Living London. About London peculiarities, meetings, frogs and souls.

It´s not that it´s been a long time since I last posted, but there were some things that I wanted to write about, and I couldn´t because my computer didn´t feel like accessing the internet.
So now I have more things to write about.

In aim to follow some order, I will start with some things that I´ve noticed in London and only London. Then I will continue with meetings, frogs and souls...


LONDON PECULIARITIES

1. The wheather. It´s always impredictable. It was sunny on Tuesday, it´s been windy and snowy ever since. Londoners complain: it´s been the coldest March in the last 50 years. Bad luck that of mine, within the last 50 years I had to choose precisely this one for coming.

2. Riddles. Londoners really love them (at least lab Londoners). As I told you, silence is sacred during lunch time, but you´re allowed to talk if you tell a riddle. The most absurd one will be welcome. Someone is reading the paper and suddenly breaks the silence saying: "Guess who I met last weekend in..." (don´t remember the place).  Then everybody starts asking yes-no questions and he gives some clues, and everybody is excited. Then someone finds out, and silence again. I was so bored (and worried) yesterday during lunch time, that I couldn´t help a guffaw when one of the guys said his birthday was the 4th of May and someone replied "May the 4th be with you"...

3. Builders. They are more discreet here, but still they whistle when you pass by.

4. Me. Don´t ask me why, but on my everyday walk from lab to home, I always stumble on the same fckng paving stone.

5. Newspapers. How they love sadist and macabre news!! There´s always some horrible death to read about during the whole week. A stabbing, a fire, a guy pushed down to the train rails, a teenager that crushes against a house, a girl attacked by her neighbour´s dogs, a poisoning during a cruise, a buggy pushed by the wind and gets hit by a car with a "little angel baby girl"... All those are real ones. And they love transcribing the grieve words in the cards at the funeral and all that.

6. The work environment. It´s so nice. If we forget about silence and riddles. Nobody is better than nobody. Everyone has a place and a lab worker is as important as a medical researcher, the cleaning woman, the IT guys or the receptionist. I can´t even think of that happening in Spain...

7. Shoes. I had been warned before about the horrible taste of London women with shoes, but oh my! How could I imagine!! Wow. I have no other words.


MEETINGS
Only a few words to say that Mar and I will attend the EBMT meeting!!! Best part, 3 days not pipetting.


FROGS AND SOULS (click here for further information)
About that, I shall start saying that I´m quite sure there is no deffinition for the word "soul" in the text, which I find to be essential if we want to get to any conclusions. I don´t know if there is something such as our Real Academia Española de la Lengua for English grammar, so I´ll just translate here the RAEL deffinition for "alma":

Basis that shapes and organises vegetative, sensitive and intelectual aspects of life.

Spiritual and immortal substance of a human being.

Basis that gives life and instinct to animals, and feeds and grows plants.

Re-reading, this is the closest to a deffinition that I could find: "there is a something in each half which possesses the power of adapting means to ends in a manner which is as deserving as the epithet ‘rational’ in the one case as in the other."

Huxley doesn´t talk specifically about central and peripheral nervous system. He just cuts off the poor frog, over and over accross several different sections, and points what happens. 
I guess if we take the 1st RAEL deffinition, then we could say that the frog´s soul lies within the integrity and interaction of both central and peripheral nervous system. The former organises and manages wills and emotions and voluntary movements, and the latter manages reflex acts and drives the nervous inputs and outputs towards and from the CNS.
If we take the 2nd deffinition instead, and we cut off the connection between both parts of the nervous system, PNS still can perform some reflex acts. So maybe the soul, as "immortal substance", is nothing but the PNS...
On the other hand, some reflex acts can be voluntarily suppressed by CNS. As when you try not to close your eyes for a long time, or when you hold your breath for a while.
The 3rd deffinition is too abstract, I think members of the RAEL didn´t know what else to write but they had to fill some blank space or something.

After all, here´s what I think:


And I´m pretty sure Luke didn´t understand a shit of what he was talking about...