Incidental drive-by nitpicking

Not trying to pick on anyone specific here, but I have seen, on at least two different blogs lately, the statement that they don't show women being given CPR on TV because you'd have to take off her shirt and bra.

And, uh ... I think people are mixing that up with defibrillators. I'm pretty sure it's a fact that they rarely show women having heart attacks on TV because they can't do the "CLEAR!" thing without taking their shirts off. (Not that they can't get around it with clever camera angles and/or objects in the way, and some medical shows do, but it's not that common, I don't think.)

But nothing about CPR requires taking the shirt off. Not that TV is known for its accurate medical depictions, but all things being equal, they don't take off men's shirts when they're getting TV!CPR, either. And I remember several different TV shows with scenes of women receiving chest compressions (Stargate and Lost, among others).

Sorry, this is just a random point of nitpick that bugged me. Carry on.

... oooh

So, I have another completely unfounded, maybe totally wrong prediction for A:tLA - The Search. Spoilers for the first two parts under the cut - no actual future spoilers, though.

( My theory goes as follows: )

:D

I possibly should not find this as awesome as I do: they found a 120,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton with the same rare bone disease that I have! (ETA: Another article on this discovery with more detailed information on fibrous dysplasia.)

The exact cause of the disease (in humans or otherwise) is not known -- it's a rare gene mutation that happens in utero -- but it's not thought to be hereditary, so this is probably not a 100,000-years-distant ancestor of mine. But who knows? At the very least, there is something incredibly cool about feeling that kind of connection to an intelligent being of a different species who died uncountable generations ago. However unimaginably different our lives are in other ways, this long-dead teenager and I had that experience in common; what an incredible thing.

While I'm at it, here's a cool article on using DNA to shed light on Neanderthal society. (Basically, studying the DNA of a deceased Neanderthal group, scientists made the discovery that the men were all related and the women weren't, from which they infer that the group was patrilocal -- women left their own group and went to live with their husbands. How cool is it that we can learn that sort of thing about people who've been dead for 50,000 years?)