For years there was the “Phantom”, a notorious criminal, haunting all of Europe. DNA testing revealed that it was a female and her crimes ranging from petty theft to murder were seemingly unrelated to each other. That each of them were done in different countries didn’t make solving the case any easier.
But eventually they did solve it. They found the woman working in a cotton swab factory. Turned out many police departments were using the wrong type of swabs. So there seem to be more than one way to incorrectly use cotton swabs.
I was curious if this was real, and it is! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7966641.stm
Case file do an episode on it. Well, she appears in an episode in chasing that killer
That makes me think the based an episode of CSI:NY after this. An almost identical plot.
Now that’s some serious incompetence there, and it’s sad that it took so many cases to figure it out.
You’re telling me not to clean my ears with swabs??? I’m sorry, but I will swear forever that they are intended for the ears. The only issue is that the makers don’t want to get sued if anyone hurts themselves. I mean, c’mon, the Japanese use both ends of these in their ears! You want me to start doing that?
They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it’s incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they’d have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn’t be able to clean my ears.
This seems to be largely an American phenomenon, that people sue the maker of a product for themselves failing to use the product correctly, no? Or at least I can’t remember a single instance outside America where either someone sued the producer for using a product incorrectly or the producer pre-emtpively puts warnings on for ridiculous stuff to not get sued if people try these things.
Either way, good to know that cotton swabs were primarily made indeed to clean ears. I don’t use them for that, but it always weirded me out when they came in those pastelle color packages with openings like tissues, perfect for a bathroom, but someone said “Yo, don’t use them for your ears! They were made for swabbing grease off motor chains.”
Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.
Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.
Better ear cleaning tools exist. They are little plastic scoops. I used to use a bent paperclip. Basically anything you can put into the ear canal and then pull/scoop/scrape earwax out is far better than a qtip, which only compacts wax into clumps. The one good use case for the qtip is drying. They can absorb water well inside the ear canal and belly button. I personally use them on my navel after showering since I have an “innie”
I’m going crazy this goddamn thread.
Don’t shove things into your orifices. Wash your ears maybe with the help of your wet fingers under the shower. If you got fat fingers or tiny ears, maybe use cotton swabs etc on the other most area of the ear canal to clean away excess.
Your ear is self cleaning. Dont stick anything in it.
Like do people stuff cotton up their urethra to dry it after peeing? Leave your holes alone.
I work in a call center where I wear headphones for 8 hours. I also game online and wear headphones at home for an hour or two each day. I am a very oily person. My ears DO NOT self-clean, as you say, given my situation. I use a peroxide ear drop every few weeks to cut down the buildup nowadays, then flush with an ear syringe. You can’t make generalizations. People should get to know their bodies and stay healthy. If I do not do these things I just described, by the way, I start to lose hearing after a few months.
See, you’re describing washing them. Good.
In ears also dont stop your ears from self cleaning, just means the final stretch has to be washed out i guess. As you do. Dont shove paperclips in there.
And consider over/onear headphones maybe.
People should get to know their bodies and stay healthy. If I do not do these things I just described, by the way, I start to lose hearing after a few months.
Yes they do, through education and medical advice. Not by sticking things into their holes.
If you got crazy buildup despite washing, you need to speak with a doctor too.
Don’t shove things into your orifices
Don’t tell me how to live my life.
Flared bases!
Don’t shove things into your orifices.
BUT I HUNGER
Food hole is the exception
You can get soft silicone ear pickers with a built in camera now so you can see what you’re scooping.
Yep, somehow America wound up doing thing that way, where instead of regulating preemptively, lawsuits are expected to do a lot of what regulatory bodies do in other countries. It’s an awful system and rarely benefits those that have been caused harm, especially when there are limits on punitive damages that are supposed to encourage corporations to not be shitbags. Individuals don’t have the resources to sue companies, either, so at best one occasionally gets a check for $2.14 for being part of a class that won a class action lawsuit.
Basically every absurd lawsuit you hear Americans do is either:
-
genuinely frivolous, tossed out of court immediately, amplified to paint suing corporations as bad
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someone trying to get damages from a company which genuinely wronged them, often with life altering consequences
Also jeez folks, clean your ears any other way, shoveling wax out of your canals with a non sterile tool regularly is asking for infections. The wax is there for a reason!
-
Americans are giga sheep. If you want prospective of just how little they think for themselves, there was a misconfigured road in a GPS app and people kept literally driving off the road because their GPS told them to, even though it was clearly and visibly into a body of water.
Then there’s also the hilarious Apple Wave prank, where a single image tricked people into nuking their phones. What makes that prank even funnier is that it was directly inspired by the iOS update that made your phone waterproof which people also fell for.
I’ve been cleaning my ears with an “ear syringe” for years. Just squirt some warm water from the faucet in there and you can hear again. Works great and is reusable. They are like 10 bucks at your local drug store.
I don’t like having water stuck in my ear.
Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.
Pro tip if this happens, add more water.
Sometimes I need a couple of more passes to unclog my ear. If I do it once and there is water stuck in my ears, it means I need to do it again. If I do it a few more times so my ear is unclogged, water will no longer be stuck in my ears.
If your ears are clogged so severely that water alone won’t help, use something like Debrox or hydrogen peroxide first to loosen your wax plug. Leave it in there for a few minutes to let the wax soften. Then follow it up with mechanical disruption from water in the ear syringe.
If your ears are too clogged so that even that doesn’t work, your clog is probably so severe that you need to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor.
I actually got advised by my doctor to use vegetable oil for my daughter’s clogged ear. A drop of oil and some massaging for 20 seconds three times a day did the the trick. Took a few days, but the clog was eventually dissolved.
I use glycerin myself, but I’ll have to try vegetable oil next time.
The other thing that greatly helps speed things along is letting the oil / glycerin sit for 5-10min, then following up with an ear syringe full of warm water. Instead of spraying directly ahead, they’re designed to safely spray to the sides, and the agitating motion of the water works well to clear the clog very quickly.
Most Japanese people have dry earwax: http://drypharmacist.com/types-of-earwax.html
Obviously this is cleaned differently compared to wet earwax.
Q-tips were very clearly designed to clean ears. They just have to cover their ass now, and tell people it’s not safe. (I do not personally have very gooey ear wax and don’t use them much at all)
As someone with wax issues in the ears, no, q-tips suck at cleaning ears. You’ll end up pushing the wax into your eardrum and causing the impacted wax that you were trying to avoid in the first place. That’s why I use those tiny screwdrivers. /shrug
I frequently need to clean my ears due to wax issues and I have used q-tips to do so for my entire life. I have only ever been told that my ears are immaculate at anual exams so this definitely depends on the person.
Yep, they don’t work for me at all
This is only true if you have tiny ear canals and too much wax build up to begin with.
Hey, you can’t just point out my tiny ear canals like that! There are people that love how they feel!
Ah, much less risky, I’m sure.
Well. I’ve seen a video where a guy tried to put a pickle jar in his pooper and then a whoopsie happened where the jar breaks.
Classic. Also ew.
Did you know that his family was watching TV in the other room while he did that?
“Rectum? Damn near killed him!”
whoopsie
Ah, 1 Man 1 Jar.
The calm with which he pulled out the pieces of broken glass was truly unnerving.
It really was. I was more freaked out than he was. Even though it was video, I specifically yelling out, “someone needs to call 911!” So, so much blood…
Screwdrivers are not actually pry bars.
Says you. I have a set of old, cheap screwdrivers specifically for use as tiny prybars.
A screwdriver and a hammer together make a great tiny wedge.
And you can use a flathead on Phillips heads, if you have enough gumption.
Multi-tools psh. The flathead is a multitool.
You’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands!
Blasphemy!
But combined with a torch, they make quick and dirty soldering irons.
Well, big flathead screwdrivers aren’t for screwing things in. Small ones have a place for decorative screws, like on light switch covers, but big flathead screws should never be used.
So big flathead screwdrivers are better as pry bars than as screwdrivers.
the tea bag was originally just a cheesecloth bag containing a loose leaf tea sample, and you were supposed to remove the tea from the bag
I see people put fqdns into search engines all the time.
Stop searching for things like “espn.com”, just put it in the address bar.
My old boss would type google.com into the chrome search box (not the address bar) then click the link for Google, and search for Gmail.com.
My wife works full time remote and had to have IT take over her computer and she watched him type google into the search bar.
what do you do about googles ‘omnibar’? its the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes, and there is absolutely no way to turn it off.
oh yeah, one way: firefox.
its still triggers me to this day as the last straw for me and google
Firefox has omnibox and it’s not as easy to turn off as you think. The immediately available settings do some things like add the “search” box back but the “URL” box still functions as the omnibox. Have to play around with about:config and even then I haven’t figured out how to change it turn back time to the before times.
I have never had firefox mistake a url for a search, though.
I have plenty of times, which is why I went hunting for a way to disable it.
FYI, the magic about:config key that you need to set to false is “keyword.enabled”. After that Firefox will finally stop using any non-url string as a search query and will instead say say “Hmm. That address doesn’t look right. Please check that the URL is correct and try again.”
Thanks!
huh. did you remember to feed the fox all the cookies websites give you? that normally keeps her happy.
Begrudgingly yes.
I’m out of ideas. Best to bury your computer in the back yard.
Settings -> Search -> Add search bar in toolbar?
Yes that is the setting to turn on the “search bar” but it doesn’t revert omnibar to only URLs.
the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes
From a UX perspective, those are both ways to start a navigation to a new page, and it’s almost always clear from context which is intended (is the string formatted as a URL? Treat it as such. Otherwise, treat it as a search string). The only hiccup is when actually searching for strings that look like a URL (no whitespace, includes periods), but that happens rarely enough that I’m perfectly happy to manually go to a search engine for those cases. Otherwise, Cmd+L-“type my thoughts”-Enter works smoothly for me in both cases (on Firefox for personal laptop, or Chrome for work one).
What are the issues that you experience with this combined flow?
the worst for this is any browser for Android tv. most of the reason I’m using a browser on the Android TV is because I’m doing something sketchy that’s going to have a weird URL ending, so pretty much 100% of the time it interprets my URLs as searches
Would you believe that there is some browser malware that breaks this and makes you actually have to go to a Google search to get to a website?
Hitachi Magic Wand.
If a company can successfully desig, build and sell heavy machinery while at the same time manufacturing personal care items, let them be.
I am still sad Hitachi was too embarrassed to carry on the legacy of its name and sold off the Magic Wand brand to its subsidiary manufacturer. Hitachi, the brand name was a compliment to you, not a liability! You lost out.
What is its original purpose?
Back massages
And they’re only $50 for the actual Hitachi model. Always assumed it would be far more expensive.
I never use them to clean my earsz I use them to masturbate my ears. Nothing so good as a good ear scratching
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really putting the “ooh” in “oo-mox”
Uuuuuumooooxxxxx
earussy
This dude spits str8 facts.
Also fun fact one of the arguments against using q tips is “addiction”.
No, I clean my ears with warm water. I dry them with cotton swabs.
Doctor Mike says not to do it, but I have been for years. This started when I got a wax ball that impacted against my eardrum and made me functionally deaf on one side until I could get into an urgent doctor’s appointment. The very next day, the same thing happened on the other side. I knew what was up for the second time and was able to get something from the pharmacy to handle it myself.
As best I can tell, there are two dangers:
- Mechanical damage, perhaps caused by accidental means
- Leaving bits of cotton behind that can then become infected
For me, I am fine taking this risk and plan to continue doing so daily.
Mechanical damage would require a major freak accident or you to be an idiot about it.
The real issue (according to my doctor, who has a lot more patience than most doctors and actually educated my stubborn ass on this) isn’t just the cotton residue you mentioned (though that is very much a factor) but also the fact that for every [small unit of measurement] of wax the QTip pulls OUT, it is also pushing IN about [small unit of measurement] of it.
This can mean infections, as you mentioned. As you push foreign content AND the wax (which is itself full of trapped bacteria) closer to your sensitive bits. It can also accelerate blockages depending on the consistency of your wax. If you have that issue that your ears get wax blockage periodically, q-tips ensure it happens even faster.
I have actually heard about the wax getting shoved in, so I know what you are referring to there. I have considered it but still think I’m better of continuing to use them. Everyone is different, though.
Apparently most Asian people don’t actually produce noticeable ear wax, it’s more of a caucasian thing.
Not sure about noticeability, but yes, Asian people have different earwax consistency to whiteys like me. :P
The Asians who have dry ear wax also tend to not have smelly armpits. It’s a genetic thing.
What’s funny is that I got downvoted over that lol.
I saw someone get downvoted into oblivion once for pointing out that a significant number of Asians don’t need deodorant. I think that there are a lot of default-white types who can’t think outside that.
Passwords. We assume a hard to guess and everchanging password will be hard to crack, but the whole point of machines is that it can be pinpointed with utmost accuracy, and everytime someone tells you to use special phrases in passwords, they’re also inadvertently saying “hey thieves, here is what to look out for, happy guessing”. They’re supposed to be more like speakeasies.
I remember long ago, when I was active as Dabran2 on Neopets, there was a vault with nine dropdown menus that you had to guess the combination to on the moon Kreludor. It was simpler and far more effective. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what’s on the other side (or I’d have to annihilate you and feed your remains to the turmaculus, assuming you believe I made it to the other side).
Passwords, as in user chosen secrets used to prove identity, are a really bad idea in general. Turns out, people are crappy at coming up with stuff that is hard to guess. They are also crappy at remembering things that are hard to guess. That’s why every website these days wants to SMS you a code or makes you use an Authenticator.
Thankfully people are catching on, and secure passwordless sign in is gaining ground rapidly.
I’m surprised no place uses IP addresses anymore to authenticate (I was around when Postopia did or whatever that candy themed game place was). Many IP-ban when it comes to identifying rulebreakers, you’d think they’d IP-authenticate too.
Carrier grade NAT. For instance, on our local mobile phone network, thousands of handsets will have the same public IP address.
All major services do risk based authentication these days. I’m fairly certain network address factors into the risk calculations.
Honing rods in the kitchen. People always try to use these to sharpen their knives but it never works and when their blade that’s dull as a butter knife isn’t any sharper they have a big hissy fit about it.
Most chef knives will form a burr (a deformation at the edge), even if sharp or very sharp, and this burr will reduce the cutting performance and it will feel “dull”. You don’t need to sharpen the knife again, it’s still technically sharp so it is honed instead. The honing rod’s grooves will realign the edge and the knife will be “sharp” again.
Toilet paper in your ahole.
I’m confused, are you suggesting. an adventurous finger tip to keep things really clean or shoving a bunch up there?
Did I stutter with the “in”?
Like inside? Shirley toilet paper is safe to use on the outside.
