Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

D_Malik

A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.

It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.

So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.

Thus spake Eliezer:

A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.

When I was a child, very cold showers were the latest fashion in my country, doctors recomended them for everyone, especially for children, to develop tolerance to cold weather. Luckily, my parents resisted. A few years later, doctors stopped recommending it, and just pretended the whole thing never happened. -- Later I heard from a doctor that the recommendation was followed by a visible increase of rheumatism, including small children, so they realized it was not that good idea.

Apparently, the people giving health advice at internet yet have to learn.

Later I heard from a doctor that the recommendation was followed by a visible increase of rheumatism, including small children, so they realized it was not that good idea.

Could be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Rheuma has many variants, but generally they are all either autoimmune or degenerative. Juvenile arthritis (JA), an umbrella term used to describe the many autoimmune and inflammatory conditions that can develop in children ages 16 and younger, doesn't include cold as a causal factor.

You can kill cartilage using cold, however I doubt the ve... (read more)

7Qiaochu_Yuan13y

... that anecdotal evidence is not reliable? I googled "cold shower rheumatism" and found a study suggesting that exposure to cold water (in this case, winter swimming) actually relieves the pain associated with existing rheumatism. A plausible explanation of your doctor's observation is that cold showers made people who already had rheumatism more likely to report it to doctors. I would certainly be wary of making children do it, but I actually have noticed that my tolerance to cold weather has gotten slightly better after cold showers (and it's noticeably lower on the days where I don't take a cold shower). The effect may be mostly psychological but it's still an effect.

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Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

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