In between rounds of getting crushed by my son in Mario Cart 8, I came across this tweet…
That time when @hotdogsladies tried to explain @kidney_boy ‘s Twitter bio to @danbenjamin 🙂 https://t.co/WWaETu7fQ1— Miloš Miljković (@miljko) June 19, 2017
Merlin Mann, if you are not aware, is a staple of podcasts and inventor of In Box Zero. In June sixth’s Back to Work, Merlin recounts coming across my twitter bio and how it stuck with him as something interesting. I love how he can’t come up with my Twitter handle or the exact quote, but he did get the word Nephrologist and totally understood the meaning of the bio, and he got why I think it is important.
My twitter bio:
Saying the product of the kidneys is urine is like saying the product of a factory is pollution. Urine is a by-product. The product is homeostasis.
This is not an original thought but me just reprocessing Homer Smith’s masterpiece for Generation Twitter:
The lungs serve to maintain the composition of the extra-cellular fluid with respect to oxygen and carbon dioxide, and with this their duty ends. The responsibility for maintaining the composition of this fluid in respect to other constituents devolves on the kidneys. It is no exaggeration to say that the composition of the body fluids is determined not by what the mouth takes in but what the kidneys keep: they are the master chemists of our internal environment. Which, so to speak, they manufacture in reverse by working it over some fifteen times a day. When among other duties, they excrete the ashes of our body fires, or remove from the blood the infinite variety of foreign substances that are constantly being absorbed from our indiscriminate gastrointestinal tracts, these excretory operations are incidental to the major task of keeping our internal environments in the ideal, balanced state.
Merlin’s voice has been flowing into my ears since I used iTunes to download podcasts to hard drive based iPods (2004?). He has given me hundreds of interesting ideas that have poked at my cerebral cortex for weeks. I am delighted that I have been able to do the same for him, even if it was just once.