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

So I happened on the thought of what happens when you’re killed in nature by another animal, and you die. You are no longer conscious. you no longer know the pain it was to have been killed. You forget everything. And this was a sudden shock to me, the true realization of what death is. It felt like the soul was taken out of me.

But the one thought that could console me was the fact that the molecules of my body would still exist, and they would nourish the rest of the world and all of its living things, and my molecules would help to sustain a whole ecosystem of living organisms, and I would technically still be alive, thriving in fact, though animal, plant, fungus, bacteria, I wouldn’t know which i’d be in.

Now I think that philosophers have so often thought about death and were extremely afraid of it, but really they are missing the next step, the realization that the amazing miracle of billions of molecules of this earth came together in just the right configuration to give them, even though it’s for such a short period of time, the valuable present of life and consciousness. It really is a present that you never asked for, and never did anything to earn it, yet extraordinary effort was put into aligning those billions of molecules to give you such a present, simply because. So we really should be very appreciative of this life that we hold, and be super thankful to whoever decided to put in such effort to give it to us.

I’ve recently been thinking about this, and last night was the breakthrough I needed to really understand it. I couldn’t really sleep last night, at least in part due to this realization, and finally this morning happened upon this article on Timothy Ferriss’s blog on fourhourworkweek.com. Seems like Tim Ferriss found a guy named David who has it figured out. In my opinion, this one simple idea could fuel unimaginable success. Read and prepare to have your mind blown:

[Bear with me, this is somewhat rough at the moment — my initial quandary was whether time, like currency, could be invested to produce a compounding effect. After a bit of thought, my conclusion is that the value of ones time could experience a significant gain, and perhaps a compounding effect over time, given an investment of [that present-state] time in knowledge, skill or other capacity, and a reinvestment of future gains (just like currency).

Money and currency — accumulated excess money — represent one part of your capacity to transact in the marketplace, and can be exchanged for help from others in the form of products or services, including “things” like consumables, depreciable and appreciable assets. Similarly every action you take, whether it be transaction-related or not, requires the expenditure of some amount of time, which is roughly fixed for all of us (say 10,000 working days between the ages of 22 and 62).

Much like currency can be exchanged for appreciable assets that can grow with a compounding effect over time if the gains are re-invested, my theory is that time can be thought about in a similar way, which may lead to more effective action.

To put this in terms of your thinking from your book, lets say you work 40 hours per week simply performing tasks requested by your employer, none of which produce any additional future potential for generating income for yourself.

This is the equivalent of spending your money on consumables or living expenses. It’s single use, and gives you no real future gain, aside from whatever currency you might earn in the moment. Now, you decide to outsource 50% of your tasks to India, producing the same outcomes with 50% of your time. You just doubled the value of your time compared to before (less the additional expense for the help). Now, with that free time, you get more rigorous about working out, studying, and building your networks. You increase your energy, skill, and capacity working with others and manage to produce yet the same results that were taking 50% of your time with only 30%. If you keep reinvesting some of your time in additional gains in your capacity to act, you can theoretically have a compounding effect with the value of your time (rather than time itself). Just like investing currency, the earlier you start this process, and continue to invest in your capacity, the more time your capacity has to compound, and the greater outcomes you can produce during your lifetime.]

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/07/lifestyle-investing-compound-time-like-compound-interest/#more-346

I feel that almost everyone focusses solely on the compounding of money, but have never realized that time can be compounded as well. And of course in turn they would miss the even deeper realization that the compounding of time can itself have compounding effects on money. This is truly one of the greatest advancements in philosophy and self development of all time.

An infection from an acanthamoeba, a tiny parasite living in the cornea, if left untreated, may cause a patient to lose their eye in a matter of days.

Opthalmologist Dr. Kenneth Maverick says, “you ask a patient what their degree of pain is, and an acanthamoeba is a 10 out of 10. And that’s because it actually nibbles on some of the nerves in the eye.”

With a confocal microscope, eye specialists can see the tiny living organisms in real time that create dark circles on a scan. Powerful eye drops, made from the same chemicals as pool cleaner, kill the parasites.

The amoeba often come from pools, hot tubs, and even well water. Proper handling of contact lenses, as well as using new contact lens cases every month can help protect patients from infection.

“Just general common sense. And if you have a contaminated contact, throw it out,” Dr. Maverick said. “It’s better than losing your eye.”

Acanthamoeba infections are most common in the south where the weather is warmer. Overall, the risk of contracting the disease is about 1 in 10,000 for contact lens wearers.

Moral of the story: Be careful to use clean contact lens cases replaced every month, and don’t skimp on the contact lens fluid when cleaning your lenses. I know several of you have a habit of trying to save contact lens fluid and use as little as possible, I won’t name names now, but stop being  cheap and don’t become blind.

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.

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.

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!

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!