Sunblock, Sun Protective Clothing and Common Sense

Summer is coming up and most of us will welcome lots more time in the sun.  As someone who long ago grew skeptical of claims about the miracles in a tube of this chemical or that, I put away the brand new super awesome 100 plus spf a couple years ago and decided to go old school when comes to avoiding sunburns and skin cancer.  Some common sense and these 4 rules of thumb have worked well for me.

1) Kids have it worse.  Whatever steps I take for myself, I take double care for kids under 12.  They burn worse and the sunburns you get as a child are the ones that really do lead to skin cancer trouble later in life.  More than anything else, this is why I switched away from sunscreen and started using sun kids protective clothing and kids UPF 50+ swimwear.

2) If you can see through it, it isn’t working.  If you can see light through a fabric but not anything else, the Ultraviolet Protection Factor, or UPF,  is about 15 to 30.  If there is no light at all coming through, that is UPF 50+ clothing. So, a white t-shirt. especially a wet one, is almost useless and denim is overkill on a hot day.   Tightly woven fabrics that still breathe and stay cool are best.  Dark colors are better than light ones, and a rash guard or swim shirt is really the only thing that doesn’t fail in the surf.

3)  I don’t always wear sunscreen, but when I do, it is has to have zinc oxide or titanium oxide as the main ingredient.  The rest is just chemical salad mumbo jumbo and marketing copy.   Those two  ingredients are the only things that block UV radiation just like clothing.

4) Any place where there are reflective surfaces like beach sand, sea foam, snow, fog has a LOT more sun coming at you.  And it comes from weird angles.  There is a reason folks go to the beach to get an all over tan - FAST.  

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link vandal

"Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn't know anything about the situation in that part of the world...It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces...I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on."   The Stoner Arms Dealers

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NCAA Brackets by starting salary for graduates.  Princeton v. Georgetown final

stairway wit

 

George Rousse's Escalier

L’esprit de l’escalier or esprit d’escalier (stairway wit) is to think of a clever comeback when it is too late.  

drawing a map out of here

Politics frustrates me in exactly the same way that religion does: it’s probably best if I keep my thoughts confined to my own head.  It really is narrowing to listen to myself make cutting lines debating it out loud.  And honestly, at this point in history,  the world view of a reactionary makes so little impression on me  that I think I must have broken something in my brain. It’s like a mass in Latin.  It really is a relief to be going away because this whole argument is irrelevant when I am out of my own country.  I think I am writing this blog to mark some new border, to move on to new topics.  Until then, I have a couple more posts mapped out, and DFW (below) is part of this map, so bear with me.

Here is David Foster Wallace from a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon University:

"Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too."