Ellie Goulding’s ‘Home’ is a song with a tide. It washes out to low tide, and you are left with stripped down melody: guitars, vocals. It rises to high tide, and you get powerful crashes of synthesizers and hip-hop inspired backbeats. Her voice has no sharp edges, just round corners.
Stephen Fry remembers Steve Jobs:
The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence.
If you’re looking for a succinct, mind-bendingly well-written piece in tribute to Jobs, you must read John Gruber’s Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot.
Despite its ungainly title, “Saussure, Predictive Text, Cycling Awake and the word ‘Book’” is an interesting article. Here’s the thesis: two unrelated books on your bookshelf can become associated in your memory, simply because they are next to one another. Similarly, two unrelated words on your phone can become associated in your memory, simply because T9 predictive text puts them next to one another. As a result, language grows in richness, because new associations are made on the bookshelves of our phones. It’s a really neat idea, one that has produced real-world results. For example, the word “Zonino” is “text misprediction” for “WooHoo!”
I have to close, just like the author of the article did: Zonino!
Nike+ has this “Power Song”; it’s what you play during your run when you need instant motivation. This is that song: “Part Of Me (Original Mix)” by Solar Stone from “Rain Stars Eternal”.
I’m 96% done with the 1440 NDBE Part II study cards I assigned myself in August. I’ve scheduled exam on October 10 and 11. I feel nervous — I think I’m on schedule, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve typed up almost 2000 digital flashcards into the Anki system. By transferring the information from the study cards to electronic cards, I can use the spaced-repetition algorithm to make my final weeks of studying extremely efficient. There is so much information: I feel I am trying to carry a gallon of water in my hands.
A tidbit of prep info from four years ago, when I was taking a Kaplan course to prepare for the dental entrance exam, echoes in my head: “Don’t be concerned about nervousness the day of the exam. Nerves are your body’s way of telling you it’s ready to peak.” Such phrases sound like silly platitudes until the day of the test. Then you hope they’re true.
It’s been a long time since I posted something on Facebook that wasn’t conceived and composed to produce a particular effect in the audience reading it. I no longer feel free enough to celebrate something (anything), express disgust, or just be myself in words and pictures. I’m constantly measuring and guessing about how my thoughts will be received. As a result, I’m more concerned with the reaction to my message and how people will judge me than I am with the actual message. That’s a bad sign: I can no longer be myself.
I love that I can talk to people and follow along in their highs and lows, but I no longer feel comfortable in reciprocating their lifecasting tendency. So, once again, I return here to do those things, to be myself. I can be much more open with my successes and defeats, knowing my audience is small and that I won’t be accosting readers with too much — if people don’t like what they read here, they can simply stop visiting. I’d rather be left alone here at tumbledry than blocked and unfriended on Facebook.
It’s raining and there’s some fall chill in the air. I just got back from getting Mykala a pumpkin soy latté and now we’re going to have a nice hot breakfast.
I couldn’t live somewhere without season changes like this.
When I see a patient, they generally need a dental device that fits with a tolerance of microns. “How does that feel?” I’ll ask. To check, they bite down once. After that, two things can happen. If you got it right, they’ll nod. You live for that nod — you spend hours in lab for that nod. I’ve spent entire afternoons separating stone from mould just to get the nod. I’ve redone impressions, asked for third opinions, agonized over silly little things, for the nod. The only thing better is when your instructor comes by and you get to show them you are, in fact, not an idiot and here, look, there’s physical proof of it — see for yourself, they’re nodding.
And then there’s the other result: your patient bites down a second time. A third. And again. They squint their eyes slightly, intensely concentrating on something distant, just above their feet. “It feels, a little weird.” This isn’t always bad; sometimes the fix is a small alteration — after all, the tolerances are small. But in dental school, the fix is frequently complicated and time-consuming. That look your patient just made means your appointment just became a lot longer. A “learning experience” is the colloquial term.
Some days, things go well. You get The Nod. Things fit so beautifully that you forget all the times they didn’t. For me, that was today. I call this a “Mister Rogers Day”. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood wasn’t a utopia, BUT problems were manageable, people were friendly, and things got resolved. Such days are refreshing.
I am nervous whenever I’m in the School of Dentistry in Moos Tower. Even on days like today when I have no patients scheduled, I am constantly aware of a sensation of compression: my heart beating in the back of my throat.
I noticed this today as I was pouring the stone to produce an altered cast. Nothing broke, nothing leaked, nothing was lost. We’ll get this fellow his removable partial dentures (upper and lower) in a few weeks, and things will be fine. So, it’s peculiar that I’m still so full of adrenaline — I wonder if my subconscious senses danger, even though nothing truly bad has happened at school for quite a while.
Last week, I did an operative competency on a patient. In a competency, your skill at performing a specific clinical procedure is evaluated by two doctors. This involves lots of paperwork and for me, lots of worrying. If you make certain mistakes, you fail your competency. This is inconvenient because you must then find another patient who needs the procedure you just failed. Failure can also make you question your clinical skills. (One of the ultimate insults in dentistry is to say someone has “hands of stone”.) However failure isn’t really a big deal — it’s not like failing an exam. You just… don’t really have any negative consequences. Just find another patient and retake the competency. I think if you fail a few times something bad happens, but frankly I don’t even want to know.
“You have 40 minutes left, and if you aren’t done by then, you’ll fail.” My instructor, who was trying to be helpful during my competency, scared the heck out of me. My patient had arrived late, so I got started late. Time was never something I had in abundance. At that point, I was staring down an MOD amalgam prep with no matrix band, and I told myself “that’s a ton of time!” And it is. In private practice, it should take you 5-10 minutes tops to do what I had to do.
It took me 35 minutes.
There are few things that can go wrong when you condense amalgam (silver fillings) into a tooth, which is what I was doing. You can fail to touch the neighboring teeth (“proximal contacts”), which is an automatic fail. That part went fine, but when I was removing the wedges we use to produce these proximal contacts, I realized how nervous I actually was. I picked up the cotton pliers to pull the wedges, and the shaking of my hand telegraphed to the end of the pliers. I tried not to clatter them against the patient’s teeth.
Now came the fun part: removing the matrix band. These bands are essentially rudimentary moulds that give you the rough shape of the tooth’s axial contours. The interesting thing is, you remove a matrix band when the amalgam is still setting up, so your filling is relatively fragile. If you do it wrong, you have to start the condensation over again. I did not have time to do that. At this point, my shaking got bad, and I had to brace my hand against my patient’s teeth. Thankfully, she didn’t notice. Band removed. Contacts verified. Occlusion refined. I passed. It all went fine. Slow, but fine.
I hope I can shake these nerves before I take my fourth board exam in the spring: patient-based boards. Dentistry at the school is stressful enough without having to calm your hands down.
Eleven days ago, my piece about serving millions of hits with limited resources hit the top of the popular Hacker News website. The visits to tumbledry went from 42 the day before the article to 29,000 the day after. Since then, comment spam has been continually left by what are most likely automatic little programs called bots.
Spam is an annoying problem. I had to keep deleting these trashy comments full of links to lord-knows-what (I didn’t click them to find out). Even more interesting (not at all unique, but interesting), there were some spambots posting excerpts from literature. I’d start reading the comments, knowing it was spam, but I’d keep reading wondering what was going to happen on that fine summer’s day or to that poor little boy. I guess good literature shines through even the jumbled mess of comment spam.
I want neither junky links nor unrelated prose (no matter how well-written) in this space. This morning, I finally decided to tackle the problem. I’ve since added a few lines of code to limit the privileges of those who have left few comments here. As I was in the process of writing, saving, and testing the code, more spam comments kept appearing. And appearing. And appearing.
I tried to tell myself that it was just a bot, and it was just a coincidence, that it wasn’t trying to mess with me as I committed the changes to the code that runs everything here. Still, it felt like I was engaged in some weird digital skirmish with some ghost in the machine. I hope the changes I’ve made keep things from getting junked up too much.
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