APP for Nonconformists

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Self Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

You may find this conversation interesting or useful as a colleague if you are on the fence about joining the Association of Professional Piercers. 

Read more

LESS THAN 30 DAYS UNTIL THE APP CONFERENCE!

Invitation Top Banner
Less than 30 MORE DAYS UNTIL THE CONFERENCE!
ONLINE REGISTRATION CLOSES THIS WEEK!

Our 17th Annual Conference and Exposition will be in
Las Vegas, Nevada on June 17-June 22, 2012.

You need not be an APP member to attend the Conference!*

Read more

How smooth is smooth enough? Surface finish standards for body jewelry

A superficial proposition:

Professionals and clients have a right to know the roughness of the surface finish of body jewelry from each manufacturer they choose to do business with. Roughness can be measured as Ra to the microinch (µin) or Metric: micrometer (µ) or nanometer (nm). (The final smooth finish for many polished surgical implants is specified at 0.025µm to 0.05µm (1µin to 2µin)). This would alleviate confusion and allow a more frank discussion of the merits of different processes to arrive at a desired finish.

Smoother is better in our case, but how smooth is smooth enough?

Read more

World Standards Day at BMXnet

I am teaching Biomaterials standards for body art at the BMXnet conference in Essen, Germany this month for World Standards Day, the celebration of the birth of ISO October 14th, 1946. ASTM International will participate in the U.S. celebration of World Standards  Day, sponsored by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) on Oct. 13 in Washington, D.C. This year’s … Read more

Ethical algorithms?

Thanks, Aurelia
Thanks, Aurelia

Ever wonder why we get different results when we search for the same thing? I don’t think it is a glass half empty/half full thing. It seems evident that the internet is serving as both the library and news journal for many of us, and that our machine personalized search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest are skewed in different ways. This has been apparent on Facebook as well, perhaps in a more obvious way when some of our friends’ disappeared from our news feeds.

Read more