taras22,
I changed my mind and would now agree it was not a complete waste of time. I, accidentally, found an interesting lecture by that same Dr. West about respiration at the limit. You may not be interested in it, but your partner may. There are some results from actual respiratory measurements on Mount Everest. It is very informative and thought-provoking. On the other hand, she may be familiar with that already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRN124iuqZ8&list=PLE69608EC343F5691&index=14
I also googled "gobbledygook", the word I had never encountered before. The first definition that shows up (I did not dig deeper, I admit) puts it as "excessive use of abstruse technical terms". I read my earlier post again and found maybe three, let’s say four, terms that are not simple English words and I used them sparingly (each one once, except V/Q maybe twice). V/Q, pCO2, FiO2, brainstem. Although they are not your everyday grocery store language, they are as basic and well-known in anything that even remotely discusses breathing. They are far from being complicated or abstruse, much less used excessively. I have a hard time accepting that anyone familiar with these issues finds them too technical. Not to clog this thread, but is there a way your partner could point out parts in that earlier post that she found incorrect or objectionable? I would really appreciate it as I would like to improve my understanding of things and would surely enjoy finding out I was wrong and learning how. I am not sure how to do it outside of this thread, though.
As far as painting goes, I was not thinking deep enough to dissect painters into categories, but it does seem reasonable. In my mind it was not some famous painter, but pretty much your average neighbor, so to say. My point was that for painting you do need to put an effort into learning, even if it is just how to hold the brush, and it will altogether require a lots of practice and muscle coordination (throwing-paint on-the-canvas-from-the-distance kind of paintings do not qualify for this purpose) while hearing is inborn. Now, I am not sure I can fully agree with those differences between hearing and listening, but I can see room for a reasonable debate there.