Through Glasses Darkly
Paper submission deadlines and other projects are catching up again, so this will be a quickie; just had a new pair of spectacles made at OWNDAYS, and despite picking out their Transitions lenses as with my last pair about four years ago, the cost came out to less than a third of that. Now, I'm aware that one can rack up the price quickly with various additional options (e.g. high [refractive] index, anti-blue light, polarization etc), but the difference was still staggering. Not too sure how much of that went to the neighbourhood optician mark-up, but let's just say that I'm ordering backups online. It's not been great times for brick-and-mortar eyewear retail, so hopefully they manage to branch out to related services.

While my new glasses will take a bit of time to arrive, it wasn't hard to understand the popularity of the OWNDAYS price system and store ambience, which allowed free browsing of frames. Moreover, another point of inconvenience - lost prescriptions - has also been alleviated, what with the availability of a machine to recover one's prescription from one's existing spectacles. Comparing the recovered values with my own records, they got the Sphere and Cylinder for both eyes exactly right, while being only one or two degrees off for the Axes. In fact, there appears to be an FDA-listed app for prescription scanning with smartphones too, but alas for iOS only.

Since we're on computer vision for lifestyle purposes, there's also an app for face shape analysis, for those into matching hairstyles and accessories based on such; FaceApp for one doesn't appear to have much of a selection for the former for genderswap purposes, but yeah, there's no time to be commentating on that or the local elections in any depth.


Review Quiz: Can you spot any discrepancies in the presentation of the results, for HCQ & Dexamethasone?
(Source: twitter.com)

Returning to #Recoverygate, said trial has finally released a preprint justifying their HCQ doses... verified on five patients. This has done little to deflect critics of what's increasingly looking like possibly a flawed therapeutic approach, with the WHO now canning their SOLIDARITY trials for HCQ, as foreshadowed a couple of weeks ago. Anyhow, it has been reported that some 27 Brazilian researchers are now facing legal charges for fatally overdosing patients with chloroquine in their own study, but somehow I wholly expect it to get very quiet over in Great Britain, on this matter...