horseshoe crabs, Catherine the Great, &c
“as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts”
I wanna go tag horseshoe crabs
(they’re not crabs btw, they’re closer to arachnids than crustaceans but are really in a class of their own (Merostomata (literally: legmouth (fuck i need syntax highlighting to get the parenthetical counts right here (and also for the sake of living in a candy-colored wonderland, as Dominus would say (also Dominus recently told me that my newsletter reminds him more of his own blog than anyone else's does, and it was one of the best compliments I’ve ever received in my entire life))))))
More horseshoe crab awesomesauce- (& no I’m not talking about their hemocyanin/ copper-based blue blood that we bleed from them for our own medical purposes, honestly CW for sad legmouth pics but it’s a helluva thing)-
they breathe via BOOK GILLS. Only horseshoe crabs have these. No one else.
Book gills are modified legs that you breathe through. (Why ‘book gills’? They’re filled with ‘page-like’ membranes called lamellae.) also you can swim with them. Imagine flapping around with big ol lungleg fins or something, what a life
Spiders otoh get book LUNGS. But those are tucked up inside where you can’t even use them for swimming, what a fuckin waste
also maybe insect wings evolved from gills?
moving on.
Catherine the Great was the first person in Russia to be inoculated against smallpox, and then “she promptly deemed anyone who didn't get inoculated an idiot.”
"Starting with me and my son, who is also recovering, there is no noble house in which there are not several vaccinated persons…
Many regret that they had smallpox naturally and so cannot be fashionable."
The doctor performing the procedure (Baron-to-be Thomas Dimsdale) “secretly arranged for a stagecoach to rush him out of Saint Petersburg” just in case he accidentally killed the Empress. (He did not.)
“His cousin, housekeeper and third wife Elizabeth Dimsdale was a diarist and recipe collector.”
- [there’s a whole fic just waiting to be written based on this one perfect sentence from the first paragraph of] the Wikipedia page of the doctor who inoculated Catherine the Great against smallpox
(there’s probably something interesting to be said about the power of fashion to effect social change and therefore health reform here, but perhaps another day)
also let’s just take a sec to appreciate Lorenzo Homar’s sweet sweet poster design skills
god i love gwern - What is the oldest food you could potentially eat?
and
Running Traffic Lights as Complex Disasters
short stories i recently read & enjoyed
The Fat Magician by Gene Wolf (via gwern, who thinks it was inspired by the Marx brothers) - I usually can’t tolerate Holocaust fiction, though probably not for the reasons you’d think, but this one was full of sleight of hand and it was good.
Catch That Rabbit by Isaac Asimov - nice little logic puzzle of a story, but mostly I enjoyed its scattered perfect sentences, eg
“You're as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts.”
“Before we do anything toward a cure, we’ve got to find out what the disease is in the first place. The first step in cooking rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.”