Ming’s Wisdom

Routinely fish from the deep ocean are caught and extracted for their omega-3 oils and sold as nutritional supplements. What happens to the rest of the fish that is now depleted of some of its most valuable nutrients? Is it then sold as fillets to cheaper markets in developing nations whose people are already malnourished?

from http://www.care-mates.com/blog/?p=491:

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.

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!