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Getting Caught in a Blood Trap

Sun, 23 Apr 2017, 07:53 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

Julia texted me from Kentucky with what I thought was a question.

She asked if I knew what color blood is when it’s in our arteries and veins. There’s the easy answer, and then there’s the question of blue-blooded veins. And seeing as how I didn’t really know the answer, I made our back-and-forth texting into a conversation about how one might go about designing an experiment to determine the answer.

But evidently she wasn’t asking a question. It seems she was testing me. And she was tickled that she had proven that I didn’t know.

Here’s the thing of it: why ask me? Why test me? I’m not a doctor. My brother is, and for all of this asking/testing, she might have texted him, instead. I’m not a nurse. Her aunt is, she might have texted her. Asking me a medical question is analogous to — what? — asking either of them about the Lagrange Planetary Equations or micro-service architectures. I suspect they’d field a question about them similarly to how I fielded and failed Julia’s blood trap.

I wonder why she texted this Cuzuncle. And I wonder how long until she comes around to Celestial Mechanics or Software Design. Might not be long.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License