Ming’s Wisdom

Ginger is good for car sickness. People have pointed out that if you feel nauseous while in a car on a winding road (or any other situation such as on a boat, after riding a roller coaster, etc), you can simply put a piece of raw ginger in your mouth and suck on its juices slowly to decrease nausea. If you like the taste of raw ginger, or if you need a little more than a trickle of juices in your mouth because you get very car sick, or if you simply don’t know where to spit out a piece of ginger you’ve already sucked on, you can chew and eat the ginger as well. Personally I love eating ginger, and plan on putting some chopped ginger cubes in my car as a snack for longer trips in the mountains.

Here’s a little background information on what causes motion sickness: “All motion sickness results from your body sensing a discrepancy between what you see (in this case, the inside of a car, which tells your brain that you’re sitting still) and what you feel (your body’s vestibular system, which senses balance from your inner ear, tells your brain that you’re moving). The conflict between what you see and what you feel triggers the production of a neurotransmitter, likely mistaken by your body as a signal of hallucinogenic poisoning, so your body tries to rid itself of whatever is causing the disorienting condition.” (1)

As a tangent, simply from the above definition of motion sickness, we can deduce that looking out the window at objects that are moving as expected (in the correct direction and speed, exactly opposite of the direction and speed that you’re traveling) when your body is in motion, can reduce motion sickness. Basically, stop looking at the inside of the car, and stop reading! Another way to reduce motion sickness is to sleep, during which you aren’t looking at anything, so the conditions for motion sickness cannot occur.

I’m actually fairly unfamiliar with the chemical properties of ginger that reduce nausea, but from a quick search any form of ginger will do. A lot of websites suggest ginger pills or supplements, or putting some in your food before a trip, but raw ginger cubes or slices could be a much more cost effective and natural way to reduce motion sickness. I especially like being able to occasionally grab a chunk of ginger to chew on as a snack on trips.

1) http://www.brooksidepress.org/Products/OperationalMedicine/DATA/operationalmed/Manuals/GMOManual/clinical/Motion%20sickness.html

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.

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!

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.

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.