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Would you ever consider throwing sulfuric acid into your face? Hopefully, the answer is no. Yet whenever you chop an onion, what happens isn’t that different from getting acid in your eyes.

Onions, tasty and delicious though they Hermes Bracelet might be, are the bane of many a cook’s existence, since it’s nearly impossible to cut into one without inducing a veil of tears. The bad news is that cutting onions causes an unavoidable chemical reaction that burns your eyes; the good news is that there are ways to make those tears a thing of the past.

Why We Cry

Onions grow underground, where they absorb sulfur from the surrounding soil. The sulfur turns into a substance called sulfoxide, and when you slice into an onion, cutting through membranes and cell walls, those sulfoxides mix with another amino acid, called lachrymatory-factor synthase enzyme. When these two substances combine, the result is sulfenic acid, a highly unstable compound.

When the sulfenic acid hits the air and mixes with oxygen, it changes again, this time into a compound called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, made up of sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide—not exactly chemicals you’d want around your eyes. The gas wafts upward toward your face, and when it hits your eyes, your corneas instinctively recognize it as a caustic, harmful substance. They instruct the lachrymal glands (located behind your eyes) to produce tears to wash the gas away. The tears caused by onions aren’t emotional tears; they’re reflex tears, which the body produces in response to an irritant. They protect the eyes by washing away dust, dirt, smoke, and other debris. Most people instinctively reach up to wash away the waterworks, but think twice when you’re handling onions—your hands will probably be covered with the same chemical that’s irritating your eyes.

Luckily, syn-propanethial-S-oxide is both water-soluble and sensitive to heat, so washing the compound with water or heating it up will render it inert. That’s why washed and cooked onions don’t have the same uncomfortable effects as raw onions do.

If You Can’t Stand It, Beat It

If you just can’t imagine life without French onion soup, fret not—there are several ways to mitigate onions tear-inducing properties.

1. Wear goggles. They protect your eyes from the harmful gas, and they’re easy to find at most kitchen-supply stores. However, they’re bulky and expensive, not Burberry Handbags to mention that they make it hard to see what you’re doing. Some people feel that wearing contact lenses is enough to protect corneas from irritation.

2. Freeze it. Put the onion in the freezer for ten to fifteen minutes before you chop it. The offending compounds and the water in the vegetable will freeze a bit, and won’t mix as readily when cut. Just make sure not to freeze the onion entirely, or it will end up mushy.

3. Light a candle. Some people believe that if you light a candle near your work surface or turn on a burner on a gas stove, the flames will burn up some of the sulfurous gas as it’s produced. Flames also create convection, which pulls the fumes closer and incinerates them.

4. Give it a shower. Cutting the onion under running water will wash away the gas. However, be careful while wielding a wet knife.

5. Keep a slice of bread in your mouth. If you hold on to the end of a piece of bread with your teeth, letting it stick out from your face, supposedly the bread absorbs the gases and prevents them from making it up to your eyes. Some swear by this method; some consider it silly.

6. Chew gum. Gum encourages you to breathe through your mouth and, in so doing, inhale the gases before they reach your eyes. Don’t worry—they won’t corrode your esophagus.

7. Turn on a fan or vent. Setting up a desk fan near your work surface or turning on a ceiling vent can whisk vapors away.

8. Use a sharp knife. Alton Brown of the Food Network recommends using the sharpest knife you have, because precision cuts disturb the fewest amount of cell walls and release the smallest amount of gas. When you hack or gnaw at the onion, the increased cellular breakdown will result in more fumes.

9. Buy milder onions. There are over four hundred kinds of vegetable in the onion family, all of which contain differing levels of enzymes. Spring and summer onions, like Vidalias, Super Sweets, Maui onions, and Walla Wallas, have higher sugar and water contents, which make them noticeably milder. Fall and Burberry Handbags winter onions, such as white, yellow, red, and Spanish onions, are more pungent and tangy. Distant relatives, like shallots, scallions, and garlic, are virtually tearless.

Some methods may work better than others, but if your cooking is suffering from a case of onion-induced despair, anything’s worth trying. If all else fails, there’s one foolproof way to avoid getting this sulfuric acid in your eyes. Remember that it takes about thirty seconds for the chemical reaction to fully kick in and take effect, so … chop faster.

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A few months ago I wrote a post on personal analytics. There I discussed Hermes Bracelet how more and more people make their life decisions based on numbers. They don’t make their decisions based on what they feel but based on facts. This way their decisions are well-informed and based on strong foundations.

Things to track in your lifeHow can we apply personal analytics to our lives? The key is to track your life metrics. Only by tracking them can you get the numbers upon which to make informed decisions.

Unfortunately, the tracking process is still mostly manual these days (with a few exceptions like Nike+ that can automatically track your running speed and distance). Because of that, if you track too many metrics you risk spending too much time on the tracking process at the expense of doing real work.

So the best thing to do is to track just a few important metrics. This way you can get the benefits without spending too much time on the tracking process. Here are three essential things you should track:

1. Income and expenses

You should know how much money you make and how much money you spend on different things. Many people aren’t aware that they have financial problems until everything is too late. Or perhaps they’re aware, but they don’t know how it happened. Consequently, they have no idea how to solve it.

That’s why it’s important that you take note of your income and expenses. Doing that helps you spot the weak areas in your personal finance so that you can take the necessary actions.

To track your income and expenses, you can use a spreadsheet or a personal finance application. Here are a few personal finance applications you can use:

One simple rule on money management that I find useful is to spend your money to buy assets whenever possible.

2. Time

Have you ever had days where you wondered why you’ve accomplished so little? That’s one reason why you need to track your time. You need to know where your time went.

There are many ways to do this. You can create a time log where you record all your activities during the day along with the time and duration. This could be burdensome though. A Burberry Handbags simpler way is to just track how many productive sessions you have in a day. The Now Habit (here is my review) suggests a session to be thirty minutes long but it’s up to you. The important thing is to make sure that the productive session is indeed productive. Reading e-mails and random browsing don’t count. Alternatively, you can track your time indirectly by tracking your goals for the day or week. If you achieve your desired goals then you know that you’ve used your time productively.

To track your time, you can use a timer and spreadsheet or use a dedicated time tracking application like Klok and RescueTime. If you choose to track your goals, you can use a to-do list application like Remember the Milk or even just a text file.

3. Habits

Do you have a good habit that you want to build or a bad habit that you want to break? As Peter Drucker said, what get measured get managed. So tracking it is a good way to reach your goal.

You can do it simply by taking notes of how many times you do the habit in a certain period of time. You can then see how your score is for that period of time. With good habit, the goal is to maximize the score while with bad habit the goal is to minimize it. If you want to, you can reward yourself whenever you make an improvement. A spreadsheet or a text file is enough for tracking your habits.

The first and second metrics deal with your personal resources: money and time. They are limited so you must make sure that you use them wisely. There’s still one more important resource actually, which is your energy, but I don’t know how to track it (any idea?). Thethird metric deals with your habits which, of course, are essential for an effective life.

By tracking your Burberry Handbags personal finance, time, and habits, you increase your awareness of your life. This helps you not only to figure out what problems you might have but also to take the necessary actions to solve them.

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I always like to extract life lessons from seemingly unrelated ideas. This time I want to discuss an interesting article titled Why Poor Countries Are Poor. The article, which talks about Hermes Bracelet the reasons some countries are poor, takes Cameroon as an example:

Life Lesson

The average Cameroonian is eight times poorer than the average citizen of the world and almost 50 times poorer than the typical American. And Cameroon is getting poorer.

To grasp the situation better, look at the infrastructure there:

Douala, a city of 2 million people, has no real roads… Piles of rubble and vast holes mark unfinished construction or demolition work. Along the middle is a strip of potholes that 20 years ago was a road… As our car slowly bumped and lurched through the crowds, I tried to make sense of it all by asking Sam, the driver, about the country. “Sam, how long was it since the roads were last fixed?” “The roads, they have not been fixed for 19 years.”

19 years? How could that happen? Remember, Douala is a major city. Didn’t the people complain about it?

The Main Reason Poor Countries Are Poor

Economists have theories about what make a country poor:

Economists used to think wealth came from a combination of man-made resources (roads, factories, telephone systems), human resources (hard work and education), and technological resources (technical know-how, or simply high-tech machinery).

But the author argues that the picture is incomplete. There is an important part missing. The missing part explains why a poor country couldn’t build those necessary resources in the first place. Here it is:

Government banditry, widespread waste, and oppressive regulations are all elements in that missing piece of the puzzle… During the last 10 years or so, economists working on development issues Burberry Handbags have converged on the mantra that “institutions matter.”

Having bad institutions is the main reason poor countries are poor. How do you know whether or not a country has bad institutions? There’s a clear characteristic:

…self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places, they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition. Cameroon’s tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in check.

That’s it. There’s nothing to hold self-interest in check. As a result, everyone just looks for ways to benefit himself without ever thinking about what the consequences might be for other people or future generations. There’s no mechanism to restrain short-sighted behavior.

A Life Lesson for Individuals

I know that an individual is much less complex than a country, but I do see a parallel here. To succeed, especially in this era of globalization, you need to have good resources. Having good infrastructure, knowledge and technology is tremendously helpful. But, above all, what you need to be successful is good “institutions.” It’s good “institutions” that enable you to use your resources effectively and even build them in the first place. Without them, your self-interest will rule:

1. You will only do things that give you short-term benefits.

2. You won’t do the painful things necessary for long-term good.

3. You might cheat to get something for yourself at the expense of other people’s interest.

Good “institutions” help you prevent this short-sighted behavior.

The question is: what constitute good “institutions” at individual level? What are the things that hold self-interest in check? The answer, in my opinion, is your values and self-discipline. These are the foundation upon which you can build many other things necessary for success. They help you Burberry Handbags develop your potential and use your resources in the best possible way.

Let’s look closer at both of them:

1. Self-discipline. Self-discipline pushes you to do things that are painful in the short-term but good for you and other people in the long-term. Self-discipline makes you do the deliberate practice necessary to master a skill. Self-discipline makes you do your work even if you don’t feel like to.

2. Values. Your values fuel your self-discipline. They ensure that you have the internal motivation to do the right things rather than external motivation (like fear of punishment). They ensure that you can stay disciplined in the long run. Furthermore, they keep you from doing things that are harmful to other people or future generations.

Though they are different, the core of what makes a country successful is also what makes you successful. You need something that holds short-sighted behavior in check. You need something that makes you do painful things today for the sake of long-term good. You need to have strong values and self-discipline.