I got out of the house this morning on my way to get an MRI. I saw an arthropod!
As for the MRI, I don’t know. I fell asleep during it, in spite of the obnoxiously loud industrial music hammering through the headphones. It might be a few days before it’s analyzed and they can tell me what’s going on.
The good news is that the pain is greatly diminished, replaced with soreness and fatigue. I’m mainly feeling like I need to lie down and sleep while the cartilage/ligaments/whatever carry out repairs.
I’m really happy to hear you are healing, PZ. I hope it is a smooth recovery.
Sounds like you don’t need a few days to analyze the “obnoxiously loud industrial music hammering through the headphones”. Yeesh! I’m surprised they didn’t give you a choice. I recall getting something relaxing when I had an MRI for my heart valve thing.
Neat Odonata!
Dragonfly or Damselfly, Ican’t recall how to tellthe diufference now, should know (& yeah, could google but..)
Beautiful either way.
FWIW. Wikipage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odonata
It’s a bluet, a damselfly.
Sea spiders have no HOX gene
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/science/sea-spiders-abdomen-genes.html
“This is the first genome assembly that’s put together a whole Hox cluster for a sea spider,” Dr. Sharma said. “And it’s missing from the cluster.”
That raises an interesting question, said Antonis Rokas, an evolutionary biologist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study. Did the abdomen shrink in these creatures because the gene controlling its patterning was destroyed? Or did having an abdomen get less and less useful because of some circumstance in which a knotty sea spider ancestor lived, so that when the gene finally disappeared, nothing much changed?
“We don’t know what caused what,” he said.
I also had an MRI today!
I seriously wish I could have slept. I’m just not a 5 AM kind of person.
I’ve had a few MRIs lately looking for cancer moving to my brain. When they ask me what kind of music I want, I say none at all. I can’t hear it for the noise of the MRI itself; and I can play Gordon Lightfoot songs in my head just fine. 8-)
Are you sure the sound wasn’t the MR? With modern music it’s hard to tell.
@3 Damselflies (generally) hold resting wings vertically, dragonflies hold resting wings horizontally.
@8 I must have lucked out then; when I had my MRI done recently, I was given noise-canceling headphones & was asked as to what music I wanted. The MRI was loud but I could still hear the music, so not terrible. The banging noises will drive you nuts though.
I don’t know based on what PZ said if he was listening to actual industrial music or he was calling the MRI noises that. I’ve heard plenty of industrial music and most of it sounds much better than what an MRI machine probably produces. I have yet to see the Rick Beato take on this comparison though.
Hopefully PZ’s knee is a relatively easy fix. Kinda crappy way to spend the early part of a sabbatical.
Erlend Meyer @9
When I had my cataract surgery they were putting me into twilight (a k-hole?) and I jokingly mentioned how some techno music would be appropriate for how the drugs were making me feel and they actually started playing some rave type stuff. Helped ease me through the procedure, but there was no background “industrial” noise like with an MRI. Reznor time.
I kinda hate to be the get off my lawn guy, but draw the line at mumble rap. A friend told me how his daughters were into dubstep and I tried that out. Sounded not too different from electronica I listened to ca. 90s. I kinda dug it.
I think the Boomer anthem “My Generation” is ageless.
Hemidactylus @12 I had my cataracts done last year and for the first eye was offered music. I considered Bach Cello Suites and remembered that both Bach and Handel had cataract operations by the same surgeon. Bach was blinded and died a few months later. https://www.med.wisc.edu/news/handel-bach-blinded-18th-century-quackery/
@10. silvrhalide : Ah! That’s right. Thanks.
Scrumptious spider dining you got right there.