The Disposable Toothbrush Done Right


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by alles-schlumpf

How about a disposable toothbrush that dispenses two or three “servings” of toothpaste? I know there are those thin, miniature toothbrushes with a single serving toothpaste pellet buried in the plastic bristles, but that design makes for an uncomfortable and difficult experience.

What I’m imagining is a full-sized toothbrush (perhaps a bit shorter, but not more than 2 inches shorter) with real bristles and a full diameter. Below the head of the toothbrush, near where your thumb naturally rests, is a toothpaste-filled bubble coming out of the shaft of the toothbrush that, when pressed by the thumb, pushes or “pumps” the toothpaste through the base of the brush and up through the center of the bristles.

Quality materials, proper size, and no moving parts—this satisfies all three, and I do not know of another disposable toothbrush that does.

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An Adjusted Age


cc licensed flickr photo shared by photobunny

It has continuously bothered me how much stigma is associated with your chronological age. Too often there is an expectation that you should be living a certain life in a certain way at a certain age. Seven years ago, when I was much younger (a relative age), I wrote about this. I argued for an adjusted age based on numerous variables.

Skip ahead five years. I’m watching a scientific programme on the telly, and it is telling me about two doctors, Dr. Oz and Dr. Roizen, who are providing customers with an adjusted age based on their response to questions about physical health and lifestyle. They call it RealAge.

Their approach is primarily physical. It can all be done online, though I think an in-house assessment including a physical and some strength tests is also available. I like this idea, and I like these doctors. I believe that to get an accurate, and comprehensive assessment of one’s age, however, we need to include other variables other than physical health.

First, I would start with intellect. Smarter people live longer; it is known. Secondly, I might include a psychological test to uncover any neuroses (an attenuating factor) and discover the level of emotional intelligence the person had (hat tip to Daniel Goleman.) Third, I may or may not address a capacity for profound understanding, i.e., something close to spirituality but something that doesn’t necessarily need to be spiritual per se. I would take into account the person’s appearance and social behavior. Do they look young? How do they move? Are they a bit immature? What kind of personality do they have?

Finally, I would take into account certain rites of passage relative to when others pass through the same. For example, leaving the nest, making their first major purchase, the loss of virginity. (Incidentally, those last two may be the same event for some.)

Of course, all of these factors would be weighted differently, with physical health and lifestyle still receiving the lion’s share of the weight. In any case, I’d like to see RealAge and the above described method of calculating age—I’ll call it TruAge to differentiate between the two—accepted in place of calendar age. In fact, I would suggest that people calculate their RealAge or TruAge and use it in place of their calendar age when answering the age-old inquiry.

Why bother with all of this? Because you really do have some control over your aging, and using a fixed calendar age does not reflect this. A TruAge is liberating. It empowers an individual on a fundamental level, a level that once seemed immovable.

It allows you to travel in time.

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A Snopes For Food Ingredients


cc licensed flickr photo shared by ecstaticist

Do you read food labels? I confess, I didn’t make a habit of it until a couple of years ago. Since then, I’ve discovered all sorts of interesting spices, flavors, chemicals and preservatives. Many of these are quite safe; some are even beneficial. Others, however, are a bit more questionable. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have information about food ingredients at the touch of a button without numerous Google searches? I hear a rhetorical, “Yes!”

Enter ingredients.com, or since that’s taken, some less direct way of saying it. It would be a website devoted to the latest objective information about food ingredients. What consensus there is about each ingredient would be presented first, followed by differences of opinion and the evidence for each. A score would be given to each, with 100 being the highest, i.e. the healthiest and safest.

But, here’s the great part. You’d have an iOS and Android app that would allow users to scan the bar codes of items at the grocery store, and each item would have a combined score, or perhaps color code. You could even apply it to restaurant menu items if you crowd source that information. You could then expand the site to items found in a drugstore, e.g. mouthwashes and creams.

It would need to be as objective as possible, and have a team of people who represent views from across the spectrum, from scientists to government regulators to ingredient manufacturers to doctors (both Western, Eastern, and alternative.)

7

Cigarettes That Quit Themselves

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Justin Shearer

My father has smoked for several decades. He’s addicted both physically and mentally, but it is more psychological at this point. He enjoys the smoking experience and the reflective time. The strange thing is, however, that he thinks (psychological) that the addiction is more physical. That got me thinking—what if I could tell him that he had already kicked the nicotine habit months ago? Might that provide the necessary impetus to just quit completely?

Here’s the idea. What if you could special order a carton of cigarettes with only a percentage of the standard nicotine amount? You would smoke your 90 percents for a month, then the 80 percents for another month, and so on until you were smoking nicotine-free tobacco.

(I know that last part sounds funny, but if we can make anything gluten-free or sugar-free, I think we can make tobacco nicotine free. I know the first few reductions could certainly be done in the manufacturing process.)

This way, one could choose to keep the psychological habit intact while quitting the physical habit. You break one addiction; then the other.

Alternatively, your spouse special orders them and brings them back to the house with the groceries. You smoke them not knowing that you’re gradually being weened off of nicotine. The idea here is that you could smoke without knowing that you were quitting, and you could quit gradually (rather than making a huge jump to zero nicotine, like they tried with True Cigarettes in the 80’s.)

I like this idea more than the electronic cigarettes which simply repackage the addictive substance. 

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