain, optionally via the medium of sports.

It's very much aimed at a general audience (by which I mean both "not people with any particular pre-existing knowledge about pain" and also "not chronic pain patients"), with the infuriating-to-me feature of having not an actual bibliography but instead a "selected references" section, i.e. any claims I wanted to actually check required digging and then guessing (and in one case working out that they were actively wrong about which year the thing was published in, at least for referencing purposes). I did nonetheless get some useful information and vocabulary out of it (I'm especially here for the pointer to the 3P approach to pain management), and it prompted another couple of articulations.

Overall: not a disrecommendation; plausibly a light read if you have, you know, a recreational interest in pain; verify any specifics you want to rely on.

The Old Guard: Opening Fire, Rucka et al. A's conclusion was Well It Was Better Than The Second Film; mine was ( mild spoilers? )

DW catch-up: halfway through September!

Playing. Inkulinati, mostly watching A play and occasionally making Suggestions. Does not work as well as a Shared Activity as I'd hoped (annoyingly I think I'd need to play basically all of it hands-on myself in order to internalise mechanics and strategy, rather than being able to e.g. swap who's driving for every level) but I am enjoying it happening in my vicinity. Today we also read the PDF of the art book together, which I am not counting as Reading because it was mostly looking at the pictures in another context.

And after six months I GOT UNSTUCK ON I Love Hue! The Ascension/Air/1, extremely gratified that searching for it revealed someone who'd managed to complete everything but that, and bolstered by this knowledge I turned brightness all the way up and the phone upside down and FINALLY managed to sort out the yellows, on my nth attempt... in way fewer than the average number of moves. VICTORY.

Cooking. ( Read more... )