The Two Worst Letters In The Alphabet: B & E

I came home from the hospital today after interviewing a lovely patient. You know, a very nice middle aged woman who could describe an illness amazingly well, and who didn't answer the question of "where is your abdominal pain?" with the words "I had two barn fires back in 1974..."

So when I reached my door, I noticed that it wasn't closed all the way. It was extremely strange since there really isn't anything that can prevent this heavy steel door from closing. Until I noticed the dent and scrapes beside the lock. And the jagged piece of metal stopping the door from latching shut. And the missing deadbolt that I'm sure was there this morning.

So obviously the first thing that entered my mind was "Well, it sucks that my computer was stolen again," followed by "I can't believe that someone broke into my last 2 apartments." When I entered my 3rd floor apartment I was surprised to see that many of my things were untouched. But I quickly saw the rectangle of empty space on my desk that used to be my laptop.

It turns out that my roommate was hit harder than me, but my laptop was a lot better than his (which is a given, because mine was a Mac). So there's one upside to having a bunch of worthless crap instead of nice things that you can be proud of. Now I need to deal with the claims adjuster and police, as well as decide whether I should get a new computer now or wait for the insurance money (minus $1000).

On the bright side, I'm glad that I backed up 15 GB of music and some of my pictures (including the ones from my travels). And also that I'm not in the middle of writing my thesis.

Band/Album Names (Pt 19)

It's time for another installment of band and/or album names! Will the excitement ever end? Maybe. Tune in to find out. But until then, enjoy these beauties:

• The Sleep Terrorists*


• Sandals Are Fun


• Big In Kenya


• The Speech Bananas


• If I Was A Chick


• The Physical Tickets


• Coma Village

*this term refers to people who have sleep terrors at night and wake up screaming. Unfortunately (yet predictably), the band name Sleep Terror has already been used.

Science Fact - Clean & Dry

If you are like me, you own several pieces of clothing that have specific washing instructions. Things like "hand wash only", "do not tumble dry", or "dry clean only". And if you are like me, you don't pay attention to these things and have shrunken, discoloured, or pretty much ruined all of these garments. Boo-urns. I know I would get more mileage out of my clothes if I just paid more attention to the stupid tags, but I always forget just the one time, and then it's too messed up for me to care about following the instructions anymore.

Anyway, the topic of this post is dry cleaning, that magical process whereby your clothes become clean and (hopefully) not damaged, even if you've spilled red wine and/or 10W40 all over yourself. What is dry cleaning? Do your clothes actually stay dry? Can I do this myself in my basement? And does dry cleaning cause cancer? The answers to all of these questions are coming up, so stay tuned!


The origin of dry cleaning came about in France when Jean Baptiste Jolly realized that his tablecloth became a lot cleaner after someone spilled kerosine all over it. Thus, the idea of cleaning clothes using non-polar chemicals and NOT water (thus the "dry" part of dry cleaning) was born.

Normally we use water and detergents to clean our clothes. But sometimes the water and/or detergents can ruin the fabric. In other situations the things that we spill on our clothing are not water soluble, so the normal washing methods can't get rid of the stain. This is when dry cleaning is the best choice. Let's talk about how this process works.

Your clothes are first sorted into groups like "heavily stained / last saturday night's party clothes" and "delicates / nothing that belongs to a man". Then the clothes are searched for anything in the pockets (especially pens) and for buttons or clips that could get damaged during the actual cleaning process. After that, it's ready for action.

The clothes get thrown into a big washing machine, but instead of water they use non-polar (or water-repellant) chemicals. The standard dry cleaning chemical is called perchloroehylene, or PERC. This solvent gets added to the clothing at a certain temperature and gets mixed around. As the liquid gets dirty, it gets diverted to a chemical recovery mechanism while new chemical is added to the machine. The used liquid is filtered several times and then is distilled, recovering about 99.99% of the original perc. That's pretty good recovery. Once the clothes are clean, they get spun down and dried. The drying step uses warm air to be blown over the clothes, and then cool outside air for the deoderizing final step.

Sometimes the dry cleaners use other chemicals to help remove certain stains. Very oily stains like grease can often be removed by perc alone, but more organic ones like red wine and blood are harder to get out. In these cases they add "catalysts" or enzymes to the stain, or they add a small amount of detergent to the perc.

These chemicals are not very good for you, so it would not be a good career choice to work in a dry cleaning facility (if you were very concerned about your health). The cancer rates are higher around a dry cleaner's than around a power plant or oil refinery. And if you wore 1 piece of dry cleaned clothing each week for 40 years, you would exceed the amount of perc exposure deemed to be the "safe" by 150 times!! That doesn't sound very good.

The good news is that there are other chemical being used for dry cleaning. Some of these, such as liquid CO2 or liquid silicone, have a much lower health risk. The downside is that they are more mild so don't clean your clothes as well. Hopefully in the future we will figure out the best way to clean clothes without giving everyone cancer.

Oh, and don't set up your own dry cleaning system in your basement. It's way too risky. Leave it to the professionals who you pay to take that risk for you.

Science Fact - Quite a Looker

I was reminiscing about elementary school with a friend today, and it conjured up a memory of mine form grade 4. I was in an almost empty classroom for some unknown reason, meaning that I was alone except for quiet Cindy sitting by the wall. And in order to pass the time I developed a challenging and thought-provoking game whereby I would throw my sharpened pencil into the ceiling tiles to see if I could get it to stick. After a few failed attempts the pencil lodged into one of the foamy squares (victory!) but after a brief second it freed itself and fell to the ground. Right in front of Cindy.

I asked Cindy a couple of times to throw/pass the pencil to me, but to no avail. She was conscuois of me, but completely unresponsive. As this was normal for Cindy, I went to go pick it up myself. But just as I reached her feet and bent down to get it, she swooped down faster than I have ever seen her move before and grabbed the pencil. And then brought it up just as quickly. Into my eye.

I had to wear a patch on my eye for a while, but apart from the ridicule of classmates I escaped any real damage. Lucky for me. And best of all, I could pretend to be a pirate on the playground!

This memory was appropriate for our current medical topic: ophthalmology (aka eye doctor stuff). So I thought I would write down some info on our eyes in order to make you appreciate my story even more.


Let me first talk about each part of the eye and what it does:

• Cornea - The cornea is a tough, clear layer of cells in front of the eye. It can heal itself quickly, but it hurts so much if you scratch it.


• Lens - The lens helps to focus light onto the back of the eye. It can change shape according to how far away you are looking.


• Iris - This is the colourful part of your eye. It can contract or expand to let different amounts of light into your eye. The hole it makes is the pupil.


• Pupil - As I said, this is not a structure. It's the hole in the middle of the iris that lets light into your eye.


• Retina - This is the photosensitive area in the back of your eye. It converts light into nerve impulses and sends them to your brain. This is the part that contains those cells called rods and cones (cones are used for precise vision and for colour, while rods are good for seeing the “big picture” and for night vision).

Now that we know the basics, let's talk about a few weird things about our eyes. First of all, the retina has an area in the middle that is designed to work super well. All of the cells that may interfere with light are pushed to the sides so that the phororeceptors get the most direct light possible. This spot on the retina is called the macula, and the centre of it is called the fovea. When you look directly at something, you are lining up your fovea perfectly with that object. This allows you to see it very clearly.

The fovea contains mostly cones (the precise vision cells), which makes sense because when you focus on something you would like to see it well. But remember that the cones are crappy at night. The rods are the cells that are best at night, and these cells are found in the rest of the retina. So if you've ever looked at a starry sky, you may have seen a faint star out of the corner of your eye, but when you turned to look at it the star disappeared. The only way to see it was to look 5-10 degrees away. This method uses your rods more than your cones, enabling you to see things that don't produce much light.

Now for the second cool thing about eyes. The retina has to send all of the visual info to your brain, and it does this via the optic nerve. But at this area of the retina there are no photoreceptors. So if light shines on the optic disc (where the nerve meets the retina) you will not see anything at all. This is called the blindspot of the eye. Any object that is 30 degrees away from centre (away from your nose) will magically disappear! You don't notice this very often because one eye will compensate for the other one. But you can test this with the picture below. Cover your right eye and focus on the shape on the right with your left eye. Then move your face closer and farther away from the screen slowly until the shape on the left disappears. This is your blindspot. You can do the same by switching eyes and focusing on the other shape.


You can check out more fun eye games at these websites:

• Optical Illusions


• Visual Phenomena