5 Things You Should Know – Part 34

Here are this week’s 5 things you should know.

01. Not all plungers are created equal

There are different plungers for different drains.

This and This are Cup Plungers and are designed to unclog sink and bathtub drains. These are also the classic or original plunger designs and can be used for toilet bowls but are more suited for sinks/bathtubs because your toilet bowl drain is curved The bottom of these plungers is flat so it is more difficult to form a seal with the bowl.

In the image above you can see the differences between a toilet plunger (on the left) and a sink plunger (on the right). Toilet plungers are also known as flange plungers.

This more modern design is better for toilet bowl unclogging because of its curved shape. It is significantly easier to get a seal between plunger and bowl and with the increase in size you trap a large volume of air in the seal which makes for a more powerful plunge.

You should also remember that as with anything price matters. Cheap plungers will not perform as good and for as long as ones that cost a more.

Additionally you should have a cup plunger and flange plunger just because of the specific uses but also because you shouldn’t be using a toilet plunger in the sink because of sanitation issues.

02. The signs of major characteristics of co-dependency in a relationship

A lot of people have the impression that in a relationship between two people (whether it’s friends, family, or lovers) it’s noble to sacrifice time and effort to make things work and that they’re somehow bad if they don’t–but then don’t realize that they’re actually stuck in a cycle of hurting themselves. Many people also don’t even realize that co-dependency is a thing, or rationalize their actions away by telling themselves either that it’s not that bad or that it’s just one individual case or event, and not the larger issue that it really is.

The checklist was taken from the book ‘Toxic Parents’, and an elaboration is below:

“Originally, the term co-dependent was used specifically to describe the partner of an alcoholic or drug addict. Co-dependent was used interchangeably with the term enabler–someone whose life was out of control because he or she was taking responsibility for ‘saving’ a chemically dependent person. But in the past few years the definition of co-dependency has expanded to include all people who victimize themselves in the process of rescuing and being responsible for any compulsive, addicted, abusive, or excessively dependent person.”

Co-Dependency Checklist

• Solving their problems or relieving their pain is the most important thing in my life–no matter what the emotional cost to me.
• My good feelings depend on approval from them.
• I protect them from the consequences of their behavior. I lie for them, cover up for them, and never let others say anything bad about them.
• I try very hard to get them to do things my way.
• I don’t pay any attention to how I feel for what I want. I only care about how they feel and what they want.
• I will do anything to avoid getting rejected by them.
• I will do anything to avoid making them angry at me.
• I experience much more passion in a relationship that is stormy and full of drama.
• I am a perfectionist and I blame myself for everything that goes wrong.
• I feel angry, unappreciated, and use a great deal of the time.
• I pretend that everything is fine when it isn’t.
• The struggle to get them to love me dominates my life.

03. You may not be tired because you slept too much

You may actually be just dehydrated.

While we sleep we lose a significant amount of water due to respiration and perspiration. We lose over twice the amount of water sleeping than we do resting awake. Which explains part of why we lose weight while we sleep. Studies show some grown men lost 2lbs of water during an 8 hour sleeping cycle due to water loss. Every time you exhale you release water vapor (hence why a mirror fogs when you exhale on it).

So when you sleep for a longer duration of time you lose even more water, resulting in dehydration, which causes tiredness.

Symptoms of dehydration:

• Little or no urine, or urine that is darker than usual
• Dry mouth
• Sleepiness or fatigue
• Extreme thirst
• Headache
• Confusion
• Feeling dizzy or lightheaded
• No tears when crying

Water is a vital component to the human body (we are 2/3 water), so if we are not constantly replenishing our bodies it will effect how we function, and we will not be able to perform to our full potential. Water IS our most important nutrient after all.

04. Six myths about vaccination and why they’re wrong

• Vaccines cause autism. Initiated in 1998 following the publication of the now notorious Lancet paper, (not-a-Dr) Andrew Wakefield was the first to suggest that the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine might be linked to autism. What he didn’t reveal was that he had multiple conflicts of interest including that he was being paid by lawyers assembling a class action against the manufacturers of MMR, and that he himself had submitted an application for a patent for a single measles vaccine. It eventually unraveled for Wakefield when the paper was retracted in 2010. He was struck from the medical register for behavior classified as “dishonest, unethical and callous” and the British Medical Journal accused him of deliberate fraud. Once the idea was floated, scientists were compelled to investigate, particularly when it stood to impact public health so dramatically. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence to show that there is no link between vaccines and autism comes from Japan where the MMR was replaced with single vaccines mid-1993. Guess what happened? Autism continued to rise. After this door closed, anti-vaxers shifted the blame to thiomersal, a mercury-containing component. Thiomersal or ethyl-mercury was removed from all scheduled childhood vaccines in 2000, so if it were contributing to rising cases of autism, you would expect a dramatic drop following its removal. Further evidence comes from a recently published exhaustive review examining 12,000 research articles covering eight different vaccines which also concluded there was no link between vaccines and autism.
• Smallpox and polio have disappeared so there’s no need to vaccinate anymore. It’s precisely because of vaccines that diseases such as smallpox have disappeared. The impact of vaccine complacency can be observed in the measles epidemic in Wales where there were over 800 cases and one death, and many people presenting were of the age who missed out on MMR vaccination following the Wakefield scare. In many ways, vaccines are a victim of their own success, leading us to forget just how debilitating preventable diseases can be – not seeing kids in calipers or hospital wards full of iron lungs means we forget just how serious these diseases can be.
• More vaccinated people get the disease than the unvaccinated. Although this sounds counter-intuitive, it’s actually true, but it doesn’t mean that vaccines don’t work as anti-vaxers will conflate. Remember that no vaccine is 100% effective and vaccines are not a force field. So while it’s still possible to get the disease you’ve been vaccinated against, disease severity and duration will be reduced. With pertussis (whooping cough), for example, severe complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis (brain inflammation) occur almost exclusively in the unvaccinated. So since the majority of the population is vaccinated, it follows that most people who get a particular disease will be vaccinated, but critically, they will suffer fewer complications and long-term effects than those who are completely unprotected.
• My unvaccinated child should be of no concern to your vaccinated one. Vaccination is not just a personal issue, it’s a community responsibility, largely because of a concept known as “community immunity”. This describes a level of vaccination that prevents epidemics or outbreaks from taking hold and spreading. Some people question the validity of this concept, sometimes referred to as herd immunity, but the impact of it breaking down can be easily observed in places where vaccination levels fall dangerously low – take the case of measles outbreak in Wales, for example.  The other important factor about community immunity is it protects those who, for whatever reason, can’t be vaccinated or are not fully vaccinated. This includes very young children, immunocompromised people (such as cancer sufferers) and elderly people.
• Vaccines contain toxins. A cursory search of Google for vaccine ingredients pulls up a mishmash of scary-sounding ingredients that to the uninitiated can sound like “franken-science”. Some of these claims are patently untrue (there is no anti-freeze in vaccines), or are simple scaremongering (aborted foetuses – in the 1960s some cells were extracted from a foetus to establish a cell line that is still used in labs today). Some of the claimed chemicals (and remember everything is made of chemicals) are present, but are at such low levels as to never reach toxicity. The simple thing to remember is the poison is in the dose – in high enough doses even water can kill you. And there’s 600 times more formaldehyde in a pear than a vaccine. Also, if you ever read the claim that “vaccines are injected directly into the blood stream” (they’re not), be skeptical of any other claims made.
• Vaccines will overwhelm kids’ undeveloped immune systems. The concept of “too many too soon” was recently examined in a detailed analysis of the US childhood immunization schedule by The Institute of Medicine. Experts specifically looked for evidence that vaccination was linked to “autoimmune diseases, asthma, hypersensitivity, seizures, child developmental disorders, learning or developmental disorders, or attention deficit or disruptive disorders”, including autism. The researchers confirmed that the childhood vaccination schedule was safe. The amount of immune challenges that children fight every day (between 2,000 to 6,000) in the environment is significantly greater than the number of antigens or reactive particles in all their vaccinations combined (about 150 for the entire vaccination schedule).

05. You can download a copy of all of the data that you share with Google

It is called “Google Takeout.” Go to Google Takeout where you will see a graph of all of the services that you subscribe to. From there, you can download a zip file of everything.