Philip McGarvey

paul wheaton wrote:For me, a 96% solutions was to go poo-less.  

Next step - while on a different health journey it was suggested that dandruff is caused by what you eat.  

Same here.  Up to age 23 I used soap and shampoo regularly and usually had bad dandruff and stinky hair.  Then I quit shampoo and soap completely, and also improved my diet, and I have barely had any dandruff at all in the 12 years since then, and my hair smells OK according to my family who are not inclined to flatter me in this respect.

I do wash my hair with just water, and brush it, every week to few weeks.

I'll pitch in my anecdote:

Zero products, no soap/shampoo/sunscreen/lotion/chapstick.  Just occasional lard for moisturizing dry/cracked feet and occasional white vinegar as deodorant in the armpits if I need to be extra presentable.

I wash with cold water daily by getting in the creek, getting out, scrubbing my whole body just with my hands to mobilize any grime, and then rinsing again in the creek.  No soap or anything.  

I wash my (long) hair every week or two or three with a hot shower with just water and brushing it.  I'll scrub my face with a cloth with hot water.

This has mostly been my routine for nearly 10 years.  I haven't used shampoo or soap on my body in ~12 years.  Haven't used sun screen in at least 8.  I'm often in the sun but I mostly cover up with clothes rather than sunscreen.  My hands and feet and face tend to have a tan and I try to expose the rest of my body to sun gradually and never in huge amounts at once.  I now very rarely get any sunburn.  My skin feels smooth and healthy.  

There have been some times where I was barefoot or in sandals a lot in a dry climate and my heels started to crack a bit, and then I rubbed animal fat (lard or tallow) into them, sometimes before putting a sock on and sleeping with it on, which helped immensely.  

I have nothing against making natural skincare products, I'm kind of interested actually but just haven't put in the effort since I don't seem to need anything.  Admittedly the first months or maybe a year when I quit using soap and shampoo after having used it my whole life, I think I was pretty stinky - but I also was barely even washing with water then so I'm not sure how long it would have taken to get to a natural balance and smell OK without any products.

What was very stark to me was how my skin has almost never had any rashes or acne or anything in the 12 years since quitting all products.  Up until about age 23 when I always was using soap and shampoo I had frequent skin rashes, acne, dandruff, my hair stunk between showers, my body odor was much nastier than it is now.  I can't exactly say how much of this was due to diet vs skin/hair products.

A year later my sleep apnea still seems to be better most of the time.  There have been a few times I've had congestion perhaps from allergy to plants or pollen or something, where I could barely breathe through my nose and did not sleep as well.  I imagine my nasal breathing capacity could still be improved even if it's a lot better than it was, and maybe it's possible with more improvement I could continue nasal breathing even with some congestion.  I recently spoke with a breathwork teacher and was recommended to keep using mouth tape and also look into the "mewing" exercises for opening up the nasal breathing capacity - which I did, and I'm very interested in that.  I've been practicing resting my tongue on the roof of the mouth rather than the bottom of the the mouth where it had normally been, and also closing my lips, although that feels less natural still.  I do often notice my tongue resting on the roof of the mouth though, which is new and exciting.  

Mark A Ferguson wrote:although I wouldn't personally assume the sleep apnea itself was cured without testing.

How would you test for it?

I sometimes record my sleep to see if I snore.  Lately the couple times I did it there were a few minutes of snoring near the beginning of sleep but most of the night seemed to be consistent quiet nasal breathing.  The main thing I go by is if I wake up after 6-7.5 hours feeling well rested and without a dry mouth and without having drunk any water.  But I'm curious what it would mean to still have sleep apnea without any of those symptoms.

I'm sorry that's happened.  

I don't really have an answer for how to get around what they're trying to make you do.  If you really do need to use facebook, you could install their app briefly to confirm your identity, and then immediately uninstall it.  You could perhaps do this on some old phone you don't use anymore.  

If you're concerned more with "It would be too easy for me to use it" than "it will spy on me", you could install their messenger app, which lets you do direct messaging but doesn't have the feeds etc.

Better would be to open direct text chats or group chats with the people you want to stay in contact with.  My family all use a few group chats to stay in touch, we never interact with each other through social media.  This is definitely superior, because the big tech company doesn't get to decide who sees what and when - we all see everything that gets said or shared in there, and don't have to see any distractions or ads.

I think everyone would be well served to move toward group chats.  I am in local community group chats too on Signal which are superior to facebook groups for all the same reasons.  

I imagine some governments can still get all our messages from Signal if they want to through someone's compromised phone or through hardware backdoors, but at least the tech companies theoretically don't get to mine them for data.

Also related, I recommend adblock plus and/or ublock origin, and the socialfocus browser extensions that can hide ads and feeds and short videos etc from your internet experience.

Pete Podurgiel wrote:I like to eat some variety of mushroom every day, but wondering if it might not be a bad idea to give it a rest once in a while.

Agreed.  I don't worry about it too much but I imagine there is a benefit to taking a break from almost any category of food occasionally.  It seems natural to have seasonal changes in diet which effectively would do this, and also humans have always done various kinds of fasting which is known to allow the body to do things it doesn't get to do while digesting food, including some aspects of healing.  

Who knows what the "optimal" rhythm would be, but it might be wise when I notice I've eaten the same thing every day for weeks to take a break from it for a couple days.  Fasting would be the simple (but not easy ;) way.

If you have a conventional wood stove where a lot of the heat goes right out the chimney, and with less or little mass around it, larger logs can be better because they spread the heating out over a longer time rather than having a brief very hot fire where much of heat goes out very quickly.  That's the only advantage of larger logs - a slower cooler burn.  With a RMH or otherwise a long enough chimney and/or enough mass to absorb the heat, it's ideal for the burn to be hot enough to maximize efficiency by burning off all the smoke, and for that, thinner splits are better.

For what it's worth, I have ate various kinds of wild mushrooms every day for long strings of days and in varying large quantities, with no obvious issues so far.  

I haven't had wine caps though.

I'd rather LLMs didn't exist but while they do they can be useful for finding information.  Some kinds of information are hard to find with a normal google search but LLMs can find them easily.  (Google often gives lots of fluff websites rather than original sources)

Still, take care not to replace human connections with LLMs.  I respect anyone who chooses to stay off the internet and learn from real people, or goes in that direction in some way.  Meanwhile, to the degree we do use the internet to find information, LLMs are useful, and there are a variety of ways to use them.  Getting them to give direct links to original sources is the most useful I think.

For anything that's likely been discussed on permies I'd start by googling "site:permies.com blah blah".

For example, I recently successfully convinced a friend to put in a wood floor instead of vinyl floor.  I Googled site:permies.com vinyl floor and read all the discussions that seemed relevant.  I also queried an LLM with "how long does vinyl flooring last, and does it shed toxic compounds into the room?  give direct links to sources for all the information you give"

Other example LLM queries:

"give me five direct links to pdf of the manual for ______"   And then I have the manual.  For a quick follow up I can give the pdf of the manual back to the LLM and say "give me exact quotes with page numbers for everything this manual says about ____"

Or e.g. troubleshooting a chainsaw there's a lot of information out there that won't be in manuals and the LLM can be very handy for giving next steps for what to try.  I could have made a post somewhere like arboristsite but it might take some time for useful replies to come in, and they might be mixed with people mocking me for not intuitively knowing what to do without asking.  I troubleshoot a lot of mechanical/tech things and I don't want to invest the time to become a thorough expert on all of them, LLMs are really useful here.

Or "are there people out there who think ____, and what do they say about it?  (even if they're kooky that's OK)   Give direct links to places where they're talking about it"

Or "give me direct links to pdfs of five scientific papers that discuss _____"  And again, give the pdf of the paper back with "give exact quotes and page numbers where this paper explains or shows data on _____"

At the moment, LLMs are not yet completely full of ads and stuff.  I imagine this will change rapidly and they might become far less useful.  But at the moment it's a relatively distraction-free way to find info from the internet in a simple text format with links to relevant original sources.

r ransom wrote:I'm happy to hear these things.

Do you guys worry about sunlight or other things when choosing a spot for the guitar to live.  Or is convince most important?

This is a good point - I wouldn't hang an instrument somewhere where it would get direct sunshine.

Hanging them on the wall is the way to go, so you don't accidentally set things on them or knock them off something, and so they're always accessible to play.