On the Quiet
To avoid alarming their visitors, hospitals typically alert their staff to emergency situations by announcing “codes” over the public address system. Alberta uses these:
Code Red: Fire
Code Blue: Cardiac arrest/medical emergency
Code Orange: Mass casualty incident
Code Green: Evacuation
Code Yellow: Missing patient
Code Black: Bomb threat/suspicious package
Code White: Violence/aggression
Code Brown: Chemical spill/hazardous material
Code Grey: Shelter in place/air exclusion
Code Purple: Hostage situation
These haven’t been standardized; a few other systems are listed here. One common variation is “Paging Dr. Red” or “Paging Dr. Firestone” to alert staff of a fire. Sometimes “Code Clear” is announced when the emergency has been dealt with.
For similar reasons, airlines refer to dead bodies as “Jim Wilson.” American Airlines’ help desk for funeral homes is called the American Airlines Jim Wilson Service.
Self-Help
REMEDIABLENESSES, written in a spiral, produces a 4 × 4 word square all of whose entries appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.
IREN is a variant of iron, a DEME is an arbiter or ruler, a SESS is an assessment, the BREE is the eyelid, LEMS are lunar excursion modules, and ENES is an archaic form of once.
(Jeff Grant, “Some of My Favorite Squares,” Word Ways 40:2 [May 2007], 96-102.)
In a Word
anamnesis
n. the recalling of things past; recollection, reminiscence
alogism
n. an illogical or irrational statement or notion
eutaxy
n. good order or management
satisdiction
n. saying enough
In “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” a hotel manager successfully finds a man’s name in his ledger at Sherlock Holmes’ request even though he knows only the first name.
“I should like to have seen the index to that pay-list,” remarked the Holmes commentator James Edward Holroyd. “How do you enter the name of a man who has no surname? As Beppo ‘X’?”
Possibly the manager used the same indexing system as Holmes himself, who in “The Sussex Vampire” looks up the forger Victor Lynch under V in his record of old cases. “Good old index,” he tells Watson. “You can’t beat it.”
An Odd Result
Suppose s is the infinite series 1 – 2 + 3 – 4 + …. The diagram above presents 4 copies of the series. Each white disk represents +1, and each red disk represents -1. Each pair of red and white disks annihilates to zero, and the connecting lines show that all of the disks beyond the first +1 (green) can be paired off in this way. The result is that 4s = 1 and, perversely, that 1 – 2 + 3 – 4 + … = 1/4.
(It’s not really that simple — this series doesn’t tend toward any finite limit, but any summation method that’s linear and stable does produce the sum 1/4.)
Cameo
This is the only known photograph of Connecticut’s Charter Oak, a famous symbol of American independence before a storm blew it down in 1856.
Curiously, the father of the country seems to appear among its branches.
Self-Care
In 1984, a British homemaker was reading at home when a voice told her, “Please don’t be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.” She tried to ignore it, but the voice said, “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following,” and gave her three pieces of information that she had not known. When these proved to be true, she consulted her doctor, who referred her to Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, a consulting psychiatrist at the Lambeth Healthcare NHS trust.
An examination found nothing, so he diagnosed her with a functional hallucinatory psychosis, and after two weeks of counseling and thioridazine the voices ceased and she went on holiday. But they soon returned, telling her that she needed immediate treatment and giving an address, which turned out to be the computerized tomography department of a large London hospital. The voices told her that she needed a brain scan because she had a tumor and her brain stem was inflamed.
Azuonye found no evidence of this, but she was so distressed at this point that he ordered the scan anyway, and it showed evidence of a meningioma with a left posterior frontal parafalcine mass extending through the falx to the right side. She elected immediate surgery (the voices agreed), and the operation was carried out in May 1984. When she regained consciousness, she heard the voices for the last time. They said, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.”
When Azuonye presented this case at a conference in 1996, three opinions seemed to prevail. Some thought that the voices had been telepathic communications from people who had learned about the tumor psychically and were trying to warn the patient. Others thought that the patient had known about the tumor before coming to the U.K. and had invented the story in order to get free medical care under the National Health Service (this seems unlikely, as she’d been living in the U.K. for 15 years before hearing the voices).
The third explanation, which Azuonye shared, was that the presence of the meningioma had triggered enough residual sensations to alert her that something was wrong, and that her fear had led her unconsciously to take in information about London hospitals, which was expressed by the voices. The fact that the voices stopped when the tumor was removed showed that the symptoms had been related to the presence of the lesion.
(Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, “A Difficult Case: Diagnosis Made by Hallucinatory Voices,” BMJ 315:7123 [December 20, 1997], 1685-1686.)
Last Call
The last confirmed sighting of New Zealand’s huia wattlebird occurred in 1907. Sound recording was then in its infancy, so no recording of the bird’s call is known to exist. But in 1949 local historian Robert Batley arranged this recording of Hēnare Hāmana, a skilled caller who as a young man had participated in an expedition to seek the huia in the Ruahine Ranges north of Wellington. That effort was unsuccessful, but Hāmana, now in his 60s, remembered the call and performed it in the studios of radio station 2YA. So, to that extent, the call has been “rescued.”
Birds have occasionally returned the favor: See The Parrot of Atures and Ghosts of Scotland.
(Thanks, Charles.)
Fair Enough
Lincoln used a particular logical sleight of hand, long familiar to humorists, as a means of addressing the tariff question. He told of a fellow who had come into the grocery store in New Salem and asked for a few cents’ worth of crackers. The clerk laid them out on the counter, but after just sitting for a while the fellow said, ‘I don’t want these crackers, take them, and give me a glass of cider.’ So the clerk put the crackers away and gave him the cider, which he drank and headed for the door. ‘Here, Bill!’ called out the clerk, ‘pay me for your cider.’ ‘Why,’ said Bill, ‘I gave you the crackers for it.’ ‘Well, then, pay me for the crackers.’ ‘But I hain’t had any,’ responded Bill. ‘That’s so,’ said the clerk. ‘Well, clear out! It seems to me that I’ve lost a [few cents] somehow, but I can’t make it out exactly.’
— Richard Cawardine, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor, 2017
Podcast Episode 214: The Poison Squad
In 1902, chemist Harvey Wiley launched a unique experiment to test the safety of food additives. He recruited a group of young men and fed them meals laced with chemicals to see what the effects might be. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Wiley’s “poison squad” and his lifelong crusade for food safety.
We’ll also follow some garden paths and puzzle over some unwelcome weight-loss news.