Bathroom Mirror Research Articles

Heterogeneous Catalysis: On Bathroom Mirrors and Boiling Stones

Though heterogeneous nucleation of liquid droplets on a smooth surface (such as a bathroom mirror) is a classical topic in nucleation theory, it is not well-known that this topic is actually a pedagogical example of heterogeneous catalysis: the one and only effect of the surface is to lower the activation Gibbs energy of droplet formation. In contrast to, for example, catalysis involving molecular reactions, the lowering of the activation barrier can be calculated with basic thermodynamics. This is an instructive exercise for a physical chemistry course that also explains to students why boiling stones have to be added to distillation vessels.

Boy with Flowers (review)

Reviewed by: Boy with Flowers Carrie Shipers (bio) Ely Shipley. Boy with Flowers. Barrow Street Press. In his first book, selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, Ely Shipley concentrates his substantial lyric attention on the borders between seeing and knowing the world and ourselves. One of the book’s most powerful tropes is reflections and the many surfaces in which the self is reflected and distorted. In “Glass,” the speaker, “drowning in the sounds of bass / I mistake for my heart,” sees himself reduced and multiplied in the light of a disco ball, an experience so disconcerting he comforts himself by remembering his face as seen “behind a fog of / breath in the bathroom / mirror” and in an offhand remark made by a bartender. Returning to the present, he relocates his upside-down self in a woman’s glass: I sit next to her and she holds me between her fingers, then her lips. She tilts me back with her head, but I’m never quite right side up. Instead, I just disappear somewhere inside her. In an earlier poem, “Encounter,” the speaker views his reflection in a shop window and in more domestic surfaces, including a bathroom mirror, the bottom of a teacup, and “the bulbous end / of a long-stemmed wineglass,” which, the speaker reminds himself, is “the shape of someone’s / breath, held.” The speaker knows that his physical reflection cannot reflect his emotional self, but he is less concerned with accuracy than with continually reassuring himself that he does, in fact, exist. Throughout this collection, the body is both a burden and a gift. In “Roll of Dimes,” the speaker’s father teaches him that self-defense is not without its own kind of pain. Punching his father’s palms with a roll of coins clutched in his fist, the speaker notes that his own fingers are crushed “over and over again, between / all I held and wanted // to push away.” One of the things the speaker wants to push away is the female body into which he was born; in “Six,” the speaker moves from contemplating the shape of a guitar to his grade-school memories of urinating on himself because the adults around him were not sure which bathroom he should use. Yet the speaker uses even this devastating memory as a means of contemplating beauty. At the end of the poem, he yearns to be the mouth of a guitar, hollowed out and bodiless except for that balloon of sound resonating invisibly . . . Because what is seen so often is inaccurate, the speaker longs to take refuge in sound even though he realizes that it is inseparable from the [End Page 203] body that produces it. In other poems, Shipley maps the various intersections of breath and song as lovely, purposeful, and capable of bearing meaning. The speaker’s attention to what he hears and remembers hearing from sources as various as a ballerina music box, an ice cream vendor ringing his bell, “the haze and fuzz / of electric guitars,” the electronic hum of a city, and a neighbor’s late-night cough allows him to forge connections to the world that are visceral even when they initially seem disembodied. Despite its limitations and confusions, the physical world, and in particular the physical body, is a source of pleasure as well as pain, although the two often are intertwined. In “Horizon Line,” the speaker, hearing the story of his aunt’s near-fatal car accident, which left her with several dramatic scars, becomes heady “with the weight of how / fragile we are, how disembodied, then composed” and longs to trace the scar left by the surgeon’s needle, which he describes as “map to a place / I will never enter.” Because bodies are what we have in common, bodies are both sources for and targets of violent emotions. In a poem mourning the murders of two transgendered teenagers in Washington, dc, Shipley attributes their deaths to the fact that their “assailant could not / bear their bodies / the way they must,” a dilemma revisited by poems in which the speaker struggles to bear his own body. The...

Promises of Peace and Passion: Enthusing the Readers of Self-Help

Promises of Peace and Passion: Enthusing the Readers of Self-Help

Enabling the Auteurial Voice in <em>Dance Me to My Song</em>

This paper reveals that while the feature film "Dance me To My Song" is listed in Rolf de Heer's oeuvre, its primary author is Heather Rose Slattery, a woman with cerebral palsy who wrote, co-directed and played Julia, the lead character. I assert that in the film Julia is not held up as an object of pity, rather is a fully embodied character, thus defying the "normality drama" (Darke 1998) of disability which aims to "reinforce the able-bodied audience's self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other". Director de Heer seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose's tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the "normality drama" because in the film's diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she 'dances' better than her carer, the 'normal' Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film's primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. As with de Heer's other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her.

Personal Accounts: Musing Over Medications

Personal Accounts: Musing Over Medications

A CAPITAL FEAST OF CHEMICAL FINDINGS

BIG SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCES offer many intellectual attractions, but there can often be major distractions as well. When the American Chemical Society held its national meeting in Washington, D.C., in late August, some of the obvious—and pleasant—distractions were the majestic sights of the nation's capital. At the same time, though, Hurricane Katrina was laying waste to New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast, and many meeting attendees found themselves anxiously monitoring television news reports in the convention center and in their hotels. Despite such distractions, some 13,000 conferees took advantage of the cavalcade of science and technology presentations being offered. Here's a small sampling of the research discussed at the meeting. Nanoparticle Coating Keeps Glass Fog-free Michael F. Rubner and Robert E. Cohen may have just robbed Hollywood horror filmmakers of one of their most beloved cliches—the threatening note furtively traced in the fog of a bathroom mirror. That's because the MIT pro...

The Unholy Darkness: An Autobiography Sightlines: The View of a Valley Through the Voice of Depression How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me: One Person's Guide to Suicide Prevention The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D

The Unholy Darkness: An Autobiography Sightlines: The View of a Valley Through the Voice of Depression How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me: One Person's Guide to Suicide Prevention The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy Detour: My Bipolar Road Trip in 4-D

Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic

Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic Sut Jhally (bio) Jhally, Sut. 1989. Advertising as religion: The dialectic of technology and magic. In Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. by Lan Angus and Sut Jhally, New York: Routledge, 217–229. Reprinted with the permission of Routledge. The Magic of the Marketplace In contemporary America, we are immersed most of our waking hours, in a world and a discourse where all normal physical and social arrangements are held in abeyance. • from deep in the ocean depths, swimming alongside sleek and dangerous sharks, taking on their shape and form, emerges “a new species” of automobile — a Chevrolet Baretta. • as a woman passes behind him, a man is overcome with desire and immediately starts to pursue her in a blind passion, pausing only to snatch up some flowers that he presents to her when he catches her. We are told the spell is cast because the woman uses Impulse body spray. • a young male adolescent stares in horror at his pimpled complexion in a bathroom mirror. As he applies a magical lotion, his pimples immediately disappear, even as we watch. • a young attractive woman boldly enters a pool room where she announces she has had enough of Mr. Wrong and that it is time for Mr. Right. As she sings this she throws a can of Right Guard antiperspirant to individuals with the faces of grotesque monsters. They are immediately transformed into handsome young men who crowd around the woman. • young woman walks by groups of men; a “sea breeze” is unleashed by her that envelops the young males. In advertising, (the commodity world interacts with the human world at the most fundamental of levels: it performs magical feats of transformation and bewitchment, brings instant happiness and gratification, captures the forces of nature, and holds within itself the essence of important social relationships (in fact, it substitutes for those relations).What is noteworthy about such scenes is not that they are concerned with the role of objects in the social lives of people. Such a relationship is one of the defining features of what it means to be human; the relationship between people and things is a universal one. What is noteworthy in the modern period however is the extent to which goods enter into the arrangements of everyday life. Much more so than in previous societies, in the consumer culture it seems that every aspect of life is permeated by the presence of objects. Karl Marx, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century and in the early phases of the development of industrial capitalism, perceptively pointed to what would become the main features of the developing system. In the opening lines of Capital he stated that: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’.” 1 Unlike all previous modes of production, capitalism discovered the “secret” of material production and proceeded to install it as its central and defining activity. While Marx did not witness the emergence of the institution of national advertising, he was able to penetrate to what would become its essential feature: It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production (if commodities … the labor of the private individual manifests itself as in element of the total labor of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the product, and, through their mediations, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e. they (to...

Where there's one

there's more than one- you can bet your life. Take the lone cockroach who flits into view when you flip on the kitchen light one starved for sleep night Your heart sinks doesn't it. And when you find that first gray hair magnified in the bathroom mirror one incandescent morning you root it out in despair don't you. Termites hives infidelities lies they don't come in ones. So when the surgeon concedes there's reason to hope— only one positive node— you know the divide between none and one is infinite. whereas with one— where there's one you simply can't believe only. What it comes down to is lack of faith Why not an errant cockroach? Why not a single gray hair?. You have a conversion experience.

Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety

of the most disheartening aspects of folkloristics, the scientific study of folklore, is the persistent lack of analysis or interpretation. It is not just popularizers who churn out anthology after anthology of only without attention to context or possible meaning(s) of such texts, but the academic folklorists themselves, who despite pretentious definitional debates about the wisdom of continuing to use the term or exaggerated claims of the importance of reporting folklore as performedeven to the point of calling this approach ---what exactly is the theory supposedly underlying theory???do little more than report folkloristic texts totally devoid of the slightest hint of thoughtful commentary. Yes, certainly the legitimate concern for performance has resulted in more accurate reporting of texts, but it is nonetheless hard to find instances where such increased accuracy has yielded actual insights with respect to the meaning or significance of folkloristic event. I would like to illustrate this disappointing facet of folkloristics by examining one single traditional ritual found in American folklore. (It has also been reported in Newfoundland [Hiscock 1996].) After surveying what little is known about the ritual, I will propose an interpretation of it which I believe will make perfectly clear what the ritual is all about. In 1976, and Herbert Knapp, in their anthology of American children's folklore, devote whole paragraph in general discussion of what they term Scaries to the following item: One child told us she was always too chicken to summon Worth. She said, 'I knew I'd really be scared.' And really being scared is no fun. A child summons alias Mary, alias Jane, by going into the bathroom alone at night, turning out the lights, staring into the mirror, and repeating Worth, softly but distinctly, forty-seven times. She comes at you out of the mirror, with knife in her hand and wart on her nose. Never when we read Worth comic strips did we dream that the respectable busybody was moonlighting as mirror witch! (1976:242). Here we most of the primary elements of this ritual: child, almost always girl, goes into bathroom at night (or at in the dark) and repeats the name in some form which supposedly results in frightening creature named emerging from out of the bathroom mirror. Folklorist Simon J. Bronner in his 1988 American Children's Folklore included an entire page of discussion of what he called Worth Rituals. He describes the ritual as a girls' tradition common in elementary school which invokes atmosphere of the seance (1988:168). Whoever the figure is, Bronner indicates that the participants are Huddled typically in bathroom with the lights turned off and that they have to really 'believe' in her, or else she won't (1988:168). In his notes to his texts, Bronner remarks that Bloody Mary is yet another name for variations of 'Mary Worth' rituals (1988:266, n.24). of the five texts Bronner reports-collected from male informant from Middletown, Pennsylvania, in 1984-is as follows: was character who was murdered in the woods behind Pine Road Elementary School. To call her ghost, girls go in the bathroom and prick their fingers with pin to draw drop of blood. Then they press the two droplets of blood together and say We believe in Mary ten times with their eyes shut. Then upon opening their eyes they look into the bathroom mirror. The image of Mary's face would appear in the mirror. She was said to been young girl with long hair, very pale skin, and blood running down her face from large cut in her forehead (1988:168169). Bronner offers no more in the way of interpretation than did the Knapps, but his text includes an element not found in the Knapps' brief report, namely, the presence of blood. …

The Power of Shared Stories: Growing Old in the Company of Other Women's Voices

In my fiftieth year of life, I suddenly believed that I had grown old. I don't know what made this thought so central to my existence. I do know that this abrupt awareness of my own mortality was different from my realization the first time that a young grocery store clerk called me ma'am. It was different from my reaction the summer of my thirty-second year when, hearing someone whistle as I walked on the beach with my three daughters, I realized that this leering gaze was directed not at me but at my thirteen-year-old daughter. And it surpassed my reaction in November of that same year when, after announcing to my students that I was celebrating my thirty-third birthday, a student (herself a twentythree-year-old returning student) exclaimed, My God, are you well preserved! In those days I only laughed at such revelations. But as my fiftieth birthday crept dangerously close, I began to take these observations more and more seriously. When the young woman cutting my hair remarked, With this much gray, I'd really suggest you dye your hair, I responded by spending an hour that evening standing at the bathroom mirror, looking at my hair. When had it happened, this graying of my hair? Had it accompanied my forty-ninth birthday? Had I been too busy to notice before this moment? Enid Shomer's Woman at Forty notices this change, as she: stands long at her mirror as though it were a pool which could smooth the distortions of her face ..'

The Chocolate Man

A man, standing high above a toilet peeing, stares in the wall-to-wall bathroom mirror of his new, upscale apartment. The image in the mirror is over six feet tall, not quite thirty, athletic and energetic, well-educated, well-paid, single, and proud. The man smiles at the image faintly and says, You're okay. The image points at the man and replies, No, brother, you're okay. It's noon Sunday and I have slummed away whole sheets of morning on my twentieth-floor terrace, trying to make sense of what happened to me yesterday ... or, depending on how you look at it, what did not happen. My maiden jaunt through my new community, Bay View, was either a carpeted introduction or a stinging slap in the face. I can't decide which, and it matters dearly. It's the difference between inclusion and exclusion, night and day, stop and go, sanity and schizophrenia. My loose-fitting navy blue sweat shorts and pineapple tank top flap in the breeze. Dark shades and a tinted acrylic terrace wall shield my eyes from the sun. Arms crossed, legs crossed, I sway in a giving chaise lounge in meter with the elegant ripples of glossy blue waves that comb the bay, oblivious to the din of the pedestrians way down below. Occasionally I pat my sandaled feet on the carpeted terrace floor to the straight-ahead, post-bop jazz streaming from a carousel of compact disks through stereophonic speakers in the living room. I peer at the bay and the thought comes and goes that Bay View needs a lot more trees, shrubbery, and wildly growing things. Unfortunately, the idea is twisted with hypocrisy. My old Queens neighborhood had hardly any public plant life to speak of--a tree here, another there, reeds of grass squeezing through cracks in the sidewalk slabs that dominated the streets. On the other hand, Bay View is generously peppered with all sorts of flora--conifers, bloated shrubbery, ivy galore. The first time I gaped at Bay View from my terrace, I exclaimed to my girlfriend Fifi, Why so many trees? But now that I have been secularly baptized in my new surroundings, I no longer feel this community has enough plant life. I would prefer that Bay View be thatched densely enough to quench my newfound thirst for privacy. Toward that end, I have contemplated foresting my terrace. However, I must be considerate of my shapely, tangerine-breasted next-door neighbor Susan Bayer. The verdant blotting of the translucent acrylic partition separating our contiguous terraces might be taken as a vile reenactment of Jim Crow cowardly hiding behind nature's dress. My built-in historical baggage would not allow me to brook the devilish fellow, so how could I expect my neighbor to accept him? But, who knows, perhaps she would applaud whatever initiative I took to buttress our division. I suspect Dr. Bayer will come out, as usual, at six on the dot, to bask, too, but separately, in an ebbing sun--her own shrubs, her chaise, her flowers in their bulging pots, her sun-shades resting securely on the huge braid of hair running laterally across the top of her head. I would not be surprised if she did not say Hello today. Though not unpopular in this swirling city, the naked proximity of our contrasting skin complexions fosters uneasiness. On the ground, the earth level, it is safe to say Hi, smile broadly, and chat, but briefly. But height creates social distance, no matter how near the chocolate and cream-colored fingers. The higher the floor, the greater the uneasiness. Black and white. Beige and more beige. The wall dividing our terraces symbolizes the madness. I have lived here now for two weeks. The first time we met, we looked, smiled, exchanged identification, backed away from the wall, and thereafter each of us has assumed the other does not exist. Perhaps her glass door will slide open a bit before or after six. If it does, I will ask if she's had dinner. If she is receptive, I will invite her over for baked chicken. …

A Chick from My Dream Life

I LOVED HELPING my sister Betsy hide her bad hand in the morning. By eight, she'd be standing on the side of the bathtub, looking at her body in the bathroom mirror. Okay, she'd say. She would fling out her bad hand: Make it fashionable. I'd flip through my tube tops, finding one the same color as her swimsuit. Betsy examined her tan lines or put on Sea Coral lipstick because she thought that was right for the beach. She ignored me when I pulled her bad hand?the one with no fingers ? toward me and put a tube top over it. She liked tube tops because they hid her hand completely but made her look like she was carrying something bright. Maybe tape it shut, I said. Or paper clip it. And bunch it at your wrist. There. Betsy would hold the tube top up and examine it. Cool, she said. I smiled, the expert. I wanted the tube top to look natu ral. I wanted to slip the tube top over her and see a good hand push through. My parents were the ones who started helping Betsy hide her bad hand. After my mother hemmed the bottom of Betsy's coats, she would sew the extra material to one sleeve. Betsy always had sleeves that were too long for her; I thought all her coats looked like they were coming alive and tak ing over her body. My mother took forever with those sleeves. I hated watching her with Betsy. Because of her hand, Betsy possessed my parents in a way that I didn't. Sometimes when I played with Betsy, I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands; but the sight of me with gigantic sleeves always seemed to annoy my mother. You don't want to look like a waif, she said, and rolled up my coat sleeves all the way to the elbow. Helping Betsy with her hand was the only thing I could do right that summer. Betsy was only eleven, a year younger than me, but had become pretty. The sun went into her skin and she held it easy, her hair, knees, glowing. Everyone knew her walk at our junior high school, a slow, wat ery step, her hair lifting and slapping her shoulders. Betsy understood something that I didn't, and as her older sister it was my job to stop this. That was the summer when my father moved from his bed to the couch every morning and when my mother tried to figure out what was wrong with him. My father was tired. He woke up at night, cold, when it was warm outside. He had a little cough. All over the house I could hear him;

On Looking into the Bathroom Mirror

On Looking into the Bathroom Mirror

Teaching Home Cleaning Skills to a Blind Client

Four household cleaning tasks were taught to a blind woman of average intelligence using procedures to compensate for her blindness. General and specific task analyses were compared as assessment techniques for cleaning a bathroom mirror, a patio door, and a bathtub (Experiment 1) and sweeping a floor (Experiment 2). A multiple baseline across responses (Experiment 1) and an AB experimental design with follow-up (Experiment 2) were used to evaluate the efficacy of training. The results showed that the client rapidly acquired the necessary skills and was able to generalize them to unfamiliar objects and to retain them. The research not only suggests a model for training blind clients in household maintenance skills, but also has implications for task analysis.

So you are going to present a scientific paper.

Speaking in public is an art which few physicians have the time to master. This discussion is directed to most of us, who on occasion have started for the platform to deliver a paper before a medical or lay audience with no preparation except the notes or manuscript in our hands. From the standpoint of education, entertainment, and personal promotion, this may be a catastrophe. In a scientific meeting, like it or not, people will not listen to you unless you can catch and hold their interest. for this reason, the presentation of a scientific paper is in some respects a show, and details of showmanship must be exploited. The nourishing of a stream of interest in an audience requires the use of “props”—usually lantern slides, occasionally models or exhibits—in which must be combined the unexpected, the pleasing, and the familiar with a slight variation. In this material, color, composition, and lighting (or ease of viewing) are of first importance. Of the actor, more later. Now, consider for a moment the longsuffering audience. Up until a moment ago, when your name was announced and you strode upon the boards, you were the audience. Had you perhaps been bored by previous speakers, annoyed by their mannerisms, confused by their methods of presenting facts? If you can remain a member of the audience, consciously, while you are on the stage, your talk will be a success; otherwise it may be something less. The timing of your paper is crucial. You must finish before the deadline. This requires frequent practice runs with watch in hand before the bathroom mirror. When engaged in this exercise, speak slowly and remember to subtract several minutes from your allotted time for unexpected contingencies. There are only two reasons which cause a speaker to exceed his prescribed time. One is the feeling that anything he says must be important to others. This is the intoxicated-withthe-sound-of-his-own-voice fellow. The other is the fear of omitting some detail which will clinch the argument or bring in reluctant converts. This is the chap who does not understand that the word “scientific” refers to his paper but not the audience. It is a sound rule never to say all you know, and to retire while your listeners are hoping for more. They will ask you again. If you are allotted twenty minutes, speak for seventeen minutes and sit down. You will be astonished at the applause. The subject matter or content of your talk must be limited by the time at your disposal. The journalistic approach is a successful one. Talk in headlines, with just enough “copy” or explanation after each to make the main thought clear. Be simple in concept, terse in expression, and logical in progress from one idea to the next. The tabloid newspapers get a message across to each reader with a minimum expenditure of his time and effort; a Times requires the leisure of a Sunday afternoon.