Spent all day at the conference. I woke up bizarrely early ahead of my alarm so I made it to the first talk even though I wasn’t particularly interested in it.
I’d booked myself onto a workshop to learn more about brain wave monitoring, it’s something I use in theatre every day so I was keen to know more about it. What I didn’t expect today was to discover two new noninvasive bedside monitors of brain function, automated pupillometry and ultrasound optic nerve sheath diameter. They are both more often used in ICU than in theatre, but I’d never even heard of them and it seems they’re in pretty widespread use over here. The first one takes the place of the nurse shining a little torch into your eyes to see what your pupils are doing, and in the second one you just put a small ultrasound probe on your closed eye, and by measuring how swollen the covering of the optic nerve is, you can see if there is swelling in the brain. Considering one of the common ways to measure pressure inside the skull is to plunge a knitting needle-like probe right into the brain tissue, you can see the appeal of these other techniques. And this is why we go to conferences I guess.
I also took this photo, in one of the last sessions. I just wanted to show that it’s possible to manspread with your arms, not just with your legs. FYI he was the next speaker and he was Italian.
I’ve got a later start tomorrow morning, so I decided to go to one last concert on my final night in Florence. The same company who did “The Marriage of Figaro” were putting on a show of duets, so I went along to that. It was fabulous, one of my favourite shows that I’ve attended here, up there with “The Four Seasons” on my first night. The female singer was very good, but the male was something special. I knew a much higher proportion of the songs tonight, too. This was the program, although there were a couple of substitutions, both for more well known tunes.
The encore was “O sole mio” again, this time as a duet. They got a standing ovation at the end, including from me.
I was sitting next to a couple of American women, from California. We all shared our dismay that the upcoming presidential election should be so close. They were both about my age, I guess our generation grew up thinking progressive liberal democracies were where the world was inevitably heading. Remember the Berlin Wall fell in our early twenties. Were we wrong?
I took this photo walking home. Florence really is a beautiful city.
