My initial comments on Life Hacks (two separate posts, one in February and the other in March) skipped over a couple of notes. I want to mention them today because of their potential life-saving value; these are more like PSAs than hacks. To help us get through them as fast as possible, I've rearranged them into a semi-continuous thought:
Remember that saliva follows gravity, especially when an avalanche leaves you unsure of which way is up... same for bubbles underwater... saliva can also remove tape that is over your mouth... you buy time if you pull your shirt over your face before being buried alive... play dead with brown bears, but punch black bears in the nose... lie on your back when sinking in quicksand...
I'd suggest checking those out before accepting them as fact, however - the quicksand note in particular looks a little suspicious.
There were a couple of hacks that left me wondering why I hadn't bothered to think of them myself. One example was the suggestion to use ground coffee for liquid cleanup, including vomit. I used to notice how the custodial staff in school deployed sawdust for similar tasks, so this one partially reflects my lack of curiosity in terms of understanding the basics about common solutions. Determined not to make the same mistake again, I looked into the use of ground coffee in general. It turns out that there are quite a few recommendations out there - ground coffee as fertilizer, ground coffee as insect repellant, ground coffee as skin treatment. I'm not sure about any of those other ideas, but I'm willing to try a couple out for myself if I'm in a situation where I've exhausted all other ideas. I will keep you posted.
The other example was a note that the lines on a Solo cup correspond to serving sizes of various alcoholic drinks. I've likely used these cups over several thousand occasions so it struck me as a little odd that I'd never noticed the fact, but it turns out that this fact isn't strictly true - even PolitiFact weighed in to debunk the idea that this was built into the design. So is it false? Not necessarily, the lines are pretty close, regardless of the original intent; let's agree that it's true on average (!). In any event, this hack is the essence of the entire book, focusing on functionality in the present-day ahead of considerations related to the original blueprint.
