MSICS to correct "preventable blindness"

A TEDX talk in which an American ophthalmic surgeon explains how "manual small-incision cataract surgery" (MSICS) with a 50c scalpel is an effective substitute for the standard American-style laser-guided procedure costing $2,000 for the treatment of mature cataracts.  The worldwide statistics are staggering: cataracts in 200,000,000 people causing half of all worldwide blindness, with each untreated case also impairing the life of associated caregivers.

Concise, well-spoken, and definitely worth 15 minutes of your time, IMHO.

"Nature's first green is gold..."

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

         ---- Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

The photo is of an oak tree in my back yard. In a few weeks the golden catkins will fall, leaving light green leaves, which will darken over the summer and turn russet in the autumn.

Reposted from 2018 to add a closeup photo of the 2024 new foliage and catkins:

Image from ten days ago; the leaves are already green and catkins falling.

Omarolluk

I remember finding stones like these on lakeshores in northern Minnesota.  Never knew they had a name until I encountered a discussion of a particularly odd one -

- at the WhatsThisRock subreddit.  Here's the wiki:

"Omars are a distinctive type of glacial erratic that consists of dark siliceous greywacke and exhibits prominent rounded, often deep, hemispherical voids and pits. The hemispherical voids and pits result from the selective dissolution of carbonate concretions within the greywacke... Omars are typically rounded and range in size from pebbles to boulders. Their rounded shape, whether found in glacial tills or glacial-fluvial (outwash) gravels, indicate that they were eroded from pre-existing littoral or fluvial deposits.

The name given these glacial erratics refer to their source, which is the Proterozoic Omarolluk Formation in the Belcher Islands in southeast Hudson Bay. The Laurentide Ice Sheet eroded omars from the Belcher Islands, an archipelago limited to only about a quarter of 1% of Hudson Bay. Glaciers moved omars from the southeastern part of Hudson Bay to central Canada and into the U.S. where they were deposited on moraines. Because scientists know precisely where they came from they are very valuable in documenting the movement of glaciers."

"Best of show" at Westminster

I will defer comments and just offer this description from The New York Times:

"Like all show poodles, Sage appears to be about 75 percent hair, with a sumptuous coiffure that rises to a huge pouf above and around her head, surrounds her body in a kind of puffball, and reappears again as topiary-ed pompoms on the end of her tail and at the bottom of her skinny legs, as if she is wearing après-ski boots. She trots daintily, as if running was slightly beneath her."

Image cropped for size/emphasis from the original.  The dog's full name is GCHG Ch Surrey Sage.  For fox ache.

Math puzzle

What fraction of the image is black? 

Ignore the straight lines and express your answer as a fraction, not as a "series" extending to some asymptote.

Answer here after you kick yourself for not solving this instantly in your head.

"Someone like you" redux

I heard that you're settled down 

That you found a girl and you're married now 

I heard that your dreams came true 

Guess she gave you things, I didn't give to you 

Old friend, why are you so shy? 

Ain't like you to hold back or hide from the light 

I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited 

But I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it 

I had hoped you'd see my face 

And that you'd be reminded that for me, it isn't over 

Never mind, I'll find someone like you 

I wish nothing but the best for you, too 

"Don't forget me, " I beg 

I remember you said 

"Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead" 

"Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead" 

You know how the time flies 

Only yesterday was the time of our lives 

We were born and raised in a summer haze 

Bound by the surprise of our glory days... (repeat)

Nothing compares, no worries or cares 

Regrets and mistakes, they're memories made 

Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?... (repeat)

The top embed is what I understand was the first release of the song twelve years ago in 2011.  The second was recorded at the London Palladium in 2021.  I'm sure I'm not the only listener to detect a difference between the two: the first an outcry of anguish by a young girl, the second expressing acceptance and defiance by an adult woman.

Divertimento #194

Innovative pastry creations

How cinnamon is harvested from trees

Industrial-level harvesting of trees

Woodworking

Colorful crepe creations

Chemical rust remover

Man catches cobra with a bottle :)

"De-aging" a 400-year-old wooden beam

The economics of a coin-operated laundrette

Michelin star-level cutting of an onion

Chocolate-covered ice-cream cone

"Texture-painting" a wall

Packaging ice cream

Unclogging a blocked drain (tree roots)

Removing paint with dry ice (less risk silicosis)

Interesting way to construct and serve a sandwich roll

Opening a dam spillway gate

Removing soapy water from floor

Adjusting a caulk nozzle

Vibration will homogenize fresh concrete

Removing varnish from a painting

"UFO sighting" debunked (is moth close to CCTV cam)

Is the horse walkiing away from you, or toward you??

Man in criminal court swallows cyanide.  Full video in top comment.

How to bend plywood

How to build a dam

Rainbow drinks discussed in the thread

Animals

"It's raining ducks"

Octopus camouflage

Happy cow (note jump at end)

Elephant on a rampage

Kangaroo stampede

Orca attacking shark -  awesome

Lioness rescued by her pride

Mantis eating hair from someone's arm

Bees like Krispy Kreme doughnuts

"Tornados" of insects (though not mosquitoes as labeled)

Horse getting cleaned

Rescuing a bucket-headed bear

Deep-sea squid brooding her eggs

Reticulated python

Border collie in an agility competition

Nature and science

Dashcam footage of tornado

Popsicle-sticks demonstration of something

Freshly cut jasper

Two straws in a water bottle

Indonesian volcano erupting

Candle ice

Bored?  Make a fire tornado

Owl can turn his head better than you can

Melocactus fruits

Blue-bottomed iceberg

Tumbleweed stampede (good comments)

Mesovortices in motion

Impressive or clever

Geometry of cabinet drawers

"Extreme Firemen" competition

Refrigerator from the 1950s

How Australia implements crowd management

Skilled mudder at work

Anti-mosquito racket

Halloween costume (would probably be shot)

Man catches bass using only his hands and a minnow

A remote-controlled life jacket

Hiding in plain sight

Identifying songs in one second

Water goes through permeable concrete

Professional builder laying mortar (note top comment)

"Please tidy up that bin of nails"

Timelapse of patio being cleaned

Nice automobile advertisement

Cereal box domino fall

Unusual neck gyrations

Sequential perfect faro shuffles

Garbage truck eats a couch

It's called a hydrovac

Removing a roadside curb

Girl rescued from freezing pond

Sports and athleticism

The Red Panda

Baseball's Randy Johnson kills a bird 

   (note his company logo nowadays)

"Please wait 10 minutes before opening your soda."

12-year-old girl runs 17 mph

6-year-old does 80 backflips

Kid converts a 1-7-10 split

Robotic dance moves

Rock climber hangs inverted by toes

Russian army acrobatic stunt

Professional catching a tennis ball on his racket

The University of Minnesota has a basketball player

Volleyball serve

Falls and WTF

Residential street racers

Driver abandons car rather than damage gate

Baseball fan ruptures both ACLs on the steps

Idiot driver gets karma

Humorous or cheerful

Dog doesn't recognize owner after latter's weight loss

Mom creates a virtual roller coaster for daughter

Turtle on a tiny skateboard

Dancing flex duct

"Simon says" done by a professional

Trump extols his cognitive capacity

Elderly lady meets Alexa

Gravy jug from the AwfulTasteButGoodExecution subreddit

Embedded photos from Cake Wrecks (twice), via Neatorama.

Mother-of-the-Year candidate

Chile's Torres del Paine National Park

Ending my blogging day with some awesome photos from a gallery of 30 images of this park posted at The Atlantic.  

Photo credits Anton Petrus/Getty  (top) and Lukasz Nowak1/Getty (bottom)

Managing falls at assisted living facilities

Some senior-care homes say they don’t have the ability to lift fallen residents. Many have adopted “no lift” policies to avoid the risk of back injuries for staff and other potential liabilities...

A nurse wo worked at an assisted-living facility in Greensboro, N.C., who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak with the media, said her company required caretakers to call 911 even if a resident had just slid harmlessly out of a chair.

“If you’re on the floor, period, you’d have to call,” said the nurse, who left her position last year. She said residents were often embarrassed by the lift-assist calls. Some begged her not to dial 911. She said she had no choice.

Fire officials point out they bring no special skill to such situations — it’s just a matter of who’s doing the work...

Lift assists are now the seventh most common type of 911 call, with an average of 1,800 lift-assist calls every day nationwide, according to an analysis of the National Fire Incident Reporting System, which collects emergency calls from more than 23,000 fire departments...

A growing number of cities and towns — from Rocklin, Calif., to Naples, Fla., to Lincoln, Neb. — have started pushing back with special fees of $100 to $800 for senior lift-assist calls... In Mequon, Wis., the fee is billed directly to the facility to emphasize that it’s the company’s responsibility, said Deputy Fire Chief Kurt Zellmann.

“We tell them they can’t pass that onto the patient,” he said. But they can’t prohibit it...

Assisted-living facilities appear to make far more 911 calls for lift assists than nursing homes, which have higher staffing requirements, according to Ron Nunziato, senior policy director at the Health Care Council of Illinois, which represents nursing homes. Nunziato said he rarely called 911 for a lift assist at a nursing home during the three decades that he ran a company that included both nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.

“We had enough staff and equipment to get someone off the floor, out of the tub, whatever the case may be,” Nunziato said, adding: “We don’t believe that skilled nursing facilities are causing the concern.”

More details and commentary at The Washington Post.

"Florida is filled with trash"

BOCA RATON, Fla. – While many people have expressed outrage over a viral video showing teenagers dumping garbage into the waters off South Florida over the weekend, one of their classmates is sticking up for them.  

A Boca Raton Community High School student who didn’t want to give his name said he was on the boat next to the perpetrators during Sunday’s Boca Bash. That classmate said his fellow students’ actions are being unfairly scrutinized.

“Trash happens everywhere, all over the world,” that classmate said. “We are terrorizing 15-year-old kids ‘cause of trash. Yes, I know they are dumb, but at the same time, we all (have) to realize that Florida is filled with trash.”

"Cavernous space" (5): ABYS-

I learn things while doing crossword puzzles.  The April 24 NYT puzzle asked for a five-letter word meaning "bottomless pit."  The answer was ABYSM, not ABYSS.

Editorial comment accompanying the puzzle cited Merriam-Webster as noting that the adjectival form "abysmal" is more commonly used than "abysm", while conversely the adjectival form "abyssal" is less commonly used than "abyss" (I have ever heard it used only in reference to the sea-bottom plains),

"All four terms descend from the Late Latin word abyssus, which is in turn derived from the Greek abyssos ("bottomless"). Abyss and abysm are synonymous (both can refer to the mythical bottomless pit in old accounts of the universe or can be used more broadly in reference to any immeasurably deep gulf), but the adjectives abyssal and abysmal are not used identically.