Muffin: bad blood

Muffin's been snuffling a bit the last few days, so we took him to the vet yesterday for some blood work. He was a good little monkey, though he was pretty traumatized and lethargic due to them taking blood (he has very tiny veins and they used a very tiny needle but a whole lotta alcohol). They called back at noon with some pretty bad news -- his white blood count is abnormally low, and his monocyte count is oddly high. This points to a possible chronic infection, which could be psittacosis, which is not at all good.

If it is, it's possibly transmittable both to humans and other birds, though birds can be carriers and not necessarily "shed" the disease for long periods of time. The doc's recommended course of action: 45-day antibiotic treatment. It's either administered orally daily or via injection weekly. I think seven (or even fourteen) times the trauma of sticking meds in his beak is a better course of action than six injections, honestly.

We've moved him back into the isolation room, set up the heating pad and the light again. He's a little confused, but he's still cuddly and friendly. He's such a good little feathered monster -- he really doesn't deserve all this. But he will get the best care.

Of course, now we need to monitor everyone -- feathered or otherwise -- for symptoms. Fret.

Nuffle Bowl VI: Dairyland vs. Manhattan

So it all comes down to this. ( Bring it! )

Weird science

Let's see how bad we can bend your mind today. First, maybe gravity is broken: a decent look from the LA Times at the Pioneer Anomaly.

Second...oh, just read it. It's making my head hurt.

If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find?

Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states.