As a radiologist, I have few clinical pearls to offer, but let’s talk about anatomical plurals!
This post all started when we were trying to discuss a fascinating case involving the male external reproductive organs, but we were all stumbling over the terms. So… one penis has a corpus spongiosum, two corpora cavernosa (each with a crus), a urethra, and a glans penis, but two penes contain two corpora spongiosa, four corpora cavernosa (four crura), two urethrae, and two glandes penium? And the corresponding scrota contain pairs of testes and epididymides, respectively susceptible to orchitides and epididymitides??
Penile jokes aside, let’s learn how to pluralize some anatomy! (Disclaimer: This is a humor piece; I have no linguistics training.)
Originally I had planned but one post to transition from national to personal matters, but once the other post surpassed 3000 words I couldn’t shoehorn this in anymore. So, for my now annual tradition, a self-centric recap:
In medicine, we have an extended vocabulary set that is mainly composed of anatomic terms derived from Latin and Greek. Medical-ese, if you will. Sometimes, they resemble unrelated words in common parlance, but they are best not confused for obvious reasons. Following are a few examples of many:
1.
ephemera (uh-FE-mer-uh) — 1. objects that are meant to be used only for a short time; 2. such objects that become collectibles, such as ticket stubs or handwritten missives
For the first two weeks of September, Katie and I drove around upstate New York and then Maine, focusing on hiking, camping, and generally just escaping from from New York City and civilization at large. These days, it’s other people who pose a looming health threat to each other. Simultaneously, our newsfeeds pose a constant threat to our collective sanity. And, if you’re Californian, you have actual fires posing an incendiary threat. It’s all bad.
CS50, Harvard’s introductory computer science course, is the most influential class I’ve ever taken. CS50 spurred my interest in computer science – which I nearly pursued as my career – and the methodologies of computer science continue to inform my understanding of the world and guide my decisions to this day.
The Cult of CS50
I was reminded of this because the New Yorker recently published a profile on David Malan, CS50’s charismatic and innovative professor (and my boss at one point!). Even though much of the interview focuses on Malan’s pioneering work in digital-friendly education with high production value, the article also captures some of Malan’s quirks, like his antiquated speaking habits (he says “lest” a lot) and his Jobs-esque wardrobe, and it took me back to my time at Harvard. When I took it in 2009, CS50 was more cult than ordinary Harvard course, garnering a class size approaching 700, meaning nearly half of Harvard undergrads take it. It held enormous events like an overnight hackathon and a project exhibition fair, replete with corporate sponsors such as Google, Facebook, and Dropbox. CS50 even has its own branding and swag! I still wear my “I took CS50” t-shirt and CS50 hoodie; in fact, a Harvard alum wearing a crimson H hat commented on my CS50 shirt in Trader Joe’s the other day.
At home, I type in a strange custom keyboard layout that’s almost certainly unique (see above). The alphanumeric layout is Dvorak, but I’ve remapped most of the symbols and modifiers. Notably, CapsLock is Backspace, Backspace is Tab, Tab is Delete, and Delete was CapsLock. Punctuation is moved so ? and ! are with . and ,. Many changes are optimized for coding, such as moving brackets, braces, and the logical operands & and | to more accessible spots. I designed the layout in 2011 (and stopped coding in 2013, lol), but since then I’ve typed on it from memory on a normal Qwerty keyboard. I just finally bought a custom-printed keyboard to reflect my own layout, but not after strongly considering fully switching back to Qwerty. Let’s review the results of my protracted keyboard design experiment.
For his birthday celebration, my college roommate requested that we congregate on Zoom for a PowerPoint party and share 5-minute presentations on any topic. Concurrently, I was comparing many popular chocolate chip cookie recipes to find out what aspects these bakers all consider important. Thus, I took the opportunity to combine the projects, scripting a dense half-silly rapid-fire 38-slide 5-minute presentation on cookie baking science. Here, I’ve reformatted that presentation’s tables and script into this blog post.
If interested in the recipe I currently follow, scroll to the end.
Hainanese chicken rice, especially popular in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, is an elegant meal centered around a poached chicken and spreading its flavor to an accompanying rice and dipping sauces. It’s one of those elementally simple dishes where the quality is generated from finesse and technique.
I surveyed a collection of online recipes by Tasty, Food52, Steamy Kitchen, and Nyonya Cooking and smashed their common elements together into a sort of statistical average recipe.
Read those blogs for insight into why the recipe works. Really the only addition I can contribute is that a typical American supermarket chicken, weighing 5.5 pounds and bred for enormous breasts, is prone to poaching unevenly. Take care to find a suitable chicken and good ginger. Continue reading Hainanese Chicken Rice→
