Category: Misc

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Made some new friends on a paddle down a Florida creek

We drove down to spend March in Florida, near Venice — just south of Sarasota, on the Gulf side — so of course I brought my kayak, and when I had a free afternoon I took it down to Curry Creek, which runs behind the mobile home park where we are staying, and empties into the bay and from there into the gulf. It was a beautiful day for a paddle, so I took it slow and paddled about three or four kilometres — saw a few ibises, a couple of herons, some miscellaneous birds of various kinds, and lots of moss hanging from the trees.

While I was paddling, I saw a man sitting on a bench on the bank of the creek and he was looking at something across the creek. “There he is,” he said, pointing at an alligator sunning himself on a sand bar — about eight or nine feet long probably. As I paddled by he submerged, so I only got a shot of his head poking up above the water. Further along I saw another one, but he was completely obscured except for his nose, and seemed to want to have nothing to do with me, which was fine with me 🙂

The only downside to this whole trip is that it was such a beautiful day that I just kept on paddling for about two hours, despite a dull ache in my shoulder that had been there for a few days, and I haven’t been in a kayak for about six months. I thought maybe I could paddle it out, but this was a mistake — the following day I could barely move my shoulder without pain, and it was throbbing even without me moving it. So now I am on a rest, ice, warm, no exercise regimen for awhile I guess. But it was worth it! Almost.

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Why do so many medical entities use the wrong symbol?

A guy posted a tweet about a mural on a medical building that shows someone who presumably represents medicine fending off death, while holding a staff with wings at the top and two snakes wrapped around it. Pretty normal, right? Except that the staff with wings and two snakes has nothing to do with medicine at all — it’s called a “caduceus” and it’s associated with Hermes the messenger (or Mercury, if you are Roman instead of Greek), who is associated with commerce and other things. What this medical god should be holding is the rod of Asclepius, which has no wings and only one snake.

Despite this, lots of medical iconography, especially in the US, uses the caduceus instead of the rod of Asclepius. The US Marine Service started using it in 1857, and in 1902, it came to represent the US Army Medical Service and the US Public Health Service, which adopted it in 1881. Why did they choose the wrong one? Probably because it looks more impressive. After all, it’s got wings. And two snakes instead of just one. Way cooler 🙂

There are also theories that the two-snake rod became popular as a symbol representing medicine because early medications used mercury, and from there it became associated with pharmaceutical side of medicine, and then later was used to represent all of medicine. But some medical professionals don’t like to use the two-snake staff because it is primarily associated with commerce, rather than with the healing arts in general.

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How to create literature by George Saunders

George Saunders is an author — his books include Tenth of December (a Finalist for the National Book Award) and Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize — and a professor in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. He writes a Substack newsletter called Story Club, and this comes from one of his responses to a would-be author’s letter:

“Even a person raised alone, fed by a machine, out in a cave somewhere, exists in this atmosphere of pressure – because that pressure is intrinsic to the human mind.  The mind makes the pressure, the tension, the longing, the hope. We want this thing, we get it…and then we want more.  We always feel slightly off, somehow. We find ourselves at peace but not the right kind of peace. And so on. This is what drama is, really: it comes out of the truth that nothing is ever enough for us, that every human situation (even a quiet one, even a happy one, even a deeply contented one) always teeters on the brink of change, because of the restlessness of the mind. And that right there is the stuff of literature.” 

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There’s no such thing as a fish

Stephen Jay Gould was an American geologist, paleontologist, biologist and popular-science author who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. At some point (it’s not clear exactly when) Gould — who had spent a lifetime studying evolutionary biology — declared that “there’s no such thing as a fish.” This comment became the name of a popular podcast spun off from the QI TV series, in which the hosts discuss interesting facts. But what did Gould mean? Obviously there are things called fish. Was this some attempt to be funny, like the guy who tried to convince people that birds aren’t real?

Not exactly. What Gould meant was that the term “fish” doesn’t really have any scientific or categorical meaning per se. In other words, lots of things that are defined as fish — many of which even have the term “fish” in their name, like the hagfish — are not really similar enough to be considered part of the same category of living things. As the Wikipedia entry for the podcast notes, a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish, for example. All the things that we might believe to be common to fish — living underwater, having gills, fins, giving birth via eggs, etc. — are not universally true for everything that is usually thought of as a fish (also, there are lots of things called fish that aren’t, including the cuttlefish, starfish, crayfish, and jellyfish).

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