I work in the medical device space (mostly software as a medical device). I attended the AAMI Nexus conference two weeks ago and attended a talk about making devices more eco friendly. The tension between safety and sterilization and packaging was definitely brought up. It’s a hard balance to make. One example I thought was interesting was that the NIH did a study to see if it was necessary to swab people’s skin and use gloves before a shot. It turned out it wasn’t and it didn’t make a difference, so they stopped requiring the providers to swab people’s skin or wear gloves, thus saving an immense amount of waste when taken over all vaccine shots.
I really like diagrams as text for simple diagrams where you don't care too much about the formatting. I think Figma is better if you really care about the formatting. I just discovered this the other day, but you can create mermaid diagrams in Notion by adding a codeblocks and selecting the "mermaid" language from the dropdown.
I don't know too much about this, so I definitely could be mistaken, but the professor seems to say this hieroglyphic may be connected with our current letter "B". Also, I think he said something about "house" on another video and I believe it was different.
The connection between the letter beth and the house character (which beth means) is pretty well established, it's by no means my theory. It might not be 100% certain, but it's the only one I've heard over the years.
When it comes to that video, surely the professor would be aware that lowercase letters are a late invention, b is just a version of the original B, so the lowercase shape per se is irrelevant. Furthermore, I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that B comes from semitic beth, so whatever you do, you need to compare THAT shape to Hieroglyphs.
I agree, any connection between the Egyptian "foot" hieroglyph and the lower case "b" seems irrelevant, but it seems that the Phoenician letter bet looks kind of like the Egyptian "foot" too, so perhaps that's where the connection lies.
The Wikipedia article for "b" seems to list both the "foot" and the "house" hieroglyphs in the development on the sidebar... not that Wikipedia is always correct.
I think the professor in that video is quite well known and has written several books on Egyptology, so I doubt he would be completely off base on something so basic. In any event, you're absolutely right that there the house hieroglyphs is related. I was wrong to question that. But it seems that the "foot" hieroglyph maybe has some relation too. If you find anything more about this, I'd be curious to hear what it is.
You're right, they do show the leg glyph in the sidebar, but then in the text they write:
"The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨ Leg glyph ⟩, but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨ Bet ⟩ probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ Per ⟩ meaning "house"."
It doesn't seem from this that they are claiming that B comes from the leg glyph. so it's very strange they put it in the side-bar, if it's etymologically unrelated.
Also, if you look at the Aleph article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph, they have a sub-section with some Hieroglyphs that are pronounced as aleph, without mentioning any historical connection, which seems very strange. The rest of the article talks about letters that are historically related, so why bring up the vulture glyph? In the article for a they don't show the vulture though, only the ox.
I think part of the reason people say things like this is that they are so strongly inclined to see writing systems as alphabets, so they just have to find "the letter b in Egyptian", even though that makes no sense at all. Egyptian didn't have a letter b, they had a number of glyphs that represented 1, 2 or 3 consonants.
Btw I'm sure the professor knows his Egyptology, so the preceding wasn't referring to him, but maybe he didn't study the origin of the Semitic writing systems. That's not really Egyptology.
That's absolutely true. We work with a lot of technical founders who are turning their research into a diagnostic medical devices. One of the first questions we always ask is: how will the information produced by your device help clinical decision making? More data is _nice_ but if it doesn't alter the course of treatment, it's pointless. Sometimes it's okay if the doctor doesn't know if the problem is A or B if the treatment for A and B is the same.
