BEAUTY EXPIRATION
Do beauty products, cosmetics and creams and so on also have an expiration date, like food products that can be seen on the packaging?
A. You can infer from your question that when you get new beauty products, you probably aren’t looking at the bottom of the packaging to figure out all those symbols. However, those little symbols can tell you when it’s time to throw out the product or how long you have to use it.
On almost every beauty product, there is a box with a small “6M”, “12M”, or “24M”, depending on the product. Indicates how much time you have after opening to use the product before it expires. We should all check our products in case we have some expired stuff lying around.
CURVE
Can you tell me how the famous learning curve can be explained?
A. People often refer to skills as having a learning curve. The idea is that you learn more about a topic as you spend more time working on it, and that experience can be described in terms of a graph with time at the bottom and your competition on the y-axis.
But we misuse the term when we describe a difficult subject as having a “steep learning curve.” If the line on the graph immediately goes up, we could imagine ourselves climbing a mountain to catch up with the competition. But a steep slope means that we are gaining a lot of competition in a short time. This would describe a topic that is easy to learn.
ANTIDEPRESSANTS/NA
I was recently prescribed some antidepressants, but I’m a bit surprised because I don’t have depression, just panic attacks, is this medicine the right one?
A. NA, antidepressants are real and often helpful in treating depression. But as the authors of a review of psychological terms point out, the drugs we call “antidepressants” are at least as good for treating things other than depression.
These classes of drugs, such as tricyclics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are also used for panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bulimia nervosa. With this as background, I share that they are not universally effective against depression either; It depends on the person and the severity of the depression.
Trust your doctor, but if you have doubts there is no such thing as a second opinion (other than mine).
THE MOST INTELLIGENT
Everyone knows that dolphins, Australian collie dogs and some monkeys (for obvious reasons, I exclude politicians) are highly intelligent, what is the smartest bird?
A. The crows. I share with you that in some Native American folklore, ravens are known as tricksters, a reputation that may stem from the intelligence of these birds. Ravens and their relatives in the family Corvidae, which include ravens and jays, have the same brain-body ratio as apes, suggesting a high level of cognition.
Ravens are known for their complex social behaviors, such as holding apparent grudges against people who cheat them (a sign of their memory) and enacting “funerals” over dead members of their species, from which they glean social information. They even recognize human faces. Corvids also understand cause and effect, plan for the future, and make and use tools such as fashionable sticks to help them extract food from tight spaces.
