Sent from my iPad
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Amazing Multiple Exposure Portraits
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Motorized Electric Skates
bookofjoe
Stylish, what?
From a website:
................................
These innovative electric skates strap onto your regular shoes and propel you around at speeds up to 8 mph for up to 5-6 miles.
They each feature an 80-watt motor that's integrated into a rugged fiber-reinforced nylon frame and smooth-rolling 6"-diameter rubber tires.
A handheld wireless remote control throttles both skates at the same time.
To stop, just let go of the throttle or lean back on the heel stopper just like a regular pair of skates.
A fun and inventive mobility solution for students to get around a campus quick more quickly, workers to zip around from cubicle to cubicle, or any time you want to lazily enjoy the outdoor scenery without too much exertion.
................................
[via The Green Head]
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPad
Lillipad — "Squat on the loo, it's good for you!"
bookofjoe
I won't argue: billions of Asians concur.
From New Zealand comes this remarkable addition to the W.C. space, offering a whole new perspective.
From the website:
.............................
The natural squat position — the healthy way we evolved to go! Infants instinctively squat to poop and pee, as does the majority of the world's population.
The Lillipad is an ergonomic squatting platform that sits around your toilet to facilitate the squat position. The Lillipad enables a variety of squatting and squat/sitting positions to suit the flexibility of you and your family.
To ensure comfort, the footpads are adjustable and slope slightly forward and towards each other. To ensure a good fit, the Lillipad is available in two standard heights and the footpads allow width adjustment.
The Lillipad and the build-your-own squatting platform are far more comfortable and stable options than simply perching on the rim of a toilet. They also introduce the healthy and hygienic concept of squatting to others.
The step of the Lillipad provides access for children and (if they are sitting) a footrest too. While the Lillipad or the build-your-own squatting platform are in place, the toilet can still be used in the sitting position.
History of the Lillipad
The Lillipad* squatting platform was conceived in 1991 when I was confronted with a sit-down toilet after having adapted to squat toilets throughout India and South East Asia.
Perched on the rim of a toilet, I realized resting my feet on some timber would make things more comfortable and stable.
Today, many years on, the Lillipad packs down into a small box and has been shipped to over 20 countries.
What's kept me producing Lillipads all these years is a passion to create a beneficial, environmentally friendly, and affordable product — and a certainty that squatting is the way to go!
We also offer plans to build-your-own squatting platform for just US$10 (customize your squatting position).
*For all of you who thought Lillipad was spelt Lilypad, Lillypad, Lily Pad or Lilipad — good on you for finding us!
FunFact
Squat toilets are also known as Arabic, Chinese, French, Hole in the ground, Indian, Iranian, Japanese, Korean, Natural-Position, Nile pan, and Turkish toilets.
.............................
$169 at http://lillipad.co.nz
Full disclosure: Mine's en route.
Can't hardly wait. Erm....
[via a reader whose name I've forgotten — please advise so I can credit you.]
Sent with ReederSent from my iPad
BehindTheMedspeak: Snakebite — Everything you were taught is (dead) wrong
bookofjoe
That goes for me as well, though it's only dimly — if at all — that I remember the subject from 2nd year med school pharmacology and various rotations on the medicine wards.
David Maurer's first-person account of being bitten by a copperhead while working in his garden appeared in the June 18, 2012 Charlottesville Daily Progress; excerpts below.
Caption for the photo by Sabrina Schaeffer (above), which accompanied the Progress story: "Dave Maurer's left arm on May 14, two days after the snakebite, still shows significant swelling. Emergency medical personnel made a series of marks on his arm to track the progress of the swelling."
Don't be confused as I was by Maurer's right arm being closer to the camera.
Encounter with a Copperhead
I recently had the good fortune to be bitten by a copperhead snake.
Of course, I wasn't seeing it that way as I lay in Martha Jefferson Hospital with CroFab antivenin coursing through my veins and my left arm swelling to Popeye-esque proportions.
It was only after the considerable pain, bruising and swelling had subsided that I started to have a more enlightened take on my experience with envenomation. My awakening came as I learned fascinating facts about the poisonous snakes indigenous to Virginia — copperhead, cottonmouth and timber rattlers — and the blessings of modern medicine.
My encounter with the copperhead occurred around 9 a.m. May 12. That Saturday morning, I was topping a stand of bamboo that grows under the power lines leading to my Albemarle County home.
I was using short-handled clippers and had reached into a clump of bamboo to lop off a long shoot. I felt an unusual pain on the inside of my left wrist that made me think I had stabbed myself on a sharp piece of bamboo.
My second thought was that I had somehow gotten a cramp in my wrist. I quickly changed that assessment when I saw the two small puncture marks just above my work gloves.
In one of those remarkable displays of the brain's recall ability, I immediately pictured the U.S. Army Special Forces instructor who had given my class a lesson on poisonous snakes during my training in the mid-1960s. His first remark on what to do if bitten: "Don't panic. You're probably not going to die, but get medical attention as soon as possible."
I took him at his word. Being dirty and sweaty, I showered, changed clothes and made sure my dog had plenty of food and water.
All this took about 10 minutes, and in that time the swelling above the red bite marks had become noticeable. The pain was also increasing, but nothing I would term excruciating.
I called my primary physician, Dr. John Lanham, who told me to come right in. He has had experience with snakebites from his time practicing medicine in a remote area of Sudan. It took him about 10 seconds to assess the situation and send me off to MJH's emergency room.
"The nature of the venom is hemorrhagic, and that's why you had the bruising," Lanham said. "Some of the venom ruptures red blood cells and some of it lets the blood leak out, which causes the swelling.
"Then there's also certain types of enzymes that cause local tissue necrosis. It was primarily the pain you were experiencing and the local swelling that had already occurred that got you out of here and to the emergency room pretty fast."It looked like there was more going on than just the pain from the strike."
Aside from the pain, which had escalated to a burning sensation along the length of my left arm, I felt fine. I had no problem driving the few miles to the hospital.
At this juncture, I already had learned two valuable lessons.
The first: During warm weather, never put your hands or feet into grass or bushes where you can't see where they're going.
Secondly, never assume the snake is going to be on the ground. The copperhead that bit me was at least 5 feet up in the bamboo.
I never saw the snake, but it had to have been small in order for the bamboo to support it.
Victoria Brianna Hovey was bitten twice by a young copperhead on May 22. It was the day before her 12th birthday, and she was visiting her sister in Stanardsville."I was in the driveway getting ready to get in the car when I startled the snake, and it bit me," Victoria said recently as she recovered in her Greene County home. "I screamed, and when I jumped back, I stepped on its tail and it bit me again [on the other leg].
"It felt weird, like a pinch. My sister's boyfriend tore his shirt in two and tied it around my ankles so the poison wouldn't go up my leg, and then he called [emergency].
"They told him to take the shirt off [the ankles] and get me to the hospital."
Dr. Christopher P. Holstege, director of the Blue Ridge Poison Center at the University of Virginia, said applying a tourniquet is an absolute no-no. So are other widely believed practices.
"There's so much misinformation about first aid for snakebites, even from somewhat reliable sources," Holstege said. "I've seen probably more harm done by cutting and tourniquets than from the snakes themselves.
"Before we had good studies on this, people would do some very crazy things. They would put tourniquets on with the thought it would keep the venom in one place, but this does more damage than good.
"People would cut open the site of the bite and try to suck out the venom. We know suction doesn't work at all, and, in fact, studies have shown it does more harm.
"Many of the snakebites we see are on the feet and hands. If you cut in those areas, there's a good chance you'll cut tendons, nerves or other structures."
Cutting the proverbial "X" at the site of the bite only creates a more serious wound and greatly inhibits healing. And not only is it impossible to suck the venom out, but the attempt can deliver bacteria from the mouth into the wound or venom into the mouth.
"The venom goes into the subcutaneous tissues, so you're not going to get it out by sucking; you're just not," Holstege said. "There's a number of snakebite kits on the market, and I'm absolutely appalled they're allowed to sell them.
"In the kits are a suction device, scalpel and a shoestring you can use for a tourniquet. All the things we know that cause harm and don't work.
"We now know that even applying ice to the swelling does more harm then good. You think because there's swelling, ice would be a benefit, but studies show that's not the case."
Mendoza said another danger of a snakebite kit is that it gives a false sense of security to the user.
"You think your snakebite has been treated and it hasn't," Mendoza said. "The best snakebite kits are car keys and the nearest hospital."
Below, a sidebar that accompanied Maurer's story.
An aside: Maurer is, in my opinion, the best writer on the Daily Progress staff, good enough to fit right in on the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or any English-language publication in the world.
Why he's stayed with my Podunk town's paper for decades is a mystery to me.
Full disclosure: Maurer came to my house in January, 1993 to interview me for a story on my first book, "Baby."
The article appeared in the Daily Progress on February 25, 1993.
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPad
BehindTheMedspeak: Last Minute Robot — End of Life Care Machine
bookofjoe
From LikeCool: "The Last Minute Robot consists of a padded caressing arm and a mechanical recorded voice designed to guide and comfort dying patients with a carefully scripted message. It was created by Dan Chen, an artist, designer, and engineer who just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in Digital + Media. He built the machine as one of a series of functional robots capable of reenacting human social behaviors."
"The device is activated and an LED screen reads 'Detecting end of life.' At this point, the doctor exits the room, leaving the patient alone by him or herself. Within moments the LED reads 'End of life detected' and the robotic arm begins its caressing action, moving back and forth, stimulating the sense of comfort during the dying process. Simultaneously, the robot annunciates the patient's name using a script, while stroking the patient through death."
Sounds good to me: I'll take one.
One thing, though: Is there battery backup for end of days?
[via TC_Chu's Point and
BehindTheMedspeak: "The body carries two to five pounds of bacteria"
bookofjoe
That was the single most astounding fact — among many contenders — in Gina Kolata's June 13 New York Times story about the Human Microbiome Project; excerpts from the article follow.
For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things to be avoided.
But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body.
No one really knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria. But what do they look like in healthy people, and how much do they vary from person to person?
In a new five-year federal endeavor, the Human Microbiome Project, which has been compared to the Human Genome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.
They discovered more strains than they had ever imagined — as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person's collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person's. To the scientists' surprise, they also found genetic signatures of disease-causing bacteria lurking in everyone's microbiome. But instead of making people ill, or even infectious, these disease-causing microbes simply live peacefully among their neighbors.
The results, published on Wednesday in Nature and three PLoS journals, are expected to change the research landscape.
Until recently the bacteria in the microbiome were thought to be just "passive riders." They were barely studied, microbiologists explained, because it was hard to know much about them. They are so adapted to living on body surfaces and in body cavities, surrounded by other bacteria, that many could not be cultured and grown in the lab. Even if they did survive in the lab, they often behaved differently in this alien environment. It was only with the advent of relatively cheap and fast gene sequencing methods that investigators were able to ask what bacteria were present.
Examinations of DNA sequences served as the equivalent of an old-time microscope. They allowed investigators to see — through their unique DNA sequences — footprints of otherwise elusive bacteria.
The work also helps establish criteria for a healthy microbiome, which can help in studies of how antibiotics perturb a person's microbiome and how long it takes the microbiome to recover.
In recent years, as investigators began to probe the microbiome in small studies, they began to appreciate its importance. Not only do the bacteria help keep people healthy, but they also are thought to help explain why individuals react differently to various drugs and why some are susceptible to certain infectious diseases while others are impervious. When they go awry they are thought to contribute to chronic diseases and conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, even, possibly, obesity.
Humans, said Dr. David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist, are like coral, "an assemblage of life-forms living together."
Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the division of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute, had another image. Humans, he said, in some sense are made mostly of microbes. From the standpoint of our microbiome, he added, "we may just serve as packaging."
The microbiome starts to grow at birth, said Lita Proctor, program director for the Human Microbiome Project. As babies pass through the birth canal, they pick up bacteria from the mother's vaginal microbiome.
"Babies are microbe magnets," Dr. Proctor said. Over the next two to three years, the babies' microbiomes mature and grow while their immune systems develop in concert, learning not to attack the bacteria, recognizing them as friendly.
Babies born by Caesarean section, Dr. Proctor added, start out with different microbiomes, but it is not yet known whether their microbiomes remain different after they mature. In adults, the body carries two to five pounds of bacteria, even though these cells are minuscule — one-tenth to one-hundredth the size of a human cell. The gut, in particular, is stuffed with them.
"The gut is not jam-packed with food; it is jam-packed with microbes," Dr. Proctor said. "Half of your stool is not leftover food. It is microbial biomass." But bacteria multiply so quickly that they replenish their numbers as fast as they are excreted.
The first problem was finding completely healthy people for the study. The investigators recruited 600 subjects, ages 18 to 40, poking and prodding them. They brought in dentists to probe their gums, looking for gum disease, and pick at their teeth, looking for cavities. They brought in gynecologists to examine the women to see if they had yeast infections. They examined skin and tonsils and nasal cavities. They made sure the subjects were not too fat and not too thin. Even though those who volunteered thought they filled the bill, half were rejected because they were not completely healthy. And 80 percent of those who were eventually accepted first had to have gum disease or cavities treated by a dentist.
When they had their subjects — 242 men and women deemed free of disease in the nose, skin, mouth, gastrointestinal tract and, for the women, vagina — the investigators collected stool samples and saliva, and scraped the subjects' gums and teeth and nostrils and their palates and tonsils and throats. They took samples from the crook of the elbow and the folds of the ear. The investigators resampled subjects three times during the course of the study to see if the bacterial composition of their bodies was stable.
Unflattering Portraits
bookofjoe
From Laughing Squid:
"The Unflattering Portraits project
by Reverend Aitor of The Misanthrope Specialty Company
aims 'to lovingly commit everyone's oft-ignored flaws to paper.'"
Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee
bookofjoe
From Colossal:
"Artist Guy Laramee has recently completed a number of new sculptural works where he transforms thick tomes into incredible topographical features, among them mountains, caves, volcanoes, and even water."
"Many of the works are part of a new project titled Guan Yin, a series of work dedicated to the forces that enable individuals to endure grief and pain, or in his words, 'the mysterious forces thanks to which we can traverse ordeals.'"
"If you happen to be near Quebec, a number of Laramee's works are currently on view at Expression Gallery in Saint-Hyacinthe through August 12."
[via Paul Biba]
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPad
Thursday, June 14, 2012
iOS 6 adds some great eye candy to new Music app
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
While Apple talked about a few new iOS 6 features during the keynote here at WWDC, there are always plenty of new features hidden in the operating system, some that we won't even fully hear about until the OS actually goes out to the public. But here's one found by the guys over at the iDownloadBlog, presumably in the developer beta.
It turns out that the big silver metal buttons in the Music app on the iOS 6 beta not only have reflections showing on them as if they're shiny, but will actually look like they're reflecting at different angles when you tilt the iOS device back and forth. There's a video to watch of it if you want, but you won't really be able to see this in action until you're holding it in your hands.
And that's why this is so great: Someone at Apple was building this app, decided that those buttons should really look different when the device is tilted and wrote code to make the accelerometer do just that. It's not a marquee feature, but it's an incredible touch that shows just why Apple is as popular as it is.
[via The Verge]
iOS 6 adds some great eye candy to new Music app originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPad
SPCA Int'l money not going to animals
A charity that raised close to $27 million to help animals worldwide spent nearly all of that money on fundraising expenses paid to a direct mail company. 
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPad
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Ultraviolet Portraits by Cara Phillips
bookofjoe
From BuzzFeed:
"Photographer Cara Phillips
takes photographs of people
which brings out the interesting 'imperfections' on their skin."
[via @brainpicker and Matt Penning]
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPad
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Mosquito Nail Paintings
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)