It turns out that most ancient Egyptians had almost no teeth by the time they were 35. Natural tooth decay aside, the grit and sand which blew in from the desert ended up in almost everything they ate and so wore their teeth down at an accelerated rate.
On that segue, I had my first dentist appointment in about 2 years today. They took a series of X-rays to check on things followed by the cleaning which was nothing special. The cleaning was done by an assistant, and the dentist himself came in for a look. He proceeded to tell me that I had 5 cavities. This was something of a shock to someone who has never had a filling in her life, and so I naturally was rather sceptical. He also thought it would be good to take out one of my wisdom teeth as well (I only have three). His apparent method for determining what was a cavity was to place his pick in the middle of my tooth and press down as hard as possible. If the enamel had been thin enough, I could picture his pick plunging through my tooth, via the pulp into the nerve itself, with a rather unpleasant result.
He left me to chew on that though (pun intended) so I paid and returned to the lab. Fortunately I have really good insurance, and a $200 bill became only $20. I probably will have the “cavities” filled and will be happy enough to leave the tooth where nature put it, although even with insurance that will still set me back $150. My teeth are still aching from where he was probing about.
The last few days have been fairly hectic. As astute readers may remember, there is a conference this week on Thursday and Friday, with my presentation on Friday afternoon. On Monday we went to see a talk by a physics professor who wants to study our materials, and while there we talked to an engineer from a local electronics company who thinks he may be able to exploit their unique properties. This is very nice, since the potential market for the devices he is talking about is many millions and probably hundreds of millions of dollars.
The physics professor asked me to give a talk about the chemical aspects of the materials on Thursday, which will be a nice warm up for my presentation on Friday. It is however keeping me very busy and I'm very tired on my return home each evening.
I also booked a ticket down to Miami for the July 4th long weekend. I know that travelling will undoubtedly be crazy, and I wish it had been somewhat cheaper, but I'll just have to deal with that.
Cool link of the day is Driveaway.com Basically people need their cars transported across the US. You need to drive 400 miles a day and sometimes you can swing free gas. I wish I had time to chase this up, imagine driving between the major cities, taking a few days off in each until a good deal came up and then on to the next destination. The great American road trip.