Stuff

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

You are not a court of law. You are not required to hear them out, argue, nor give them a second chance. Block them. Nothing bad will happen to them without you! It's fine! Goodbye forever! Prevention is better than cure.

It should not be that hot that far north.

Buildings and traffic lights are melting, I can only imagine what the power grids must look like in some cities considering the hoards of people hooking up AC units to their home, and most importantly, people are dying.

People knew from ancient times that certain things, like contact with sick people, bodily fluids, dead bodies, or "dirty" things/things that smell bad, can make you sick, even if they didn't know precisely how. And they couldn't know. In order to prove that a microscopic organism was the cause of a disease, you wouldn't just have to be able to observe microorganisms. You'd have to identify that there are specific microorganisms that are found in people who get a specific disease, and that they are not found in healthy people, and that exposure to infectious material that contains those microorganisms can cause a healthy person to become sick.

We think of germ theory as being "so simple!" because the rituals of protecting from harmful microorganisms are culturally ingrained in us, and we have access to the technologies to perform them. But if you were sent back to medieval times, would you be able to come up with a way to purify dirty water on a scale that would work for everybody? Could you come up with a treatment that kills the fleas that cause bubonic plague? Would you even know how to clean the clothing or tools that people used daily without damaging the item? How do you sterilize a cup made of wood or pewter? How do you make sure the water you're washing your hands with is clean? Can you make enough soap to fulfill the needs of handwashing? How do you safely examine a patient if you don't have gloves? How do you make the cloth you're using to bind a wound sterile?

Meanwhile, you probably don't even know how to safely preserve food without refrigeration, how to dispose of human waste without toilets or running water, where to dig a well, how to recognize different parasites and diseases in farm animals, how to recognize spoilage in stored grain, or how to use medicinal herbs. That's a lot of medical knowledge medieval people would have had that you don't know because you don't need to know.

"Wash your hands with soap and water" we would tell everyone! But we ourselves don't even know how to make soap!

It starts out with him being able to do a miraculous surgery bc of the emergency medicine bag he had with him when he time traveled. But then later when there is a cholera outbreak, he can only save a few people due to exactly these kind of problems: sanitation is very difficult (cholera causes diarrhea); he can’t conjure medication out of thin air; and even if he can make rehydrating solution, he can only commission a few needles and rubber tubes to make IVs.

In another story arc, he tries to grow penicillin, and through a ton of labor and collaboration with Edo-period scholars, manages to succeed in isolating that strain of mold! But then there is no way to grow it at scale, and he can’t make enough to even save one patient.

If you're lucky you might be able to kick-start certain avenues of research, but generally the tech base of wherever you end up is going to seriously limit the impacts you're likely to have over anything but the very long term. The celiacs thing might be doable, and would definitely be a legacy worth leaving, but you'd need access to multiple babies with actual celiacs (something impossible to diagnose accurately besides 'do they respond to a gluten free diet?' before modern medical technology) AND be able to correctly identify all the foods containing gluten AND all the gluten free foods necessary for a healthy diet - which may not even be available - AND be able to get the parents to agree to your suggestion AND have the results be persuasive enough for the idea to spread.

And for whenever someone mistakenly tells you that humans can only hurt nature -

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

Per wikipedia:

The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.

and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.

The sister ship HMHS Britannic is still perfectly preserved because of the way it sank, and partly in due to the coral that has grown around it keeping the structure in tact I believe was the reason.