Treating luggages for bed bugs

If you are paranoid about bed bugs, you can take these precautions after travel:

1. Keep luggages in the car under the hot sun for several hours to kill bed bugs.
2. Wash clothes immediately and dry them. Make sure that the transport to the laundry room does not spread the bugs. 
3. Carefully inspect your bags, scrub with stiff bristles, and vacuum the heck out of it.
4. Seal the vacuum bag when done. 

Treating bedbugs with insecticide

Once you have positively identified a bed bug infestation (see article), quickly get professional help.

Don't apply pesticides yourself. According to the Environmental Health and Safety school at Harvard, Gentrol and Phantom are registered bed bug pesticides that professional pest control experts can use. Residual insecticides last for a month or so, which is good, because the chorion (egg shells) of the bugs protect them. It's a good idea to get another inspection three weeks later.

Do not allow spraying of pesticides on your mattress or anywhere that you would directly contact.

Controlling bed bugs

Drat! Despite your precaution, you got those critters in your house. Get professional help ASAP (see future article)! In the meantime, you can keep them from feeding by creating obstacles to the food source—which, unfortunately is your unconscious body.

Create a bed bug-free zone by doing the following:

1. Disrupt pathways to the bed and you.

• Coat the legs of your bed with vaseline or mineral around 2 inches wide.
• Place a barrier of chalk or silica aerogel around the bed posts.
• Wrap double-sided carpet tape (or other tape) around the bed legs and the floor area.

2. Eliminate hiding places

• Caulk cracks, and areas where pipes and wires penetrate walls and baseboards.
• Encase the mattress with tight bed bug cover. Replacing it does nothing. The bugs can come back.
• Pull the bed away from the wall, make sure no linen or blanket touches the floor.
• Reduce clutter to minimize hiding places. 

3. Thoroughly clean suspect area

• Inspect crevices and bed area and suck bugs up with vacuum cleaner. Use stiff bristle brushes to dislodge eggs. 
• Dismantle bed frames to find more hiding places.
• Remove drawers from desks and drawers
• Turn over furniture

Identifying and collecting bedbugs

Bed bugs, or what nerdy entomologists call cimex lectularius, are light yellow in color in juvenile bugs who have not fed and reddish brown in adult bugs. They are the size of apple seeds and can be seen by the naked eye.

They are nocturnal, so the best way to catch them is waiting until the middle of the night. They tend to hide in mattresses and crevices close to a food source—you.

You can collect them in small leak-proof containers filled with rubbing alcohol. Send teh

Metabolic rates

Image was borrowed. 

Your "metabolism" (the rate at which you burn calories) has three components:

• Basal metabolic rate (BMR) - energy you need to live. Breathing, pumping blood, maintaining body temperature. It uses up about 50-60% of calories.
• Thermic effect of food (TEF) - energy you use around food. Eating, digesting, and storing. 10-15%
• Activity-related energy expenditure. All the getting around and exercising. Rest of the stuff. 

If you want to lose weight, easiest to fiddle with the third one. Mighty hard to maintain weight loss by fudging the first two, which are determined by various factors, such as genes, gender, body composition, activities, and so on. As you lose weight, your BMR goes down as well. As you eat less, so does the TEF. So it gets harder and harder to lose weight.

Fidgeters have higher BMR, so they tend to be leaner. But fidgeting is genetically determined, so if you weren't born one, it's hard to pick up the "habit" (it's really unconscious movement, so it's not like the fidgeter can choose to start fidgeting).

Converting IRA to Roth in 2010

Fidelity wrote a great article on the subject.

How many calories are you burning?

Want to know how many calories you are burning for your sports or activities? You can check out a calorie counter.

It's not completely accurate, because it doesn't account for various things like your body composition (how much of you is made up of muscle and bones and how much of you is made up of stuff that jiggles), base metabolism, athletic conditioning, gender, intensity, and all that, but it's a good start. Figure that the actual number of calories you burn probably depends on the intensity.

For example, the calculator says that a person on average would burn about 420 calories for an hour of competitive badminton (kudos to the calculator for differentiating between silly leisure badminton and competitive badminton). But I've seen data where one can burn 500 to 800 (for singles games) calories an hour.

So how do you figure out intensity without a fancypants heart rate monitor (like Polar)? You can use perceived exertion. Try chatting during exercise. If you can still chat, that's low exertion; chat with gasping, medium; cannot say a word, high; blacking out, that's way too much.

The website has a bunch of other calculators, so don't forget to scroll down and check them out.