bookofjoe

BehindTheMedspeak: Practicing medicine with a cellcam

It's here: telemedicine without the middleman.

Up to now telemedicine has consisted of doctors in fancy rooms with all manner of expensive video and computer equipment, talking back and forth as they look at one another and exclaim how cutting-edge and up-to-the-minute they are.

Hey, guys and girls: don't go breaking your arms patting yourselves on the back just yet, 'cause someone just ate your lunch.

The new issue of the journal Archives of Dermatology has a most interesting report by a group of physicians from University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland.

They took pictures of 61 leg ulcers in 52 patients with a first-generation camera phone and had doctors make diagnoses based only on the pictures.

They compared the photo diagnoses with those made by physicians who examined the patients in person, the traditional way.

The result: the agreement between the remote and the face-to-face evaluations was very good, so much so that the physicians concluded that such photo diagnosis was a reliable substitute for in-person evaluation, at least in cases where such access was difficult or impossible.

I like it.

Readers will recall my comments here previously that this illustrated, written blog is merely a placeholder for full-time, always-on/never-off (huh — I guess that's redundant, isn't it? But it still sounds cool, so I'm gonna let it stand) 24/7/365 live bookofjoe TV.

Specials will be broadcast from the O.R., so you can see what I look like when I sweat.

Ha.

Bring on my videoCellcam, if you please, so we can get this show on the road.

Freudian Slippers

So there's always a question of boundaries, isn't there, when it comes to buying a present for your therapist?

I mean, you don't even know her birthday, if she's straight, married... nothing.

She sits there quietly, listening (not daydreaming or wondering how it is anyone can be as boring as you are — you hope).

Week after week, month after month, year after year it goes on.

Will it ever end?

Who knows?

But when this year's holiday season rolls around, why not consider a little levity?

How about these stylish slippers, with the great man himself caricatured on their fronts?

$24 here.

Just make sure they don't come near any core issues.

For those, God invented apples.

Smarties to lose the tube — England goes ballistic in protest

This iconic Nestlé candy, far more popular abroad than in the U.S., is slated to exchange its 68-year old tubular package (above) for a hexagonal one (below) called — surprise! — a "hexatube."

Last week's announcement occasioned an onslaught of letters to the BBC, many of which were reprinted below a story about the change.

My favorite comment, from one Bob Ross: "The darkest moment in the nation's history."

Smarties have been sold in a cylinder-shaped container since they were first launched by Rowntree's of York in 1937.

They were originally named Chocolate Beans but were renamed a year later.

Nestlé also is going to discard the removable plastic lid, collected for the letters that were imprinted underneath, in favor of a cardboard flip-top.

The company said the redesign was necessary to ensure the brand remained "fresh and interesting" to children.

The sugar-coated chocolate sweets will retain the same eight colors — red, orange, yellow, green, mauve, pink, brown and blue.

Big fake stones

For many years I've been looking, without success, for just the right thing to solve a persistent, low-grade, but nevertheless annoying problem near my home.

I live on Magnolia Drive (below).

Magnolia Drive was named Magnolia Drive because — D'oh! — it's got lots of magnolia trees lining its sides.

I have several in front of my house, between Magnolia Drive and the semi-circular drive that curves in front of my home.

There's also a row of pine trees between the magnolias and the street proper.

I live sort of in the country; there are no sidewalks.

Years ago our neighborhood association sent out a newsletter asking all the homeowners to trim back their trees from the edge of the street since they were impinging on the roadway, which in many areas is barely wide enough to permit two cars to pass side-by-side.

Being young and foolish, I complied.

Big mistake.

Because not only did cutting back the lower branches open up the roadway on my side of the street, it also removed significant foliage that had provided a privacy screen.

But there was one more negative side effect: now that the area on the side of the road was clear, it was just wide enough for a car or two to park there, right in front of my house under the pines along the roadside.

I do not like looking out my front windows and seeing cars there, on my property.

It is intrusive and unpleasant and ugly.

Over the years the pines have regenerated to the point that they almost — but not quite — make it impractical to park under them.

So I have in a low-key, not urgent fashion been looking for something that I might place there that would make the area untenable for parking.

And today I think I may have found it.

Now, I've previously seen those hollow fake rocks at Plow and Hearth and suchlike, but they just didn't seem real enough and in fact were simply shells, very light and flimsy.

The Garden Spheres pictured up top, on the other hand, are solid; made from fiberglass resin and crushed stone composite; and have enough weight to make contact with a vehicle less than pleasant for its bodywork.

The largest one, 17" in diameter, weighs 22 lbs. and costs $69 here (item #14851).

I bought it.

I'm gonna roll it right onto the grassy area along the road alongside the pines and see what happens.

Probably someone will steal it but hey, you never know until you try.

World's most innovative bird

The envelope, please.

And the winner is... the crow!

Tied for first place is the blue jay.

Then came falcons, hawks, woodpeckers and herons, all at the upper end of the [bird's nest?]-shaped curve.

The bird IQ (Innovation Quotient) test was developed by Dr. Louis Lefebvre of McGill University in Montreal.

He presented the results of his study of bird intelligence at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting Monday in Washington, D.C.

His scale takes into account every analysis of innovative behavior published in ornithology journals since 1930.

The results indicate what birds do their natural habitats; parrots, which have great verbal dexterity in captivity, show very little innovative behavior in the wild.

Clive Cookson of The Financial Times, reporting on the study, wrote, "by contrast, a group of vultures learned to wait beside minefields during the war in Rhodesia for unsuspecting gazelles to be blown up into a meal."

Australians, meanwhile, are not exactly dancing in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney upon learning that half of their national coat of arms is occupied by the emu (below),

declared "the world's dumbest bird."

We get email: from Bill "The Nutcracker Guy"

On January 21 I featured the Texas Native Inertia Nutcracker (above).

What a great name.

Maybe I should get on the clue train and change my blog's name from bookofjoe to "Wisconsin Inert Native Nut."

Ya think?

Anyhow, last evening seems I was doing close to nothing, but different from the evening before, when over the electronic transom came an email from Bill "The Nutcracker Guy" Price himself, sole owner/proprietor/manufacturer/seller of the Texas Native Inertia Nutcracker.

Here's what he said:

I am Bill, The Nutcracker Guy, saying thanks for placing this on your site... it's really a super product and I have enjoyed being associated with it since 1977... I've sold a lot of nutcrackers !!

Cracked me up.

'Prep' — the belt

I was amused to read, in Janet Maslin's perceptive and amusing story in this past Monday's New York Times headlined "Vicarious Living: Power of Snob Appeal," that people attending Curtis Sittenfeld's readings from her surprise best-seller (above) are turning up wearing versions of the pink-and-green ribbon belt on the book's cover.

So you can tell a book by its (belt) cover.

Amazing Slow Downer — 'Audio slow motion'

From Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:

This sweetly intuitive program for ear-playing musicians slows down the tune without altering the pitch and/or plays the tune in any key you like.

Crooked & complicated melody, complex ornamentation, blistering speed?

With this you can tune it to your instrument, slow it down, isolate the tricky parts, put them on loops and play along with them over and over until you get it right.

And marvel at how inventive and agile your favorite jazzmen/fiddlers/pipers/bluesmen/etc. could and can be.

If you play like this, I need say very little more: this is our wet dream, as big an invention as written music or the phonograph.

Works directly from the CD drive, or with any MP3/AIFF/Wave/AAC/M4A files on your HD; iTunes friendly; originally written for the Mac, now available for Windows as well.

Download the demo and see how it works: I believe you'll agree that the $45 price is an excellent value.

I used to pay much more for those clunky old Marantzes that were nowhere near as useful and then broke.

This cool tool has opened a whole realm of hard tunes to me.

It's that social thing — you need to play with people who are better than you, but you really don't want to waste the patience of good musicians by making them to go over that tricky part for you again.

It's relaxing to let the machine do the machine work, and relaxing makes for good music.

The program is frequently upgraded, and upgrades are always free. (There's a note about "major upgrades may entail a slight fee", but the OSX version was free to people who'd bought classic.)

A couple of times I had to email for help and was fixed up immediately apparently by the program's author, a Swedish musician and programmer named Rolf.

— Tim Jennings

Amazing Slow Downer

$45

Available from ronimusic

[via Tim Jennings and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools]