Historically, watches have had very little information to offer, and essentially zero interaction. It used to be, after a watch was set to the correct time, there was no button pressing, scrolling, or reading to do*, only glances to see the time, each lasting a fraction of a second. With the introduction of Apple Watch this year, there will be a vast increase in the pressing, scrolling, and reading done on watches. To accomodate, people may chose to wear this device differently than their old watches: on the inside of their wrist. Let’s work through the anatomical reasons for this.
Back in November, Richard Burtonstrapped an iPhone to his wrist with a prototype of the Apple Watch’s face displayed on-screen. Doing so made it possible to examine the feel of interactions with the watch ahead of its release. When I say feel, I’m thinking specifically about the way the muscles and joints of our forearms feel as they work in concert to shift a watch face towards our gaze. After testing, Burton noted something interesting about wrist position:
As a result of the twisting strain, I wonder if this might lead to more
people wearing [Apple Watch] on the inside of their wrist.
Let’s look at the bones, muscles, and tendons, the anatomy of this twisting strain.
First, some basics. You can wear a watch on two distinct positions on your wrist: the widespread top-of-wrist position and the far less common inside-of-wrist position. Let’s call top-of-wrist conventional and inside-of-wrist gauche†. When you check the time on a watch worn in the conventional (top-of-wrist) position, you elevate your elbow slightly and then pronate your hand, placing the watch face in a plane normal to your gaze. Conversely, when you wear a watch in the gauche (inside-of-wrist) position, you supinate your hand to bring the watch face into view.
Those links on pronation and supination are not particularly helpful for understanding my point. So, let’s do an exercise: place your entire forearm onto a flat surface (like a table) in front of you, palm down, with your fingers pointing straight ahead. Now, rotate your hand so your knuckles are touching the table and you can see your palm. The anatomical term for what you did when you rotated your hand is supination. You’ll feel some resistance to the rotation, just a little bit of strain in your forearm. If you repeat this palms-up/supination motion with your elbow closer to your side, you’ll notice your biceps (on the front of your upper arm) pulling to supinate your hand. Remember that point about your biceps.
Now, return your hand back to palm-down position. If you go past that postion, rotating your pinky skyward, like you were checking a watch in the conventional (top-of-wrist) position, you’ll notice a little more strain than before. So, if a device is positioned in the conventional or gauche position on your wrist, you’ll need to engage muscles, producing some strain in your forearm, in order to interact with it.
Why are you feeling strain? Explaining that requires an examination of your arm bones: the main bones of the forearm are the radius and ulna, and they slide around one another, not unlike the strands in a rope:
When you supinate your hand (left half of that image), the radius rolls across the ulna and the two become (essentially) parallel. Recall the effort this takes, your arm bones want to return to their original orientation‡. You can imagine this like you are untwisting the strands of the rope—it takes a certain amount of torsional energy to hold a rope in an untwisted position. When you return your palm to the table, the radius and ulna (rope strands) return to their overlapped, unstrained state. It also takes energy to twist rope strands together more tightly — analagous to pronation of the hand.
So if it takes effort to both supinate and pronate your hand, why would one be preferable? Answering this requires seeing some muscles on those bones. First, look at the pronator teres and pronator quadratus muscles below (highlighted in blue), the ones you use when when you pronate to view a watch in the conventional position. Next, look at the supinator (highlighted in green) and biceps bracii (top of second image) muscles, the ones you use when you supinate to view a watch in the gauche position.
Did you notice a difference between the muscles groups used for these opposing actions? The muscles that supinate are far more powerful compared to those that pronate (recall the strain in your biceps when you supinated your hand). This difference in size is mostly due to biceps bracii, which forms most of the front of your upper arm! Big muscles fatigue far more slowly than small ones, all else being equal. So, when you wear a watch in the gauche position, in defiance of convention and at risk of fashion faux pas, you recruit far larger, less fatigue-prone muscles during each interaction. This was of little importance when we used to quickly glance at our wrists, but in preparation for the pressing, scrolling, and reading we’ll be doing, we might consider flipping that watch display to the inside of our wrist.
* If you wound it, you did so when the watch was off your wrist. And yeah, yeah calculator watches.
† We get the word “gauche” from the French, where it means, literally, ‘left’ but the connotation when used in English is something unsophisticated or socially awkward. Something you can do, but in defiance of convention.
‡ Say “thanks” to your interosseous membrane.
Alberta’s Tar Sands and the High Cost of Oil — read this and you’ll feel blinding white-hot rage. Tribal lands, guaranteed for perpetuity, ruined. Sky-high cancer rates. A river made worthless. Wholesale, short-sighted environmental destruction. Half a billion gallons of water polluted daily. A physician trying to alert others to cancers, threatened with the end of his career. Government sitting idly by, interested only in the profits of the tar sands industry. This scar on the land will take hundreds of years to heal, all this damage done for money.
I noticed this great light coming in and was taking a few pictures of Ess, and then her mama came up behind me and started singing. This is her reaction.
Emily and Nick bought us a gift card for Punch Pizza and a movie. They did a smart thing and said we had to use the gift before they returned from Mexico (they correctly guessed we’d wait a really long time to get out of the house without Ess if they didn’t dictate a use-by date on their gift). So, here we are at Punch Pizza!
Lili Reitz, executive director of the Ohio State Dental
Board, said last year a quarter of her complaints – or
140 – were against dentists at corporate chains. Yet she
has little authority to take action against the
companies. Instead, her power comes from having control
over the license of individual dentists.
My emphasis above is the entire problem — these corporations chew through young dentists and lean on them to do things that fresh graduates have no idea are poor decisions if your goal is to maintain good relationships with patients for the long term.
“What’s frustrating for us is to go dentist by dentist by
dentist. By the time we get there, they’re not there
anymore” because corporate chains have high turnover
rates.
It is your license that goes on the line when you are pressured to do things by corporate dentistry, and your license that suffers when complaints are brought. These businesses suffer no repercussions; poor feedback doesn’t matter to them since they are high volume, franchised, not structured to work with patients for the long term.
I think corporate dentistry has things to teach small business dentistry: insurance leverage, consistency, and efficiency. But, these good things are meaningless when you see these corporations also lean on huge treatment plans, credit cards, and hard selling: all required to maintain their size and growth.
We were everywhere we could go this Christmas. I was up at 5am on Christmas Eve to go exercise before I worked until noon, at which point I came home to see Essie and Mykala dressed up, Essie’s bottom half looked like a candy cane and Mykala was resplendent* of course. Then it was off to my parent’s for some home-made Dr. Fuhrman lasagna and cookies and presents. Essie opened first, her little hands grabbing each piece of tissue paper. I love to see her touch, feel, grasp things and she has suddenly become so skillful at grabbing everything. The presents were exhausting for her, though, and she needed a nap. This was a theme throughout our presents opening—frequent breaks!
Next, we drove to my grandpa’s to celebrate his birthday, have some of Mykala’s phenomenal Christmas guacamole with pomegranate seeds† and see my mom’s side of the family.
Back into the car, up to Forest Lake, where we saw Mykala’s mom’s side of the family at Mykala’s parent’s house. Essie got to see everyone and was so excited she couldn’t even fall asleep. We popped her into her car seat and she finally slept all the way back down to Woodbury, where we went to St. Ambrose midnight mass with my mom.
Ess was snuggled up in her car seat with her Christmas-colored dog from my parents, “skinny dog”, and she slept through the entire mass. Through all the singing, the readings, the homily, the incense, trumpet-playing, clapping, the entire thing. We went home for some sleep.
Then back at it on Christmas Day! Mykala made me the best cup of coffee I think I’ve ever had‡ and we opened presents from one another. We got Ess one thing: a little, adorable bunny whose tag read “My name is Isabella, please look after me.” We’ve been looking after her.
Then, up to Mykala’s parent’s for mac and cheese paninis and family gifts. Things were going swimmingly until (during one of the breaks in present-opening) I reached for whipped cream, and Essie, perched at my chest in the Baby Björn, employed her rapidly developing skills to grab the edge of a large cup of very dark hot chocolate. I caught the glass, Essie was shaken up but not burned, but the hot chocolate was everywhere. I felt like such a doof. Everything into the laundry, backup clothes on Ess.
Kourtni’s fiancée Arlene then surprised us all with a lovingly crafted and stunning painting of our daughter. So many tears! It was just so unexpected and so different from store-bought gifts to get something we immediately treasured: this hand-crafted visage of our little Essie.
* That’s an excuse to use that work, “resplendent”. I can’t actually pronounce it, so I might as well type it. Plus, it is a good descriptor for how Mykala looked.
† Ok, so, how is it “Christmas” guacamole? Avocados are green, pomegranate seeds are red… and they taste ridiculously great together.
‡ I’ve had some good cups of coffee, but I’ll tell you, the taste is really enhanced when you consume the beverage on your first daughter’s first Christmas morning the day after an exhausting but really without strife, drama, or discord Christmas Eve. Plus, Mykala is great at making coffee.
Thought I worked yesterday, and it turned out I didn’t. Before I figured this out, I drove out to both of the places I normally work, then drove home after a tour of the Twin Cities in the still-dark cloudy morning, and had the privilege of reading Christmas stories to Essie. Next, the three of us went out to pick up a gift, wrapped presents, made salt dough ornaments, took a nap (the three of us! Essie woke up first…), and watched two Christmas movies: The Santa Clause and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
I was feeling a bit Monday-ish during a lot of the day, and looking back the day after, I wish I’d been cheerier. I have been needing less and less time between an event and the regretting of my missing “experiencing self.” My “remembering self” sees the meaning, the fleeting time, the value of experiences. My experiencing self is mercurial and worried.
However, I don’t think I need to think about all this in an abstract way: I love my wife and my daughter, and I’ll keep trying to love them truer and truer.
