Lessons Learned in 2025: Insights Worth Sharing

Hope everyone’s year has been off to a wonderful start! I just got back from my honeymoon in New Zealand, so I’m still adjusting to the toilet spiraling clockwise. It’s a little late, but I’d like to start the new year by looking back at ten things I bumped into in 2025 that felt worth sharing.

My wife’s favorite wedding photo!

1) Administrative legibility: When making things measurable makes them worse

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State gave me a vocabulary for something I’ve watched all over medicine and governance: the urge to make reality legible to a central authority. Scott’s book opens with a parable on German scientific forestry. Old-growth forests were hewn down and replanted in monoculture straight rows, so yields could be counted and predicted. The result was a landscape that looked impressively orderly from above (both literally and metaphorically). Yet, these forests proved less resilient over time, because many of the forest’s positive externalities arose from the messy, hard-to-measure parts: biodiversity, soil dynamics, edge ecologies, loss of ancient mycelium, and local uses that didn’t fit neatly in a ledger.

Forest in Germany facing dieback.

In our eye ER, an example of legibility is the time to “first provider“. While speed matters, when the time it takes to first see a doctor becomes the quality metric of choice, overall patient care can become less efficient. Triages get less comprehensive, physicians suffer from constant interruption, and unnecessary tests can get ordered. Press Ganey scores (a 1-5 scale of patient satisfaction) are even worse when treating patient experience as a proxy for care quality. This is despite the fact that satisfaction can be driven by wait time (which depends on the number of other patients who are having an emergency), the quality of the vending machines, and the perception of care quality (e.g. prescribing antibiotics “just-in-case” for a viral problem). Again, while patient satisfaction matters, Press Ganey scores correlate weakly with objective quality metrics. One large national cohort study has even found that patients in the highest satisfaction quartile had higher total spending and higher mortality (adjusted HR ~1.26).

Legibility isn’t necessarily evil. However, optimizing for easy-to-quantify metrics can be expensive; the system pays in brittleness, perverse incentives, and a slow forgetting of what the numbers don’t see.

2) Dunbar’s number and the missing middle of modern life

Dunbar’s number is a theorized upper limit on the number of people with whom a person can sustain a stable relationship, hypothesized to be between 100-250. This constraint may be a biologic limitation imposed by neocortex size. What really stuck with me this year was Terence Tao‘s observation that modern life seems to revolve around either atomized individuals or huge organizations that we can’t steer. Organizations that operate at or below Dunbar’s number, the “human-scale” middle, are becoming squeezed out to the detriment of social well-being.

This naturally reminded me of Putnam’s Bowling Alone, in which he posited that social capital has been declining in the United States since the 1960s. This mirrors the decline in “third places,” physical spaces for social interactions outside home and work where the middle used to grow. Social media offers a seductive substitute by massifying sociality: you can be “around” thousands of people, maintain weak ties longer, and even feel intimacy through parasocial relationships. Parasociality can provide warmth without reciprocity, and feeds can mimic community without the friction that produces trust. Meanwhile, large organizations can be so gargantuan that individuals feel both less agency and less responsibility for collective decisions, both of which are psychologically jarring.

To me, the missing middle of small groups beneath Dunbar’s number still seems like where belonging, accountability, and purpose actually live.

3) Finite vs. infinite games: stop trying to “win” what can’t be won

James Carse’s distinction between Finite and Infinite Games is wonderfully clarifying:

  • Finite games have fixed rules and a winner (sports, career ladders, matching into the “most prestigious” residency).
  • Infinite games are played to keep playing (learning, relationships, living a meaningful life).

A lot of modern misery comes from applying finite-game logic to infinite-game arenas. I grew up reflexively treating everything like a finite game: more accolades, better scores, bigger milestones. But the logic of finite games is counterproductive for infinite games. Whether it be friendships, marriage, or finding meaning, “winning” breaks down when one hoards trophies instead of building something together worth inhabiting. The shift I’m trying to make is simple: keep ambition, but aim it at creating possibilities (deeper connection, more curiosity, more generosity, better work) rather than chasing arbitrary finish lines.

4) Externalizing information: writing as thinking’s exoskeleton

After reading Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, I had to try a Zettelkasten-style system (creating a web of interconnected ideas – I used Obsidian). After a month of excitement, I ran headfirst into the real constraint: high-quality note-taking was far too time-consuming to be practical. Although I didn’t keep up, the attempt reinforced that writing isn’t just storage, but also a cognitive prosthesis.

My poorly interconnected Zettelkasten. I did find it was helpful for more easily finding citations in conjunction with Zotero.

Externalizing thoughts in writing does several useful things:

  1. It improves thinking. Once an idea is on the page, you can evaluate it objectively. Flawed or incomplete thinking becomes visible.
  2. It reduces mental clutter. Instead of focusing on remembering minutiae like in oral societies, our brains can be freed to digest new information.
  3. It compounds knowledge. Private thoughts die with you; public notes can become scaffolding for other minds.

The irony is that modern life has made knowledge infinitely accessible. With access to nearly every text, everywhere, all at once, attention has turned into the bottleneck. The next step isn’t more information; it’s better filtering and synthesis. LLMs are the obvious first steps. The more interesting possibility is the massive upsides of direct brain-computer interfaces (after all, my former fraternity brother and current Meta Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, has even said publicly that he wants to wait to have kids until Neuralink-like technologies exist). Although I’m unsure whether such a techno-utopian future will be exhilarating or dystopian, I’m certain that less time spent finding information will free up more time for deciding on what’s worth thinking about next.

5) Black swans and the seductive lie of the bell curve

Although self-reported data, this distribution is quite Gaussian (other than some pretty gratuitous rounding up from the 5’11” guys).

I began reading Taleb’s Black Swan at the same time I came across this Veritasium video. The core insights are essentially the same. First: many physical traits we evolved to intuit (height, shoe sizes) are well-approximated by normal (Gaussian) distributions. Second: many social and complex systems aren’t like that at all; they’re dominated by power laws (think Pareto’s 80/20 rule), where a small number of outcomes account for a huge share of the total. Examples include income, wealth, scientific citations, social-media reach, wildfire size/severity, city sizes, and so on. Third: if we apply Gaussian intuition to non-Gaussian situations, we will systematically underestimate tail risk and be surprised by “impossibly rare” events.

The practical upshot is that we must live with the tails in mind: maximize exposure to positive Black Swans (e.g., making many small but high-risk bets with lots of upside), and minimize dependence on supposedly “low-risk” paths that are actually fragile (e.g., not continuously learning in a“stable” career founded on a single skill set that could be automated).

6) The Overton window: politics lags public opinion (and so can markets)

The Overton window is a useful lens with which to view politics. In its simplest form, it postulates that politicians tend to champion ideas that sit inside a socially acceptable band.

An example from the Mackinac Center where Joseph Overton once worked.

The nuance is that there isn’t one window, there are many overlapping ones (primary voters vs. general electorate, party elites, donors, courts, bureaucracies, media ecosystems), and the feasible set of ideas can be multidimensional rather than a single left-right line. Politicians don’t just discover the window; they also shape it through framing, agenda-setting, strategic ambiguity, and coalition-building – sometimes widening what’s discussable, sometimes narrowing it by making alternatives seem unserious or taboo. Think tanks (and movements, unions, religious groups, journalists, etc.) move public opinion less by convincing everyone of a particular position, and more by manufacturing usable ideas: language, moral frames, and research that shift the Overton window and make previously awkward positions safer to hold.

There are echoes of this idea outside of politics, but with the same caveats. Markets have palatability windows, yet those aren’t just consumer taste; they’re shaped by gatekeepers (platforms, distributors), incentives (pricing, risk), and narrative (what feels authentic or trendy). For example, fusion cuisine is akin to a chef trying to craft a commercially successful menu within the window of acceptable options to diners of a local demographic (I think of all the myriad adaptations of Chinese food to local tastes). There’s an ethical analogue too: the set of beings and harms we treat as morally acceptable tends to expand in fits and starts. “Shrimp welfare” sounds like a punchline outside niche circles; however, Effective Altruists are making serious arguments to try to make it part of mainstream moral consideration.

The counterpoint is that leaders sometimes move ahead of public comfort, especially when they can act through institutions insulated from immediate electoral backlash (executive orders, courts, military policy). Truman’s Executive Order 9981 (1948) desegregating the U.S. armed forces is a good example: morally right and supported by internal surveys, yet outside the political mainstream for the time.

Credit: Gallup

7) The Ovsiankina effect: why unfinished tasks haunt you (and how marketers weaponize it)

I spent an embarrassing amount of time in 2025 online shopping for decorations for the wedding. I was also treated to tons of spam along the lines of, “Save 15%—you’re all set to finish booking…,” for services I had definitely not started booking. These marketers were partially leveraging an effect elucidated in the 1920s by Maria Ovsiankina. Briefly, she found that people have a tendency to resume unfinished tasks, even in the absence of external rewards.

Although helpful for task completion, unfulfilled goals can cause cognitive interference. This is not the same as the related concept, the Zeigarnik effect, which postulates that unfinished tasks are more cognitively accessible than finished ones. In his original study, Zeigarnik found that both children and adults remembered interrupted tasks more readily than completed tasks, even when more time was spent on the completed tasks. Although often cited in productivity lore, the Zeigarnik effect looks highly context-dependent, and recent meta-analytic work suggests it’s not a universal law of memory.

Obviously, cognitive offloading (e.g., making to-do lists) is a great way of keeping track of unfinished tasks. However, to further reduce the cognitive interference from unfulfilled goals, plan-making can decrease intrusive thoughts and spillover into unrelated tasks. In other words, making a plan can satisfy the urge to complete unfulfilled tasks. This is especially salient if you are prone to inattention or rumination: open loops may hijack working memory more aggressively, or fragment attention differently, in people with these traits. I’ve tried to apply this to everyday life. On my to-do lists, I not only write down what needs to be done, but also explicitly write down the next needed action. By treating capture as closure (i.e., writing things down as a substitute for inefficient task-switching), I’ve tried to improve my focus on the task at hand.

8) Runway numbers: hidden airport detail

While watching planes land in YTZ (Billy Bishop Airport in Toronto) from the comfort of CN Tower earlier this year, my wife wondered aloud about the numbers on the runway. That led us to a delightful CGPGrey video (I’d highly recommend this channel)!

Runway numbers are not arbitrary labels, but a code based on magnetic direction. Each runway is numbered according to its magnetic heading, rounded to the nearest ten degrees, with the final digit dropped. For example, my home airport, PHL has a runway pointing roughly to a magnetic azimuth of 268° is labeled Runway 27 (west, from the perspective of a plane approaching the runway). Its opposite end, 180° away at 88°, points east as Runway 09. To distinguish between parallel runways, airports add the suffixes L, C, or R (for Left, Center, or Right) from the perspective of an approaching pilot.

Credit: Orion 8 – Wikimedia

The keen observer will note that the Earth’s magnetic north is not static. The slow but steady drift of the magnetic north pole means runways’ magnetic headings gradually change over time. When magnetic drift changes the rounded designation, airports repaint the numbers. As airports at high latitudes are most impacted by the drift of the magnetic pole, Canadians have advocated for switching to true north.

9) Abbe number: color fringing quantified

As an ophthalmologist, I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t gotten new glasses in over 5 years. I finally got a new pair this year and opted for shatterproof polycarbonate lenses. Although I love my new prescription, I was initially quite bothered by little rainbows in my peripheral vision. That led me to read about the Abbe number (V-number), a measure of chromatic aberration. In short, a higher Abbe number = less dispersion = less color fringing.

Credit: Andreas, Wikimedia

More formally, the Abbe number, Vd, is defined as:

Vd=nd−1nF−nCV_d = \frac{n_d – 1}{n_F – n_C}

where nC ,nd, and nF are the indices of refraction at 656.3 nm (deep red), 587.56 (yellow-orange), and 486.1 nm (cyan-blue). For the human visual system, Abbe numbers of less than 40 are clinically noticeable. Polycarbonate has an Abbe number of approximately 30, hence the rainbows. The Abbe number of the natural crystalline lens is approximately 47 and corresponds to almost 1.38D between 450-700 nm. Thankfully, the eye has multiple ways to minimize the impact of chromatic aberration, including macular pigmentation and the distribution of certain types of cones in the fovea as compared to the periphery to correct for blue light being bent more. Functionally, when the eye focuses on mid-spectral wavelengths, most light remains less than 0.25D out of focus, with wavelengths at the extremes of the visible spectrum having lower luminosity.

The Abbe number is an additional parameter to consider when evaluating intraocular lenses (IOLs). Most IOLs have a lower Abbe number than the natural crystalline lens (e.g. Clareon’s is 37). Among commonly used IOLs, only the Tecnis platform has a higher Abbe number (55) (I have no affiliation with J&J). However, the clinical impact of this parameter has been debated, with mixed evidence on the contribution of chromatic aberration to contrast sensitivity.

10) Weddings: Does size matter?

I feel absurdly lucky to have married the love of my life this past August. Wedding planning, however, was occasionally… onerous. After a few hours gluing popsicle sticks to paper fans and burning enough candles for an 1890s séance (in an attempt to keep costs down for my father-in-law), I couldn’t help wondering whether all the prep work was worth it. (Spoiler: yes.)

One crude proxy for “wedding success” is the probability of divorce. This sent me down a rabbit hole on the association between divorce risk and the size/ cost of a wedding. The evidence here is correlational, not causal. However, a frequently cited U.S. study by economists Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon surveyed 3,000+ ever-married respondents and found a few interesting patterns (free link here):

  • Higher wedding spending was associated with a higher divorce rate. (HR 3.17 for couples spending > $20k vs. couples spending < $1k)
  • Lower wedding attendance was associated with a higher divorce rate (HR 12.5 for couples only with no guests vs. >200 guests)
  • Other factors that predicted a lower divorce risk: high household income, attending religious services, having a child with one’s partner, going on a honeymoon. Higher divorce risk was associated with a difference in age, a difference in education, and reporting that a partner’s looks were important in the decision to marry.

Of course, these findings probably reflect the wedding as a signal of underlying conditions. Expensive weddings can translate to medium-term financial strain, a situation not helped by rising wedding costs (even r/weddingsunder10k has adjusted the acceptable budget to $20k). Smaller weddings can proxy for constrained resources or limited social support. That being said, while the wedding itself isn’t a magic spell, I can safely say our wedding day was the most magical day of my life.

There’s a lot more to dig into from this paper! I’d highly recommend a close look at Table 3 or this more readable breakdown of other key findings from the paper from the Atlantic.

On that note, wishing everyone a happy 2026! If you’re curious, my 2025 reading and travel lists are below – because I’m incapable of not keeping lists…

What I read in 2025

  • How the World Ran Out of Everything — Peter Goodman
  • Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott
  • White Trash — Nancy Isenberg
  • A History of Medicine in Twelve Objects — Carol Cooper
  • The Wide Wide Sea — Hampton Sides
  • Quality of Vision: Essential Optics for the Cataract and Refractive Surgeon — Jack Holladay
  • Cataract Surgery for Greenhorns — Thomas Oetting
  • Into the Great Wide Ocean — Sonke Johnsen
  • The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli
  • The Country of the Blind — Andrew Leland
  • My Family and Other Animals — Gerald Durrell
  • The Silk Roads — Peter Frankopan
  • Have You Eaten Yet? — Cheuk Kwan
  • What the Chicken Knows — Sy Montgomery
  • Box Office Poison — Tim Robey
  • Grizzly Confidential — Kevin Grange
  • More Than Just a Game — Christopher Bjork & William Hoynes
  • Millions of Cats — Wanda Gág
  • Question 7 — Richard Flanagan
  • The MANIAC — Benjamín Labatut
  • The Devil’s Element — Dan Egan
  • How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
  • Everything Is Tuberculosis — John Green
  • Atlas of the Invisible — James Cheshire & Oliver Uberti
  • Cornea — Christopher Rapuano
  • Persepolis — Marjane Satrapi
  • When the Air Hits Your Brain — Frank T. Vertosick Jr.
  • The Genius of Birds — Jennifer Ackerman
  • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — Yuval Noah Harari
  • Bossypants — Tina Fey
  • The Let Them Theory — Mel Robbins
  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma — Michael Pollan
  • The Social Construction of Reality — Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann
  • Aflame — Pico Iyer
  • Mood Machine — Liz Pelly
  • The Invention of Nature — Andrea Wulf
  • Puerto Rico: A National History — Jorell Meléndez—Badillo
  • 1491 — Charles C. Mann
  • Slither — Stephen S. Hall
  • The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs — Steve Brusatte
  • The Little Book of Hygge — Meik Wiking
  • The Gift — Lewis Hyde
  • Finite and Infinite Games — James P. Carse
  • The CIA Book Club — Charlie English
  • Being You — Anil Seth
  • The Tyranny of Experts — William Easterly
  • The Serviceberry — Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Abundance — Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
  • The Landscape of History — John Lewis Gaddis
  • The Cambridge Illustrated History of China — Patricia Buckley Ebrey
  • Orbital — Samantha Harvey
  • Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
  • All Consuming — Ruby Tandoh
  • Careless People — Sarah Churchwell
  • The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Art Is Life — Jerry Saltz
  • A Marriage at Sea — Sophie Elmhirst

Where I went in 2025

New Zealand has obviously been forgotten here. I’m joining a proud tradition that includes the board game Risk and the Pyongyang International Airport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_maps

My favorite places to visit were Barcelona (got engaged in the Gothic Quarter) and Nashville (spending Super Bowl Sunday at Robert’s Western World on Lower Broadway + seeing Old Crow Medicine Show playing “Wagon Wheel” at the Grand Ole Opry).

U.S.: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia
International: Taiwan (Taipei, Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Alishan), Canada (Toronto, Whistler), Spain (Barcelona), Czechia (Prague), Greece (Athens), Turkey (Istanbul), UAE (Dubai), New Zealand

Sources

Most sources should already be linked.

  • Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
  • Carse, James P. (1987). Finite and Infinite Games. New York: Ballantine Books.
  • https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115259943398316677
  • Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster.
  • Granovetter, M. (1973) The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360-1380.
  • Ahrens, S. (2022) How to Take Smart Notes. Columbia University Press.
  • Taleb, N. N. (2008). The Black Swan. Penguin Books.
  • Kwan, C. (2022). Have You Eaten Yet? Simon and Schuster.
  • https://catalog.archives.gov/id/278080420 (NAID: 278080420)
  • Łabuz G, Khoramnia R, Yan W, et al. Characterizing glare effects associated with diffractive optics in presbyopia-correcting intraocular lenses. J Cataract Refract Surg. 2024;50(4):413-419.
  • Negishi K, Ohnuma K, Hirayama N, Noda T; Policy-Based Medical Services Network Study Group for Intraocular Lens and Refractive Surgery. Effect of chromatic aberration on contrast sensitivity in pseudophakic eyes. Arch Ophthalmol. 2001;119(8):1154-1158.
  • Francis-Tan, A., & Mialon, H. M. (2015). “A Diamond Is Forever” and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration. Economic Inquiry, 53(4), 1919-1930. 

Which organization did Pearl S. Buck, James Michener, and Oscar Hammerstein found?

Answer: Welcome Home, an adoption agency

I’ve been a little remiss about posting recently, with a graveyard of half-finished posts on over-ambitious topics such as migration to Ancient Hawaii and uranium-lead dating. To get back into the swing of writing, I plan on changing direction to focus on more recent adventures and reading.

Today, I had the chance to visit Doylestown, a quaint town of 8300 people that is about 25 miles north of Center City Philadelphia. While savoring a delicious mushroom pizza from local chain Jules Thin Crust, I discovered that Doylestown’s surprising roster of famous residents includes Stan and Jan Berenstain, Pearl Buck1, Margaret Mead, Stephen Sondheim, Oscar Hammerstein, and James Michener.

One unexpected connection between Buck, Michener, and Hammerstein was their collaboration in founding Welcome House in 1949, America’s first interracial, international adoption agency. This organization’s original intent was to help place Amerasian children into American homes.2 Welcome House facilitated over 7,000 adoptions before closing in 2014 due to changing regulations about adopting international children.

A much more well-known collaboration between James Michener and Oscar Hammerstein is South Pacific. This musical was loosely based on Tales of the South Pacific, a collection of stories about the Pacific Theater of World War II by Michener. As my girlfriend knows from my random humming, South Pacific also features one of my favorite love songs: “Some Enchanted Evening.”

“Some enchanted evening/ When you find your true love,…/Across a crowded room,/ Then fly to her side, / And make her your own / For all through your life you / May dream all alone. / Once you have found her, /Never let her go.”

By the original cast members.

Pure infatuation spun over lush orchestration, this song has been covered in a #1 hit by Perry Como, by Frank Sinatra, and in an Olivier-winning performance from Philip Quast.3

James Michener had a relatively atypical career path. After growing up in Doylestown, he attended college at Swarthmore, and then became an English teacher (including a stint as a guest lecturer at Harvard). Despite his Quaker upbringing, he enlisted in the US Navy during World War II and was assigned as a naval historian in the South Pacific. His wartime sketches eventually evolved into the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Tales of the South Pacific. Despite publishing his first book at 40, he went on to write dozens of fiction and non-fiction works, which have collectively sold over 75 million copies. 4 He would use his royalties to endow various Philadelphia area organizations including the Michener Museum.

The museum, housed in a converted prison, primarily showcases leading Pennsylvania Impressionist artists, as well as the furniture of woodworker (and fellow MIT alumni) George Nakashima and some Michener memorabilia. Some of my favorite works included a Louis Bosa painting depicting the dismantling of the New York “El”, a beautiful table, and the whimsical sculpture by Wharton Esherick.

However, the most interesting exhibits focused on the sculptors Anthony Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French. I will cover them further in my next post!

For now, I will leave us with this poignant portrayal of Abraham Lincoln by Saint-Gaudens. Something about this statue perfectly captures the weight of the personal tragedy and public responsibility thrust upon Lincoln, a harried man perpetually frozen in that liminal space between statically symbolizing past glory and inspiring us forward to greater heights.5

References

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doylestown,_Pennsylvania
  2. https://pearlsbuck.org/about/welcome-house-search-information/
  3. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/02/rodgers-hammerstein-michener-south-pacific

Footnotes

  1. Doylestown is also the capital of Bucks County. The county was named by William Penn for Buckingham County in England. Pearl S. Buck only coincidentally settled here; her husband, John Lossing Buck, was from New York. ↩︎
  2. I had never heard of Ameriasian as a term before. Apparently, it was coined by Pearl S. Buck and is codified into U.S Law as “[A]n alien who was born in Korea, Kampuchea, Laos, Thailand or Vietnam after December 31, 1950 and before October 22, 1982 and was fathered by a U.S. citizen.” Time restrictions aside, Sorrow from Madama Butterfly is probably the prototypical example. ↩︎
  3. An unpopular opinion of mine from high school was that Russell Crowe’s rendition of “Stars” from the Les Miserables movie was secretly excellent. While I still have a soft spot for Crowe’s Javert today, the definitive version 100% belongs to Philip Quast, For those who can’t choose, check out this mashup! ↩︎
  4. Stories like his are a helpful reminder that it’s never too late to make a contribution. It reminds me of the fascinating chart of Atlas of the Invisible (this book is essentially a hard-cover version of r/DataIsBeautiful) that showed the average age at the creation of an artist’s most famous work was around 40 (they sampled 88 well-known artists). Most famous work is obviously extremely subjective, but nice to feel like it’s not too late for a stroke of genius! ↩︎
  5. This statue reminded me immediately of Lincoln in the Bardo, which I absolutely recommend. ↩︎

Bobby McFerrin, Yo-Yo Ma, and Sergei Rachmaninoff

It’s been quite a hiatus – who knew residency could be busy? Today, my girlfriend sent me the most interesting collaboration I’ve seen since Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party: Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma performing selections from their collaborative album Hush on The Tonight Show.

It’s jaw-dropping this was a live performance! Between Bobby McFerrin’s perfect pitch while arpeggiating and Yo-Yo Ma’s dulcet handling of the melody, their version of “Ave Maria” is one of my all-time favorites. Meanwhile, I’m certain Two-Set Violin would be taken aback by McFerrin’s vocal agility in “Flight of the Bumblebee.” I ended up listening to the whole album as an energizing backdrop to pre-rounding.

This performance totally upended my view of Bobby McFerrin, who I previously only knew for the chart-topping “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Every time I heard that song on the radio, I found the faux Jamaican accent and vapid lyrics incredibly grating. After all “put a smile on your face/don’t bring everybody down like this,” is probably some of the least useful advice one can provide to somebody already struggling. Much to my amusement, McFerrin once said his accent in the song was actually “heavily influenced by Juan’s Mexican Restaurant, which was just around the corner from the studio.”

However, after more listening, turns out McFerrin is a wizard. Not only does he have perfect pitch, but also has also mastered overtone singing, vocal percussion, and using the audience as an instrument. As Vox might describe – for McFerrin, the human voice is the ultimate instrument. Even “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was more impressive than first meets the ear. The song was the first (and only) a capella song to ever hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, with McFerrin producing all the sounds heard on the entire track.

A lovely demonstration of leveraging the audience’s musical intuition. For a different take on the audience-choir from Jacob Collier, watch here.

My favorite song on Hush was probably Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise. Having played it on violin as a child, I’ve always been quite partial to this piece. McFerrin relies on no vocal tricks – just the melody beautifully rendered – and the interplay between voice and cello is absolutely seamless. For some other gorgeous renditions, try this theremin version by Gregoire LeBlanc, cello version by Rostropovich (arranged by Heifetz), or original version performed by Kiri Te Kanawa.

Side Note: There was an interesting comment I saw from the Pentatonic Scale video that pointed out that “This is made more amazing after realizing he’s moving left to right in the traditional low to high pitches in the audience perspective, but contrary to his own. In other words, as he moves to HIS left, the “notes” raise in pitch, but this is to the right in the audience perspective, so he’s switching it in his own mind.” As someone that has played a little piano, my intuition agrees that left to right generally corresponds to moving from lower to higher pitches. However, I’m unsure if this is a generally agreed-upon correspondence (some kind of widely-used orientational metaphor a la Lakoff) or if it’s more a narrowly culturally bound construction.

It’s all Greek to me…

Today, I read E. D. A. Morshead’s translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Although my copy is a Harvard Classics from 1982, the first printing was in 1902, and the translation itself dates from the 1880s (as per this mostly positive review in The Saturday Review). Still, I was surprised by the number of words I had to look up. And it’s not just my poor vocabulary at work, Wikipedia corroborates that Morshead’s “language is often archaic.”After my second time having to log into the OED just to find a definition, I decided to compile a list of the more obscure words (found at the end of the post).

I found the word choice often got in the way of actually enjoying the play from both dramatic and literary standpoints. For example, the only line I knew from the play was RFK’s misquote of Edith Hamilton’s translation – delivered during an impromptu speech in Indianapolis in the wake of MLK’s assassination.

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Robert F. Kennedy

The original translation was actually “Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” In this context as a noun, despite means “contempt, malice, or spite.” Remarkably close though- and as one Reddit comment put it: “who the hell has Aeschylus in their back pocket?” Morshead’s translation in verse is a little less evocative, with “A boon, I wot…” just sounding silly.

In visions of the night, like dropping rain,

Descend the many memories of pain

Before the spirit’s sight: through tears and dole

comes wisdom o’er the unwilling soul –

A boon, I wot of all Divinity,

that holds its sacred throne in strength, above the sky!

  1. bale-fire – bonfire
  2. soothliest – truthfully. Even sooth as a noun “was in common use down to the first half of the 17th cent.; after this apparently obsolete (except perhaps in sense 4c) until revived as a literary archaism, chiefly by Scott and contemporary writers.”
  3. doughty – courageous, determined, bold, brave
  4. oarage – “they wheel with the oarage of their wings” – movement of limbs [or wings] etc. in a manner resembling that of oars
  5. eyas – a young hawk taken from the nest for the purpose of training, or whose training is incomplete
  6. rapine – seizing the property of others
  7. spilth – spilled
  8. unmeet – unfit
  9. twy-coloured – this one gave me trouble. The “twy-” parasynthetic combination with a noun + ED is a less popular variant of the “twi-” combination; both of these mean “having two.”
  10. minished – diminished
  11. wot – know
  12. refluent – flowing back or flowing again
  13. welter – confusion, upheaval, turmoil
  14. recreant – a person who has been defeated… (hence) cowardly, faint-hearted, craven, afraid
  15. well-a-day – alas! (as an interjection)
  16. fore-sorrow – As in “foreknowledge is fore-sorrow.” Definitely a neologism, even the OED doesn’t have an entry for fore-sorrow.
  17. stripling – a young man
  18. trammel – a long narrow fishing net
  19. wight – epithet applied to supernatural beings. (I knew this word, but once, unfortunately, confused it with “waif” in conversation).
  20. pinion – wings of a bird in flight, terminal segment of a bird’s wing that bears the primary flight feathers
  21. meed – reward for labor or service
  22. guerdon – reward
  23. horrent – “A curse that clung to our sodden garb/ and hair as horrent as a wild beast’s fell.” In this sense, horrent means bristling (as in standing up as bristles).
  24. fell – Covering of hair/wool.
  25. leal – loyal, honest, true
  26. coppice – shrubbed area
  27. fulsome – excessively complimentary
  28. obtrude – “How nor a fulsome praise obtrude, nor stint the meed of gratitude?” – become noticeable in an unpleasant way
  29. trace-horse – “A trusty trace-horse bound upon my car…” A horse which draws in traces, as distinct from a shaft-horse. A trace is the pair of ropes by which the collar of a draught-animal is connected with the splinter-bar or swingletree. A swingletree is a crossbar used to balance the pull of the horse.
  30. haply – maybe, perhaps
  31. gauds – “such footclothes and all gauds aside…” In this sense probably meaning a piece of finery or gewgaw. It can also mean a trick or prank, as well as an ornamental bead placed between the ‘aves’ in a rosary.
  32. fain – “I fain would fare unvexed by fear.” Wish, desire.
  33. appanage – the provision made for the maintenance of younger children of royalty
  34. lustral – pertaining to purificatory sacrifice
  35. hies – hastens
  36. rede – advice or counsel
  37. plash – sound produced by liquid striking something, splash
  38. plight – “I plighted troth, then foiled the god.” To pledge solemnly, to be engaged to be married.
  39. glozes – makes excuses for
  40. charnel – associated with death. As part of the phrase “charnel house” – a vault where corpses are piled or a place associated with violent death
  41. nard – spikenard, a costly aromatic ointment
  42. laver – “[The body of Agamemnon lies, muffled in a long robe, within a silver-sided laver]”. A basin or container used for washing oneself
  43. reck – pay heed to something
  44. requital- something given in return or compensation
  45. aver – state or assert
  46. lorn – lonely, abandoned, forlorn
  47. caparisoned – a horse decked out in rich decorative coverings
  48. losel – worthless person
  49. quittance – release or discharge from debt or obligation
  50. exeunt – stage direction in a printed play to indicate a group of characters leave the stage

And finally, an apt summary of the whole sordid tale of the House of Atreus…

Lo! sin by sin and sorrow dogg’d by sorrow –

And who the end can know?

The slayer of today shall die tomorrow –

The wage of wrong is woe

References

  1. Eliot, Charles & Morshead, E. D. A. (1982). The Harvard Classics: Nine Greek Dramas. Grolier Enterprises Corp.
  2. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858016626214&view=1up&seq=140
  3. http://morec.com/rfk.htm
  4. https://www.oed.com/

Greek surnames: suffixes and places of origin

During a recent visit to Crete, a local student told me that last name suffixes in Greek often reflected a person’s ancestral origin. For example, the diminutive “-akis” (-άκης) was common for Cretans, the patronymic “-opoulos” (-όπουλος) for those from the Peloponnese, “-as” (-ᾶς) from Epirus and Macedonia, and the patronymic “-oglou” (-όγλου) for those originally from Anatolia.*

Distribution of the Mitsotakis surname, using a website that visualizes the frequency of phone number registrations with given surnames. Outside of Athens (the big red cluster in Attica), the surname is relatively common in Crete.

For some specific examples:

  1. The current prime minister of Greece (as of May 2022), Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was born in Athens. However, his father (and former PM), Konstantinos Mitsotakis, was born in Chania, Crete.
  2. The former PM, Alexis Tsipras, was also born in Athens; however, his father hailed from Epirus.
  3. The dictator and Nazi collaborator, Georgios Papadopoulos, was born in a small village in the Peloponnese.
  4. Nikitaras Stamatelopoulos, a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, was similarly born in the Peloponnese. Even today, the last name Stamatelopoulos is most commonly found in the Peloponnese.
Distribution of the Stamatelopoulos surname, as gleaned from phone number registrations. Note the numerous clusters across the Peloponnese.

However, the correspondence between surname and place is far from perfect, even long before today’s globalized and hypermobile world. Before the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, some 2 million Greeks lived in modern-day Turkey. During the aftermath of the war, Greek and Turkey agreed to a “compulsory exchange” of populations, in which over a million surviving Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor and almost half a million Muslims from Greece were forcibly denaturalized and moved. The map below captures the most common surnames of Greek Orthodox refugees from this exchange. It clearly shows that Papadopoulos (yellow) was a very common name throughout the Greek-speaking world, far beyond what the “-opoulos” (Peloponnese) would suggest. However, were still a fair number of last names more typical of Asia Minor, such as Panagiotoglou, Terezoglou, and Papazoglou.

Map of the most common surnames by region of refugees from the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923. Yellow = Papadopoulos, Red = Ioannidis, Orange = Panagiotoglou, Pink= Terzoglou, Purple = Kypraios, Grey = Hartomantzoglou, Green = Karagiannis, Brown = Papazoglou, Blue = Kazakis. Credit: Alex Sakalis

Although some descendants of the population exchange have kept these more “Turkish” surnames, many others have opted to Hellenise their surnames using the Ancient Greek patronymic “-ides”. For those displaced from Greece to Turkey, even fewer traces remain of ancestral surname suffixes. The Surname Law of 1934 required all Turkish citizens to adopt a Turkish surname. Thus, those with Greek-sounding surnames had to change to more Turkish suffixes such as “-zade”, “oglu”, or “gil.”

*patronymic means a “name derived from that of a father or paternal ancestor, usually by the addition of a suffix or prefix meaning ‘son'”. Familiar examples include Fitzgerald (Fitz [Norman] = fils [modern French] = son of Gerald), MacDonald (son of Donald), and Peterson.

References

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_name#Common_suffixes
  2. https://apps.vrisko.gr/apo-pou-krataei-i-skoufia-sou/
  3. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kyriakos-Mitsotakis
  4. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konstantinos-Mitsotakis
  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Tsipras
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_Papadopoulos
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikitaras
  8. https://twitter.com/alexsakalis/status/1327557843160076288
  9. https://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2017-04-04-why-do-some-greek-surnames-end-with-o%C4%9Flu-which-means-son-of-in-turkish/
  10. https://www.dailysabah.com/feature/2015/06/22/the-surname-law-a-profound-change-in-turkish-history
  11. https://www.britannica.com/topic/patronymic

What do CODA and Bachianas Brasileiras have in common?

Short Answer: Both are related to musicians with the surname of Villalobos. Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) is a music teacher in the Best Picture nominee CODA and Heitor Villa-Lobos composed the Bachianas Brasileiras.

Bernardo Villalobos
Heitor Villa-Lobos

Sorry for the long hiatus, I’ve matched at Wills Eye Hospital, eaten lots of fantastic BBQ in Texas, and taken up rock climbing in the interim.

I heard a segment on The Intelligence a few days ago about Brazilian modernism that was highly related to my most recent blog post about Tarsilo do Amaral, Antropofagia, and modernism in Brazilian art. In brief, the podcast/article traces the course of Brazilian modernism in the century since the Modern Art Week (an arts festival to Brazilians “as important as the…Armory Show”) – discussing the Antropofagia movement, the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, and the evolution of bossa nova. Of greatest interest to this post, it notes that Heitor Villa-Lobos presented some of his works at the Modern Art Week as well.

As a young man, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) rebelled against his mother’s desire for him to become a doctor. He instead become a “musical vagabond” that played guitar and cello to support himself while traveling around Brazil. During this period, he absorbed Brazilian folk music, especially the Afro-Brazilian music of the country’s north. After his travels, he enrolled in the National Institute of Music in Rio de Janeiro where he seriously studied classical stalwarts such as Bach, Wagner, and Puccini. Among an extraordinarily prolific output (with ~2,000 credited works), his Bachianas Brasileiras (1930-1945) are probably some of the best known. These works uniquely blended Western classical music with Brazilian folk and popular music.

I’ve heard Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 live twice in my life – once with Nicole Cabell and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2014- and the other time at a concert with a Stanford professor that refused to extend my funding for a research project. In any case, it’s quite sublime. For a recording helmed by Villa-Lobos himself:

CODA (child of deaf adults) is a coming-of-age comedy-drama directed by Sian Heder that is a remake of the 2014 French film La Famille Belier. Ruby (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of her family, struggles to balance her passion for singing with her responsibilities to her family’s fishing business. The cast is rounded out by her inspirational music teacher Mr. Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) and family (Troy Kotusr, Daniel Durant, and Marlee Matlin). It’s up for three Oscars (including Best Picture) in 2022. I would definitely recommend streaming on Apple TV or seeing it in theaters (for free!). You’ll never hear Judy Collins’ “Both Sides Now” the same after watching…

From CODA. Ruby’s audition for Berklee (actually filmed in Rockport, not Berklee).

Not totally related, but I also watched Soderbergh’s Kimi the other day in which Billie Eilish’s ‘Oxytocin’ was featured multiple times. Since then, another song from Happier Than Ever, Billie Bossa Nova has been totally stuck in my head. For some real bossa nova, I had a radio show from a few years ago also attempting to explore the evolution of Brazilian music here:

Track listings for the show can also be found on the website of WMBR 88.1.

References

  1. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2022/02/12/how-the-cannibal-manifesto-changed-brazil
  2. https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/chapters/chapter-5/modern-art-week-and-the-rise-of-brazilian-modernism/
  3. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heitor-Villa-Lobos

How are the Donner Party and Tarsila do Amaral related?

Short answer: Cannibalism. The Donner Party was a group of pioneers who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains and had to resort to cannibalism; Tarsila do Amaral was a Brazilian modernist painter instrumental in the formation of the aesthetic movement Antropofagia (cannibalism).

Abaporu by Tarsila do Amaral. Source: MALBA

One of the other residency applicants during my interview today was from Brazil. Separately, my friend sent me the most recent episode of “Great Art Explained” about Dali’s Persistence of Memory. Somehow these two things together reminded me of the magnificent work of Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973).

Tarsila was the scion of coffee plantation owners in São Paulo and studied art in Brazil before leaving for Paris. There she studied with noted Cubists such as Fernand Leger and Andre Lhote- which helped inform her future work. In 1928, she painted Abaporu (oil painting on canvas) as a birthday present for her husband, the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade. In the Tupi language (an language formerly spoken by the aboriginal peoples of South and Southeast Brazil), abapor’u means “the man who eats man” from aba (man), poro (people) and u (eat). The painting itself was described by Tarsila as “a monstrous solitary figure, enormous feet, sitting on a green plain, the hand supporting the featherweight minuscule head. In front a cactus exploding in an absurd flower.”

Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question.

Oswald de Andrade in Manifesto Antropofago

When Oswald saw the painting, he was said to have exclaimed “That looks like a cannibal, a man of the earth.” This went on to inspire Oswald to write the Manifesto Antropofago (Anthropophagic [Cannibal] Manifesto”). The manifesto proposes that Brazil “cannibalize” European culture, ridding themselves of direct influences to create their own culture. In the short term, the ideas of the Manifesto were suppressed in the wake of the Brazilian revolution of 1930 and the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas. In the longer term, the Manifesto would help inspire figures in the Tropicalismo movement of the 1960s.

Abaporu was sold in 1999 for $1.5 million to a (gasp) Argentinian collector and sits in the MALBA in Buenos Aires. Today, it is valued at over $100 million. However, as Freakonomics noted in their second podcast on art this week, all value is theoretical until it comes time for auction… The most expensive Brazilian painting to actually sell at auction is Tarsila’s A caipirinha (Brazil’s national cocktail made with cahaca [sugarcane liquor], sugar, and lime). This painting was sold by court order and went for $9.25 million, beating out Alberto de Veiga Guignard’s Vaso de flores.

A Caipirinha - Tarsila do Amaral - WikiArt.org
A Caparinha by Tarsila do Amaral. Source: Wikiart

The Donner Party was a group of unfortunate Illinois pioneers that attempted to join the westward migration to California in 1846. Consisting of the families and employees of brothers George and Jacob Donner and local businessman James Reed, the party started off around 30 people strong. Their journey was unremarkable at first, reaching Independence, Missouri in May and Fort Laramie, Wyoming in July. However, their party (along with 50 unfortunate others) split off from the main group in late July, intending to head to California instead of Oregon. Following the advice of the unreliable explorer Lansford Hastings (and later Major in the Confederate States Army – they truly hired the best and the brightest), the party pushed ahead into the Hastings Cutoff. This route was 125 miles longer than the established trail and cut through inhospitable deserts. The group lost valuable time over the next few months breaking new trails, fixing wagons, and searching for dying cattle. By late September, the Donner Party was the final migrant party heading towards California. On October 31st, the group finally reached Donner Pass… and found their route blocked by snow.

10 Things You Should Know About the Donner Party - HISTORY
Hastings Cutoff. Source: History.com

The party then built makeshift cabins around a nearby lake (Donner Lake) and tried to subsist through the winter. Due to the harsh weather and inadequate food supplies, deaths soon occurred; this left the survivors to resort to cannibalism of the dead bodies. For those interested in a more detailed accounting, the Encyclopedia Britannica provides a great summary. Amazingly, the last survivor did not leave the camp until April 21, subsisting on cannibalism for weeks. Although harrowing, the misfortunes of the Donner party did nothing to slow the pace of migration to California. Today, Donner Lake is a gorgeous alternative to Lake Tahoe – I can personally attest it is a great place to boat, hike, and water-ski.

Donner Lake - Wikipedia
Donner Lake. Source

References:

  1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Donner-party
  2. https://coleccion.malba.org.ar/abaporu/
  3. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3871
  4. https://womennart.com/2017/08/16/abaporu-by-tarsila-do-amaral/
  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_language
  6. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09528829908576784
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Lake
  8. https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/tarsila-do-amaral-abaporu/

How are nine-dart finishes related to determining the composition of atoms?

Short Answer: Both are applications of the change-making problem.

Not exactly a nine-dart finish, but probably my favorite scene from Ted Lasso.

A leg (single game) of darts requires the player to score exactly 501 points, ending with either a double or the bullseye. Each shot consists of 3 darts, and each dart may at most score 60 points (triple 20). Therefore, the minimum number of darts necessary to finish a game is 9. The most traditional way to achieve this feat is by scoring a triple 20 on each of the first 6 throws, leaving 141 to score on the final three darts (known as the outshot). There are three preferred ways for performing the outshot:

  1. Triple 20, triple 19, and double 12
  2. Triple 20, triple 15, and double 18
  3. Triple 17, triple 18, and double 18

However, there are many more than 3 ways to achieve this score. As a matter of fact, Wikipedia provides a handy table showing there are 3944 ways of achieving such a finish (574 if double-in, double-out). Calculating the number of ways of achieving this score is an application of the change-making problem, itself a special case of the knapsack problem.

Ways to achieve a nine-dart finish (assuming one is not playing double-in, double-out like Ted and Rupert were).

The change-making problem seeks to find the fewest number of coins (of integer denominations) that add up to a given amount of money. This is directly analogous to finding the fewest number of darts (which are each worth integer scores) to reach 501 (the “given sum of money”). The change-making problem is a variation on the coin change problem – in which one wishes to find the possible ways of using infinite coins of prespecified denominations to make change for a specific amount of money. With a few constraints, it is easy to imagine how these problems relate to the nine-dart finish question. At first blush, it seems one could solve these problems by using as many of the largest denomination coin/dart as possible, then progressing to the next largest etc. This technique actually works for American coin denominations. However, this “greedy” algorithm does not work in general. For example, using 8 triple 20s (480), will leave a remainder of 21, which cannot be achieved with a double.

Instead, these problems may be solved in pseudo-polynomial time by using dynamic programming. Without going too much into technical details, this technique involves finding all combinations of smaller values that sum to the current threshold, then using this stored information to work up to the goal amount.

Another application of the change-making problem is in finding combinations of atoms that could comprise a mass/charge (m/z) peak in mass spectrometry (MS). In this case, the possible constituent atoms each have an integer mass/charge (denomination of coins) that we will try to sum up to an observed mass/charge peak (“given sum of money”).

Bonus questions:

  1. Who has the most televised nine-dart finishes in history?
  2. Who achieved the first televised nine-dart finish?
  3. Who plays Ted Lasso in Ted Lasso?

References

  1. Burns, Brian. Encyclopedia of Games: Rules and Strategies. Page 269.
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dart_finish
  3. https://algodaily.com/challenges/the-coin-change-problem

Answers:

  1. Phil Taylor with 11. Michael van Gerwen is in second with 7.
  2. John Lowe
  3. Jason Sudeikis

Why do humans (but not turtles) benefit from rapid chest compressions in CPR?

Short answer: Turtles have a shell, so chest compressions aren’t really possible. But it’s more interesting than that!

Medium answer: CPR in adult humans should be performed at a rate of 100-120/min. By contrast, turtles can survive at heart rates as low as 1 beat every 5-10 minutes. Human heart muscle is oxygenated by dedicated blood vessels (coronary vessels), whereas turtle heart muscle is directly oxygenated by the blood in the heart. The coronary arteries require a pressure gradient to fill, which can be achieved only by multiple compressions in a row. Therefore, the primary focus of human CPR focuses on keeping the heart perfused via compressions, whereas turtle CPR can focus more on oxygenation.

Adult_OHCA_COS_600x415
The adult out-of-hospital Chain of Survival. Source.

While reading about painted turtle physiology yesterday, I came across a line from Donald Jackson’s review: “Under [anaerobic and hypoxic] conditions, the turtle’s heart rate can be as low as 1 beat every 5–10 min.” This didn’t square at all with my understanding of human CPR, in which 30 chest compressions should be performed for every 2 rescue breaths.

The rationale behind 30 compressions is that a longer stretch of uninterrupted compressions leads to increased time of adequate blood flow (perfusion) to the heart muscle (myocardium). When spontaneous circulation stops, there is no longer a pressure gradient between arteries and veins. As chest compressions begin, this gradient begins to build up again due to resistance from arterioles. The heart relies on this pressure gradient to be perfused – during diastole (when the heart relaxes), back pressure from the arterioles allows some blood to flow backwards towards the heart. During this time, the aortic valve that connects the left ventricle to the aorta is closed, so blood will instead flow to the coronary vessels (blood vessels that supply the heart, whose entrances are at the aortic root). However, if there is no pressure gradient due to loss of spontaneous circulation (or the cessation of compressions), no blood will flow into the coronary arteries. This pressure gradient actually takes a few compressions to build up – as seen in the diagram below. There is actually a pretty substantial reserve of oxygen in the blood, so distributing that reserve is usually more important than giving more oxygen.

Figure 2 from Cunningham et al. shows that prolonged interruptions in chest compressions leads to a decrease in myocardial perfusion pressure that takes a while to build up again.

By contrast, turtle hearts are three-chambered and lack significant coronary circulation. Similar to fish hearts, turtle hearts are composed primarily of spongy myocardium that receives direct perfusion from the blood within. In addition, turtle hearts lack a complete septum between the left and the right ventricle. This contrasts with humans in which, the left and right ventricles are completely separated. Thus, turtle hearts can support both left-to-right shunts to better perfuse the body during exercise, as well as a right-to-left shunt to increase digestion and gastric acid secretion.

Turtle circulation showing left-to-right shunt (L) and normal admixture of blood during diastole (R). The left image emphasizes the role of the left-to-right shunt during exercise, while the right image demonstrates perfusion of the right ventricle by direct admixture of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. Source

Therefore, “turtle CPR” focuses more on oxygenation. For those that ever have to resuscitate turtles, some pearls are:

  1. Turtle CPR is all about the airway. Small pieces of food can get stuck resulting in choking. In addition, turtles can indeed inhale water and drown – even in shallow water! This is despite the fact that turtles can oxygenate in water via cloacal (combined GI/GU tract) breathing…
  2. Get the turtle out of water
  3. Elevate the hind end of the turtle (to let gravity get rid of water)
  4. Straighten, then bend the front legs of the turtle. This may help squeeze out some more water from the lungs.
  5. Take the turtle to a vet afterwards! They will give oxygen (and usually antibiotics)

Also, everyone can benefit from a basic understanding of how to perform CPR. Dr. Glaucomflecken makes an excellent pitch here. And for those short on time to formally learn – remember to push hard and fast on the center of the chest (100-120/min, about the speed of Stayin’ Alive). Rescue breaths do not lead to better survival if you are not EMS trained. If you don’t believe that- even Walter White says so (don’t follow his example though -instead lock your elbows, use your core, and don’t hang out with psychotic drug lords)!

References

  1. https://cpr.heart.org/en/resources/cpr-facts-and-stats/out-of-hospital-chain-of-survival
  2. Jackson DC. How a Turtle’s Shell Helps It Survive Prolonged Anoxic Acidosis. News Physiol Sci. 2000 Aug;15:181-185. doi: 10.1152/physiologyonline.2000.15.4.181. PMID: 11390905.
  3. Cunningham LM, Mattu A, O’Connor RE, Brady WJ. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation for cardiac arrest: the importance of uninterrupted chest compressions in cardiac arrest resuscitation. Am J Emerg Med. 2012 Oct;30(8):1630-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ajem.2012.02.015. Epub 2012 May 23. PMID: 22633716.
  4. Farmer CG, Hicks JW. The Intracardiac Shunt as a Source of Myocardial Oxygen in a Turtle, Trachemys scripta. Integr Comp Biol. 2002 Apr;42(2):208-15. doi: 10.1093/icb/42.2.208. PMID: 21708712.
  5. Farmer CG. On the evolution of arterial vascular patterns of tetrapods. J Morphol. 2011 Nov;272(11):1325-41. doi: 10.1002/jmor.10986. Epub 2011 Jun 27. PMID: 21710654.
  6. https://farmer.biology.utah.edu/Hunt%20and%20Shunt.html
  7. https://crazycrittersinc.com/cpr-in-turtles-and-tortoises-yes-they-can-choke-and-drown/

How do painted turtles hibernate without oxygen for 3 months?

Short answer: Cutaneous respiration (breathing through their skin) and storing lactic acid in their shell.

Eastern Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta picta).jpg
Eastern Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta picta) Source: By Greg Schechter

While reading about green anoles and “hibernation” yesterday, I came across this intriguing line from Vitt and Caldwell’s Herpetology and felt compelled to read more:

Survival [of painted turtles during hibernation] is possible because of high tolerance for lactic acid buildup, which can be stored in the shell, and because their metabolic rate is reduced to 10–20% of their aerobic resting rate.

Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) are the most abundant turtles in North America. There are four subspecies of the painted turtle, with the Western painted turtle being both the most colorful and common. Adult females are larger than adult males (10-25 cm vs 7-15 cm, weight 500g vs 300g). Painted turtles are named for their coloration and have red, orange, and yellow stripes found on their heads, necks, and tails. These turtles can live a long time – more than 40 years in the wild!

Painted turtles live in slow-moving freshwater. They bask for warmth on logs or rocks in the warmer seasons. In the winters, they hide and hibernate in the muddy bottoms of their freshwater habitats. Like many other reptiles, the sex of the hatchlings is determined by the temperature of the nest during the middle third of the incubation period (22-26 degrees C for males, >28 degrees C for females). Of course, global warming hurts these turtles’ chances for reproduction by causing more and more hatchlings to be female.

image
Metabolic rate depression during anoxic submergence of the painted turtle. Source

The hibernation of painted turtles is particularly interesting – they can survive in freezing waters (as low as 3 degrees Celsius) without oxygen for months at a time. Cold and anoxic environments allow the turtle to use a fraction of the energy of a similarly-sized aerobic mammal (e.g. < 0.01% of the ATP usage of a comparably sized rat). There are 2 possible limiting factors for the survival of a turtle facing such prolonged anoxia: 1) depletion of glycogen reserves and 2) buildup of lactic acid (a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism). As noted in the figure above, painted turtles can use as little as 0.01 kcal/kg/min in anoxic, cold environments. For a 500g turtle, this amounts to only 7.2 kcal/day. Painted turtles have high glycogen content in their livers, skeletal muscles, and heart – these stores are sufficient at this level of energy expenditure for the average turtle to last for 5.5 months! Clearly then, the major hurdle facing the anoxic turtle is the buildup of lactic acidosis.

FIGURE 3.
Postulated mechanism of shell buffering of lactic acid in painted turtles. Source:

Painted turtles can build up plasma concentrations of lactic acid as high as 200mM (by contrast, a normal level in humans ranges between 2-4 mM). The painted turtles counteract this phenomenon in several ways:

  1. Direct body fluid buffering – painted turtles have high baseline plasma bicarbonate concentrations (40mM), with periotneal and pericardial fluid having concentrations of 80-120 mM.
  2. The turtle’s shell. The shell may release calcium carbonate, allowing for further buffering. In addition, lactate may be directly sequesterd by the shell. The lactate can then be flushed out later in normoxic conditions. Even during hibernation, turtles can switch between a normoxic and anoxic states (which may explain turtles swimming below the ice of frozen ponds). Apparently, this mechanism is not unique to the painted turtle, but generalizes to vertebrate bone, the carpace of crustaceans, and the shells of snails. As further proof, soft-shelled turtles fare much poorer in anoxic waters, lending more credence to the shell mechanism.
Western painted turtle. Photograph by Clay Showalter.

For those interested in more reading, I’d recommend looking into the work of Professor Donald Jackson. He passed away in 2020, but he seems to have written much of the seminal work on painted turtle physiology during his time at Brown.

As a final note, adult painted turtles cannot survive truly freezing temperatures (-1 to -2 degrees C). However, hatchling painted turtles can via supercooling – which I may discuss this further in the future… Also, stay tuned for a discussion tomorrow comparing turtle and human CPR!

References

  1. Vitt, L. J., & Caldwell, J. P. (2014). Herpetology: An introductory biology of amphibians and reptiles. Pages 203-227.
  2. Taking the temperature of the painted turtle. Lab Anim (NY). 2013 Sep;42(9):315. doi: 10.1038/laban.376. PMID: 23965557.
  3. Jackson, D.C. Hibernating without oxygen: physiological adaptations of the painted turtle. J. Physiol. 543, 731–737 (2002).
  4. Jackson DC. How a Turtle’s Shell Helps It Survive Prolonged Anoxic Acidosis. News Physiol Sci. 2000 Aug;15:181-185. doi: 10.1152/physiologyonline.2000.15.4.181. PMID: 11390905.
  5. https://cob.silverchair-cdn.com/cob/content_public/journal/jeb/223/3/10.1242_jeb.222075/3/jeb222075.pdf