MEDUSA ATTRACTS INVESTORS

This was the headline on page B3 of today’s Chronicle Herald from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Not the snake-haired Gorgon of classical mythology, but Medusa Medical Technologies Inc., a Halifax company best known for their Siren ePCR (electronic patient care reporting) system. Why Medusa? I couldn’t find an explanation, but could it be a visual reference, i.e., many individual strands of information being sent electronically to a single system? Siren also is a classical reference, one of the two or three sweetly-singing but deadly half-bird women who appeared in the stories of both the Argonauts and Odysseus. Orpheus, one of the Argonauts, sang more sweetly and drowned out the Sirens, and Odysseus was tied to the mast of his ship while his men blocked their ears with wax and thus successfully sailed past the Sirens.