Ming’s Wisdom

Something that most people may not hear much about is the hazards of drinking soymilk. They are actually many, as listed below:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/soy-milk-dangers.html

There are some benefits of soy that you usually hear about too:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/soy-good-or-bad.html

You’re going to have to decide for yourself whether the benefits outweigh the risks, since everyone has different risk factors (e.g. someone who is allergic to dairy and has heart disease may lean more towards eating more soy, versus someone fine with dairy and fine on heart health and protein intake). Here’s a good article I found that tells the whole story:

http://www.quantumbalancing.com/news/soy%20dangers.htm

It’s a very insightful look into the history of soy and what it does to the body. And understanding the traditional Asian diet, I think I’d agree with the article’s claim that Asians don’t actually eat that much soy. In my family we’d have a tofu dish every couple of weeks. There hasn’t really been a time when people gorged on soy like in the current American health-conscious market.

The reason that I’ve gathered all this information and am inclined to believe it, is that I just drank a cup of Silk soymilk (probably 6-8 ounces, vanilla flavored if that’s relevant), and after about five minutes had some stomach pains, and after another few minutes started to have trouble breathing as well, and sneezing. This fit in pretty well with what I believe to be allergy symptoms to soy:

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/soy-allergy-symptoms.html

The odd thing is that I can eat tofu and soybeans fine, though soymilk always gives me this reaction. I never explored whether this could be an allergic symptom, but today I finally discovered an article that shows others have indeed experienced this as well. I’m curious whether this happens with soymilk buy not tofu is due to different processing to create soymilk, or if it’s a difference in cooking process.

All in all though, I would suggest doing some research before consuming soy products beyond the occasional tofu dish.

Your chances of surviving an airplane crash are 40% higher if you sit in the back.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4219452.html

Also, very interestingly you have a non-zero chance at surviving a 30,000 foot free-fall from an airplane (that’s 6 miles), if you relax and land it right.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4344036.html

It’s almost like surfing the air, guiding your body to the right position and location using aerodynamics, though the landing is a little harder to stick compared to most extreme sports =P.

I don’t intend this article to be any bad omen for anyone, but it’s always good to be more knowledgeable about the world and prepare to thrive in any situation however unlikely they are.

Having a bad memory can sometimes be a blessing, especially when listening to music. I like to play music while driving, often putting a single song on “repeat-one”, so that the song plays again and again forever (when I’m in that mood, I’ll keep one song repeating for 20-40 minutes during a drive). The beauty of this setup is, when you’re done listening to an amazing song, you get to listen to it again. My memory is bad enough that when I listen to the song again, it feels like a whole new experience. And sometimes I might even forget that the song is on repeat, so I’m pleasantly surprised at the end of the song, that I get the luck to hear it all over again.

On a somewhat, but only marginally related note, life is beautiful, because it doesn’t give you the opportunity to fail. You really really aren’t talented enough to truly fail, because it would take an extraordinary effort to succeed at failing. How does that work? Because life is a continuously repeated cycle of 1-second time segments. You are only talented enough to fail for one or more time segments (some of you who are extra talented may be able to achieve failures lasting several multiples of 86,400 segments – multiples of a day). You may shout out that you’ve achieved failure, but a failure during one time segment inevitably is washed behind you into a past time segment when the next time segment takes its turn to be the present time. The failure is short-lived as it’s mandated to be attached to a time segment that slowly scoots to the back of the line, off into memories to be forgotten. The very next time segment that comes along is a new opportunity to succeed. The cool thing is, most things in life allow you to fail continuously for many time segments, and success is achieved as long as you achieve success for at least 1 time segment only (as long as you don’t seriously injure yourself in trying, that does follow you to the next time segment). If you take a bigger picture (bird’s eye view) of time, we can assign each hour of a day to be our time segments to be analyzed. There are 16 waking hours in this day, so 16 time segments. You may be able to achieve failure in one or more of your time segments, but after that failure life inevitably pushes another time segment onto you, forcing you to try again. Given a 1 in 2 chance of failure at a given goal, you have a 1/2 ^ 16 chance of continually failing. That’s 1 in 65 thousand. So you’d have to be extremely talented, be very persistent, and have extraordinary discipline to actually fail. Frankly, I don’t think anyone I know really has the patience and endurance to fail, so just go out and do it!

Aluminum foil is usually used for covering food, but can also become the best window blinds you can buy. The summer sun when shone directly into your window contains a lot of energy that heats up your room. Some belongings are especially sensitive to heat: computers can overheat when performing processor or graphics intensive tasks, posters can expand and wrinkle, and some plastics can melt. All of these have happened to me since my window faces west, taking in the bulk of the afternoon sun’s light energy. What I decided to do is cover the window completely with aluminum foil, but you could also lace your blinds with strips of aluminum foil for a more appealing look. This works amazingly well, since aluminum foil has a reflectivity of 80% or 88%, depending on if you use the dull side or the shiny side to face the sun. Putting the foil up in the summer immediately reduced my room’s temperature by around 10 degrees. As a side benefit, at night when the sun is down, light is reflected back into your room to keep it well lit. If you decide to attach aluminum foil to your window, I would recommend attaching it to a detachable cardboard so that you can remove and put back the reflective surface when desired, such as when you want some heat to shine in during a cold winter morning.

Another use for aluminum foil is to remove rust. Aluminum foil can be dipped in water, then used to rub surfaces to remove rust. The friction and heat from the rubbing will cause aluminum to oxidize, pulling oxygen atoms from wherever it can to produce aluminum oxide. A convenient source of oxygen is the rust, and when the aluminum leaches away oxygen atoms, rust loses one of its essential components and disappears, leaving behind a shiny iron or steel surface.

Toothpaste can be a great wall cleaner. Shoe or bed-frame marks on walls proved to be very hard to remove from walls. However, with a little toothpaste and a paper towel, light wiping removed the marks easily, and even improved the whiteness of the surrounding areas that were touched by the paper towel and toothpaste. The only disadvantage of toothpaste over certain cleaning products is its cost, so it might be worth trying cheaper cleaning products first and only resorting to the toothpaste when they don’t do the job. Toothpaste is also amazing for when you get a new electronic gadget or other toy, and taking off the price tag label leaves a sticky mess on an otherwise shiny smooth surface. The sticky glue is no match for Mr. Toothpaste.

The best product that can be used for originally unintended purposes though, is contact lens fluid. It does an amazing job of cleaning clothing that contains organic stains (almost anything you get on your clothes is organic; food, drinks, grass stains, oil, etc). For example, some oily stir-fry drops on your expensive pants, if you get a cut playing some ball and a little blood gets on your shirt, or any other instance of getting something dirty on a piece of clothing that cannot be washed off by conventional means, all can be remedied by pouring some contact lens fluid on the stain, and rubbing until the stain is gone. It’s recommended that you use soft contact lens fluid labeled “no rub” so that the fluid goes through the full protein dissolving process, but you should still rub the stain to give it some help. I discovered this after realizing that contact lens fluid works by dissolving proteins from your eyes that ended up on the lenses, so why wouldn’t the fluid dissolve proteins in organic stains? Any food or drink stain should contain a lot of organic compounds, and dissolving them leaves you with a cleaner garment. So far this technique has proven to be quite useful for me, as I haven’t found a case yet that the fluid could not clean. If you give it a try, let me know how it goes!

There’s not enough time in life to regret things, since it could be better used towards exploring other opportunities.

Keeping track of finances can be difficult and time consuming, so it’s best left for others to do it for you, saving your time and effort. I recommend Mint for personal budget and bank account tracking. I’ve used it for roughly a year now (or more), and have found that having a summary view of all bank accounts, loans, investments, and credit cards can be very insightful. In addition, all new transactions from all accounts are automatically updated for you without needing to enter them yourself. You can also look at all your month’s transactions to analyze how much you’ve spent on different categories of items, and find trends in your budgeting. I’ve definitely had some trouble with Mint not connecting to some of my accounts as well as it should, but all in all I’d still say it has added enough value to my life that I’d keep using it.

Nutrition is another difficult set of information to keep track of, and most people don’t really track it, since there are dozens of nutrients and vitamins to add up to make sure your daily values are sufficient, and at the same time the need to keep track of protein versus good fat versus bad fat versus complex carbohydrates versus simple sugars etc, as well as PH balancing, etc. I’ve recently discovered NutritionData, which turned out useful in finding the nutrition values of almost all foods, such as 1 cup of chicken soup with skin. It allows you to save the foods and portions that you’ve looked up, and keeps track of your recipes and their nutritional values. Simply going to the site and checking out a few foods can get you thinking about nutrition and how different foods could complement each other for a balanced diet.

It’s always been a mystery to me why some of us get sick easily when riding in cars, boats, or roller coasters, while the rest enjoy those stomach-churning motions without any ill symptoms. A couple months ago I finally figured it out.

I was watching a Discovery documentary on the evolution of ancient sea creatures from several hundred million years ago, and the realization hit me during the narration of how certain animals in the ocean have their closest living relatives being a species that lives on land. They key fact I learned was that the sensitivity of the inner ear (which helps animals balance), is gradually changed as a species moves into the ocean or onto land. Species that live on land require a sensitive inner ear for good balance and always keeping their head up. An example of when this comes into use is when you roll off your bike, and you are able to keep your head up to avoid injury of hitting it on the ground. However, for a species that lives in the ocean, this is not needed as much, but an inner ear that is too sensitive could overload due to the 3-dimensional freedom involved in living underwater.

The next piece of the puzzle is solved by the principle of evolution. Those animals that have a more sensitive inner ear will be less likely to hurt their head during a fall on land. Those animals that have a less sensitive inner ear will be more likely to have more agile movements in water without getting nauseated. In the history of the earth, some species have undergone a move from land to water or water to land, and over the next few million years their inner ears have evolved to increase or decrease in sensitivity to adjust to their new environment.

By this logic, humans, as land animals, should on average have fairly sensitive inner ears, at least in comparison to ocean creatures, and all get car sickness. But why then do some people get nauseated in cars and some don’t? The answer to this question lies in what if the earth floods and we as a species move to the ocean over the next several million years. Nature has provided us with natural variation (due to sexual reproduction), so that a whole range of sensitivity occurs in different people’s inner ears. In case we stay on land, those with sensitive inner ears will carry on the species, and in case we are pushed to the ocean, the ones with less sensitive inner ears could survive. This gives us as a species the ability to survive in a changing environment (and potentially one day become like the dolphins, whales, and sea lions, if that’s the direction we need to go to survive). So now you know why you have car sickness, and your buddy doesn’t. The two of you join forces together to carry on the survival of our species.

I’ve been working with Johnny on a huge re-make of our website. Recall ticketwatchr.com that we announced almost two months ago, well we’ve redesigned it completely and even changed the name. Check out http://www.slickseats.com/, the next step of the evolution of the project. It’s solely focused on the buyer’s experience purchasing tickets to sports, concerts, and theater.

This has been a huge learning experience in creating a website in an effective fashion, as over the past few months we’ve come from having almost no experience in this area, to being able to complete the SlickSeats projects in a couple of weeks. Hopefully more great projects will come out soon , but for now, check out the website, give us your feedback, and keep us in mind if you need to buy tickets to something!

A lot of us have taken medicines in the form of a pill. However, most of us probably have never thought about the distinct sequence of motions that produce the action of swallowing a pill. I’ve found that more often than not, a successful pill-swallowing involves the following:

1. Put pill in mouth, on top of tongue.
2. Gulp a small mouthful of water, but do not swallow.
3. Pill floats in mouthful of water near center of mouth.
4. Swallowing pulls pill with water.

This sequence prevents mishaps such as when swallowed too fast, only the water goes down while the pill is stuck on the tongue. The key is that the pill floats to the middle of the mouth so that it follows the flow of the water. Sure, most people already know how to swallow a pill, but this could be good knowledge in case you need to teach a kid or younger sibling, who often have trouble with it.

Next is a tip on keeping your laundry wrinkle-free. I’ve long used washers and dryers, but clothes would come out wrinkly, even if I thrash the clothes around to shake out the wrinkles after taking them out of the dryer. This usually involved quick heavy movements of the hands while holding the clothes, pulling the clothes up, then quickly pulling back down, to cause a wave movement in the clothes and lots of pulling force to pull the wrinkles to become straighter. Well doing this after taking clothes out of the dryer works okay, but doing this after taking clothes out of the washer and before putting into the dryer works great. If you do it between the washer and dryer, your clothes will come out with much fewer wrinkles.

This next tip most people already know about, but it’s useful enough to put out there again. Get your gas at night or early morning when the temperature is colder. Gas stations measure how much you pump using volume, not mass. “Pounds” or “grams” are measurements of mass, while “gallons” and “liters” are measurements of volume. Mass measures how much you really get, volume measures how much space it takes. And because fuel expands in heat, the same amount of fuel takes up more space (gallons) when it’s hotter, and more gallons means you’re paying more for the same amount of fuel if the temperature is hotter. So, pump gas in the coolest time of the day and you’ll save a little bit of money on gas.

This is an focused study of a recent event that reveals multiple failure points in our society and institutions. This case specifically studies recent activities in Humboldt squid movement and the commotion that followed.

The Humboldt squid is a large squid commonly found in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, around 200 to 700 meters in below the surface. In recent years their habitual territory has apparently expanded north to California through Alaska, from their original location off the coast of South America. This fact, paired with anecdotal evidence from aboard fishing boats about their aggressive behavior, quickly spiraled into sensational stories of alien-like creatures of the deep with massive tentacles invading the lives of humans everywhere. Before reading on, watch this excerpt from PBS on the subject: http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/the-fierce-humboldt-squid.

Go back and watch the linked video if you haven’t yet. Some of the following will pull information from that clip. I will break down the rest of the article into the different aspects of our society that have fundamentally gone wrong to make these recent events possible.

First of all, there’s been a failure of both the general public and the scientific community to sit quietly and observe all that the world has to offer. There have been dozens of documentaries (airing frequently in recent years) produced by widely-respected television channels such as Discovery and PBS that claim the squid are instinctively aggressive and cannibalistic, to the point of eating anything they come across. Almost all of these documentaries draw off observations from squid-fishing boats, where the squid are found in a fight-or-die stressful situation with many of its neighbors being hooked to their death by people. Observing squid while your boat-mate is actively participating in slaughtering the squid’s partners would not lead to the same results as observing them in their natural habitat.

Worst part is, this is coming from professors from leading research universities. In the video, a Stanford professor says, “This squid, only thinks about two things, one is eating and one is reproducing. Even though they have big brains, I don’t think they spend a lot of time philosophizing”, and assumes that during times when he cannot observe the squid, that they are probably feeding. This would not be an unexpected comment from a non-scientist, but for a professor who has been studying marine biology for 30 years, a summarization of an agile and highly developed animal species to have only two types of thought processes paints a grim picture of the state of education in our society, especially considering that this professor probably teaches a lot of soon-to-be misinformed students. In addition, he studies the squid behavior hitched on a fishing boat, from a vantage point at the water’s surface, while dozens of lures with sharp hooks attract squid to their death while other squid watch. It also brings up the question, what exactly, are the qualifications that an individual must have, in order to become a Stanford professor?

And on top of that the whole commotion reveals a huge lack of responsibility, both for the environment and for accurate portrayal of facts in the media. These documentaries simply state that we are facing a huge problem of squid invading the territory of fisheries and are causing fishery economic numbers to go down. They do cite climate change as a cause for the mass migration, but most people’s solution is to hunt and eat more squid, instead of fixing the root problem of what we’ve done to this earth to cause that climate change. This is all aired on our most trusted channels for learning on television, Discovery channel and PBS. The clip linked to in this article is from PBS, from a northern California public broadcasting channel that claims it “provides consistently high quality public media that informs, educates, entertains and engages… reflect the value we place on human dignity, lifelong learning and the power of ideas, and on the importance of community service and civic participation”. Yet their summary of the show which aired last year, says “Packs of fierce Humboldt Squid attack nearly everything they see, from fish to scuba divers”, having no proven case of Humboldt predation on humans. All the while, northern California is actually considered one of the most educated areas in the country, yet no one decided to dig deeper into the story. Discovery channel is no better, airing repeated series of shows such as “Squid Attack” without giving viewers full background information so that the viewer at least has the opportunity to ponder the possibility that the squid are not vicious creatures invading “our” territory. Again, they have access to some of the best minds in the world, yet most shows on the Humboldt squid have been accounts of their cannibalistic behavior, and no one decided to question it.

The human reaction to the whole series of squid migrations also brings up a question of how much compassion do we really have for our fellow species. Our views (as a society) on many of the issues we face are of “us” versus “them”. The squid are not one of “us”, and therefore they can be thought of as creatures without emotion, without logical thinking, without communal bond. In fact Humboldt squid have the biggest nerve fiber of any creature on earth (this includes humans) and a large, complex brain structure. They live in communities of up to a thousand, and hunt cooperatively to gather small fish and krill. Yet when scientists saw one particular behavior, they reacted with one common explanation. In the particular circumstance when squid were being pulled out of the water with hooks by fishermen, other squid immediately came up to the hooked squid, and grabbed them with their tentacles. Scientists concluded that they must be extremely aggressive creatures and are seizing the opportunity to eat their friends while they are weak. As an intelligent creature that lives and hunts cooperatively in large communities, in a situation where food is not scarce, eating each other would not seem to be the logical action to take when a predator is near, making this somewhat of an odd explanation to offer. Other scientists cite that they have found pieces of Humboldt squid in others’ stomachs, though this still does not prove that they are habitual cannibals, as even the nicest of humans has resorted to cannibalism when faced with scarce food/life or death situations as in extreme after-plane crash survival cases. I have yet to see any scientist offer up evidence in attempt to prove that the observed behavior under fishing boats is indeed an act of opportunistic eating instead of trying to pull a friend back from a vicious human predator. Almost everyone listens to the scientists (after all, they are the scientists), and happily offer to hunt down the squid and eat them. This same type of thinking of “them” as all cold-blooded creatures incapable of intelligence and bonding, has created many of the problems we have faced as a society. Stereotypes and racism both stem from an intrinsic distrust of “them” with an arbitrary boundary drawn not based on individual personality but on skin color or other attribute. Religions intolerant of the style of thinking of “them” have caused division among people, and even wars. In fact it was a view that “they” are not as intelligent, that “they” have no emotions, that justified slavery for hundreds of years.

The world has improved over the years and some have become more tolerant of others, but there’s a lot more to improve on, and the small incident of our perception of Humboldt squid are only a peek into how people’s collective minds can lack a compassion for the others that share our earth. Overall, even a piece of news that hasn’t gotten much attention on CNN or the world news, can show us so much about the current state of affairs. If you’ve read to this point, you’re probably a very intelligent and educated person who cares a lot about the world, and you might never have realized that even in this day certain segments of the world (*ahem* well known universities) are probably not quite as compassionate and environmentally responsible as you thought, that education and media truthfulness are still in a sad state, and even the most respected “experts” cannot always be trusted.

Squid brains: 1, Human intelligence: 0.