Storytelling that balances statistics and compassion, from A to Z
To send Women’s History Month out in style and to unabashedly advertise the upcoming A-Z blogging challenge of April, this post will honor the role played in women in early invention–very early, in fact. I want to focus on a major invention that contributed to the evolution of our entire species: the baby sling.
Continue reading “The Mother(hood) of Invention”
I was going to write a one-sentence, spring-themed message, wishing everyone a happy equinox and pointing out that Melbourne is probably experiencing roughly what we’re feeling in Northern California. Then, it turned out much of what I knew about the equinoxes was wrong.
The earth is not round.
It doesn’t move in a circle around the sun.
Day and Night are not equal to each other.
The North is not treated the same as the South.
Since I was This Old when I learned The Truth, I will share it with you, appropriately, on the northern vernal equinox, i.e. today, March 20th, 2025. There will be science, although I will not discuss the ecliptic because I have hard time visualizing it. I promise there will be no arithmetic. There will be geometry. And you might find yourself wobbling a little, which will be in keeping with the situation.
Surgery is the topic of today’s post, namely because I had shoulder arthroplasty last Tuesday. The technique was reverse shoulder replacement and, as you ask, what is that? be assured that I will get there. We have to cover a little anatomy, anthropology, Popular Mechanics, history (of course), and technology along the way.
Let’s talk about joints, specifically shoulders, ball-and-socket joints, and the term synovial. I had originally thought that fish had no ball-and-socket joints, and I was going to claim that it was the reptiles, crocodiles crawling out of the water, who began to develop those movable arm and leg joints rather than fins. But it turns out that, even at the beginning, fish had some types of ball-and-socket joints in their jaws, in their vertebrae, and even in their fins.
Synovial=(Greek) put together+egg=the shape of certain joints
The word synovial is important here because it means that within rigid bones, there is a hollow part and a bumpy part that fit together. Even with fish, there were hollow/bumps that fit together in fins and jaws which allowed for more flexibility and rapid movement. When reptiles developed the ability to walk on land and swim in the water, those fins turned into longer bones with multiple places for movable joints.
Continue reading “A Disjointed Post”