STOP PRESS! My car is saved!

Just a quick post to announce that my super mechanic Peter has performed another of his technical miracles and managed to save my little Punto!!! Apparently it wasn’t the cam belt to have snapped but a pulley and although he had to change the cam belt itself as well, the valves were fine and the engine as well, so the car can keep on running a few more months (touch wood!!!) and I might have the time to look for another suitable vehicle! Unfortunately knowing me, I’ll forget about all this and I will find myself in the same situation in a few months!!!

Water glasses

Maybe for some of you this is old news but I’ve just found this video on the website of the Italian newspaper “Corriere della Sera” and I’m so happy to be able to report some good news for a change. We all need good news, don't’ we?

http://video.corriere.it/?vxSiteId=404a0ad6-6216-4e10-abfe-f4f6959487fd&vxChannel=Dall%20Italia&vxClipId=2524_2cbefe98-df41-11dd-bb3a-00144f02aabc&vxBitrate=300

Professor Joshua Silver – a retired physics teacher at Oxford - began working on eyeglasses that can be tuned by the wearer in 1985. It took more than 20 years to finally come up a design which can be made cheaply on a large scale. His goal is to bring better vision to a billion people worldwide who cannot afford, or don’t have access to, an optometrist.

Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.
The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. Apparently the principle is so simple that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

(A Zulu man wearing adaptive glasses. Photograph: Michael Lewis)

Silver’s goal is to distribute a billion pairs of his adaptive glasses to poor people by 2020 (the pun in the year is intended, I’m sure). Already, 30,000 pairs have been given out in 15 countries.

Let's hope this won't get Specsavers bust!!!