I love the elaborate complexity of Tull and Floyd, but the visceral, sometimes incoherent, simplicity of Nirvana and AIC grabs a different place.
Just as Descartes denied animals enough consciousness to be able to feel “real” pain, so that he reduced their response to unpleasant stimulus to instinctive reaction (yes, this is a very simplified description: here are more details), so many doctors thought that babies sensed no pain because their nerves were not yet myelinated. Therefore, operations could be performed without anesthesia or analgesia, even open heart operations! Cite.
From the abstract:
It was thought that neonatal nervous systems were so immature that they did not feel pain and that lack of myelination translated into a decreased or disorganized response to pain. It is now known that incomplete myelination only leads to a slower conduction of pain, not an absence of pain. This decreased speed is offset, however, by the shorter distance the impulse needs to travel to reach the neonatal brain. Myelination is usually complete by the second to third trimester. There was a belief that because the infant would not remember the pain, it was not necessary to provide relief from pain. Another common concern was that the risks of pain relief exceeded the benefits when it came to pharmacologic and anesthetic use.
This did not begin to change until about 40 years ago! In fact, the process is still ongoing, and in some countries/regions/cultures it has hardly begun.
Animal researchers sometimes went to nihilistic lengths with this. If you crushed a rhesus monkey’s balls in a vise it did not scream in agony, it “exhibited testicular compression vocalization”. 
How did I not know that Neil Young and Daryl Hannah are married ???
I know! Isn’t that so unexpected??
TIL that while the word ‘condominium’ is recorded from 1714 and was apparently used c. 1700, it did not come to mean ‘privately owned apartment’ until 1962.
A word in politics and international law until sense of “privately owned apartment” arose in American English 1962 as a special use of the legal term.
The Aviv in Tel Aviv and the Ababa in Addis Ababa are both derived from the same Semitic root, meaning flowering.
Condominium is still used in the original sense, for example, Germany and Luxembourg have a condominium over the river Moselle that forms their border. That includes bridges, which I imagine means that if you committed a crime on a bridge they would have to decide which country would prosecute you.
I think I’ve more often encountered that meaning spelled “codominion”.
You’re probably thinking of its use in Jerry Pournelle’s works. I can’t find it in any dictionary.
Strange, but true:
OJ Simpson had just completed a pilot for a new TV series called “Frogmen,” in which he played a character “Bullfrog Burke.” This was just before the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. NBC sat on it, and supposedly it was confiscated, and remains so to this day, by the LAPD.
Never mind.
I’ve known for years that the numbers at either end of an airport runway are based on the heading of a landing aircraft, expressed in terms of degrees rounded to the first two digits. What I didn’t know until yesterday was that the numbers are based on magnetic north rather than true north. As a result, runways occasionally have to be renumbered and repainted as the North Magnetic Pole drifts.
The variance of true north from magnetic north, expressed as degrees to the east, is currently about 14 degrees at my locatiion. Less than 20 years ago it was zero.
(Illustration from Wikipedia article, Polar Drift.)
That’s because aircraft have magnetic compasses. I believe GPS uses true north, but most General Aviation aircraft don’t have GPS.
This can’t be right. As I understand it, aircraft use gyrocompasses. Gyrocompasses work with the rotation of the Earth, so they point to true north, not magnetic north. And it doesn’t require the use of GPS – gyrocompasses don’t need satellites.
However, aircraft commonly use heading indicators or directional gyros, which are not gyrocompasses and do not align themselves to north via precession, but are periodically aligned manually to magnetic north.
The huddle used in American gridiron football was invented by deaf students at Gallaudet University who did not want the opposing team’s players or coaches to see the sign language they used to communicate.
St. Lawrence was allegedly martyred by being roasted alive on a gridiron. His last words (according to that story) was something like, “Turn me over. I’m done on that side.” If you want to celebrate his feast day on August 10th, you may want to go to the Saint Lawrence Gridiron restaurant in Boise, ID.
I’ve been misinformed.
Think I’ll go to Casablanca for the waters.
And here I always thought a gyrocompass was a Greek taco that had everthing in it.