About Vacuum Cleaners

Why vacuum?
1. Aesthetics
2. Preserve your carpet
3. Health

1. Aesthetics is easy: your carpet looks better if it is not covered with dust, soil and hair.

2. Preserve your carpet: dirt degrades carpet and shortens its lifespan. But, according to the Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI), overly-aggressive vacuum brushes can also damage carpet.

3. Health is a lot harder. The health benefit of vacuuming is supposedly less dust = healthier lungs. In the last 10-20 years, the focus of health concerns has shifted to the sub-micron particle size.

One would think that a vacuum with a HEPA filter would be the best, but according to Consumer Reports, "many with conventional filters perform just as well."


Judging from the results of This search on pubmed, academics can't find much evidence that vacuuming carpets reduces levels of allergens, and report that vacuuming can even worsen airborne allergen levels!

The main problem is that the bag and filter can only catch the dust that reaches them. Every vacuum cleaner leaks dust into the room air. Some are better than others; the range measured many orders of magnitude in one Quest labs study.

Conclusions:
1. To keep your carpets looking good with minimum damage to the carpet and your lungs, choose a vacuum with the CRI Seal of Approval for one that passes minimum standards for Soil removal, Dust containment, and Carpet texture retention.

2. For allergen control, vacuuming is worthless at best. According to this 2006 abstract, a good thing might be to spray your carpets with a 15% solution of alum in water.

Non-antibacterial hand soap

It's hard to find liquid hand soap that does not contain triclosan, even though lvh.org states:

An FDA panel has confirmed after numerous studies that the use of antibacterial soap is no better than plain glycerin hand soap to reduce infectious disease. Also, studies have shown that antibacterial soaps may be harmful to you and your family in two ways:

1. By killing good bacteria – Our skin and intestinal tract are lined by millions of "good" bacteria, which we need to keep the harmful bacteria away. By killing good bacteria, antibacterial soap makes space for the harmful bacteria, possibly weakening our immune system.
   
   
2. By creating drug-resistant “super-bugs” – Antibacterial soaps also can cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics, making it more difficult for doctors to treat bacterial infections when they occur.

So lately I've been refillling our soft-soap dispensers with cheap shampoo.

It looks, smells, and works great, and it saves money.

Getting floss out from between your teeth

Did you ever get dental floss stuck between your molars? You're flossing your teeth, suddenly you feel the floss fraying. As you try to pull it out from between your molars, the floss breaks, leaving a strand wedged in. I've tried grabbing the frayed end with my fingers, but it's too slippery and breakable. At best, I get a few loose strands out.

Last night I got a strand out with a toothpick.

Using my tongue, I pulled the loose strands away from my teeth. Then I laid the end of the toothpick on the part of my tongue with the floss stuck to it. I rotated the toothpick between my fingers and it started spooling up the floss. When I had wound all the loose floss around the toothpick, I gently tugged and the floss came free! Cool!

I think it helped that I was using a wooden toothpick. It's rough enough to snag the floss and hold it securely enough that a few wraps are enough to overcome the friction of the floss stuck between my teeth.

Probiotic Hand Lotion: Prediction #2

Every time I go to UCSF hospitals and clinics, I notice these germicidal soap dispensers at every sink and germicidal lotion dispensers in every hallway.

I predict that one day they will be replaced by dispensers of probiotic goo.

Furthermore, I think it would be cool to see probiotic skin care and oral care products that were tailored to your genotype.

Bachelor tip #1: Refrigerate before opening

Bachelors go through food more slowly than families, and tend to throw out more spoiled food.

Food packages often say "Refrigerate after opening." But they last longer if you refrigerate before opening.

Why this works:

The air in your home is swimming with microorganisms that cause food spoilage.

As soon as you open a package, you can assume that microorganisms are growing on the contents.

Microorganisms need three things to thrive:

1. Warmth
2. Moisture
3. Calories

If you open a room-temperature package and then refrigerate it, the microorganisms get a few hours' head start while the food cools down.

By refrigerating the food before opening, you rob them of that head start.