Most people have heard the horror stories: a surgeon operates on the wrong leg, the wrong arm, or even the wrong patient. They sound like urban legends, but they aren’t. These mistakes have happened.

The good news is that they’re rare, and they’re much rarer today than they used to be.

That’s because medicine learned an important lesson. Good surgeons aren’t enough. Good systems matter just as much.

Today, before an operation begins, the patient’s identity is checked repeatedly. The procedure is confirmed. The correct surgical site is usually marked while the patient is still awake. Then, just before the first incision, the entire operating room pauses for what’s called a “time out.” Everyone in the room confirms they’re about to perform the right procedure on the right patient and the right body part.

It may seem repetitive. It’s supposed to be.

The checklist isn’t there because anyone expects the surgeon to forget which knee to operate on. It’s there because human beings make mistakes, especially in busy, stressful environments. Aviation learned that decades ago. Medicine followed.

That’s why cartoons about “wrong-side surgery” resonate. They exaggerate the absurdity of confusion at exactly the moment when there shouldn’t be any. We laugh because the situation is ridiculous—and because we know the consequences wouldn’t be.

Most safety rules exist because someone, somewhere, learned a painful lesson the hard way. Wrong-site surgery is one of them.

Sometimes the most important words spoken in an operating room aren’t the technical ones.

They’re the simple ones:

“Let’s make absolutely sure we have the right patient, the right procedure, and the right side.”

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Here’s one of those issues that shouldn’t have much to do with Democrats or Republicans.

Changing the clocks twice a year is stupid.

Apparently, Tom Cotton disagrees.

The U.S. House has passed legislation to make daylight saving time permanent. The vote wasn’t particularly close — 308 to 117. Republicans voted for it. Democrats voted for it.

Donald Trump wants it.

Tom Cotton doesn’t.

Cotton has said he will “always oppose” permanent daylight saving time. His argument is that it would mean darker winter mornings, particularly for schoolchildren.

That’s a legitimate argument. There are legitimate arguments for permanent standard time, too.

But here’s where Cotton loses me.

He admits changing the clocks twice a year is a problem. He doesn’t particularly like doing it either. But he doesn’t want permanent daylight saving time, and he doesn’t want permanent standard time because that would mean giving up those long summer evenings.

So his solution is basically:

Keep doing the thing everybody agrees is stupid.

This is also one of those rare issues where Cotton finds himself on the opposite side from Trump. Trump wants permanent daylight saving time. A large bipartisan majority in the House wants permanent daylight saving time.

Cotton wants Arkansas to keep springing forward and falling back.

Every. Damn. Year.

Sometimes Washington makes complicated problems complicated.

Sometimes Tom Cotton manages to make a simple problem complicated.

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Admit it—you’ve done this.

I know I have.

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This photograph doesn’t look like much at first glance: a pavilion, a ball field, and a few young trees on the north side of Russellville.

But there’s a lot more going on here.

The photograph was taken in June 1972 and is archived with the wonderfully descriptive title, “Park at re-claimed strip coal mine, north side, Russellville, Ark.”

And that’s exactly what we’re looking at.

Coal was strip-mined in the Shiloh Creek area north of Russellville from 1957 until 1962. When Lake Dardanelle was filled in the 1960s, some of the old strip pits were flooded. Other portions remained above water as spoil piles, cuts, and rough mined-over ground.

Some of that land was reclaimed and became Shiloh Park.

That’s why the landscape in the 1972 photograph looks so barren. The pavilion and ball field were there, but the trees were little more than saplings. Much of the ground had been a working strip mine only about a decade earlier.

The reclamation story didn’t end there.

When I started driving Pleasant View Road to work at Arkansas Nuclear One in 1981, the area was still obviously strip-mine country. I drove that road regularly until 2017. I can’t pinpoint from memory exactly when the landscape changed. I just remember that it did.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the Shiloh Reclamation Project tackled more of the abandoned and flooded mines. Wayne Van Buren, who was Geologist Supervisor at the ADEQ Russellville Field Office, later told me:

“We reclaimed the strip pits under our Abandoned Mined Lands Program. We won a national award for eliminating a dangerous highwall and backfilling extremely dangerous deep waters.”

The spoil piles themselves became part of the solution.

“We saved the City of Russellville a lot of money, too. Leveling the spoil piles allowed for the rapid construction of the ball fields.”

That later reclamation helped transform more of the old mining landscape into the recreational area around Pleasant View Park.

The project was a joint effort involving the Corps of Engineers, the City of Russellville, the Russellville Rotary Club, and the Arkansas Abandoned Mine Land Fund. More than 2,600 trees and shrubs were planted, and the work received a National Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Award in 1993.

And the name Shiloh is much older than either the park or the mines. Shiloh Creek and the old Shiloh locality date well back into the 1800s. There was a Shiloh Church and campground here long before anyone thought about strip mining the coal beneath the ground.

I went back to Shiloh Park recently and photographed the pavilion that stands there today. The original pavilion in the 1972 photograph is gone, replaced by a newer one. The tiny trees have become a mature wooded landscape.

It’s hard to look at Shiloh and Pleasant View today and imagine strip pits, highwalls, and piles of mine spoil.

But that’s the story behind this old photograph.

It isn’t just a picture of a park. It’s a picture of a landscape in the middle of becoming something else.

Three more images: 1972, 2014, and 2026

Several years ago — OK, it was a long, long time ago — I was attending college as a non-traditional student, finishing up my degree while working full-time. George Herbert Walker Bush was the president of the United States, and Al Gore was a United States Senator who hadn’t invented the internet yet.

One of the classes I was in was college algebra. It was the first college class I had ever taken that required a calculator—the only calculator I had used in high school had been a slide rule.

The airhead I was sitting behind struggled to get the answers and kept asking the professor how to do the calculations for the problems on the blackboard.

Exasperated, the professor finally asked, “What kind of calculator do you have? It’s supposed to be a scientific calculator.”

The airhead replied, “Well, of course it’s scientific — it’s a solar calculator!”

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What are you legally required to do when a traffic light turns yellow?

There’s a common belief that if you’re still in the intersection when the light turns red, you’ve run a red light.

In Arkansas, that’s not what the law says.

Arkansas Code §27-52-107 says a steady yellow light warns that the red signal is about to appear. It then says:

“vehicular traffic shall not enter the intersection when the red or ‘STOP’ signal is exhibited.”

Notice the word enter.

If you enter the intersection while the light is yellow and it turns red while you’re still crossing the intersection, you haven’t violated that particular provision.

And that wording isn’t an accident.

Arkansas deliberately changed the law

Until 2001, Arkansas law was more restrictive. It said motorists could not “enter or be crossing the intersection” when the light was red.

The Arkansas General Assembly passed Act 1606 of 2001 specifically to remove the part about crossing the intersection.

The legislature’s official summary explained exactly what the act did: it removed the language warning drivers about “crossing” the intersection when the traffic light turns red.

That left us with the law we have today.

The important question is therefore not:

Was the light red while my car was in the intersection?

It’s:

What color was the light when I entered the intersection?

If it was yellow, Arkansas law permitted you to enter.

If it was already red, you were required to stop.

But should you go through a yellow?

That’s a different question.

A yellow light isn’t an invitation to accelerate and beat the red light. If you can stop normally and safely, stopping is the prudent thing to do.

But neither should you panic and slam on the brakes because the light changed to yellow when you’re already close to the intersection.

Yellow means exactly what Arkansas law says it means:

The light is about to turn red.

And in Arkansas, the legal line is drawn when you enter the intersection, not when you finish crossing it.

Sources

• Arkansas Code §27-52-107
• Arkansas Act 1606 of 2001 (HB2550)
• Arkansas General Assembly, General Summary — 2001 Regular Session

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