Adventures of a Discoverer

It is a natural process in most humans: ears produce wax, that wax tends to accumulate in the ear canal, and eventually that messes up your hearing. There are some ways to deal with that yourself: q-tips, ear drops, etc. Recently, though, a company here in Redmond is offering... an ear car wash. The "car wash" in the name is just to give the idea of a process where your ear canals can be quickly and easily cleaned, like a real car wash cleans cars. The procedure is based on a device that looks like a really big pair of headphones: a nurse fills the "headphones" with water and then adjusts them on your head. Once started, the device pumps lukewarm water at some pressure in your ear and collects all that comes out, which includes the wax in your ear canal and anything else that may be obstructing your hearing. I tried the process today. You have to schedule a time, but once in the clinic the process is indeed quick. The device was adjusted to my head and activated, an...

For quite a long time, when people needed to get some extra energy, they would drink coffee. Some decades ago an alternative was created: energy drinks, like the original one, Red Bull. They can be more powerful than coffee and now there is an incredible amount of brands and types of energy drinks available, if you need to get just a little bit more (or a lot more) energy. Recently, though, yet another alternative is available: caffeine pouches. As you may know, caffeine is the substance in coffee that gives that jolt of energy that people like. When energy drinks were invented, people realized that you could concentrate caffeine and put it in a drink like a soda, and that became even more popular. Then, in the last year or so, someone had an idea: why not put the caffeine in a pouch, which you can keep behind your upper lip, and slowly release caffeine for a long period of time? And with that we got the caffeine pouch. I recently bought a batch from one of the most popular brands to t...

One of the last things I did in my trip to Utah was to add another National Park to my list of visited parks: the Arches National Park . This park is right next to Moab in southern Utah, and it is famous for its unique geological formations: the ground in the park is mostly composed of sandstone, and the intense winds that carry sand sculpted the rocks over the years, resulting in some unique shapes. You can see many balanced rocks, rock arches, columns and monoliths, resulting in lots and lots of visitors to the park. Because of that during the middle of the year you actually need to reserve a slot, given that the park (wisely) limits the number of daily visitors. Another good piece of advice to anybody visiting the park, especially in the middle of the year, is that it is very very hot. Being a desert, it has lots of sunshine and not much shade, and you lose water very fast (my water bottle was emptied in no time). That's compensated for some amazing vistas, and being able to see...

Moab in southern Utah is famous for its adventure tourism and beautiful rock formations: while we were there, Jenn and I found a way to experience both at the same time. The town is surrounded by rock formations where, if you're brave enough, you can take a car with rock crawling capabilities and drive over the rocks. Of course, it would be pretty insane for a regular driver to try that: not only you need a special car, but you have to be a driver with the experience required to negotiate some of the most challenging rocks. Because of that, there are a number of companies that offer tours with a driver, so you can just enjoy the views and the thrill of rock crawling. That's what we did. In our case, we took a tour in a modified Hummer, that was especially tailored to deal with rock crawling and to take tourists while doing it. We also had a very experienced driver, and we were very thankful for that! There were moments when we were thinking "is the car really going straigh...

My recent trip to Utah was really cool because I could experience a number of new things. One such thing, that I had heard a lot but had never tried, was "glamping" (or "glamour camping", I guess?). Of course, I have done camping a number of times before, in many different forms: in groups, with family, individually, in a van... However, "glamping" was something I hadn't tried. As far as I understand, glamping consists on "camping without most of the inconveniences of camping, but still kinda camping". That certainly seems to be the case of the ULUM Moab , the glamping site that Jenn and I went. It is located close to the town of Moab in southern Utah, which is famous for adventure tourism and its beautiful rock formations in the desert. You have to drive away from the city through a dirt road in the middle of the desert until out of nowhere you see the place. There is a reception with a fancy restaurant and three small pools (they are really...

Last week, I traveled with Jenn to Utah, to get to know one more state in these United States. Among other things we did there, we toured the Great Salt Lake, a particularly curious body of water in northern Utah, and it turned out to be quite interesting indeed! So, the Great Salk Lake, as the name implies, is a lake filled with salt water, but not regular salt water: whereas the ocean water typically has 3.5% of salinity, the Great Salt Lake has around 25% of salinity. In fact, the only other body of water that is saltier is the Dead Sea. Differently than the Dead Sea, though, the Great Salt Lake does have life in it: its most famous inhabitant is the brine shrimp , a tiny little crustacean that is all over the lake. Additionally, there are also the brine flies, a tiny little fly of which there are millions of them around the lake. I could check that myself when I approached a rock at the shore of the lake: at a distance, I thought that the rock was black, but as I got closer all the...

In the latest Olympic Games, you may have seen some athletes with big red circles on their backs: people got curious about them, and eventually they figured out that those athletes were undergoing cupping therapy. As you may imagine, I got curious about it too, and last week I had the opportunity to try it myself! Cupping is both a very old and quite modern therapy. It has been used in Asia for centuries, together with acupuncture. Recently, though, it has become a fad around the world, especially among some high performance athletes. The technique is more or less like this: the therapist applies a suction cup (either made of silicon or glass) on various parts of your body in order to "loosen" the muscles and increase blood flow in those areas. The therapist may move the cup around your body, in order to spread its effects on the body, and the therapist may also leave the cups for a small amount of time sitting on some specific parts of the body that need a little more time t...