(source: I used to volunteer at a Raptor conservancy).

You can see the effect in how prey is eaten after a hunt. A mammalian sprint-predator like a cheetah has to catch its breath before eating what it has just caught. Its avian equivalent, like a Peregrine falcon, can immediately start eating.

(source - worked at a raptor conservancy). It depends on which bird. Some are really smart and can learn tricks (e.g. retrieving specific objects) for food rewards. They can work out simple puzzles, such as finding food hidden under sliding blocks. Crested Caracaras are examples in my experience.

Others are much less intelligent, in particular owls, who aren't particularly wise. They have great instinctive behaviours but can't solve puzzles. This is partly because, for their vision, a lot of their skull is filled with eye rather than brain - owl eyes are tubular rather than eyeballs and can't move in their sockets, hence the 270 degree neck turning.

I've had two complete blackouts due to Ventricular Fibrillation, and one near blackout where the VF stopped after nine seconds (as reported by my ICD). In my experience, vision and thinking seem to stop at the same time, with increased dizziness being the first functional effect (after perhaps 7-8 seconds). My ICD is set to fire at 14 seconds, by which time I'm guaranteed unconscious and won't feel the painful shock. It takes 2-3 seconds to recognise the warning signs (painless fluttering sensation in my chest), so there are 4-5 seconds of normal consciousness when I can try to make sure I fail safe. Like sitting down.

This is why I don't drive anymore.

Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.

(Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unstressed and stressed, like "if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE ...", the so-called heartbeat rhythm)

Shakespeare actually used a variety of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians make snarky comments in prose (just like a badly behaved audience) on the badly rhymed acting of the clowns. The fairies, meanwhile, speak in trochaic verse, so their king and queen sound stylistically different from their Athenian equivalents, almost like Shakespeare has given them a foreign accent. When two characters are arguing, the ten syllables of a normal line are sometimes split between them to emphasize the back and forth nature. If a character is flustered or annoyed, their lines may be obviously different from the 10 syllable norm, again to emphasize their mood.

For actors learning their lines, the syllable counts almost act as stage direction hints: if they aren't 10 syllables, then some mood or other needs to be taken into account.

Most of their advertising / info is probably on Facebook.

Their physical store is in Bishop Auckland, a small town a few miles south of Durham.

My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.

Challenges (apart from the time taken) are coming up with a good enough gene representation that captures the essence of the problem, building an efficient fitness function, and avoiding local maxima - i.e. a solution that is almost but not quite good enough, but from where you can't breed a better solution.,

The air may be the same everywhere, but roads and safety laws aren't.

(which I am now keen to use in an actual conversation)