kindproject

100th doctors visit for a detached retina

Posted by jonathan - 17/05/08 at 08:05:25 am

	Name	Score
1.	JBK	100
2.	WTF	97
3.	OMG	92

Next week, Wednesday, will be my 100th doctors appointment with my retina surgeon. I have asked that they put a leader board up like the old school arcade games.

At the very least I am hoping for a cake :)

Since I started seeing this doctor, he has built out his own surgery center and his business seems to be thriving. For me the twelve surgeries, at least I think its twelve, (do I count the laser procedures, do I count the gas removal), have been trying. Hopefully there are not too many more.

ice cream truck wars, next season on Discovery

Posted by jonathan - 14/05/08 at 09:05:14 am

New yorkers have have heard of the yankees-mets rivalry and probably the china town bus wars. You might be familiar with other local rival businesses of cable fame portrayed on shows like Discovery’s the deadliest catch, History’s ice road truckers and axmen, but this one is new. Good Humor is trying to muscle its way back into the ice cream truck business after retreating to the supermarket freezer and ceding the the streets to Mr. Softee.

There have been harsh words, hurt feelings and even bloodshed between competitors. In 2004, a couple in their 60s who owned and operated two ice cream trucks were ambushed in the Bronx and beaten with an oversized wrench. The motive, the police said, was the couple’s ice cream route. A rival ice cream salesman was charged with assault and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

While disputes between drivers of ice cream trucks rarely become that violent, they can be cutthroat.

- NyTimes

In my neighborhood the familiar tune of Mr. Softee started up last weekend.

23andMe

Posted by jonathan - 12/05/08 at 05:05:26 pm

I have been seeing more articles about this new personal genome service, 23andMe. On the patientslikeme.com blog, a staff writer talked about the privacy implications of submitting her info, but in the end she spit since her company, patientslikeme, is all about sharing of medical info. Yesterday at work we got an invite to get a 50% discount for this service. I went to the site, read through some info and while still not really seeing the immediate value was considering the purchase mostly out of curiosity. Today I found out how much the discount was. Let me just say that the price confirms my feeling that access to medical services in this country is completely class ($$$) based. I’m not sure this is how George Bush expected you to spend your $600 tax rebate this year. Would you drop a grand on gene mapping?

ref: nytimes article

day of measurement

Posted by jonathan - 08/05/08 at 06:05:32 am

Sometimes you have to stop and ponder good inventions. 218 years ago today the french created the metric system. Despite signing the Treaty of Meter in 1875 and our friendship with the french during the period of the metric systems birth, we Americans still have not adopted this most logical of measurement systems. Look how consistent the metric system is on the right of the ruler. Evenly spaced lines, only three heights and a certain beautiful precision. Look at the chaotic wave of the varying heights of lines on the left of the ruler. The lack of numbering making you count and guess the hash lines in between.

1790: The French National Assembly decides to create a decimal system of measurement. The metric system is born.

This came after the storming of the Bastille but still before the declaration of a republic and the execution of King Louis XVI. But revolution was in the air: “National Assembly” was simply the new name the upstart Third Estate had given itself.

The assembly was acting on a motion by Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. Under the ancien régime, France measured with an inch, foot and fathom (pouce, pied and toise) about 6.6 percent larger than their English counterparts.

The first meter was based on clockmaking: the length of a pendulum with a half-period (a one-way swing) of one second. Responding to a proposal by the French Academy of Sciences, the assembly redefined the meter in 1793 as 1/10,000 of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole.

The system was elegant. All conversions were based on 10, with Greek prefixes (deka-, hecto-, kilo-) for multiples and Latin (deci-, centi-, milli-) for fractions. The gram unit of weight was defined by the weight of one cubic centimeter (aka milliliter) of water.

The new “Republican Measures” became legal throughout France in 1795 and were made compulsory in 1799 when definitive platinum meter bars and kilogram weights were constructed. But resistance to the new measures lasted for decades.

France also used a quasi-metric Revolutionary Calendar with each month consisting of three décades of 10 days each. (Revolutionaries even attempted a metric day of 10 hours of 100 minutes each of 100 seconds each.) But Napoleon returned France to the Gregorian calendar in 1806.

The current International System of Units — or SI, for Système International — is based on the Treaty of the Meter signed in Paris on May 20, 1875. The United States was a signatory, and the metric system is the legal system in this country, although the legal alternate English system remains more widely used. (An online conversion engine can make translation easy.)

The meter was formally redefined in 1960 as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red light radiation of the krypton 86 atom (transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5). The new standard was 100 times more precise than the old. The current definition, adopted in 1983, makes the meter the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second.

That’s 39.37 inches to counter-revolutionaries.

- Wired

that is based . Not sure about you, but I still think a system based Today was the day

Is fido good for johny jr?

Posted by jonathan - 06/05/08 at 06:05:14 am

My wife and I have long believed that the anti-bacterial germaphobed American masses have lost touch with the natural cycle of life. Ashes to ashes dust to dust is lost on the control-freak, ocd culture of Americans. I am a firm believer in “the Hygiene Hypothesis, formulated by the epidemiologist David Strachan about 20 years ago, argued that children’s immune systems were not being sufficiently challenged - because of falling family size and increasingly sterile homes - to learn how to fend off diseases. The result was that once harmless invaders, such as cat hair, triggered immune overreactions (this is what constitutes an allergy). In the late Nineties, the evidence for Strachan’s hunch was snowballing: kids in daycare showed lower rates of asthma than infants kept at home, suggesting that immunity might be conferred by early contact with other children.”

In the latest news, scientists now believe that my dog, melba, helps the immune system of my baby, emma. Just one more reason why dog is mans best friend!

Last week our news pages quoted a study from the National Research Centre for Environmental Health in Munich saying that children lessen their risk of being sensitive to allergens if they grow up with a dog. Professor Joachim Heinrich and colleagues found that children raised with a dog had fewer allergy markers, such as antibodies to pollen, house-dust mites, cat and dog dander and mould spores. He told the European Respiratory Journal that a dog’s presence in early childhood encourages the immune system to develop less sensitivity to allergies such as asthma, eczema and hay fever.

- Times online

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