Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

hey does anyone know if there exists a thermometer capable of reading temperatures over 106 degrees Fahrenheit that can also be used for what is essentially a newborn child
failing that, what does an electronic temperature usually tell you if the temperature is simply too high for it to read

 

A screaming voice: "Go to an emergency room at the speed of light. Temps over 104F are causing severe damage rapidly."
The ones we use have a blinking red LED at temps over 102F. We haven't let anyone in the family go past that to see what it says after 104 (the default "get help fast" reading). If the LED blinks we go to doc.
A newborn child should not be allowed a temp over 102F without a doc involved. Brain damage can occur (and most likely will if it goes much past 104F for very long). Your story should include doing everything possible to cool them down.

 

haha yeah the thing is they aren't actually going to die or remotely be hurt by high temperature and it needs to be like, temperature at which child should already be super dead or something
it....is a part of a plot thing
I mean I am going to include the last part, but outside of that, not super sure what to do, because most thermometers, from what I can tell, do not measure past 106 degrees Fahrenheit at the highest, but the story definitively involves child having temperature that should have already killed them super dead
....and I don't actually KNOW at what temperature a child would already be super dead, because I tried to Google that and found a lot of disease stuff and I Have Problems With Disease
I'm also not sure what to do re: hospital because like......how would a doctor handle that sort of thing, I don't know, I mean at that point it would kind of be pretty fucking weird medically speaking that the kid is alive and well (outside of Burning Up) when they should not be

 

Old style mercury thermometers sometimes have a scale that goes higher than that. Modern consumer-grade electronic ones usually don't. Hospital ones might but I isn't a medical professional so don't know.
The "super dead" thing isn't a thing. Super high temps are not usually instantly fatal - they just cause massive damage, particularly to the brain. The longer the high temp persists, the more damage is done. When the person recovers from whatever caused the high temps they are damaged, but there is no magic formula to tell how much, other than going so long that when they recover they are really noticeably altered.
A person can survive very high fevers, even higher than docs say, with minimal damage. Another person hits 102F for a few days and comes back with serious, noticeable damage.
The usual treatment at the hospital for a very young child (don't know about newborns) is to cool their head gradually (like in between traumatically fast and cartoon slow) while cooling their body a little more gradually.

 

Better info than mine!
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003090.htm

 

thank you :D

 

when my brother had staph as a teen, apparently he hit 106 or something and everyone was super worried

but we don't Think it caused brain damage

(that's mostly a joke)

 

I had a friend who hit 106 once, but she was already at the hospital when it happened so everything was OK other than things being really scary for a minute. (She is/was very sickly and was in the hospital a lot for her condition, but I think that's the only time she's had a fever that high that I've known her.)

 

That is the prettiest 'lol' I've ever seen, it looks like a vine with leaves

 

Arabic script does that! Be absurdly pretty.

 

Time for weird niche bio questions
Is there any particular reason hemocyanin couldn't appear in a mammalian species, or is it just a case of "both these things work so neither dies out"?

 

Can't verify accuracy, but this was interesting, and seems accurate to me, a layperson, at least.

 

As far as I know, that explanation is correct. Especially for big, warm, quick-moving, active animals, hemocyanin just isn't going to cut it. You need something that can really tote some O2 around, and hemoglobin fits the bill.

Please ask more niche biology questions :3

 

I need tips on avoiding a virgin-whore complex. My protag is aro-ace and strongly practical, and another girl who hangs out with her is pregnant while underage (she consented) and the protag is judgy. I want ways to make it clear that's not my opinion. Pregnant girl ends up alive, albeit ill because she's underdeveloped, and has a relationship she's content with, and the baby will probably be fine depending on how the story goes, so that's the obvious problems out of the way. Is there anything I should really avoid?

 

hm, maybe start with having other people express other opinions, more or less nice?

i vaguely remember a book i got gifted for my birthday which i had to ditch after 10 pages because the male protagonist was going on and on about how women are just too weak without anyone telling him to shut his fucking face.

and have it be a thing, but not a thing the protag really focuses on aka mentions it every other paragraph.

a strongly practical person would also probably support the pregnant girl? like, help carry stuff around, hold hair out of the way while morning sickness is being a bitch, other pregnancy related stuff i don't know about.

maybe also have the protagonist acknowledge that it's their own opinion?

 

Yeah, I wasn't going to have it be a big thing. Protag just sort of smugly thinks "Look what she's got herself into, she can't be very bright, I'm going to sensibly wait till I'm older and then marry my BFF..." *some time later* "wait, I don't really want to get married at all, hang on, am I judging because I don't get why she would even have wanted to have sex in the first place?" But she doesn't hate the other girl or think she should be punished, and they're in circs where they all need to help each other. Pregnant girl also needs a chance to do something intelligent to really break protag's assumptions, I think. I was going to have the pregnant girl be a lord's runaway daughter, but it might make more sense if she's new money and thus knows something about finances, so then she can be the one who starts to suspect the villain's up to something when she notices he's fiddling the books of the halfway house they're in.

 

Ooh, that would also be why she felt she had to run away when she got pregnant. Among the rural commoners, from among whom my protag comes, a teen pregnancy would result in, for older teens, a hasty wedding, and for younger ones some hiding away and a "new little sibling". When the family's trying to fit in with the upper crust, who already look down on merchants a bit, the slightest hint of impropriety could be a disaster.

 

Also I am really crap at magic systems, and I want to do something which runs a bit like Simon R Green's stuff; All Myths Are True, but most people don't have very powerful magic. I'm debating whether gods/demons/angels should make appearances or not, thinking not because it's too easy a gamebreaker. But I have a nogitsune and a werewolf who are both pissed at humans using the term "werefox" because they work differently, and elves have some kind of natural magic but it can't be too powerful because there's a lot of them and they're pretty integrated into society. Anyone got tips for building a magic system which can fit a lot of variety in?

 

Make the cost of doing magic very high. Like they need to eat a TON of food after, and if they haven't been eating good even small magics can make them pass out.
Or the magic causes their bodies to wear down similar to over exertion - too many days in a row of using magic and they just don't have the energy.
And of course bigger results require bigger investment - making an elephant fly would be extremely exhausting.
With training / practice the cost can go down but must always be high enough that "miracle" type magic is extremely rare.

 

I've used one where the use of magic gives affects similar to aging - so the 45 year old wandering mage looks 60 and suffers aging type effects (joint and muscle pain, mostly).
Another one is a Bard who doesn't know she's using magic (she's a beginner) and has to eat nearly constantly or feels like she's starving - to the point where whenever she's sitting at a table with food on it she doesn't even think about it - she helps herself to bites.