bookofjoe

Space Alien Watch

Very stylish, like nothing ever seen on Earth.

These minimalist watches feature a waterproof, flexible rubber band with the look and feel of a surfer's ankle strap.

The ultra-lightweight mini-LCD display runs on a long-life alkaline battery (included).

They come in a set of two - one for you, and one for the apple of your see-in-the-ultraviolet eye - for $14.98.

Feh on Vuitton and Chanel and all the glitzed-up nonsense they're peddling for astronomical amounts of cash: with your Space Alien Watch, you're the best.

Too bad the picture's cropped: I'm almost certain

it's wearing the blue one.

Ask yourself: WWETW?

BehindTheMedspeak: Emergency management of the airway in accidents with brain injury

For as long as I've been an anesthesiologist, it's been received knowledge, absolute fact, that the best airway in an emergency is an endotracheal tube.

It makes sense: a tube from an outside source of oxygen directly into the trachea, preventing foreign material from making its way into the lungs, seems bombproof.

But a new study, published last month in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, seems to show just the opposite.

Scientists from the University of Pittsburgh found that accident victims with brain injuries who had an endotracheal tube placed in the field had a death rate nearly four times higher than those intubated in the ER.

Moreover, pre-hospital-intubated patients were 61% more likely to have a poor neurological outcome and 92% more likely to have at least moderate functional impairment.

How can this be?

The same issue of the journal ran an editorial exploring this apparent conundrum.

The authors of the editorial were as puzzled as I was.

They concluded that the study by the Pittsburgh group was well conducted and that its results could not be dismissed.

They observed that the people inserting endotracheal tubes at accident scenes were, for the most part, paramedics working in very chaotic situations without the aid of anesthetics and specialized muscle relaxants available to emergency room physicians.

They noted that paramedics "have limited endotracheal intubation training and clinical skills and do not have access to the drugs used for Emergency Department intubations."

That has to be bottom line, in my opinion.

Intubating the trachea is deceptively simple.

Even after decades, I still occasionally misplace a tube and put it in the esophagus.

But that's no big deal - if you recognize it promptly and replace it correctly.

As my residency chairman said, more tellingly than I realized at the time, "It's never the first mistake that kills the patient."

True, truer, truest.

I can see how paramedics could fail to correctly intubate a patient, ventilate the stomach inadvertently, and end up with a brain-dead patient on arrival in the ER.

Doesn't make it right, but it makes it understandable.

But to tell them not to try to place a tube, and instead simply mask the unconscious patient, flies in the face of decades of experience, training, custom, and teaching.

It's going to be a while before the lessons of this landmark study take hold.

MorphWorld: Dior Sparkling Lip Palette into Motorola RAZR•V3 Cellphone

Interesting shape-shifting between the worlds of accessories (Girlie Division) and technotoys.

The Dior ($42 here) comes in two shades (top and just below).

The RAZR comes in electroluminescent blue and silver

and it'll set you back about $600.

You can see

why it's called the RAZR.

'French Airport Police Lose Explosives'

Huh?

I don't read the Onion and all the funny-type stuff, either online or in real life, 'cause reality's much better.

So when I saw the headline in this past Monday's USA Today:

French Lose Explosives At Airport

I thought for sure I must've picked up somebody else's paper.

But there it was online, too, all over the world.

The gist of the story: French police train their bomb-sniffing dogs by concealing plastic explosives in unknowing passengers luggage, then see if the dogs can find it before it makes it onto the plane.

Whoa.

Turns out the dogs still need work: one slab of plastic explosive, weighing about 1/3 of a pound, described by French security officials as "no more dangerous than a bar of chocolate," made it onto one of 90 possible flights last Friday night.

Security officials said that there was no chance the explosives could go off because they were not connected to detonators.

Gee, that's reassuring.

French police had no idea which plane loaded the bag so they notified all the involved airlines and destination airports.

The police said the unwitting traveler might not even have noticed their acquisition.

They described it as "a small blue case, between 50 and 60 centimeters [20-24 inches] long."

So far, though officials in Los Angeles and New York have searched all flights to their airports that could've carried the explosive, the item has not been found.

Can you imagine the fate of the traveler whose bag was found to contain the secretly placed explosive?

No matter how innocent she or he might be, they'd be forever on every watch list on the planet.

And once you're on one, you never, ever get off.

It's kind of like a nightmare 21st century version of "Hotel California."

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and French police said that this training exercise would no longer be used.

Doh.

As if there weren't already plenty of reasons not to fly....

World's most expensive briefcase

The Valextra "Diplomatico" will run you a cool €7000 ($9,400).

I love the company's website.

The ultra-plain homepage is aspirational.

My kind of company.

High-end.

As you may have noticed, my tastes are very simple: like Oscar Wilde, "I like only the best."

But I love the antipode as well.

If you're the kind of person to buy a Valextra briefcase, you're not gonna do it online.

Head for the company's headquarters in Milan and do it right.

It's at Via A. Manzoni, 3.

Telephone: +39 02 99786000.

BehindTheMedspeak: We share 60% of our DNA with... chickens

"Cheep."

Just in from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, and the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium, an analysis of chicken DNA published in today's Nature magazine.

The sequencing of the one billion base pairs, or "letters," of DNA cost $13 million and took ten years.

The chicken is the first descendant of the dinosaurs to have its genome sequenced.

The domestic chicken, with an estimated 20,000 to 23,000 genes, has roughly the same number of genes as humans.

The analysis shows that we share a common ancestor with our feathered friends: a kind of reptile that lived about 310 million years ago.

Hey, I just had a great idea for a sequel: we'll call it "Jurassic Coop."

Maybe not, huh?

Anyway - here's the story off the BBC website:

Scientists Unlock Chicken Code

The DNA of chickens will help us understand our own genome

The chicken is the latest animal to have its genetic sequence decoded.

A team led by the Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, has read through the DNA of the red jungle fowl, the ancestor of domestic chickens.

The genetic variations of three types of domestic chickens have also been mapped by an international team at China's Beijing Genomics Institute.

The work will be useful for scientists as they probe the causes of disease and could help them combat avian flu.

The chicken genome comprises about one billion base pairs, or "letters", of DNA - in contrast to the three billion found in humans.

Hidden in the chicken DNA code are its genes, the starting templates the bird's cells use to make proteins.

It is these sophisticated molecules that build and maintain the animal's body.

The sequence deposited in a public database this week represents a first draft.

It still needs to be tidied up and the gene locations tracked down.

Nonetheless the code will already provide invaluable information for biomedical and agricultural researchers around the globe.

Dr. Dave Burt, of the Roslin Institute, UK, has been working on chicken genomics for about 10 years.

He said the completion of the sequencing effort, which had cost $13m, was most welcome.

"The basic scaffold is there. Now we have to attach the meaning to it - it needs people to annotate the sequence, to say where the genes are," he said.

"The project will bring together all the biological knowledge about the chicken."

Scientists will compare the data with the human code to see if there is information there that can throw light on our own biochemical make-up.

Recent outbreaks of avian flu have accelerated researchers' interest in learning more about the chicken genome and how genetic variation may play a role in the susceptibility of different strains to the disease.

In addition to its tremendous economic value as a source of eggs and meat, the chicken (Gallus gallus) is widely used in biomedical research.

It serves as an important model for the study of embryology and development, as well as for research into the connection between viruses and some types of cancer.

The Washington University researchers, directed by Dr. Richard Wilson, deposited the initial assembly into the GenBank database for worldwide release.

The draft has been used by a team, led by the Beijing Genomics Institute in China and supported by the Wellcome Trust in Britain, to create a map of genetic variation for three different strains of domestic chickens.

The strains were a broiler strain from the United Kingdom, a layer strain from Sweden and a Silkie strain from China.

To make the map, researchers identified and analysed about two million genetic variation sites, mostly single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

SNPs are minute variations scattered through the DNA sequence and make a major contribution to the differences between individual animals in a species.

"We can use this knowledge of genetic variation to map characteristics that could be production traits, such as how fast they grow," said Dr Burt.

Cluck, cluck.

World's smallest museum - Musée-Placard d'Erik Satie

It was the long-time home home of the great 20th-century composer.

Located at 6, rue Cortot, 75018 Paris, France

Telephone: 42 78 15 18

Metro: Lamarck-Calaincourt

Bus: Montmartrobus

Hours: By appointment only

Admission: Free

Sonia Rykiel said it's one of her two favorite museums in the world.

The other?

Musée de la Vie Romantique, also in Paris.

But I digress.

The private Satie museum contains paintings, manuscripts, documents, scale models, and objects.

FunFact: after Satie died, his friends went to this tiny apartment and found it jam-packed with thousands of umbrellas of all shapes and sizes, most unused.

If you don't have Satie's Gymnopédies and other short works for piano, you could do a lot worse with your $6.98 (at amazon: put B00004SYFP in the classical music search box).

[via Sonia Rykiel]

Yes, THE Sonia Rykiel.

Pricenoia

Very cool website.

Amazon comparison shopping, international style.

Simply put a book, CD, DVD, or game into the search box, and up comes the price - in your currency, with shipping costs to your country added in.

Interestingly - or of necessity, I guess - the site's "In association with Amazon."

The fellow who reviewed it for Cool Tools, where I found it, said that prices vary tons between different Amazon stores, and that it is "absolutely false" that the best store to order from is the nearest one.

He points out that music and DVDs are cheaper for Americans from Amazon Canada (not included on Pricenoia, so you've got to go there directly) than from the U.S. store.

And that Europeans can usually get stuff cheaper from the U.S. - including shipping - than from any European store.

There's also a bookmarklet - whatever that is - that lets you compare prices while you're examining a product page at Amazon, and a graph of price evolution over time for every product in every store.

How do you spell arbitrage?

[via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools]