#experts in their field

[saltyphantomcollective]

Gangs all here

[meep--tm]

i can shut the door on us but the room still exists

[natdeviantrat]

can i call for a challengers redo

[hellenhighwater]

hi hellen! i'm a high schooler thinking of pursuing law - i know it's tough to get into, but i'd like to give it a shot. how did you know that it was right for you, and what would you consider to be the most important things to do to prepare to study it in advance? any additional advice would be great, thanks!

Well, the thing you often hear about "oh, you're so good at arguing, you should be a lawyer" is mostly bull. The actual main skills for a lawyer are research, writing, analysis/application, negotiation, debate (not arguing) and emotional regulation. If that sounds appealing, it may be a good fit!

I pretty much always tell people that you should do your bachelor's in something other than prelaw. In fact, it should be in whatever field you would want to have a career in if you weren't a lawyer. Law schools generally do not require specific undergrad majors, as I, with my double art degree can attest. Law school is geared to give you all the basic tools necessary for being a lawyer. I did not notice any meaningful advantage a prelaw major provided to my peers. If you have a particular law school in mind, look into their admissions criteria, but otherwise--get your bachelor's in your backup career.

Work on your reading and writing, and go to court. Courts are open to the public and these days most of them actually have facebook and twitter pages where they post dockets; many courts post-pandemic actually also livestream all proceedings, sometimes right on youtube. Look at what's going on in some of your local courts, and just go watch it happen. You are welcome to sit and watch court proceedings, just don't be disruptive and be prepared to go through a security check. Get a sense for what goes on!

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Do you know why dogs do that little exhausted sigh when they lie down even when they haven't really done anything that particular day?

I, too, make exhausted little sighs when I flop down and am suddenly extremely comfy!

But, okay, here's what super interesting. I didn't want to just give you a flippant answer, so I started looking up if sighing is a behavior in other species than humans. Because it's always worth keeping an eye out for accidental anthropomorphism. Turns out? The science on sighing is fascinating. Stay tuned for intense nerding out, and maybe a bit more of an answer.

First off, we gotta know what a sigh is.

"The sigh is a deep augmented breath with distinct neurobiological, physiological, and psychological properties that distinguish it from a normal eupneic breath. Sighs are typically triggered by a normal eupneic breath and are followed by a respiratory pause, which is referred to as 'postsigh apnea.'"

In non-jargon, that definition means sighs are a deep breath with a different pattern to it than normal, easy, regular breathing. "Augmented breaths" are frequently used as a synonym for "sighs", and the best definition I found is that "they comprise prolonged inspiration and increased tidal volume followed by a respiratory pause and several seconds of faster breathing. So a longer than normal inhale where you take in more air than normal, then an exhale, and then pause before breathing in again. Oh hey, look, I found a graph!

The graph is super well labeled, but just to be clear: each cycle of the red line is a normal breath, where what's being tracked is the movement of the chest wall. The part where the vertical blue bar is, that's the cycle with a sigh. The red line spikes really high (during inspiration, or breathing in) at that blue patch, and for longer than the normal period of a breath. See how it's almost like two inhales on top of each other - a normal slope and then another upward spike? That's the "augmentation" of the normal breath, almost a double inhale without breathing out in-between. Then, after the red line drops (on the exhale) there's a flat bit. That's the respiratory pause, which the period after the sigh where you wait before you inhale again.

Apparently people have been tracking sighing scientific for like, over 100 years. The first record of it in academic literature was in 1919. And we know some really cool stuff. All humans sigh spontaneously. Even babies sigh! They do it every few minutes, whereas it's less frequent but still pretty regular in adults: one study found about once every five minutes, or twelve sighs an hour.

Okay, but why do we sigh? We only sort of know, because there's a bunch of different things that have to be studied to answer that question. The direct physiological aspect of it is the most well known at this point. You've got lots of little sacs lining your lungs, called alveoli, that facilitate gas transfer from the air you breathe into your blood. They make sure oxygen goes in and carbon dioxide gets breathed out. But sometimes they collapse and deflate, which prevents them from doing their job. When you do a big sigh, the air quantity in your lungs ends up being double that of normal, which inflates them again. So sighing is a way of doing lung maintenance, in a sense.

But there's so much more going on when you sigh than just that! This is the stuff researchers are still working on. They've got some pretty solid conclusions to start, but they're very emphatic that there's a ton more to learn.

Basically, the main hypothesis right now is that sighing functions as a "reset" for your internal state when it's out of balance. People sigh more when they're acutely anxious or stressed, are anticipating a negative outcome like a shock or seeing a negative image, or have chronic anxiety, PTSD, or panic disorders. Higher sigh frequency is also associated with pain: people with chronic low back pain sigh more, and how much they do correlates with how high their pain rating is at the time!

Another aspect of sighing is that it's frequently associated with periods of relief. Studies have noted that people sigh when they're able to relax following tension, like if they're interrupted while trying to do something really mentally taxing, when they finish a task that took a lot of attention for a long time, or if a negative stimulus stops/goes away. The reason behind that is actually thought to be why people sigh so much when they're upset or in pain: sighing doesn't just signal relief, but actually cause it! Some studies have found that people experience a temporary reduction in muscle tension right after a spontaneous sigh. (Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to also happen when you sigh on purpose.)

Sighing is also thought to facilitate behavioral and emotional transitions. The frequency at which someone sighs changes even just when they transition from sitting to lying down. People frequently sigh right before they fall asleep or start to wake up. One study found that people sigh more frequently when they go from a situation of being unable to anticipate what's next to a situation where they know what the outcome will be - regardless of if that outcome is going to be negative or positive! That led the researchers to hypothesize that sighing functions as an emotional reset from states of high internal arousal (a word which here means "the state of feeling awake, activated, and highly reactive to stimuli.") So sighing might not just bring relief when something really intense ends, but it might also help people prepare for upcoming stress.

Basically, researchers think that sighing may contribute to what they call "psychophysiological flexibility." That means that sighing helps keep someone in a physiological and emotional state that matches the situation they're in, and helps the body and mind adapt quickly when something changes. They noted that these types of transitions may involve "anticipatory, activation or recovery responses." In other words: they think spontaneous sighing is relevant not only when you're worried about encountering a leopard in the bush, but when you have to hide from the leopard you tripped over, and then also when you're calming down after the leopard got bored and left.

There's a whole bunch of research left to do about how exactly spontaneous sighs do what they do, but there's also a whole other aspect of the behavior that hasn't really been studied yet: their social function! In humans audible sighing is a salient social signal. (The researchers said the part of the paper addressing this that it is a "lay belief" that sighs have a "communicative function to convey emotions," which makes the whole thing feel like it was written by aliens observing humans from afar). But they did note that sighs for social communications may be totally different from other types of sighs, since the exhalation is often very exaggerated and doesn't always occur in tandem with that "augmented" inhale pattern that spontaneous sighs have.

Okay. So. I've been a nerd forever, but what about doggo sighs? Why do they occur? Obviously, the research doesn't give us a direct answer. The majority of the behavioral / situational research on sighing has been done on people, not animals. But it's pretty well documented lots of animals sigh (it might even be all mammals, I just don't have a citation for that). And some of the studies that have been done on animals indicated that they, too, sigh in relief when negative situations end or unpleasant stimuli go away.

Let's go back to my joke at the beginning of this book I've written. My first instinct was to be like "who doesn't sigh in relaxation when they finally get a chance to rest their bones?" That totally matches what's in the research: getting a chance to rest after activity is often both a behavioral transition and an emotional one, and if there's any physical discomfort being experienced, physical rest is often is a relief.

It seems fairly probable that dogs sigh when they lay down for at least one of those reasons. I can't prove that hypothesis, but it tracks with what the science says so far. The situation you described meets the main identified criteria for sighing: there's the physical transition of laying down, the behavioral/emotional transition of being ready for a period of low/no activity, and the possible relief of pain or discomfort that comes with laying down. We don't have any any evidence (that I was able to find) of species that sigh for other reasons, or sigh in situations that don't meet those criteria. We don't know for sure that this is accurate - this isn't fact, simply my educated guess. But since sighing seems to help muscles relax and relief discomfort, it seems reasonable to me that a good old sigh after the relief of laying down would make the transition to a resting state feel even better.

Sources:

Effects of the hippocampus on the motor expression of augmented breaths

Brainstem activity, apnea, and death during seizures induced by intrahippocampal kainic acid in anaesthetized rats

The Integrative Role of the Sigh in Psychology, Physiology, Pathology, and Neurobiology

Sigh rate during emotional transitions: More evidence for a sigh of relief

The psychophysiology of the sigh: I: The sigh from the physiological perspective

The psychophysiology of the sigh: II: The sigh from the psychological perspective

Affect Arousal

UCLA and Stanford researchers pinpoint origin of sighing reflex in the brain

[possamble]

Do you have any headcanons or thoughts about Falin having a crush on Marcille pre-canon? Especially during her later years at the school/the years she was with Laios.

Just full on "awkward and slightly gnc teenage lesbian has a massive crush on the touchy-feely girly girl straight best friend" tropes everywhere. Even better bc it's the "best friend is also the popular girl while lesbian is the slightly ostracized quiet one" dynamic in school. Falin gets so so so good at not having a heart attack every time Marcille gets in her personal space. But she's so resigned to never saying anything bc why would a girl as blinding as Marcille ever like her back. She also doesn't make an effort to get over it either, she's just content to be trapped in that stable dynamic of silently being in love with Marcille while getting to enjoy CLEARLY being Marcille's favourite person. She gets so used to it that it's almost just background noise most of the time-- it would have to be, unless she wanted to be freaking out 24/7 bc Marcille is so goddamn affectionate.

Her feelings also definitely change throughout the time that they're in school together-- at first it was this "whooaaah pretty older girl" puppy crush that you can clearly see developing in the flashbacks we get (I think she doesn't even like... realize her fixation on Marcille is romantic at all until years after it starts, when she's 12-14 ish and all the other girls around her are talking about crushes). But then they get closer, over the years Marcille starts getting really attached and letting down her guard, and Falin gets to see the ridiculous side of her. She gets to calm her down from her tantrums when experiments don't work out, or help her clean up when something explodes in her face. I feel like the progression of her feelings from "schoolgirl infatuation" to "unrequited love" probably almost exactly corresponds to how slowly Marcille goes from trying to keep Falin at a polite but friendly distance (like she does with everyone else) to her facade completely eroding as she becomes her cheerful and ridiculous self again for the first time since her father died.

That's probably the saddest part: Falin knows that she's clearly Marcille's favourite person on the surface level, but she doesn't quite fully grasp the enormity of what that means to Marcille. She doesn't get that she's the person who made the world colorful again for Marcille, that she is the first person outside of Marcille's family to really and truly make her laugh. She just thinks she's the beloved but dinky little short-lived sidekick, one of many that Marcille has had and will have.

Part of it is that, despite Marcille becoming such a clingy and affectionate best friend, I think her initial demeanour already did its damage. You see Falin being super adventurous and weird at first, bringing Marcille berries and other stuff, only to be rebuffed by Marcille exasperatedly saying she's working or looking kind of put off by it. And by the time you see her a little older, shes already quieter and better at masking -- and I'm not saying that that's entirely Marcille's fault (being the weird girl at an all girls academy for almost the entirety of her teenhood must have been brutal, my god) but she definitely learned that she's a potential nuisance to Marcille if she doesn't tone herself down. She learned that Marcille most likely sees her as a weird little kid following her around bc she has no other friends. And for the most part, she was never given any reason to unlearn any of that.

And that all very very smoothly transitions into Marcille being her "first love that was never meant to be anyway" when she leaves the academy. Chapter closed in her mind: she loved and pined from a distance and that was that. Every now and then she'll see another woman with Marcille's build or her shade of hair and be like ":( I miss her..." But then just kinda move on with her day. Same with when she's going through her own spellbook and finds a note that Marcille left her/correction that she made-- she'll smile fondly and reminisce about how much Marcille doted on her, and then move on.

Sometimes she thinks about contacting Marcille but convinces herself that it's too late (she spent too many months focusing on getting Laios healthy again and didn't mean to go no contact, but ah well). It's only when she has a practical reason to be reaching out that would also benefit Marcille ("Marcille is studying dungeons and we need a trustworthy mage to go with us to the dungeons") that she feels like she's allowed/that it wouldn't just be 100% a nuisance.

I almost think she didn't expect Marcille to reply at all, only to get a telegraph (or some in-universe equivalent of express mail, maybe magical pigeon carrier) that's like. EN ROUTE TO ISLAND. LETTER TO FOLLOW. and she freaks out like AAAA LAIOS SHE SAID YES WE HAVE TO CLEAN UP NOW.

I do think getting a response accidentally sparks a little hope in her, judging by the way she acts in the chp 57 flashback-- she's pouty that Marcille sees her as a kid, gets really worked up about being presentable, and then tries to play it cool when she actually meets Marcille (as if she didn't freak out and force Laios to shave while rambling a mile a minute about Marcille). She's an adult now, really and truly, and she's seen and survived things that her 18 yr old self would have never even imagined-- then all of a sudden, the person she was in love with since she was ten years old appears, and she's so desperate to be seen as mature and competent. She's trying soooo hard to impress Marcille with her newfound combat and dungeoneering experience...

Only to fall right back into their old dynamic. RIP. At least she gets the girl eventually, even if it takes dying twice and being the core catalyst behind an almost-apocalypse.

[sidhewrites]

sure would love if people in so cal stopped being piss babies when I say that there's a good reason fireworks are outlawed here

[petitesmafia]

"shallow bond"...Fyodor has only skimmed through the Chuuya sparknotes meanwhile Dazai has studied the lore he has done the extensive research he has a Bachelor's a Master's AND a PhD in Chuuyaology. Fyodor may have read the Chuuya sources but Dazai WAS THERE !!

[faytelumos]

Mech pilot system where there's three pilots???

One for the left hemisphere, one for the right hemisphere, and one for the cerebellum?

Like, you all still have to be drift compatible, you all still have to be in the cockpit together, but there's basically two thinkers and one translator.

Imagine that the mech designers fought this for years. Two humans every time with massive neural network loads on both the machine and the humans. Pilots could only be medically cleared to operate a machine for four years, max, and then their careers were over. Most didn't make it even that long.

And then someone figures out that if you put in another human to translate between the humans and mech, it flows so much smoother.

Two pilots in the front, the ones doing the strategy and the martial arts and the orders and the takedowns. A third in the back, suspended and all but fugue as they relay human-to-mech and mech-to-human, a person turned into a slave drive, but still tangled up into everybody's heads.

Like, imagine the possibilities?!

You walk into the chow hall and the people who are interested in the shiny new pilots want to know if you're a Leftie or a Migi or a Cera.

Lefties and Migis who spent too long in the cockpit that day who feel like they can't think clearly without that little voice in the back of their head whispering the answers.

Ceras who space out when the room gets loud, who accidentally expect someone else to say what they're thinking, who have nerve damage all across their bodies because it takes all they have to sort data.

Mechs who are older than the trio structure who had their cockpits gutted and refitted, who have spaghetti running up to the chunk of metal that is the third pilot's seat, like a spare part slapped into the room and given too much control.

A Cera who hangs out in the mech bay because the humans are too far from them anymore, but the mecha can't talk to them, either.

a Leftie who can't stand being in the same room as their Migi without the Cera to talk between them.

A Migi who barely knows how to be their own person anymore because so much of their brain is just outside of their reach.

A mech that just wants things to go back to the way they were, pain and lag be damned.

[make-dragonspyre-great-again]

wizard101 world tier list but it's based on how many dragons the world has

[dailypokemoncrochet]

Fiber arts tumblr is the only place I can say "I'm not selling this for any less than $200" where people are more likely to go "oh. yeah 😔" than just straight up balk at the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on a tiny 5 inch plushie (that has 4 different colors) (handmade without a pattern and nothing else like it on the market) (atypical design) (took at least 6 hours)

[nero-neptune]

“Roy was the engineer, and anything related to engineering, in any specialism, would have to pass through his hands. This included assembling the plane’s radio, just like he’d fixed the small battery-operated Spika radio and made it work.

“Adolfo sat down beside him. He explained to Roy that it was not a matter of expertise in electronics but one of ignorance, and pointed out that Roy was the least ignorant of everybody in that department. Roy argued that he had never seen an airplane radio in his life, not even in a book. Adolfo put his hand over Roy’s. ‘I know that, Roy. We all know that. I only wanted to tell you that you were the best one at handling the wires and the terminals, that’s all. But right now that’s a lot, it makes a huge difference … you are the engineer.’

“Roy, almost breathless, added something that his older friend already knew: ‘I am barely in my first year in Engineering, I’m only twenty years old, and the only time I’ve ever been remotely close to anything like this was when I helped instal a damn audio system for my cousins.’

“‘And you fixed the Spika radio,’ Adolfo responded, as if it were a thermonuclear station and not a basic portable radio the size of a pack of cigarettes. Before Adolfo even said the next sentence he knew clearly that it was as painful for him to say as it was for his friend to hear it. ‘Roy, the group needs your abilities. All we’re asking is that you try.’ ”

– “Is Anybody Listening?” from Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story by Pablo Vierci

LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE | SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (2023) dir. J. A. Bayona

[someoctober]

and i can close the door on us, but the room still exists

[mindfulwrath]

just started dunmeshi (anime version) and while i'm only up to ep 8, the thing i'm finding the most remarkable about it is how it portrays expertise

like, everyone in the main party has something they're really really good at, to the point where it's obvious why a party would want this person in particular to come take on the challenges of a dungeon, and why this particular combination of skill sets has allowed the party to get as far as they have. that's great writing, but it's not what i find remarkable.

the remarkable parts are:

everyone in the party has something in their skillset that the others could benefit from learning

even the experts don't know everything about the field in which they have expertise

#1 is pretty common in stories where skill acquisition is how the main characters progress (i'm thinking of things like naruto and dbz, where learning new techniques is how one advances in the power scheme of the world). the way dunmeshi handles it strikes me as different and interesting, because instead of The Main Character assembling an armory of skills by mastering The One Skill each secondary character has to teach, everybody is learning from everybody, and they're picking and choosing skills that are relevant to their areas of expertise. the example that comes to mind is senshi learning how to spot and avoid traps from chilchuck - he's never going to become better at it than chil, but he's learning it because it's a useful thing for him to know how to do.

#2 is what i find the most remarkable, because i don't know if i've seen it done before. the example that comes to mind most readily is senshi - who seems to know everything there is to know about the monsters he's familiar with - not knowing that lighting a fire around the red dragon's body is a potentially deadly misstep. that's a piece of information laios has, despite being orders of magnitude less familiar with the dungeon than senshi is. but it also makes perfect sense that laios would know that and senshi wouldn't, because laios has encountered a lot of dragons and read a lot about dragons and senshi hasn't.

and in my experience, in a line of work where i'm surrounded by a bunch of experts in a similar field with markedly different skillsets, this is how experts interface and how expertise functions in real life.

and it's made me realize that experts written without those two aspects fall completely flat for me.

[rootsmachine]

taissa turner & van palmer // "expert in a dying field," the beths

[unknownarmageddon]

some stuff about goats and sheep. cause i see them mixed up quite a bit

i’m sure this doesn’t apply to every goat or sheep ever, it’s just some general comparison notes and whatever