Can you imagine the energy cost of every new person?
By the way, QI is a great show hosted by Stephen Fry. Educative, amusing and thought provoking. Many episodes are available on Youtube.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Carbon footprint - Quite Interesting
Can you imagine the energy cost of every new person?
By the way, QI is a great show hosted by Stephen Fry. Educative, amusing and thought provoking. Many episodes are available on Youtube.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
What will they buy?
To me, being rich is being debt free, owning a home, and having an independent source of income.
Assuming you are a small family with the first 2 conditions met, simple math tells me that a couple of crores in a nationalized bank will fetch you 18 lakhs per annum (@ 9%, today's average interest rate), that is at least a lakh a month post tax. Your income will be permanent as long as you have the sense never to touch the capital, so you have no obligation to save (beyond a set-aside to cover inflation) . And 1 lakh of spending money is a LOT. Even today, even in the big cities. No?
So what is the deal with people chasing thousands of crores, especially through illegal means? I agree there are people who like, and are entitled to, a large and lavish lifestyle. But what can you buy with 6000 crores most of which is hidden in untraceable "benami" accounts?
Really. serious question.
Sadiq Batcha's walls had affirmation notes that read: I will be the richest man in the world.
Bernie Madoff stole something like 75 billion dollars. Seriously, what was the plan, man?
Addiction? Something like Kleptomania? Food and money - we never think of the people who abuse these two as addicts who need help.
Assuming you are a small family with the first 2 conditions met, simple math tells me that a couple of crores in a nationalized bank will fetch you 18 lakhs per annum (@ 9%, today's average interest rate), that is at least a lakh a month post tax. Your income will be permanent as long as you have the sense never to touch the capital, so you have no obligation to save (beyond a set-aside to cover inflation) . And 1 lakh of spending money is a LOT. Even today, even in the big cities. No?
So what is the deal with people chasing thousands of crores, especially through illegal means? I agree there are people who like, and are entitled to, a large and lavish lifestyle. But what can you buy with 6000 crores most of which is hidden in untraceable "benami" accounts?
Really. serious question.
Sadiq Batcha's walls had affirmation notes that read: I will be the richest man in the world.
Bernie Madoff stole something like 75 billion dollars. Seriously, what was the plan, man?
Addiction? Something like Kleptomania? Food and money - we never think of the people who abuse these two as addicts who need help.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Update on Improving shampoo
This is a follow-up to the post Improving shampoo.
I finally got around to testing CK's suggestion about using rice bran oil in place of coconut oil. Also, Instead of the 2 shampoo: 1 oil ratio I had suggested in my original post, I went 1:1 this time and to up the ante, pre-oiled my hair too. Results are terrific! At 2 : 1, you are still using too much shampoo, it turns out you can go with much more oil than you think. And remember, I went 1:1 with rice bran oil, which is a much heavier oil than coconut oil. (Halo shampoo, no water used). The conditioning effect with rice bran is markedly superior when compared to coconut oil.
I shook the mix up to form a mango milkshake-y emulsion. There is no oil smell - unlike with coconut oil which smells, well, coconutty, which I kind of liked, but no oil smell is a good thing for work days.
I had pre-oiled my hair rather heavily, so we are talking about a lot of grease here. I had to use the mix twice - first wash, rinse, then wash again. Not much lather the first time, but small, fine lather the second time around. After the final rinse, hair felt slick but not greasy, like after a conditioner.
Hair is dry now, and feels lovely. No grease, but dark, glossy, well-set look, which is what a really good conditioner will do to straight hair. Remember that this was on pre-oiled hair! I think that if you use the mix without oiling your hair first, you'll still get a gentle wash, leading to hair that looks moisturized, but also has bounce and body. It is also possible that to was unoiled hair, you could go with even more oil in the mix. I'll try it out.
But remember, these are proportions for Halo shampoo, which is a regular surfactant based shampoo that I find quite drying on its own (same as sunsilk, pantene and even biotique in my experience). If you are trying this with some other brand of shampoo+conditioner or a very gentle cleanser, you could try and go with lesser oil.
To summarize the differences between using rice bran oil and coconut oil in the mix - with rice bran oil, there is slightly lesser lather. No smell other than the shampoo fragrance. gentler cleaning, softer, silkier hair post-wash.
Where costs are concerned, rice bran oil is probably one of the cheapest vegetable oils out there, retailing at Rs. 70 - 90 per liter.
Rice bran oil is available at all supermarkets, just like sunflower oil, etc.
If you want to try this with other oils, knock yourself out! But comeback and tell us what happened. I'll live up to my promise and try the mix with castor oil, just for kicks :-D
PS: here is another suggestion, also from CK - for itchy scalp, infections or dandruff, add a couple of drops of dettol. Hm! Will certainly try this.
I finally got around to testing CK's suggestion about using rice bran oil in place of coconut oil. Also, Instead of the 2 shampoo: 1 oil ratio I had suggested in my original post, I went 1:1 this time and to up the ante, pre-oiled my hair too. Results are terrific! At 2 : 1, you are still using too much shampoo, it turns out you can go with much more oil than you think. And remember, I went 1:1 with rice bran oil, which is a much heavier oil than coconut oil. (Halo shampoo, no water used). The conditioning effect with rice bran is markedly superior when compared to coconut oil.
I shook the mix up to form a mango milkshake-y emulsion. There is no oil smell - unlike with coconut oil which smells, well, coconutty, which I kind of liked, but no oil smell is a good thing for work days.
I had pre-oiled my hair rather heavily, so we are talking about a lot of grease here. I had to use the mix twice - first wash, rinse, then wash again. Not much lather the first time, but small, fine lather the second time around. After the final rinse, hair felt slick but not greasy, like after a conditioner.
Hair is dry now, and feels lovely. No grease, but dark, glossy, well-set look, which is what a really good conditioner will do to straight hair. Remember that this was on pre-oiled hair! I think that if you use the mix without oiling your hair first, you'll still get a gentle wash, leading to hair that looks moisturized, but also has bounce and body. It is also possible that to was unoiled hair, you could go with even more oil in the mix. I'll try it out.
But remember, these are proportions for Halo shampoo, which is a regular surfactant based shampoo that I find quite drying on its own (same as sunsilk, pantene and even biotique in my experience). If you are trying this with some other brand of shampoo+conditioner or a very gentle cleanser, you could try and go with lesser oil.
To summarize the differences between using rice bran oil and coconut oil in the mix - with rice bran oil, there is slightly lesser lather. No smell other than the shampoo fragrance. gentler cleaning, softer, silkier hair post-wash.
Where costs are concerned, rice bran oil is probably one of the cheapest vegetable oils out there, retailing at Rs. 70 - 90 per liter.
Rice bran oil is available at all supermarkets, just like sunflower oil, etc.
If you want to try this with other oils, knock yourself out! But comeback and tell us what happened. I'll live up to my promise and try the mix with castor oil, just for kicks :-D
PS: here is another suggestion, also from CK - for itchy scalp, infections or dandruff, add a couple of drops of dettol. Hm! Will certainly try this.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Interesting read: Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard?
Thanks for this link, CK!
This article is primarily about cognitive neuroscience, but I found it very useful because it explains the reason why complications creep into everyday decisions about simple chores. It helped me understand some of the modern factors that might inhibit one from cultivating simplicity as a life practice.
Here's an extract of particular relevance to this blog:
Jonah Lehrer says:
"In essence, my basic decision-making flaw is that I tend to treat easy consumer decisions (toothpaste, floss, shampoo, laundry detergent, etc.) as if they were really difficult. Although I know that every floss will work well enough, I still can’t help but contemplate the pros and cons of waxed versus unwaxed, spearmint versus wintermint. It’s an embarrassing waste of time, and yet it happens to me all the time.
Why do I do this? Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer.
I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to
automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?)"
Read the full article here.
This article is primarily about cognitive neuroscience, but I found it very useful because it explains the reason why complications creep into everyday decisions about simple chores. It helped me understand some of the modern factors that might inhibit one from cultivating simplicity as a life practice.
Here's an extract of particular relevance to this blog:
Jonah Lehrer says:
"In essence, my basic decision-making flaw is that I tend to treat easy consumer decisions (toothpaste, floss, shampoo, laundry detergent, etc.) as if they were really difficult. Although I know that every floss will work well enough, I still can’t help but contemplate the pros and cons of waxed versus unwaxed, spearmint versus wintermint. It’s an embarrassing waste of time, and yet it happens to me all the time.
Why do I do this? Why do I squander so much mental energy on the mundane purchases of everyday life? I think I’ve found a good answer.
I recently stumbled upon a working paper, “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” by Aner Sela (University of Florida) and Jonah Berger (Penn). Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation in the drugstore is a metacognitive mistake. Instead of realizing that picking a floss is an easy decision, I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to
automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t. (After all, why else would there be so many alternatives?)"
Read the full article here.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Improving shampoo
Last week while traveling I found a neat way to improve shampoo, and make it last longer.
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U P D A T E !!!
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CK has as usual beaten me in the value-for-money race. He sees my coconut oil, and raises me rice bran oil.
Like coconut oil, rice bran oil has no strong scent or colour. However, it is slightly more greasy without being too viscous, which ought to make the conditioning effect better than the thinner, lighter coconut oil. And here's what'll interest the hardcore value hunter: coconut oil costs Rs. 140 per liter, while RB oil costs roughly half as much at Rs. 70!! That means a 2:1 halo to RB oil mix totals to Rs. 160 per liter!!
I'll try it out myself to test the feel, and post here.
But first – my favorite and preferred hair wash solution is a mix of powdered shikha (Acacia concinna) and "arapu/chigare” (Scientific name?. Safe, extremely inexpensive, and completely biodegradable. I mix a table spoon of both these powders with warm water to batter consistency to wash oiled hair. Admittedly, this is not for busy workdays.
Shampoos are convenient, but more expensive than traditional cleansers, non-biodegradable and bad for soil health, and their safety level for human use is dubious at best.
That said, chances are it is going to take a lot of lifestyle change before you give up shampoo altogether, so here are ways to lessen the evil.
I find shampoo use complicated because I find that it dries out my scalp and hair, which means I’ve to either oil my hair heavily, or use a conditioner. Most likely the latter, because even if I oil my hair, shampoo ends up stripping the oil off completely.
Moreover, shampoo is unnecessarily thick. You can dilute it considerably, even though the bottle says not to.
To combat the drying factor, dilute shampoo with part oil and part water. The oil softens the shampoo considerably, and has a superb conditioning effect on hair.
Take about 20 ml of shampoo in an empty bottle, and add 10 ml of oil, and 10 ml of water. Shake well. Upon shaking the contents form a milky emulsion. Contents will settle, you’ll need to shake the bottle every time before use. I don’t know yet if the oil will turn rancid, so make small batches just enough for a week.
The effect of adding oil directly to shampoo is very pronounced. You don't have to pre-oil - hair turns out perfectly conditioned and set. The lather is rich and fine, and when you rinse off, don't get nervous about the slightly slick texture - this is similar to the slickness that conditioners leave behind, and will disappear when dry. I am now trying to find the threshold at which oil becomes too much in the shampoo, so I can stay just south of that mark. The water is for dilution only – maybe I can do away with that entirely, I don’t know yet.
Which shampoo?
This should work with any shampoo – use your favorite. I tried it first with an almost empty bottle of Biotique soy protein shampoo. Nice, I loved the smell, but pricey.
I am really not convinced about the value you are getting with expensive shampoos over inexpensive ones. If you are going for a laureth sulfate -free shampoo, you are on to something good, but most of the branded shampoos in the market have the same poisons, so why pay more?
I am really not convinced about the value you are getting with expensive shampoos over inexpensive ones. If you are going for a laureth sulfate -free shampoo, you are on to something good, but most of the branded shampoos in the market have the same poisons, so why pay more?
From a value perspective, the cheapest shampoo on the market (from a reputed manufacturer) turns out to be good old Halo (M/f Colgate-Palmolive) from my childhood. There is only the yellow “egg protein” variant available, and only in 1 liter bottles. The price is Rs. 235 for the litre. In Chennai there is a Rs.30 off too, so I got it for Rs. 205. A casual price check on the supermarket shelves tells me that the rest retail at Rs. 150 - 200 and above for a 400 ml bottle.
Which oil?
Coconut is fine. Light, mild scented. I am not sure how other vegetable oils will hold up – for one, the smell should be too intense. I am very tempted to try castor oil though, will let you know what happens.
Coconut oil costs Rs. 140 per litre bought loose at the old fashioned oil merchant’s. Bottled varieties like meera etc cost around Rs. 200, and I find they give you pointless enhancements. (Advansed?? Yeah well, I am not spending nearly Rs. 300/L for poor spelling, Parachute).
Coconut oil costs Rs. 140 per litre bought loose at the old fashioned oil merchant’s. Bottled varieties like meera etc cost around Rs. 200, and I find they give you pointless enhancements. (Advansed?? Yeah well, I am not spending nearly Rs. 300/L for poor spelling, Parachute).
At 2:1 ratio, Halo+coconut oil works out to Rs. 180 per litre, which is substantially cheaper (on the average around 70%) than even the mid-range varieties like Sunsilk, and you don’t have to buy a conditioner, which makes it even better value.
I’ve just washed my hair with this mix, and while I do (ahem!) have naturally soft and silky hair, my hair feels even more fabulous than usual (:-D). Those of you with dry, frizzy conditioner-dependant hair, please try this out and let me know.
Like I said, go with more oil than what I have suggested, or try out various proportions till you find one that works for you.
**************************
U P D A T E !!!
**************************
CK has as usual beaten me in the value-for-money race. He sees my coconut oil, and raises me rice bran oil.
Like coconut oil, rice bran oil has no strong scent or colour. However, it is slightly more greasy without being too viscous, which ought to make the conditioning effect better than the thinner, lighter coconut oil. And here's what'll interest the hardcore value hunter: coconut oil costs Rs. 140 per liter, while RB oil costs roughly half as much at Rs. 70!! That means a 2:1 halo to RB oil mix totals to Rs. 160 per liter!!
I'll try it out myself to test the feel, and post here.
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