Swarm of bees, gaggle of geese, pack of hounds, pride of lions, flock of sheep, flight of swallows, and even murder of crows
The Book of St. Albans, 1486
As everyone else is reviewing the past year or making predictions for the future, I thought I would rather share some interesting things that I have seen in the last few days.
But first things first. Check out our great new t-shirt designed by boxing coach Angie Stimson. The t-shirt is only available in short sleeve and long sleeve until January 2, so don’t wait to order it or you will miss out! Our popular logo design shirts are also available. Click on the images for the links to order the shirts. Each one is a different link.
Is it Insomnia or Segmented Sleep
I ran across a piece on Medium titled “It’s not (always) insomnia, it’s segmented sleep“ by Adeline Dimond. Since I wake up almost every night between 3:00 – 4:00 AM, I was eager to see what she said. I don’t know if this has anything to do with REM sleep problems seen often in Parkinson’s, but it does make some sense to me. Most nights I wake up and go back to sleep rather quickly. Then there are those nights, fortunately not as frequent, when I just can’t go back to sleep and head for the sofa downstairs for the rest of the night. My guess is that is because of the PD induced REM sleep disorder.
A Murder of Crows and other collective nouns
Did you every wonder where the collective nouns like “a murder of crows” or a “pride of lions” came from? Fans of the NY TImes Crossword Puzzles may know some of these collective nouns from solving the puzzles. For others, these terms are a complete mystery. I learned, from another article in Medium, that the terms for a collective group of animals go back to a manuscript from 1486, which is why they sound so funny to us.
I thought that in the spirit of these collective nouns, we should come up with some new ones for us with Parkinson’s. What do you think of “A Tribe of Twitchies” or “A Passel of Parkies”? Can you come up with some other collective nouns to describe us? Please put your suggestions in the comments below.
Parkibot
What is a Parkibot? A robot with Parkinson’s? A parking robot? Something else?
I attended a meeting with PD Avengers last week that featured a presentation by Dan Friedman, who has PD and is the co-founder of Composium.ai. Parkibot is an AI (artificial intellegence) tool designed to assist Parkinson’s disease patients and caregivers. ParkiBot is trained on over 250,000 Parkinson’s disease-related documents and can search the web for relevant information in real-time. It provides detailed responses to questions, sources for claims, and suggestions for further exploration. The tool is free and accessible at parkibot.com. Dan emphasized that ParkiBot does not provide medical advice but rather directs users to reliable sources. Dan also mentioned that ParkiBot can answer questions in different languages and can search for scientific papers published recently. Here is a recording from a meeting with PD Avengers where Dan explains how to use Parkibot.
I want to thank you for supporting Twitchy Woman in 2024
and look forward to seeing you again in 2025.
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