Sharon

“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“This smorgasbord of eyes brings with it a dizzying medley of visual Umwelten. Animals might see crisp detail at a distance, or nothing more than blurry blotches of light and shade. They might see perfectly well in what we’d call darkness, or go instantly blind in what we’d call brightness. They might see in what we’d deem slow motion or time-lapse. They might see in two directions at once, or in every direction at once. Their vision might get more or less sensitive over the span of a single day. Their Umwelt might change as they get older. Jakob’s colleague Nate Morehouse has shown that jumping spiders are born with their lifetime’s supply of light-detecting cells, which get bigger and more sensitive with age. “Things would get brighter and brighter,” Morehouse tells me. For a jumping spider, getting older “is like watching the sun rising.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Recovery" is everything you do outside the gym to take care of yourself: eating, sleeping, stretching, managing stress. Another oversight of the "workout"-based type of exercise is that it does not teach us to care at all about this stuff. If you're like me, you might have even been conditioned to believe, for instance, that eating a nice big meal after a workout would be "wasting the workout." In reality, the *opposite* is true: if you don't eat enough, you are only setting yourself up for an unfair and unnecessary amount of soreness. And this is true of all recovery dimensions: if you don't sleep, or if you don't manage your stress, you will be miserable trying to build muscle.”
― Casey Johnston, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell

“Most of the fish in coral reefs are also trichromats. But since red light is strongly absorbed by water, their sensitivities are shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum. This explains why so many reef fish, like the blue tang that stars in Pixar’s Finding Dory, are blue and yellow. To their version of trichromacy, yellow disappears against corals, and blue blends in with the water. Their colors look incredibly conspicuous to snorkeling humans, because our particular trio of cones excels at discriminating blues and yellows. But the fish themselves are beautifully camouflaged to each other, and to their predators.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us