kindproject

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

world book day chapter II

Posted by jonathan - 26/04/08 at 07:04:30 am

Here at google aka neverland ranch, they have a great authors series where guess what authors come to speak about their books. Not only that, they give books away and in return the author gets some youtube video exposure. In honor of world book day on Wednesday I finally made it to a session, Authors@Google NYC Presents: Kelly McMasters, “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town”. I intended to see some others earlier, but last minute capachinos and google terminology investigations always managed to trump them.

I had briefly heard about some environmental issues in long island, obviously not as much as LoveCannal, but as most jersey peeps I tend to ignore anything on the other side of the east river. The author, Kelly was nice and friendly, I could associate with her cast in the shadows of the hamptons mentality as I grew up bordering an open sewer, barely in the boundaries of a super wealthy town.

For anyone who suffers from a chronic illness like myself, there are times when the grass looks greener in the reflection of the medicine cabinet, making another illness appear easier to deal with. This common feeling was confirmed in an article about morgellons I read a few months back, but Kelly’s book has helped me shake these thoughts. Previously I guarded a twinge of jealousy at the success of breast cancer awareness. The pink ribbons, the walk-a-thons, the stamp, all the attention in a zero sum game could only be distracting from the potential cures for my disease. Two days and a book later and I no longer harbor any jealousy of other peoples diseases.

That was a good book!

World Book Day

Posted by jonathan - 23/04/08 at 09:04:07 am

For some unknown reason I’m all into days with causes lately. Next week I’m looking forward to nopantsday, which should have a good flickr stream. I have been preparing my daughter to squirm around in diapers only.

But for today, world book day, I had to pick up a new book at the suggestion of an overly generous colleague Sean Harvey, published author of The Rough Guide to the Dominican Republic 3 (Rough Guide Travel Guides). My quick trip with Emma (babies and libraries are an unpredictable mix) over to the Jersey City Free Public Library [wow flash intro pages from 2002 were a bad idea] ended with me picking up Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

What are you reading for world book day?

PBS Tuesday night lineup

Posted by jonathan - 23/04/08 at 08:04:21 am

PBS has captured my attention on Tuesday nights with its primetime line up of Nova and Frontline. Yes I watch tv on tv and I don’t own a tivo, how old fashion of me. Luckily for you pbs, frontline, has a nice online archive of shows for you to watch on your computer. Yesterday’s hot politics earth day message, did not provide many new tidbits for me, but last weeks Sick Around the World did.

Sick Around the World compares our healthcare system with 5 other developed nations, Japan, UK, Germany Switzerland and Taiwan. Most interesting to me and why I want to move into healthcare information management is that the US spends more money as a percentage of gdp on healthcare but we consistently stack rank in the 30s in terms of health care delivered. Moreover our administrative costs for healthcare usually run in the teen to twenty percent range while other developed countries run at a much leaner 5-6% administrative costs. Every time I fill out an almost identical form at the doctors office I am reminded of how last century healthcare delivery is compared to other industries. The battle to modernize not only healthcare administration, but delivery of better care through user generated content is a battle worth fighting.

Book critique: The last three miles by steven hart

Posted by jonathan - 22/04/08 at 03:04:15 pm

In any location I like to read about the physical and social surroundings of times past. I daydream of different eras and what life would be like if I walked and lived in the past. History has always afforded me this comfort of escapism. The last there miles, while not a masterpiece is a good starting point into the 20th century Hudson county that was formed of blood, sweat,concrete and steel. Chronicling the construction of the pulsaki skyway, the book meanders is way around jersey city personalities curiously wandering into some back alley back stories. A quick read, a couple hours at most, it helps explain why the local bombed-out roads embarrass me as I drive my 2nd world mother-in-law over parts of America that no immigrant never associates with the DREAM. Like the Soviet emphasis on inner city transport as a means to control people the highways of America were used to control the work of the masses from the 30s through the Eisenhower highway era.

Some other first iteration designs of the skyway to note were the lack of a median, (the jersey barrier was introduced years latter), the slippery concrete surface and the use of left lane entrances which quickly solidified the roads nickname, deathway. The use of left hand entrances was a simple oversight of railroad engineers who had not experienced the user controlled merging which took shape with automobile traffic in a railroad ambidextrous entrance into the main path was of no significant difference.

National Psoriasis Walk, NYC May 18th

Posted by jonathan - 21/04/08 at 10:04:27 am

Continuing the annual tradition, I will be doing the new york national psoriasis walk for awareness to raise money for psoriasis. The past two years have been difficult to treat my psoriasis as it has taken a back seat to my continually detaching retina. Somehow living with itchy flaky skin is more tolerable than losing sight in one eye. I am convinced the detached retina and psoriasis are related, but comorbidity is a tough place to be in today’s siloed specialized health care environment. With both of these problems I am in the anecdotal area of modern day medicine far beyond the glacial pace of clinically statistically medically proven solutions. Psoriasis, one of many auto-immune diseases are the type of chronic illnesses that are inversely related to infectious diseases and will require creative solutions to combat for the 21st century.

Take out the wallet, make a donation or better yet join my team, you know you’ll feel much better if you do.

your test results just came back

Posted by jonathan - 18/04/08 at 11:04:33 am

My pearl does not have the best camera, but this box makes me glad my lab work does not go to shiel. Shouldn’t there be a better way to transport bodily fluids between doctor’s office and lab. These little white boxes don’t inspire much trust.

“The lab test indicated abnormal newspaper consumption.”

nothing to write

Posted by jonathan - 07/04/08 at 07:04:22 am

What is there to write when you done won’t to be seen or heard?

axman the google version, beware of the falling trees

Posted by jonathan - 02/04/08 at 10:04:40 am

Super weird vibe at the office today. No email explaining how anything will go down, the good bye emails are flowing and everyone is huddled together waiting to be called to the manger’s office.

I got the middle ground, 6 months with a severance after that so we’ll see how things go.

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