Standard Deviation: Stories about unusual encounters
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2017
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part 1: Late one night in the ER, doctor Bess Stillman treats a patient with an interesting dilemma. Part 2: As a teenager, science writer Brendan Bane becomes obsessed with collecting poisonous pets. Bess Stillman is an emergency physician and writer living in NYC. She has appeared on The Moth Radio Hour. Find her at http://www.bessstillman.com. Brendan Bane is a freelance science communicator and recent graduate of the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. His interest in biology blossomed when he first laid his eyes upon a giant, hairy tarantula. He later followed his passion to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, where he studied how tarantulas communicate their romantic intentions. (Basically, they twerk). Though he loved tromping through forests and spying on spiders in their roadside burrows, his greatest thrill did not come from the field or laboratory. Instead, he was happiest onstage, bringing audiences face to fang with spiders through visual storytelling. Now, through science reporting, he immerses readers in the lives of all flora and fauna, whether wondrous or weird.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:20.0 | Hi everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:27.3 | This week, we're bringing you stories of standard deviation, from a New York City ER doctor's strange case in the middle of the night to a teenager's dangerous hobby of collecting venomous snakes. |
| 0:37.4 | Our first story this week is from Best Stillman. |
| 0:39.3 | It was recorded in December 2016 at Union Hall in Brooklyn. |
| 0:43.3 | The theme was Science and the City. |
| 0:48.3 | It's 3 a.m. during a Saturday overnight shift in the ER |
| 0:52.3 | when a patient comes in with a chief complaint of rectal pain. |
| 0:56.2 | And because I'm the overnight physician, I know this is going to be a pain in my butt too. |
| 1:00.9 | Because nobody comes to the ER at this hour with that complaint if it's something nice and normal, like hemorrhoids. |
| 1:08.8 | The good news is that I have a medical student working with me that night. |
| 1:13.7 | And he has come all the way from a medical school in Kansas, because, as he tells me, there is |
| 1:18.9 | nowhere like New York City to do your emergency medicine clerkship. I mean, just the cross-section |
| 1:24.4 | of humanity. There's the citizens and the immigrants. |
| 1:27.6 | There's the haves and the haves nots. |
| 1:28.8 | There's the gunshots and there's the stab wounds. |
... |
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