Word Up
Category Archives: Evidentialism
The Monday Night Miracle
I hesitated writing this column out of fear it may jinx his chances. But since a dead man spoke Saturday, it’s okay for me to. And even if, fates forbid, Damar Hamlin’s condition were to worsen, the unbelievable should still be noted.
And believed. Because Monday night was nothing short of miraculous — if science didn’t do it so on the regular.
Hamlin, a safety for the Buffalo Bills, took a helmet to the chest that was so precise — a YouTubing cardiologist called it the kind of blow “you only see in medical textbooks” — that Hamlin had a cardiac arrest on field.
My brethren in the news media have done a poor job of explaining cardiac arrest, so let me attempt one.
Hamlin dropped dead. For 13 seconds, an NFL player was dead in midfield Cincinnati. And science, in the form of Bills assistant coach Denny Kellington, manually pumped blood through that dead man. Not unconscious; not woozy; not paralyzed. Dead. That’s why the players were weeping. They’d never seen a man killed. Few have.
Seconds after that, more science, this time in the form of a defibrillator that re-triggered his heart.
At the University of Cincinnati, neurologists said Hamlin’s early brain function may be fully intact.
The New York Times obtained audio of the Bills medical crew the moment Hamlin died. A supervisor ordered a gurney immediately after seeing the collision because he didn’t “like how he went down.”
And today, Hamlin is tweeting: “When you put real love out into the world it comes back to you 3x’s as much,” he wrote in his first Instagram post since his collapse Monday. “The Love has been overwhelming, but I’m thankful for every single person that prayed for me and reached out. If you know me you know this only gone make me stronger. On a long road keep praying for me!”
Indeed, the nation surely will. The Bills — a team that once went to four straight Super Bows but has never won one — is my new favorite this playoffs.
But, should this long road bring Hamlin back to the sidelines, in any capacity, I hope Kellington and the UofC crew are equally hailed.
After all, it’s not often you see a resurrection.
Back By Popular Demand: The Sun
Evidentialism Factslap: Every planet has a winter solstice.
Earth is unique among planets in our solar system in a number of ways — a habitable atmosphere being chief among them. But when it comes to solstices, Earth is just one in a crowd. The winter and summer solstices represent the shortest and longest days of the year, respectively. Because of the Earth’s 23.5-degree axial tilt, certain parts of the planet lean toward or away from the sun, which creates the seasons. It’s during the solstices (December 21 to 22 and June 20 to 22) that the planet reaches its maximum tilt away (or toward) the sun, depending on the hemisphere you call home.
Solstices also take place on other planets, but not quite in the same way. Both Mercury and Venus have little axial tilt, so they don’t experience seasons as Earth does. Mars, however, has a very similar tilt to Earth at 25 degrees, and the planet’s ice cap will grow and recede according to the seasons. Although Jupiter has a minuscule axial tilt, Saturn’s axial tilt at 26.7 degrees means solstices there are truly something to behold — during the planet’s summer solstices, its rings become intensely illuminated as they reflect the sun’s light.
However, Uranus is the true oddity. With an axial tilt of a whopping 98 degrees, the planet’s poles point directly toward the sun during its solstices. When Voyager 2 took images of the planet in 1986, Uranus was experiencing its southern hemisphere’s summer solstice, with that hemisphere bathed in continuous light while its northern hemisphere was trapped in frozen darkness. So although all planets have solstices, no two are exactly alike — and Earth’s remain something special.
