Bite Point

The Other Side of the Sheep

A long time ago, future President Calvin Coolidge was riding a horse through rural Vermont with a friend.

His friend, taking in the rough-hewn Yankee countryside, remarked, "See how closely they have shaved those sheep?"

Coolidge replied, "At least on this side."

*

As we all recognize, we now live in an era of information overload. What is recognized less than it should be is that much of the information we are exposed to comes with the bias of the presenter. Nearly everything we read and hear has been pre-digested for us. Editorialized. Opinions laid in. Content honed to elicit specific emotions--usually fear or anger. We are constantly being battered with the terrible cudgel of being told what to think.

President Coolidge's five simple words remind us of the importance of believing what we know. And that's it.

Let us then seek the objective truth and think for ourselves more often than not.

 

Joel D Canfield on Manners Matter

Here's Joel D Canfield on a subject that gains in importance with every passing week in our hyped-up speed-driven society--

Manners Matter.

http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/44.05.MannersMatter

Dentistry's Quiet Stand Against Intolerance

The first African-American graduate of a university-based dental school in the U.S. was from the very first class of the very first such school--Harvard in 1867.

My own Academy of Stomatology, founded in 1894, voted to allow "people of color" to become members--in the 1920s.

Most photos of dental school classes going back to the beginning show women students. Male and female dentists have no inherent unfair pay differential, since our income derives directly from the treatment we perform.

Christian dentists, Hindu dentists, Jewish dentists, Muslim dentists and dentists of all the other great religions become fast friends in dental school, practice together, refer to each other, research and write papers as colleagues, and interact in a thousand ways with regard only to ability, not to arbitrary ethnic or religious or cultural background.

Most important of all, we dentists treat patients of all backgrounds equally, concerned with the diagnosis and treatment, not with the kind of person who carries it, and generally always have done so, going right back to our origins as an organized profession.

Maybe the broken world we live in should take a few cues in how to behave from its dentists.

We Cannot Afford

"As a people, we cannot afford to let any group of citizens or any individual citizen, live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare. Industry, therefore, must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency. We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure. We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living--a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit a reasonable savings for old age."

--President Teddy Roosevelt, August 6, 1912

His speech can be heard and read here:

http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/2-progressivism/5-wilson/19120800_Social_and_Industrial_Justice-Theodore_Roosevelt.html

 

Bespoke Versus Commodity in Dentistry

Whenever we purchase anything, be it good or service, we make a choice. This choice is a dichotomy. We ask ourselves, "Is this a commodity, or is it bespoke?"

Now, we don't actually use those exact words. Though I'd like to induce you to. But the question, usually not expressed as a conscious thought at all, is one we always ask when we purchase a good or a service.

The word "bespoke" may be unfamiliar and give you a little trouble. Here's why I use it.

Have a look at these words:

Commodity.
Corporate.
Anonymous.
Mass-Market.
Mass-Produced.
Average.
Interchangeable.
Temporary.
Disposable.

What word in the English language stands as their opposite? I wracked my brain for a long time over this and I finally settled on bespoke. It means custom-made, created to individual order, unique, remarkable and personal.

A commodity, on the other hand, is an article of trade or commerce--an undifferentiated article. Merriam-Webster in fact is astonishingly anonymous in its primary definition of a commodity: "something that is bought and sold." Something. No hint of any particular, delightful, unique thing. Just the anonymous something.

They go on in the full definitions to say:
"an article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment"
"a mass-produced unspecialized product"
"a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price"

"Mass-produced" and "unspecialized" help us get to the core of what a commodity is all about.

By contrast, then, the bespoke is the realm of the custom-made, the personal, the unique and remarkable. And, presumably, always the more expensive. So many examples come to mind. One envisions a particular piece of furniture, and engages a skilled artisan to create it. A gourmand couple remodels their kitchen, and spares no expense in bringing to life a splendid space in which they can conceive and execute their culinary magic. A man engages a dressmaker to make a unique, one-of-a-kind dress for his wife of twenty years. A wine or tea or coffee or even Brussels sprouts aficionado seeks out a particular organically grown, handcrafted example of their taste buds' glorious desire.

And so on. We do see something interesting here: almost everything, it seems, can be bespoke or commodity, depending on how we look at it. Furniture, home improvements, clothing, food, landscaping, massages--all can be bespoke or obtained as commodities, where lowest cost is the primary consideration.

Many goods and services do blur the line of the dichotomy I try to draw. An Apple iPad or iPhone, for instance. Technically, these are commodities--amalgamations of metal, glass and rare earth elements that are mass-produced by the hundreds of millions. Hardware and software engineers were stressed to the max. Miners were exploited. Incalculably complex distribution networks were created and U.S. taxes strenuously avoided. (Something to do with Irish tax law...)

And yet, to many an end user, their smart phone or tablet is practically a member of the family. Their connection to and guide through the world around them. Their pathway to share their joy in times of accomplishment and triumph, and their succor when trouble comes calling.

Hardly a "mass-produced unspecialized product."

Same with cars. They are certainly mass-produced, but we still manage to have love affairs with them, at least in America where our entire infrastructure is built around individual motorized transport.

Back to my original assertion, then, and now with an awareness that the dichotomy is, at times, somewhat blurred. Life is messy that way.

Having observed human purchasing decisions for a long time now, I'd say that we can determine the realm the person is aiming for--commodity or bespoke--by asking one simple question:

"Is low cost the primary, overriding consideration?"

Thus, we obtain the Gasbuddy app and, casting any sort of brand loyalty aside, always seek out the lowest price gasoline when it's time to fill up our car. Makes sense, right? Gas is gas. And we very well might buy the lowest cost paper towels, as long as they aren't too rough and papery and non-absorbent. We tend to edge up the price in order to avoid inconvenience. But that's about it. When we seek the lowest price, what we want is a commodity. These days, in a world of six-sigma quality control, we expect our commodities to work as advertised, thank you very much, and they often do. But there's nothing custom or human about them. There can't be, for the simple reason that in a capitalistic system, adding bells and whistles and wonderful delightful features and a human touch adds cost.

These consumer decisions often make perfect sense, don't they?

Would you pay more percentage points for your mortgage because the broker was nice, and even made you lunch? I doubt it. A mortgage is a mortgage is a mortgage and no amount of bonhomie at the time of the deal can possibly justify higher payments for all those thirty years it runs. (Hint: try to do it in fifteen.)

So when, then, do we seek the bespoke? Ah, that is the question about ourselves that it pays to understand. I would say--

-When we wish to be delighted, and

-When we need a serious problem solved.

That explains the new car thing. New cars delight us. They smell great, they don't have any dirt or chips on them, and their controls are slightly unfamiliar. It's great fun to drive them for a time, even though we might be going to all the same places we went before. Computers and smart phones delight us, too. And they can help solve our problems. We can navigate in unfamiliar cities with GPS-driven maps and restaurant apps and it's easy to discover all the local events and businesses that stand a chance at delighting us. Delight and endless problem-solving, all in the palm of our hand. Now that's bespoke! Even though the device was mass-produced.

With this new understanding of how we think when we make a purchase, let us now turn to dentistry. This is a realm in which I'm always amazed when someone asserts, "Low cost is my primary consideration. Where can I go where the dentistry is cheapest?"

After all, this is our body we're talking about. We only get one.

In dentistry today, cheapest usually means corporate dental practice. Corporate even asserts this themselves. "Economies of scale," "pooling of resources," "reduced lab and materials costs," "reduced labor costs," and "managerial expertise" are all corporate dental catchphrases that guide them on their course of racing to the bottom on cost.

And yet.

Corporations are, by definition, legal instruments designed to maximize profits for their shareholders. That's fine as far as it goes, and corporations often create amazing things that benefit society, advance technology, and cause shareholders to prosper. In the realm of medicine and the treatment of the human body, however, things get dicey. In their race to the bottom on cost and their relentless grasping at More with a capital "M" when it comes to profits, dental corporations give in to temptation and over-diagnose, over-treat and skimp on materials, laboratories and labor. 

So yes, corporate dentistry's tempting low fees for any given procedure are often less than they are in private practice. But, in corporate dentistry, patients will be seriously over-diagnosed and over-treated. Thus, patients will end up paying far more in the end. In money. And in their precious oral health.

As in any field, in dentistry there will always be the two realms: commodity and bespoke. A portion of consumers will always make their purchasing decisions based primarily on low cost. They mystify me, though. The risks to oral health, and the odds of expensive over-treatment, are immense.

A bespoke dental practice will comprise doctors and staff who listen. Real and lasting human connections will be made. Emotional labor will be willingly expended to ensure patient comfort and successful treatment outcomes. When controversies over treatment or finances arise, solutions will be worked out. And in our increasingly transparent world, localite public opinion will drive bespoke dental practices to ever higher standards of solving problems for and delighting their patients. It cannot be any other way.

A dental practice is, in a very real sense, the sum total of all the individual interactions it has with its patients. And a bespoke dental practice is worth its fee because the human beings who are responsible for those interactions truly care about the well-being of those other human beings who are their treasured patients.

 

*****

If you really want to explore the concepts of commodity and bespoke, there's my novel, The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks. It's on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Wore-Mismatched-Socks/dp/0991301757/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404578161&sr=1-1&keywords=the+man+who+wore+mismatched+socks

Here's a standalone short story set in the novel's universe, which is respectful, since you can see if you wish to tackle Socks itself before purchasing:

https://sites.google.com/site/tmwwmms/home/the-virtue-polarization

Oh. And Socks comes with a warning label.

https://sites.google.com/site/tmwwmms/home/the-warning-label

 

Thoughts on Entering a Courthouse

Thoughts on entering a courthouse for a Letter of Testamentary:

-Courthouses are (naturally) designed to cower and intimidate. There's a lot of marble. And massive doors. And oak. But mostly marble. Marble walls. Marble tables. Marble statues. Doric columns. Or are they Ionic columns? In any event, they're iconic columns, and they intimidate.

-The police officers at the entrance with the metal detectors--THANK YOU for your service!!--do a remarkable job at staying alert. Think about it. Hundreds of people come into the courthouse every day, 99.999% intending to behave like law-abiding citizens. One in many thousands has bad intentions.
And they have to remain ready for that. Remain on high alert at all times. Remarkable.

-The difference between the speed at which a government employee and a business person accomplish a task requires scientific notation to even calculate.

-Bureaucrats still love paper. I mean they really REALLY love paper. "Bureaucrat," "Paper" and "Arouse" are three words that go together well. You can actually feel the sexual heat when a bureaucrat goes to shuffle paper, or retrieve it from its carefully catalogued repository.

-A couple with two kids came in for a marriage license. No one bats an eye anymore at the reversal of steps here, that would have been scandalous when I was young, and positively unthinkable a generation before that.

-My bureaucrat was super quirky. There's apparently nothing to stop a civil servant bureaucrat from being super quirky, as I'd imagine it would be difficult to fire them.

And you know what? I'm glad she was quirky.

She compensated for all that bloody marble.

Telechron Clocks and the Selfish Pursuit of Batteries

Here is a splendid Telechron clock from 1928 or so, "The Tudor" in beautiful Bakelite:

And "The Oxford," from the same era:

This is my newly acquired 1950s-era Telechron wall clock, "The Replica":

It's sixty years old and all you have to do is plug it in and it keeps perfect time. There are apparently thousands and thousands of Telechrons from the 1920s and 1930s that are in prime working order as well.

Telechron clocks, manufactured from 1912 to 1992, had their heyday from the 1920s to the 1950s. Telechrons were robust, reliable and also beautiful: most embodied Art Deco principles of design.

Telechrons employed an ingenious method to keep accurate time. Electric power in the U.S., once standardized in the Twenties, provides alternating current at 60 cycles per second: 60 Hz. In a Telechron, a synchronous motor spins at the same rate as the cycle of the alternating current that's driving it. This method ensures that the clock always keeps the correct time.

The inventor of the Telechron clock technology, Henry Warren, anticipated one significant flaw in this arrangement: if the electric power grid is used as a system for the "distribution of time," as he phrased it, then, in the case of a power failure, the clocks stop and lose their connection with the "master clock" as provided by the 60 Hz AC current from the power company. If there is a temporary power outage, after the power comes back on, the time will be incorrect. To address this issue, Warren designed his clocks with an "indicating device." This is a red dot that appears on the dial whenever the power is interrupted:

 

This red dot informs the clock's owner to reset the time. Even years ago, the correct time could be checked via telephone or the radio. Resetting the clock changes the indicating device back to white again.

Here's a beautiful working "The Acorn" from 1930s vintage:

Much of the appeal of Telechron clocks derived from the fact that early batteries were unreliable and didn't last long. Once battery technology improved in the 1950s and 1960s, people began buying battery-powered clocks in preference to plug-in models, especially in wall and mantle clock applications.

We all chose batteries in large part because we didn't want clock cords to show on our walls and mantles.

And what have we done....

We've littered the landscape and our groundwater with countless millions, perhaps billions, of used batteries that contain acids and toxic heavy metals. Heeaven only knows what this has done to crops, fish and wildlife, and even rates of cancer in humans.

Rechargeable batteries, like the one in this laptop I'm writing on, can and should be recycled. Though I wonder how "clean" a process that really is. And newer technologies are coming that will allow us to store energy at high density without employing heavy metals at all. But we've already thrown away so many disposable batteries, and caused so much damage to our world.

And part of the reason we did all that is because we don't like seeing cords on our walls. We are a self-involved species indeed.

 

Side Streets, Stop Signs and Selfish Staumrels

Last post, we discussed my Second Most Intense Moronic Driver Pet Peeve. This begs the question, what is my First? There are hundreds of impolite, aggressive, overly passive, infuriating, dangerous and downright scary things that today's rushed, distracted drivers do that torment me. But my number one antagonizer is:

The Maddening Side Street Nose-Out.

Here's the set-up.

We're driving happily down a main road, obeying the law, minding our own business, enjoying those few precious moments of velocity-equilibrium before the inevitable next stop sign or traffic light, at which we're required by both law and self-preservation to grind up our expensive brake metal, and grind to a fuel-and-time-burning halt.

Suddenly, we're assaulted from the side. Some rushed, clueless clown has nosed out of a side street, right through the stop sign that stands tall in plain view-- a sign that valiantly, yet, in the end, futilely strives to stave off such selfish, dangerous behavior. They've almost hit us! They finally stopped, partway out into our lane, and we swerved left just in time to avoid their left front quarter panel, and just barely missed being head-ended by an oncoming truck on the other side of the road.

Why? Why do they do this to us? Why so many times per day too? In my neck of the woods, the Nose-Out typically happens to me two dozen times a day, and my commute is only nine miles each way.

What do these people think, that it's 1963, and Sunday afternoon, and there's no one gonna be on the road? It's 2013 people--there's always a car in our way!! Or so it is logical, and safe, to assume at all times.

I've made an informal study of this phenomenon. Drivers are more rushed and distracted than ever before in the history of motor cars. And if we had collected data on the average stopping points that people choose, on side streets connecting to main roads, and if we did it over time, I am convinced beyond doubt that this is what we'd see:

1963:

1983:

2003:

2013:

They also pull out when turning left; selfish driving knows no chirality:

And of course it's worst when there's an oncoming vehicle. And it's always something big...

I really, really don't like being put in that position.

And as drivers become more rushed, more distracted by texting and other technology, and more generally angry, it's likely to get even worse. I estimate that the difference between average stopping points at side streets from 1963 until 2013 is approximately eight feet. And with all that, the Maddening Side Street Nose-Out doesn't save the offending driver any time at all.

Oh. And in case you didn't encounter it before, a staumrel is a stupid person. Hey, I wanted to maintain the alliteration. And it's a splendid word, which brings with it a slight chance of preventing me from cursing in my car each time I encounter one of them at a Side Street Nose-Out.

Driving Through an Intersection Safely

This is another off-topic post...in a way. I say that because following these principles might save your teeth. Or someone's life.

Let's have a look at a series of "aerial" photos of an architectural model. We'll have a car sitting at an intersection, and another car coming through from both the left and the right. I used a badass 70s-era Cadillac for the car going through the intersection at speed. This is because I remember my physics: momentum equals mass times velocity. p=mv. A Cadillac Eldorado from that era sported a curb weight of 5,000 pounds!

The more mass, the worse the crash. And a 70s Caddy has a lot of mass.

Here's our intersection:

We'll assume traffic lights or a stop sign on the vertical street only. In this way, the car that's driving on the horizontal street in this view will not be stopping, and will have the legal right-of-way as it travels through the intersection. This is a worst-case scenario, since with 4-way stops or traffic lights that actually get obeyed, cars are at a stop before going through. We need to consider the common scenario of moving through an intersection at speed--with very little time to react.

Here's the setup for a car coming from the left:

What I've noticed through long observation is that people are intent on their destination, they're usually rushing, and they never want to brake until they are forced to by circumstances. Thus, they dive hard into the turn. Most drivers don't even brake at this point:

They finally start to brake around here:

There are multiple problems with this approach.

First of all, if we do this, we give ourselves no time to react to any sort of surprise in the road. We're still at our highest speed during the turn, just about to brake for the first time. Everything is happening twice as fast as it would have if we had braked before entering the turn.

What if a child ran out in the street after their favorite ball, right in front of you?

Worse, as we brake in a turn, we load the outer front wheel, and unload the inner front wheel and the back wheels.

Imagine we're in our 5000 lb. Caddy, standing still, idling in our driveway. Logic dictates that each tire bears 1,250 lb. Now imagine we scream around a curve and brake once we're in it. We can easily load the outer front tire with 4,000 and more of those pounds. The other three tires are unloaded so much they lose their grip on the road.

And what might happen if we do this? A spin. Especially if the ground is wet. Wet leaves. Oil. Snow. Ice. Black ice!

Load that front wheel up (red arrow), in any sort of turn, and we just might kick out our rear wheels and spin (yellow):

The place to brake in order to give ourselves time to react in a turn is before we start to turn our wheel. In a straight line. And this has the spectacular advantage that we load both front tires evenly. Driving in a straight line, we might brake hard and skid, but there's absolutely no chance of a spin.

If we brake before the turn, we enter it at low speed, we go through the turn with maximum reaction time at our disposal, and we accelerate as we draw out of it:

Note that as we accelerate, we don't--we can't--overload the front wheels.

Now I can hear the objection that wells straight up our of your rushing-to-work hyped-up limbic system: "But I'm in a hurryyyyy!!!!!"

Guess what? Braking before a turn and accelerating through it is faster than flying into the turn and braking deep within it.

Race car drivers take each and every turn this way, by braking first and accelerating through it. And if you want to prove it to yourself, try it on a curve. Not an intersection! Pick a curve you're familiar with, brake gently in a straight line before you enter it, accelerate through it, and watch the curve-diving cad behind you disappear in your magnificent dust. Works every time.

Bottom line is, if you want to get to where you're going in a hurry, taking turns the safer way is faster.

Now let's look at my Second Most Intense Moronic Driver Pet Peeve: The Needless Intersection Head-Ender.

Our Eldorado is now coming from the right:

So very many drivers do this:

And yet so often in our crowded world, you or I are sitting right there, right in the path of a hurried moron who never thinks about road geometry:

And the same rules of skid physics apply:

I've been in this position at least fifty times in the past few years. No one has crashed into me head-on yet. But many, many have come awfully close. And of course, the precise point when they have to react to my corporeal existence is the very moment when they have the least time to do so, and the least control over their car.

And what if, instead of a car, it's a child?

Here's the way to do it:

Get there faster. Get there more safely. Never spin or hit anything. Leave stupid drivers behind in your rearview mirror.

What's not to like?

The Focus of Dental Education

A test is merely a tool, and a blunt, rusty one at that. We learn so that we can solve interesting problems and make a difference.

The focus of dental education must become solving problems for our fellow human beings, not test scores or clinical requirements. Those are vitally important tools that help us reach our goal. That goal, however-- is something far greater.

Gaining the ability to solve interesting problems in the world around us, and for the people who live in it, is the real reason for all this learning.