bookofjoe

BehindTheMedspeak: What do those abbreviations really mean?

My favorite, from Samuel Shem's 1978 classic, "House of God," didn't make the graphic up top.

WNL, commonly thought to be shorthand for "Within normal limits," instead becomes "We never looked."

[via Jerry Young]

Element Skateboards x Vestalife Limited Edition Ladybug iPod Speaker Dock

Speaker wings that open and spread out for maximum stereo sound, built-in subwoofer, and digital amplifier.

"Catch one before they all fly away."

$109.95.

MovieFlix.com: 'Watch free movies — now!'

We like free.

Tell us more.

This is a legal site which, according to a superb article in the latest issue of The Economist headlined "Hollywood and the Internet," "... makes its money from independent films, student movies, straight-to-video titles and other eclectic fare."

The Economist added, "MovieFlix... is rare among download sites: it turns a profit."

Hand Wash and Toothbrush Timer

From the website:

Hand Wash and Toothbrush Timer

Health professionals say wash your hands for 20 seconds and brush your teeth for 2 full minutes for proper hygiene.

Simply press the desired button on this battery-operated timer, then wash or brush.

Uses 3 AAA batteries (not included).

Mounts with included Velcro tape.

Lights up when time is up.

Durable plastic.

$9.99.

Self-Healing Rubber

Henry Fountain wrote about it in yesterday's New York Times Science section, as follows (note that the video on the Times website is much better than that above).

Researchers Develop a Type of Rubber That Can Repair Itself

Flubber was pretty good stuff. The super-rubber of a 1961 Disney film starring Fred MacMurray (and of a 1997 remake starring Robin Williams) could literally make people jump through basketball hoops.

But could Flubber heal itself?

A new type of rubber developed by researchers in Paris can. When a rubberband made from the material is cut and the two ends are pressed together, they quickly form a strong new bond without glue or heat.

Ludwik Leibler, Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry, part of the National Center for Scientific Research, describe the new material in the journal Nature. It is made from readily available ingredients — vegetable oils and urea — and can be repaired and reprocessed many times without losing its elasticity.

Dr. Leibler said conventional rubber consists of huge molecules with strong covalent bonds holding them together. Their idea was to use smaller molecules and link them using hydrogen bonds. “Imagine that the interactions are strong enough so the whole thing holds together,” he said.

The processes involved — studied in a field known as supramolecular chemistry — are complex. The material can easily crystallize or be too fluid. “At first we obtained things that were like chewing gum,” Dr. Leibler said. “Not quite what we wanted.”

Eventually they came up with a material comparable to conventional rubber in elasticity and in how well it recovers its original size after stretching. By tweaking the ingredients, Dr. Leibler said, it should be possible to produce a range of materials with different properties. Already a chemical company, Arkema, is working on commercializing the process.

The hydrogen bonds that hold the small molecules together are also key to the healing process. When two cut ends are brought together, molecules on each side reform bonds with those on the other. Time is of the essence: if the ends are not brought together quickly enough, the molecules will form bonds with other molecules on their own side, making a repair impossible.

....................

Here's a link to the editor's summary of the Nature paper; the summary itself follows.

Self-Mending Rubber

When a rubber-band breaks, that's it: time to get another one. But a remarkable new material described in this issue behaves rather differently. Consisting of molecules containing three different functional groups that form multiple hydrogen bonds, the molecules associate to form a 'supramolecular rubber' containing both chains and cross-links. The system shows rubber-like behaviour, that is, recoverable extensibility when stretched to several times its original length. In contrast to conventional rubbers made of macromolecules, these systems when broken or cut can self-heal when the fractured surfaces are brought together at room temperature. The new material can be synthesized from simple ingredients — fatty acids and urea — and once synthesized it is readily reprocessed. In its current form supramolecular rubber has slow strain recovery and it 'creeps' under stress, but by adjusting the starting ingredients, a spectrum of properties is attainable.

....................

Here's a link to the Nature paper; the first paragraph follows.

Self-healing and thermoreversible rubber from supramolecular assembly

Rubbers exhibit enormous extensibility up to several hundred per cent, compared with a few per cent for ordinary solids, and have the ability to recover their original shape and dimensions on release of stress. Rubber elasticity is a property of macromolecules that are either covalently cross-linked or connected in a network by physical associations such as small glassy or crystalline domains, ionic aggregates or multiple hydrogen bonds. Covalent cross-links or strong physical associations prevent flow and creep. Here we design and synthesize molecules that associate together to form both chains and cross-links via hydrogen bonds. The system shows recoverable extensibility up to several hundred per cent and little creep under load. In striking contrast to conventional cross-linked or thermoreversible rubbers made of macromolecules, these systems, when broken or cut, can be simply repaired by bringing together fractured surfaces to self-heal at room temperature. Repaired samples recuperate their enormous extensibility. The process of breaking and healing can be repeated many times. These materials can be easily processed, re-used and recycled. Their unique self-repairing properties, the simplicity of their synthesis, their availability from renewable resources and the low cost of raw ingredients (fatty acids and urea) bode well for future applications.

Voltage-Sensing Wire Stripper — 5 electrician's tools in 1

A nice companion to your spiffy new screwdriver.

From the website:

Voltage-Sensing Wire Stripper — 5 electrician's tools in 1

Quickly strip any size wire, do electrical work more safely

Hey, time is money.

Why waste it fumbling for different tools?

The Voltage Sensing Wire Stripper has 5 functions in one so you get the job done faster and safer.

Features:

• Corrosion-resistant stainless steel construction with cushion-grip handles

• Bolt cutting and threading stations for 4-40, 10-24, 6-32, 10-32 and 8-32

• Handle sensor detects AC voltage without contacting live wires

• Strips #8–#20 solid and #10–#22 strand wire

• Crimps terminals and coaxial connectors

• Uses one watch battery (included)

• Needle-nose pliers

• 8-1/4" long

....................

$29.50.

'The Silence Before Bach'

Above, an image from the new above-titled movie by Spanish director Pere Portabella.

Manohla Dargis's January 30, 2008 New York Times rave review follows.

It All Comes Down to (or Looks Up to) Bach

The jingling piano, the humming traffic and the prancing horse tap out separate if connecting songs in the beguiling nonnarrative film “The Silence Before Bach,” from the septuagenarian Spanish auteur Pere Portabella. You could say that these three make beautiful music together, though this observation doesn’t capture the contrapuntal complexity of the film, which unfolds note against note, scene against scene.

Born in 1929, Mr. Portabella helped produce films by Carlos Saura (“The Delinquents,” 1959) and Luis Buñuel (the Franco-freaking “Viridiana,” 1961), and started making his own in the late 1960s, at times in collaboration with other Catalan artists like Joan Miró. An intermittent fixture on the festival circuit, he received the first North American retrospective of his work at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago in 2006, with the Museum of Modern Art following suit a year later with its own survey. According to the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Mr. Portabella has not allowed any of his work to be transferred to VHS or DVD, which is too bad, because, to judge from “The Silence Before Bach,” he merits a wider audience.

And there is an audience for this work, despite the hurdles presented by foreign-language film distribution. “The Silence Before Bach” may be nonnarrative, but its pleasures are obvious, even when its meaning proves rather less so. Through a series of seemingly disconnected set pieces — some transpiring in present-day Europe, some in the past — Mr. Portabella creates a film that doesn’t address Bach in the usual biopic terms but instead as a jumping-off point for different visual and aural ideas and associations, including the cross-cultural reality of European identity. Following Bach’s influence, Mr. Portabella and his film bounce all over the map, crisscrossing the continent from Spain to Germany by way of various travelers, their harmonies and rhythms.

“The Silence Before Bach” opens with a camera prowling through a series of empty white rooms that look very much like a gallery space primed (and left waiting) for an exhibition. Mr. Portabella does not disappoint and starts the show soon enough with the appearance of a magically self-propelled player piano [top]. This ambulatory instrument — its keys and gears furiously churning out the “Goldberg” Variations — starts to move closer and closer toward the camera, which abruptly reverses its course and begins moving backward like a retreating enemy. It’s a strangely comical and mysterious image (attack of the player piano!) that suggests that this music (or perhaps its lovers) does not appreciate being shut away in a sterile, depopulated environment, like that of a would-be gallery.

Edward Said once wrote of Bach’s counterpoint: “The listener is aware of a remarkable complexity but never a laborious or academic one. Its authority is absolute. For both listener and performer, the result is an aesthetic pleasure based equally on immediate accessibility and the greatest technical prowess.” I didn’t find “The Silence Before Bach” immediately accessible, though this is far from a complaint. The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.

Swarovski Crystal Headphones

Created for the 2007 Swarovski Fashion Rocks event in the U.K.

DJ headphones encrusted

in amethyst crystals.

$2,400.

[via hypebeast.com]