Tried it: Sleep Restriction Therapy

Craig of that time period could curl up in the corner of Grace St (Richmond, VA) apartment on a hard floor with a bathtowel for a pillow and wake up 100% refreshed. Also pictured, at least three awesome people Craig of the current time period would love to see more often.

I've struggled with insomnia since my sophomore year in college. Organic Chemistry is a famously intense class, and many professors require students to memorize a large volume of reactions. I am terrible at rote memorization.

My roommate was also in the class, and he had a hard time too. Our study and coping methods did not mesh well. He stayed up late and hit the sack hard, developing a powerful snore. I dropped hobbies and stuck to a conventional diurnal schedule instead. That combo meant I got little sleep at night and little relaxation during the day.

That was 16 years ago (!) and I have suffered through insomnia since. I've tried various things, depression medication, anxiety medication, talk therapy, hypnosis, etc. They worked not at all, not for very long, not at all, and not consistently, respectively.

So now, I'm going to try something new, something with a lot of good press, something intense. I'm going to try sleep restriction therapy.

The idea is to increase the efficiency of your sleep first, then get the total quantity of sleep back up. Most of the instructions online are similar, but I'm going with the approach described in this video.

1) Calculate how much actual sleep you're getting. Thanks to my FitBit, I have some data to work with here already. It says I'm averaging 7 hours. But much of that is light sleep, and I know from being the actual person that a good chunk of that is me lying still hoping to get to sleep. So I'm going to peg my actual sleep average at 6 hours. Most instructions don't advise you set it at less than 5 hours.

2) Pick a wake-up time, then set a bedtime that gives you just the amount of time in bed that you calculated as your actual seep time in step 1. My commute requires me to be up at 6:55 am two days a week, and you have to use a consistent schedule in this therapy. So 6:55 am wake-up means 1 am bedtime.

3) For at least a week, don't go to bed before your bedtime, and don't stay in bed past your wake-up time. I'm told this will suck.

4) If, after a week, sleep efficiency has improved—which is to say that you're sleeping for most or all of the time you're in bed—move your bedtime back by half an hour. Make that check and shift once per week. If sleep efficiency hasn't improved, stick with the shorter sleep time. If it slips as you add time in bed, stop adding time in bed. If the slip stays put, remove a half hour of time in bed.

And you just do this till you're getting 8 hours of good sleep a night, or whatever it is your body needs (hint, for most people it's 8. A lot of people chronically get less and are chronically impaired).

So, we start tonight, 7/26/2018. Let's see how it goes.

• Day 1. The first night went fine. I watched a movie with my wife. The FitBit didn't get good data for some reason. It mistook the hour of me sitting around before going to bed as being in bed, and didn't get any detail about light vs deep vs REM sleep. But supposedly I was in bed 6:20 and asleep for 5:49, for a sleep efficiency of 349/380 = 92%.

• Day 2. Second night it was reeeaaaally hard not to fall asleep while putting my four-year-old to sleep. But I think I did it. I once again hung out with Whitney with the TV on for the last hour, which I know I shouldn't keep up. She shouldn't be sleep restricting with me, and late TV is bad. I accidentally slept in by 47 minutes, whoops. The FitBit says I was asleep for 5:58, with a time in bed of 6:34; 358/394 = 91%. The first solid hour of that was deep sleep and I got 1:37 of REM sleep. That's better than normal.

• Day 3 and 4. Next two nights went about the same. Asleep 5:28, in bed 6:30; 358/390 = 92%. Then asleep 4:59, in bed 5:32; 299/332 = 90%. This morning was the first time I managed to get up on time.

I want to pull a few numbers from before the experiment. So on July 25, I was in bed for 9 hours and asleep for 8:19; 499/540 = 92%. 7/12 it was 85%. Picking days at random because I can't find a good data export option and I'm too lazy to transcribe by hand, I have been rocking around 82% about a third of nights and around 90% for two thirds, according to the FitBit data.

If this is correct, I don't actually have a problem. But I think it overestimates my time asleep. FitBit measures sleep by movement and heart-rate variability. Are you still? Are the movements you are making ones that match with sleep? It's going to call you asleep. But I often will be lying very still and yet be awake and resenting it. Maybe I need to go into a lab and measure brain-waves to get an accurate count. But I'm going to focus more on how I feel and watch the FitBit data mostly for the delta.

One thing I've noticed is that I'm only a little bit more tired than I normally am. That suggests to me that around 6 hours of actual sleep isn't too far off normal. If that very soft math is right, my sleep efficiency is generally around 75%. But I'm a little afraid. What if 6 hours of sleep and 18 hours of feeling tired and being slightly above average is the best I can do? What if 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours of feeling good and being awesome isn't something I can achieve?

• Day 6. I'm so tired. It took immense willpower to stay up till 1am last night and getting up at 7am this morning was almost as hard. My work is slipping a little, and I'm having a bit of aphasia, which is normal for me when I'm sleep deprived but super inconvenient because I'm training a new hire right now. I have been sleeping deeply and staying asleep, though last night I was tossing and turning a bit. The combination of an uncomfortable bed and eating too much too late at night, I think. 

Current mood
By Martin Falbisoner - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

... And that's about when I didn't have enough willpower to do my job, do this experiment, and keep blogging about it. But it was at about day 8, when I started to add sleep back in, that the whole thing fell apart.

I had been seeing the density of sleep I was aiming for, so I started step four from above. But as soon as I started to let myself go to sleep earlier, I slipped and slept in, too. I tried to claw it back, but I couldn't. So it was time to reflect and determine what gains this had yielded.

First: I got a lot done staying up to 1am. Of course I had the extra time, but no one else was awake and I knew the time was coming. I read books, watched movies, did some paid freelance work. And for some reason, late at night I was able to resist wasting time on social media. It'd be good to recapture some of that during the daytime.

Second: Honestly, it's been six months since I started the experiment. I kinda lost track of this post. But where before I was sleeping badly almost every night, which is to say waking up tired in the morning after waking up repeatedly at night, now it's down to "often." And after the sleep restriction therapy is when I started to sleep better. So maybe my brain and body did get a little taste of what really being asleep is supposed to feel like.

Third: Doing this experiment and talking about it forced me to observe and talk about exactly what is different with my experience of sleep. I wake up too much. I toss and turn. I'm told that for many people, most nights, they go to sleep and then pop it's morning and they weren't perceiving the passage of time all night long—sleep is almost never a time machine to breakfast for me. I wake up and need to go to the restroom. These are specific symptoms that I could research and discuss with an expert.

I think that if I'd held to it, I would have seen greater improvements. And I think it's worth trying again.

#goals
By FOTO:FORTEPAN / Magyar Bálint, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Tried it: Groom Mate Nose and Ear Hair Trimmer

It was hard to get good action photos, and what I got wasn't flattering.

Because I am an old person, I bought a nose hair trimmer. Because I am a young person, I am blogging about it.

This post is going to contain TMI, so if noses and the things they do and produce bother you ... well, off you go.

I've had a lot of nose hair for a while. But recently it started getting so long that it sticks out my nose and can be seen by others. The mustache masks it, but I know it's there.

But it isn't vanity that led me to this purchase. No, I wanted to help myself not pick my nose. You see, with as much nose hair as I had, the snot wicks along the hairs and then dries. This is a problem for me because I always seem to have at least a little bit of a runny nose going because I am some kind of monster. So it runs, it wicks, it dries, and it pokes me. It also tugs on the hairs as I make facial expressions and that tickles.

So it takes a lot of willpower for me not to pick my nose. When you're not looking, sometimes I cave and get some relief. I'm not proud of it, being a 35-year-old man picking my nose in dark corners. But the itching!

I had been plucking. But that hurts, so much. Each time I even attempt to pluck a hair, tears well up in my eyes and my face contorts with discomfort. If I succeed in uprooting one, my whole nasal cavity protests in a forceful, painful sneeze. It is not something I could do for a whole nose full of hairs on an ongoing basis.

So I bought a Groom Mate Platinum X L Nose & Ear Hair Trimmer. Buy it with that link so I get a bounty from Amazon. They aren't paying me for this review, I bought it fair and square. But really do use the link and buy it, because the trimmer works well and I want the $0.80 you doing so will net me.

I got this one because the makers promised up and down that if you take this scary looking little steel wand, shove it up your nose, and then twist it so the blades spin, it won't rip 32 nose hairs out at once or cut your tender nose-meat to ribbons. Plus it was only $20.

Eagerly, I awaited its arrival. I'm not being sarcastic.

When I got home today, it was waiting for me in a little white shipping bag. Inside the bag was a little black box. No other shipping materials. I unboxed it, my proboscis atwitter with anticipation.

The little plastic sleeve it came in reminded me of an oboe reed case. I put it in my face and started twisting! And felt nothing. But that's good! No ripping, tearing, or cutting. Much smooth, very slice. I had to pull it out and look to confirm that it was even doing anything. And it was. Little hairs festooned the device, and a close look at my nostril revealed a much trimmed nasal lawn.

It works with two concentric rings of blades. The outer ring is much like beard trimmer, with a guard facing the skin. As you twist the bottom half of the device and hold the top half still, the inner blade ring spins around, scissoring the hairs. No batteries, plugs, or scary buzzing sensations in a spot you're sure will be gruesomely injured before you can stop it.

I got back at it. It was hard to get it into the sharply concave bit at the front. I had to push my nose up into the piggie position with one hand and then shove the trimmer in there and twist it with my pointer finger, which meant the outside was spinning instead of the inside. But even that didn't hurt.

I'm sold. I'd buy another one if that made sense. It has a lifetime unconditional warranty. It does take some effort and manipulation to get into all the angles, but it's nothing a reasonably dexterous adult couldn't handle. I just did one nostril so I could feel the difference and it's great.

The hair is almost all gone and I feel less itchy in there already. It feels naked in there, which is mostly good but it is a little more tender than the still-hirsute nostril, and when prodding at it from certain angles, I feel some stubble. I realize now that another thing tickling was the hair from one side of the nostril reaching over and poking the other side; now that is gone.

It is everything I hoped it'd be. This device has restored to me the nostril of my youth.

Tried It: Not touching people

Look at me, having normal human interaction

In college, I accidentally conducted a large social experiment in not touching people.

You see, back in high school, a hug or vigorous high-five was a social requirement both at greeting and parting. At least among my friends. If you were at a house party, you started to leave a good twenty minutes before you had to go because you needed to go around and embrace every single person. To do otherwise would have been cold or rude.

My college was a different scene. First of all, I didn't know these people so well. Secondly, it was a church college with strict rules about contact been men and women and what felt to me like a fair amount of sexual repression layered on top. And admittedly, there was a part of me that was a little weary of all the hugging, as snuggly as I generally am.

Social circles and their norms form quickly in the freshmen year of college. I didn't start off hugging my college friends as a routine thing, and so that became the pattern. Handshakes or high-fives fell that way too, being mostly reserved for meeting someone new or agreeing to something. Soon it was a verbal greeting, maybe a wave to the room when I came into somewhere, a quick tip of my hat and a little bit of eye contact on the way out. It was tidy.

Now I don't want to oversimplify. I have a lot of ambivalence about my time in college. I had some great times, did some cool things, spent time with some great people. But I also made some social choices I wouldn't make again today, the most severe of which was spreading myself too thin. Trying to be a part of too many social circles, I felt like a guest in all of them. And I wielded a lack of self-awareness that now makes me cringe. Blame it on finding myself or something.

But when I compare the four years I spent in high school with the four years I spent in college, one big big difference is that it seems to me I rarely touched my college friends, whereas my high school friends and I had frequent platonic physical affection. And today, I am in regular contact with many of my high school friends and zero of my college friends (outside of Facebook, and I am aware of the irony that a good chunk of the people who read this will come via Facebook).

Touch is a powerful thing. And it can be fraught. You don't have to look far to find stories of people, men especially, feeling a too free to touch. And some people straight up do not like to be touched. One does not, for example, touch the Queen of England, I am told.

Lyndon Johnson liked to grab people by the elbow or upper arm while talking with them. He also stood way too close to people and did other things to make them uncomfortable while making agreement with him the easiest way to escape, so don't necessarily emulate everything he did.

But these days, I lean toward appropriate touching of people. I shake hands, I hug, I high-five and jostle. When I rub shoulders with someone accidentally at a party, I smile instead of apologizing. Something in a welcome touch bonds people, reminds them that it's another human they're with. And I like the people I know too much to forgo that connection.

Tried it: Lucky Charms milkshake

Two great tastes that underwhelm together

I'm going to save you some time: it isn't very good.

A diner near me (Papermoon Diner in Baltimore) has a bangin' Cap'n Crunch milkshake that combines all the best things about the cereal and a vanilla milkshake. So I was looking forward to Burger King's Lucky Charms milkshake.

I recently had a weird taste in my mouth from eating some impulse-purchase cheese that I then forgot in my car for a few hours, so when I saw a BK on the horizon I knew it was time.

But the product is inferior to both a milkshake and to a bowl of Lucky Charms. They have achieved the opposite of synergy. It tastes like they took a bunch of stale Lucky Charms, ate a bunch of the marshmallows themselves, then roughly crushed the rest with a mallet and mixed it into a BK vanilla milkshake. Many of the chunks were too large and therefore got stuck in the straw, so even that they didn't get right.

One of the great things about the Cap'n Crunch milkshake is that the pieces of cereal are ground so fine, like little tiny flecks of cereal about the size of the top half of the number 8 in 12 pt font. It's a novel and pleasant mouthfeel. BK did not replicate that success.

The flavor is also not right. Like a lot of cereals, Lucky Charms contains phosphate, which gives it a mild, light tartness while still playing nicely with the creaminess of the milk. But they didn't get enough of that tartness into the milkshake, so other than the stale bready chunks that you have to power through, the dessert tastes almost exactly like a normal vanilla milkshake.

Except that it also tastes a little burnt. Why? I don't understand what part of the production process would introduce a burnt flavor.

I must confess that my three-year-old loved it. But she's wrong, it was a bad milkshake.

Tried It: Beyond Meat's The Beyond Burger

This was an impulse buy. I don't remember the price right now, but I do remember that it was about 2/3 the cost of a pair of beef patties at Whole Foods. My wife and children are vegetarian, which means most of the time I am too. Luckily, a lot of really good meat replacements have come on the market in recent years.

The best meat replacements, generally, are the ones that don't try to mimic meat. Black bean burgers are tasty all on their own. I like falafel, who doesn't like falafel? But at a BBQ, or for a quick meal, a straight-up burger can be what you want.

These are supposed to be special because they act and cook and taste more like ground beef than most veggie burgers. I'm colorblind, but you tell me, does that look like raw beef?



They have a lot of oil; more than beef burgers, actually. And as you can see in the video, they sizzle on the grill.

The taste is solid. They don't have much aroma, and the flavor isn't very strong. But it does feel like beef in your mouth, and it hits that meat taste, that umami. I had mine with cheese and hot sauce. My wife had it with ketchup, cheese, and mayo.

I didn't have hamburger buns. Also, my phone's camera sucks. Anyway, does this look like a normal burger to you?

The main ingredient in these is pea protein isolate, and you can taste the pea a little bit. It's well-seasoned and, for me, that component of the flavor isn't a problem.

Does it taste exactly like beef? No, but it tastes meaty. Similar to kebab in flavor. Does it have the mouthfeel of beef? Yes, they nailed it. If I snuck this onto a grill with beef burgers, 60:40 chance the person who got it wouldn't notice it isn't beef.

Easy to cook, tasty, filling, fun color-change technology. I would, and probably will, buy these again.

Tried It: Whaddyalove Chocolate - Conrad the Unicorn Sparkle Bar and The Classic Bar

This arrived just days after the Baltimore Faerie Faire came to my neighborhood.

With three daughters, I've decided to just embrace glitter. So today I'm trying a Conrad the Unicorn Sparkle bar by Whaddyalove Chocolate. I also have their Classic Bar to try. The company provided these samples to me free of charge but has not otherwise compensated me for this post.

The taste of the Sparkle Bar is a decent-to-good chocolate bar flavor. I'd call it a mild dark chocolate. It has a hint of salt. The flavor is better, more subtle and with a stronger chocolate taste and less of a candy taste, than your standard Hershey's bar. The edible glitter that gives it that visual panache doesn't seem to taste like much. Unfortunately, the bar doesn't melt evenly in my mouth, which leaves the mouthfeel not as smooth as I'd like.

Chocolate wrapped in nostalgia; I'll bite.

I love the packaging, which reminds me of the riddle puppets, which others call cootie-catchers, I played with as a kid. And the edible glitter is a nice look. So, on presentation, full marks. But the texture and flavor could use a little improvement.

In the Classic Bar, however, they nailed the flavor and texture. It's a really nice chocolate. It just barely rides the line of having a fruity note, but stays away from sourness. It's rich, and it melts nicely in my mouth. Though it doesn't have glitter, the finish has an attractive sheen. This version also has that fun packaging.

I gave half of the Sparkle Bar to my three-year-old daughter, who squealed and then showed it off to everyone in the room before munching it down happily.

Honestly, it'd be weird if a chocolate bar named that had austere, restrained branding.

Tried It: VINO Optics Colorblind and Vein glasses

This is an exciting day for this blog. I get pitches about interesting products at work, but most aren't something that would fit in the coverage area of Chemical & Engineering News. So the idea was to create an outlet where I could cover whatever I found interesting and get to try some neat stuff in the bargain.

The first pitch successfully converted from one I couldn't accept at work to one I could accept here was two pair of special glasses from VINO Optics. These glasses are designed to make it easier to see the colors in human skin arising from differences in the oxygenation of blood, especially for folks with red-green colorblindness. They sent two types, Blood draw & Color blind (or Oxy-Iso) and Paramedic Vein (Oxy-Amp), the latter of which is marketed to EMTs to assist with finding veins. They also make a third kind, Bruise-Finding (Heme-Iso), that makes bruises more visible. VINO provided the glasses free of charge but has not otherwise paid for this blog post.

VINO's glasses are designed around the theory that the red-green dimension of human color vision evolved around the ability to detect changes in the emotions and health of other humans via the color in their faces. Being able to tell if someone was flush, pale, bruised, etc. gave people an advantage. And red-green colorblind people, goes the theory, don't see that kind of thing very well.

It's true for me. I can't see most bruises well. If someone is red in the face from anger or effort, I can't tell. If someone is pale with fear or illness, it's basically lost on me.

The tech was originally developed for use by medical professionals, both to give colorblind ones the ability to take some coloration information into account and to improve the contrast on blood vessels.

I've written about glasses designed to help colorblind people before, both for C&EN and for this blog, which is how I came to the attention of this company. The keyword for the experience of those glasses is "subtle."

VINO's glasses are not subtle. The Colorblind type are a vivid pink/purple to look at and drastically change what the world looks like when you put them on. Knowing their backstory, the first thing I looked at were my veins, and indeed I can clearly trace a vein from my wrist down to my elbow; much more visible than without the glasses. But, as is often true, my babies are more interesting to look at.

I'll admit that VINO's marketing materials primed me for this. But normally, adult skin doesn't look any different for me than kid/baby skin. I was under the impression that "the glow of youth" was a figurative thing. But with these on, I can really see the difference. Their lips, ears, and the tips of their noses are pinker than their foreheads and cheeks. And they look a little bit translucent somehow, as if they were gently illuminated from within.

The glasses are fun to walk around wearing, because they change the colors so strongly. Reds become oranges but also become much more vivid. Red cars become an attractive copper color. Greens take on a cooler tone, so grass becomes a Christmas-tree green. Yellow dandelions really stand out from the grass with these on.

The chips aisle is fun, I'd never noticed how heavily that category of junk food uses reds, oranges, and yellows. Ignore the purple tone in the photo above, your brain corrects for that in a matter of minutes. But notice how it flattens the designs on the bag.

The Vein type are lighter in tint and didn't do as much for me, though the company says upfront they won't do much for colorblind people.

For me, colorblindness is mostly a conversation starter, and the Colorblind glasses are fun and interesting. They also function perfectly well as sunglasses. But I was curious to see what a medical professional would think of them.

Kristen Janiszewski, RN BSN CPN, is a nurse at the Pediatric Progressive Care Unit at University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, MD. She wore the Blood Draw & Colorblind type as she went about her work, and also shared them with her coworkers. Here are her thoughts, which are her own and in no way reflect the opinions of her employer.

"I appreciate that I can wear these over my regular eyeglasses. Granted, I look way less cool to a patient than my coworker just wearing the vein goggles on their own, but I have to see.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I put them on. In my mind, it was going to be somewhere between X-ray vision and tinted sunglasses. In reality, they didn't provide X-ray vision, in that I couldn't see veins that I didn't already see without the goggles. However, the veins were super sharp and distinct with the goggles on, like a high-contrast filter. The obvious veins were much brighter and more apparent, which then meant that as they got smaller or lighter or deeper, they were much easier to follow along their path. This was particularly helpful for IV placement, since it was easier to see where the vein stayed straight, or where there was a valve.

These worked the same regardless of skin tone. We're fortunate to have a multiethnic staff (and patient population, generally), so we got to try them on a variety of skin tones. There was really no difference, better or worse, in visibility from skin tone to skin tone.

They really worked best under bright, fluorescent light. We tried looking through them outside on a cloudy day and they didn't do much. But under intense, bright hospital lights, they were in full effect.

This is a little unfortunate when one works night shift, as I'm usually trying to minimize the number of lights I have to turn on to find a vein in the middle of the night (it's a bad enough experience for a kid, it doesn't need to feel like an interrogation). But for daytime sticks or if the patient was already awake, I'd 100% bring them in with me."

Built It: DIY Sodastream - Fail

Spoiler alert: This didn't work.

What if, instead of buying a commercial soda maker, you could just swap out the top on an existing soda bottle and pressurize that? And what if you could rescue a 2-liter from flatness by the same device?

That's what I was thinking when I decided to build my own device to carbonate aqueous liquids. My wife and I got both a whipped cream maker and a seltzer maker (both by iSi) as wedding presents, but the instructions say clearly not to get experimental with either; just cream, just water, respectively.

The principle was simple, and this was a year or so before the prices on SodaStream devices came down to under $100.  I would mount a standard Schrader valve--the same thing you use to fill a bicycle or car tire--to the cap of a soda bottle. Then I would attach the chuck you use to fill such tires to a CO₂ tank from my paintball gun, and use that to charge whatever liquid I put into a soda bottle with fizzy goodness.

I spent more than the $67 this starter kit costs, though I also had more fun.

I rode my motorcycle out to a paintball shop in Baltimore County to get my old paintball CO₂ tank filled. The owner thought the idea was great, and he was in the process of retrofitting his existing equipment to refill SodaStream CO₂ tanks, so he was sympathetic to my goal. But my tank was out spec, so I had to buy a new one for $30 bucks. With some advice from him, the parts to connect up the Shrader chuck cost me another $25.

If I were fancy, I'd attach a regulator. But the hope was to do this on the cheap, and even the most basic inert gas regulators cost around $50, plus the extra plumbing to connect it would have been another $15 at least. Truth is, the needle valve that comes with the paintball fitting for the tank seems to deliver CO₂ at soda-bottle pressures just fine as long as you're careful.

The next part was to mount Shrader valves into bottle caps. I drank more soda in a week getting bottle caps to work on than I normally do in a month. $7. After a few tries, I was able to get a decent hole drilled by starting it with a very small normal bit and then widening it with a stepper drill bit. The trick was to do it without shredding the rubber seal on the underside of the cap. Then it was just a question of putting the valve through the hole, tightening everything down, and putting the bottles under pressure.

The stepper drill bit is honestly one of my favorite tools, as a side note. 

Problem is, it doesn't work. And what kills me is that I'm not sure why. I got the liquids cold. I tried plain water, sweetened stuff, flat soda. I tried shaking it and not shaking it. I tried 2-liter bottles and 16-oz bottles. I went dutifully for days adding more CO₂. The best I got was with lemonade, and even that was a very weak fizz, not half of what you'd get from a new bottle of soda. It did also make some milk truly, deeply, repulsive.

I'd love to tell you that this DIY system worked, and SodaStream can go take a hike. If you have any suggestions on what could be done to make this system work, please share them in the comments. But when you consider that the commercial devices cost less than what I spent by at least a 25% and they, y'know, work, this whole thing was an entertaining boondoggle.

Close up of a really cool idea that doesn't work and I don't know why.

Tried It Quickie: Ocean Spray Cranberry Pineapple

This juice is dope, you should buy it.

Tried It: Raw silk diaper liner

The silk liner is the strip in the middle, which we've been using with prefold cloth diapers from Green Mountain.

See, I want to show you a picture of diaper rash so you understand how distressing it can be for a parent. But posting a picture of my infant daughter's pelvis seems like an invasion of her privacy. She may one day be mortified by this enough as it is. I'll just let you google it. When you're done dry-heaving, come on back.

It's not always that bad. But one of my twin girls recently had what looked like popped blisters all over the front of her diaper area. Or perhaps think of the texture of an English muffin, though not quite that covered in holes, #trypophobia. It also seemed red even through my colorblind eyes. Poor thing.

I'm going to sell so many muffins with this comparison. You're welcome, Thomas.

We tried Calmoseptine and other medicated diaper rash creams, we tried giving her as much diaper-free time as we could manage, we tried herbal balms based around calendula and tea tree oil. The herbal balms we use a lot and, combined with cloth diapers, we've had good luck avoiding rashes. But this rash emerged nonetheless and persisted.


Our doctor had nothing to suggest, and we were about ready to call a dermatologist. But then I spied these raw silk diaper liners, which we had bought when our older daughter was a baby. She had hardly any trouble with diaper rash, so I'd forgotten about them. But I remembered them seeming to help her.

I put the silk liner in my baby's diaper when I put her to bed that night. It goes right against the skin. I still included the Calmoseptine; I'm going after this thing with all available firepower, folks. And in the morning, I saw significant healing of the sores and much less redness.

Now look, I can't be sure that it was the silk. It could be that the medicated cream or the other things we'd been doing finally took hold. And I don't have any good scientific rationale for why it would work.

But I can say that we had many days of no improvement, then I put in the raw silk and we saw strong improvement. I can also say that the healing since then has seemed slower when she doesn't get the silk (it has to be washed and dried between uses). So I am going to keep using them, and possibly buy more.

Tried It: EnChroma glasses for the colorblind

Available for modeling gigs.

A company called EnChroma markets a line of glasses that they claim help people with red-green colorblindness see colors better. I tried them, but you should know two things ahead of time.

1) The company sent me two pair, for free, to try*.

2) They did so because I wrote about them for my day job, Chemical & Engineering News. This post is my responsibility alone and is not affiliated with C&EN or its publisher, the American Chemical Society. But I encourage you to check out that story, I talk to color vision scientists and with other colorblind scientists, and we really give the glasses a thorough look from a scientific standpoint. C&EN: Experimenting with EnChroma’s color-blind assistance glasses

With that out the way, they work! Kind of. It's subtle.

The biggest difference for me is that I can see the green of stoplights when I wear them. Normally stoplights look white, warm, and warmer to me. With the glasses on, the green light actually registers as green for me. For some people, that could be worth the $350 right there. If you're a person that buys nice sunglasses, you might be paying that anyway. The green of highway signs, which are normally grey to me, was also fun to be surprised by.

If you look for videos of people trying these glasses on, you'll see people weeping and carrying on as if putting on the glasses flipped a lightswitch and revealed all the glory of the electromagnetic spectrum to them. I think most of those people are faking it, at least to an extent. To Enchroma's credit, the videos they have in their media center tend to show people reacting more like, "Oh, hey, that's kind of neat, I think I see a difference here." Not, "THE COLORS! STRIKE ME DOWN, MOSES, I AM NOT WORTHY!" Maybe for a few people it is like that, who knows? But for me and the other colorblind people I tried the glasses with, it was more subtle.

Pictured: Not what it's like.

The other main effect is that I can distinguish more colors in the red-orange-yellow region. A painting by my brother, Carl, hangs in my office at work. It's all in that color family. I liked it before, but with the glasses on, there is about 20% more detail I can see, which takes the piece from "I like it" to "Hey, that's a really nice painting!" I've gotten many compliments on it even before revealing the family connection, and now I can see what the fuss is about.

The glasses have an interesting backstory. According to Kent Streeb, EnChroma's marketing director, the guy who invented the glasses used to make special goggles to protect the eyes of laser surgeons. These lasers fire light at a very narrow band of wavelengths (color), so the glasses are made to block just that band. But the doctors liked the way the world looked through the glasses, so they would filch them and wear them around town. One such doctor wore his purloined spectacles to an Ultimate Frisbee game, and was blown away by what he saw: grass is green. No, like, REALLY green you guys! For the first time, the grass really was greener on the other side (sorry, couldn't let that pass by unused), and he could spot the cones marking the field much better. And that's how the company thought to explore producing them as a consumer product.

EnChroma's tech carries some controversy. One critic claims that for every two colors the glasses allow you to distinguish, there's another two colors you no longer can. And I observed some discrepancy between the UV-Visible absorption spectrum of the lenses and the scientific explanation the company gives on their website (more info on that in the C&EN article). They work for only a subset of the colorblind population, though that subset includes the two most common types. But it is clear that there's a real observable effect here.

When I first learned that EnChroma was going to send me their glasses to try (and keep, thanks guys!), it was exciting. The first lead I wrote for my C&EN story was "Imagine seeing a brand new color that no one has ever seen before." I wanted them to work and be amazing, and I had to work myself back around to a place of journalistic impartiality.

In real life, it's neat. It's not huge, it didn't change my life forever. But EnChroma's glasses let me see green. I'm looking forward to trying them in the garden and in the fall colors.



*Are you a marketer, inventor, chef, etc with a funky thing I could try and write about? That'd be great! Send me note, let's do it.

Tried It: 7-11 Lemon Pie donut

I got in a wreck on my bike this morning, so I decided to get myself a pity donut. Their donut de jour was a lemon pie donut.

The frosting is unsophisticated. I liked that about it, but my wife thought it was too sweet. The crumbles on top were a good idea but a little weak on execution. They fell off too easily, so my dining table got covered in them, especially at my three-year-old's seat. They were also a little too large, and the overall effect distracted from an otherwise good donut.

The lemon curd inside though? Mild and well balanced, really a nice filling. It had enough tartness and lemon flavor to cut the sweetness of the frosting and bread, but not so much that you pucker. I will unironically call the lemon curd filling in this 7-11 donut delicate.

I'm generally a fan of 7-11's donut bread. Is that what you call the bready part of a donut? I don't know my donut anatomy. Anyway, this one is standard in that respect. Light and airy, fatty enough to feel indulgent without being greasy or slick.

So overall, I'd eat this donut again. It could be improved by stronger lemon in the frosting as well as by smaller and softer crumbles attached better. With a cup of earl gray, it'd be a great mid-afternoon treat.

Tried It: Bacon Salt: Original and Hickory

Bacon Salt is vegetarian and low-sodium, and I can barely contain how much I love that those things are true. A quarter teaspoon of the stuff has 6% of your daily sodium, however, so "low" is a relative term. I tried the Original Bacon Salt and Hickory Bacon Salt flavors.

Straight-up, it tastes like the crispy meaty part of a strip of bacon was dried and made into a powder. That this is possible makes me optimistic about the seaweed that has been reported to taste like bacon, which may come to supermarket shelves in the next few years.

*editors note: This blog is about trying things. I want to try this seaweed bacon. If you have a hookup, hook me up.*

It has MSG, which is fine. Let's examine that for a second. MSG stands for monosodium glutamate. Sodium you'll recognize from sodium chloride, aka table salt, and it's fine for you in reasonable quantities. The mono part just means there's only one sodium atom for every glutamate (shown). 

Pictured: not your doom

Glutamate is an amino acid, one of the the 20 basic building blocks that nature uses to build proteins. MSG is just table salt, except instead of chloride, they use an amino acid.

The supposed reactions people were having to Chinese food cooked with MSG were probably more caused by eating lots of low-quality fried food smothered in sugary sauces, and MSG is now widely regarded by scientific types as safe. It makes stuff taste meaty because it's an amino acid, which is what you use to build proteins, which is what meat is made of. It's a tight circle.

The other things that give it a meaty (umami) taste are yeast corpses (which taste wonderful when dilute), soy sauce (effectively), and smoke flavor. That last part is maybe a little poisonous, but if you keep your overall consumption of charred and smokey things to reasonable levels, you'll probably be okay (I am not a doctor, don't take any of this as medical advice).

So how is it? I like it. I often eat canned chili for lunch at work, and a little sprinkle of this stuff peps that up nicely. It also goes well on popcorn, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, basically anything starchy. Eaten all by itself, it has the aftertaste that I recognize from that time I accidentally ate straight MSG dissolved in hot water (Hi, Aaron). But you don't eat it by itself, you savage, what's wrong with you?

I'll leave you with the best application I've seen for Bacon Salt: encrusted onto the rim of a bloody Mary. You're welcome. 

Tried It: Flying Dog Jalepeño White Ale

I know that having Ralph Steadman's art on the labels is a big deal because he's a serious artist/illustrator who worked with Hunter S. Thompson, and I recognize that it is good art, but I also hate it. The one I like least is on their Ragin B@#tch Begian IPA, where I also hate the name, all of which is a bummer because the actual beer is lovely.

Hot pepper beers are hard to do well. I love spicy, so I'm always ready to try another one. Out of the seven I've tried, one has been excellent. It was from Throwback brewery in North Hampton, NH. Serious hotness, and a flavor like the freshest habanero laid lightly on top of a hoppy pilsner.

This jalepeño beer from Flying Dog in Frederick, MD, is good. Which I can't say for the rest of those I've tried.

Notice in the photo of the bottle that there is sediment at the bottom. You want to pour this into a glass and do it carefully, leaving the sediment behind like with a homebrew. I don't know if this brew is bottle conditioned, meaning that stuff is spent yeast, or if the flavor would just be improved by filtration.

I drank two of these tonight. The first one (shown), I just poured it all in, and it tasted moist in a bad way, like a reheated chilie relleno. The second one I poured carefully and got a clear glass of beer with a crisp pepper flavor on a solid wit beer base. The decomposed notes were gone and I could taste the hops.

From a capsaicin standpoint, we're talking an Old El Paso Medium salsa level of heat. It works for the beer, and I think nobody that was willing to drink a pepper beer would be overpowered by the heat. I wouldn't mind a bit more, but they've made a reasonable choice.

Overall, this is a good novelty beer. A fine selection to bring to a party where there will be craft beer fans, a fine thing to order at a bar. I drank it with a breaded white fish, and it paired well. Not one that I'll keep in stock at my house, but I will look forward to the remaining four bottles.

Tried it: Blogger app

This is a silly inaugural post, but I'm curious if the Blogger app is pleasant and usable for this type of content.

This blog is hosted on Google Blogger, which I use for the community newsletter I also run, www.BmoreRemingtonian.com. I didn't care for the mobile app for that because most of the content is written in Word and Publisher for use in print and then copied over into the web interface.

So far, this is okay. I'll be curious to see what the product looks like. I could see this being useful for sending off quick reviews of weird stuff I encounter whole wandering. I can't imagine writing longer posts on here though, just because I get tired of the phone keyboard. 

Update: Photo handling is a little clunky on the app. So far I can only dump all the photos in at the end. And if I don't write the text first, it's hard to find the cursor. That said, it's easy enough to clean it up the next time I'm at a full computer.