Learnt a new word today, “fixer”. I first heard it when Anthony Bourdain briefly referred to his show’s fixer during their trip to Beirut, Lebanon during the Lebanon War. A fixer, then is a native that you contact when you are planning to travel to an area. They can connect you with experiences you would never otherwise have, and are experts about every aspect of their area. What amazing travel guides. More in this article: The travel world’s top fixers - Times Online:
We’re talking about those expert Mr Fix-Its who know
their patch like the hairy side of their hand, and can
whisk you off to camp in a “lost” jungle temple, party in
an off-limits favela, or simply cook with Granny in her
native village, somewhere deep in the bush.
This morning, I was thinking about raising children. Admittedly, I know v̶e̶r̶y l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ nothing about it because I haven’t done it. I do think that when raising children, inspiring speeches carry almost no effect, while leading by consistent example is one of the most potent positive effects you can have on a child’s life.
Obviously, repeatedly telling your child not to lie while telling lies yourself is a problem. I wonder, though, if I will find myself telling my children things like this: “Doing the things you don’t want to so you can enjoy the things you do is a valuable skill no matter where you end up or what you end up doing.” Or will I understand that I am communicating this by example?
Apparently, I post a fair number of dashboard widgets these days. Here’s the latest:
The day this happened, I biked back home in the heat. The wind was up, and it felt artificial it was so hot. Odd thing: I biked past the five story Oak Street Ramp on the U’s campus, and there was this cool air wafting out of it. It had gotten so hot so quickly that the concrete of the parking structure had remained cool, and was cooling the block around it. It was really odd to suddenly be about 10 degrees cooler.
Similarly, under the trees of Prospect Park, the asphalt hadn’t heated up, and it was cooler. Noticing the changes in heat and my noticeably stickier tires rolled over the pavement was like having another sense.
One slip, and I gave myself four extra hours of lab work. Here’s how.
At the School of Dentistry, we are short on cash. (Our dean is also leaving, but that’s a story for another day). So, the students (us) do a lot of intricate lab work in order to make the stuff our patients need (crowns, bridges, etc.). That way, we don’t have to pay a professional lab to do as much of our lab work. This does the following:
Saves the school money.
Teaches students (us) what good lab work looks like.
These are good things. However, all of this lab work also:
Drives me insane.
We use a polyvinyl siloxane (sure you can use polyether, if you want to really bum your patient out) to take a really accurate three-dimensional negative of a patient’s teeth. We then use a special stone (Type IV die stone) to make a positive version of the patient’s teeth in stone.
We then go through a series of steps to produce something that looks like this:
THEN we send it to lab. They take the time to create an entire fake tooth in wax, cast it, possibly porcelain veneer it, and polish.
They are supremely good at this. Incidentally, they’re supremely good at the steps before (the pouring of the cast, the model work to produce that picture above). BUT, us students, who will never do lab work on this scale again, have to try our hand at this stuff. Pretty discouraging, when you make the mistake I did.
If you want the crown to work in the patient’s mouth without adjustments, the whole process has to be completed to tolerances of about 10-100 microns. That’s where my problems started.
I was doing a final trim on a piece not unlike the blue one you see above. There’s a border on it, called the margin, that represents the division between the edge of the crown and the rest of the tooth. I’ve never messed this part up before, but this time I nicked it when trimming. My slip obliterated a piece of margin 0.7mm wide and about 0.2mm deep. I only showed it to a few people, but the consensus was universal: a hole like that is about the size of the grand canyon when you’re doing die work. When hundreds of microns matter, a half millimeter error might as well be a mile.
