Let There Be Light

Still wintry here. Woke up to more snow today - but also, unexpectedly, sunshine. So although I had been planning a staying-in day, I managed to sneak in a short walk before lunch anyway. I was expecting an electrician to come and have a look at a couple of faulty switches in my kitchen, but he was not due until after 1 p.m. 

Looking out through my window around 8 a.m.

A brief walk in the cemetery around 11:30

Football field of untouched snow. (The pink spots in the sky are from pointing the camera right at the sun - not seeing a thing myself...)

* * *

The electrician came as promised in the early afternoon. He changed the light switch on my cooker hood - and let me understand I was far from the first tenant for whom that switch on that kind of hood (installed not all that many years ago) had broken... The other one I'd had problems with was a wall switch to the lamp over my kitchen table, which had been "moody" for a while (sometimes I've had to press it multiple times for the light to come on). He took it apart, muttered a bit, and said he didn't have the right kind of switch to replace it with in stock... So he put it back together again - but that seemed to be magic enough, because now it seems to be working as it should again. So we agreed to leave it at that and I'll call again if the problem reoccurs. (I should perhaps add that an advantage of being a tenant is that I don't pay extra for these kinds of repairs. So I'm happy as long as it works and there's no danger involved - which he assured me there wasn't.)

Leading Lines (FMTSO)

August 2013: 150th anniversary of the railway between Borås and Herrljunga. Steam train meeting a modern train at Fristad.

(For more pictures from the railway anniversary, see the post Steam Train Nostalgia - September 1, 2013)

Can’t resist including a Swenglish pun: “Livsfarlig ledning”  = “lethal [power] line”, as in high voltage. But “ledning” can also mean “lead[ing]”…

Wooden footbridge, and shadows (May 2013)

 

The tall birch trees form lines leading upwards.

The lake beach in spring, before it’s been cleaned up for the summer season. Lines in the sand shaped by the water.

Friday My Town: Leading Lines

ABC Wednesday – E for Electricity

Electricity! What would we do without it? … For one thing, I would not be writing this, and you would not be reading it!

Looking up the word electricity in Wikipedia just now, I learned (or possibly re-learned?) this:

The word is from the New Latin ēlectricus, "amber-like", coined in the year 1600 from the Greek ήλεκτρον (electron) meaning amber (hardened plant resin), because static electricity effects were produced classically by rubbing amber. (Did you know that? I’m not sure if I knew that. If I did, I had forgotten.)

Long before any knowledge of electricity existed people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BC referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile".

Greek/Roman writers in the first century AD, like Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus (court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius) attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by catfish and torpedo rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects. Scribonius reported back in 63 AD that pain was relieved by standing on an electrical fish at the seashore. Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.

Two thousand years later, I am using TENS = Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation for pain relief (i.e. nerve stimulation by electrodes placed on the skin).

In the 16th through the 18th century various electrostatic devices were used for headache and other pains. Benjamin Franklin, inventor of the lightning rod, was one proponent.

The first modern, patient-wearable TENS was patented in the United States in 1974. Initially intended for testing the tolerance of chronic pain patients to electrical stimulation before implantation of electrodes in the spinal cord dorsal column, it turned out that some patients got relief from the transcutaneous stimulation (and found that helpful enough not to want the implantation).

I got my own unit ten years ago when I (and my physiotherapist) had been trying just about everything else on the neck-shoulder-arm pains I had contracted in connection with a seemingly minor accident, and which were turning chronic. I immediately found it helpful even if not a “cure” (no more than pain killer tablets are a cure). One of the major advantages was that I could use it myself at home whenever I felt the need. I still have pain problems; but I also still find TENS helpful and am convinced that I would be worse off without it.

Actually TENS was not on my mind when I started this electricity post, but the references I found to electric fish took me there. In the first years of my pain problems I must have read a dozen books on pain and treatment of pain. But as far as I can recall, none of them mentioned standing on electric fish on the beach.