• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Dog Walk HDR I

January 8, 2021 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Like all dogs, Gus is getting slower as he ages. His main pump is failing; slowly but inexorably. If you accept that there is there is a relationship between the mammalian heart rate and overall life expectancy, you will already to know to expect late life heart issues for otherwise healthy pets. This may say nothing about their enthusiasm. For example, Gus loves the snow and today, he was out and about, running on snow and slipping on ice. He was segmenting and ranging on familiar paths, back and forth, excited by the snow while I was taking photographs. Today’s ambition, for me, was to take a series of high dynamic range photos of relatively mundane subjects as I walked quickly around our local hill.

SR000080-HDR_wp
SR000088-HDR_wp
SR000070-HDR_wp
SR000097-HDR_wp
SR000100-HDR_wp
SR000091-HDR_wp
SR000071-HDR_wp
SR000079-HDR_wp
SR000094-HDR_wp

The limit to longevity is indicated by studies that have concluded that all mammalian hearts have an endurance of about a billion heartbeats. That there are variations for body volume will come as no surprise to those who notice that whales are quite different to gerbils. You may know there are allometric rules that matter, assuming that you know allometry is what’s left when isometric relationships fail.

You’ll recognise allometric growth when I remind you that your head takes up a much smaller proportion of your body than it did when you were born. We’re not sure why but it seems likely that we need a big brain right from the start; there is a lot to learn. And of course, you know that your skeletal structure got disproportionally stronger and stiffer as your body size increased. That happened because your total volume was increasing faster than your height. What happens in middle age is for different reasons.

In summary, the human heart grows in proportion to body size, that is to say, isometrically, increasing linearly with the body. Your brain grew allometrically, it having been disproportionally larger, relative to your body, when you were a child than when reading this journal as an adult. You can see allometry everyday in birds and planes. Compare the wing sizes in the wren and the condor, the 737 and the A380 to the volume of the bodies they carry.

Except that the use of, the sense of, allometry has changed. These days it tends to be used to refer to biological scaling relationships in general. But this doesn’t matter to Gus as he approaches his billionth heartbeat. He’s recently developed gingivitis which in humans, increases the likelihood of heart attacks. But we treat him for this as we treat him for his arthritis, his heart and his general senescence.

Humans, as in many things, are anomalous in that we get about 2 or 2.5 billion beats of the pump. We’ve been very successful in extending our life expectancy so I suppose it’s a relief to know that our hearts have the durability to capitalise on the medical and nutritional advances. I’m reminded of something Bill Bryson wrote in The Body.

‘In 2011, an interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined. We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.’

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: Bill Bryson, booklink, dog, gallery, photography, walking

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Recent Comments

  • Lia Mills on Lady Birds
  • Simon Robinson on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Catherine Dunne on 2023 Subscriptions
  • Lia Mills on Apertures
  • Lia Mills on Limerick Walls

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021

Tags

ahmet altan albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers food geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • Lady Birds
  • Rounded
  • Watershapes
  • Machine Driven
  • 2023 Subscriptions

Archives

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom22 Cancelled
  • Latest Comments
  • Archives

Subscribe

You’ve been successfully subscribed to our newsletter!

Copyright © 2023 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework