Let’s face it, when a hard drive fails, our first instinct after shrieking “NO, NO! REALLY? NOW? Come ON!” is not to blame the drive, but to blame ourselves for not being better about routinely backing up all our data, which is what we said we’d start doing after the last hard drive failure.

After a hard disk crash there are two typical responses: Phone a repair place, or take an “it is what it is” attitude and not bother trying to resuscitate the dead drive. Well, there’s evidently a third thing you can try: freeze it.

Why? Well, even the non-particle physicists among us get the idea that heat makes molecules expand and cold makes them contract, and in a post about the topic, lifehacker’s Adam Pash quotes a sound explanation from “bobeltomate,” one of his readers:

“When you chill the drive, it shrinks and tightens up the mechanical parts that may have loosened, improves electrical issues (think cracked solder joints), as well as the old adage that electronics generally run better when cold. It eventually fails again because the heat buildup, of course.”

Since you may only have a small window once your drive heats up again, one tip offered in a Server Zone post cited by Pash is to retrieve the most important data first. Server Zone also suggests double-bagging the drive (to keep out moisture, bobeltomate suggests) and freezing it for about 12 hours before taking a stab at reinstalling it and recovering data.

If the drive indeed fails again once it heats up, Server Zone suggests you can try refreezing it again. But at that point you’ll probably ask yourself, is this data worth the fuss? Up to you. But if you try it and it works, you’ve got a good story to tell.

Image source: Server Zone

If you’ve ever been in line behind someone who has asked a hotel clerk for an upgrade, you may have noticed a couple things:

1) The person didn’t ask in an effective way

2) The person didn’t get the upgrade

It’s not enough to just flat out ask for an upgrade or even to ask for it nicely – you have to give the desk clerk a good reason to say yes. One of the most overused tricks hotel guests use when booking a room is saying they’d appreciate an upgrade because it’s their honeymoon or anniversary. Unless you show the front desk clerk the “Just Married” cans that were attached to your car or present your marriage certificate, he likely won’t believe you.

A better approach is to scale it back a notch. Walk up to the front desk clerk and say something like, “This is a special trip for us, and we’re not sure when we might be able to take such a trip again, so would you consider upgrading us to a better room if it’s available?”

You’ve done two things here. You’ve given the clerk a reason to say yes to a reason that’s totally plausible (and probably true in almost every case). And you’ve used the words “if it’s available,” which brings us to the second tip. It pays to ask while booking your room if you can be placed on a list for a free space-available upgrade. If you have no luck, ask again when you check in; sometimes, if the hotel is on the cusp of overbooking its cheaper rooms or alternately if business is slow, the front desk may upgrade you on the spot for free. Like most things, it’s all in the approach.

Image source: Mattes via Wikimedia Commons

Dig deeply into 4-Hour Workweek guru Tim Ferriss’ trove of advice and you’re bound to come up with some DIY potions, one of which he takes up in his post 4 Anti-Cold Cocktails That Work: From Ancient China to German Alcoholics and Modern Labs.

For our purposes, the cocktail that seems most practical, given its ease of preparation and low-maintenance ingredients, is what Ferriss describes as the Chinese cure.

You’ll need fresh ginger as well as the peel from one orange. Cut and mash the ginger, boil it for 20 minutes, and add the orange peel (cut up into sections) for 10 more minutes of boiling. Strain it and drink up.

Ferriss says a bit of honey may take the edge off the strong taste of the brew, about which he says “for me [it] cuts symptoms like sore throat and sinus pain by at least 50% over 24 hours.”

Image source: böhringer friedrich via Wikimedia Commons

Late Hawaiian crooner Don Ho knew his signature tune “Tiny Bubbles” had the power to charm generations, but neither he nor the song’s fans were likely to surmise that tiny bubbles in the water might have the power to cool the earth. It took a Harvard physicist to clue us in about that.

Our friends at Gizmodo noticed that Slashdot chanced upon a Science write-up about physicist Russell Seitz, who suggested that pumping tiny bubbles into the Earth’s oceans would heighten the oceans’ reflectivity, thus bringing the water temperature down.

Per Gizmodo, “the tiny bubbles essentially act as ‘mirrors made of air,’ reflecting the sunlight and keeping oceans cool. Early simulations showed that bubbles could potentially cool the Earth by up to 3 degrees Celsius.” Scalability is one hurdle – it takes a fair amount of energy, or as Seitz suggests, perhaps “the energy output of 1000 windmills” to bubble up an ocean.

Another problem – obvious to a toddler with a bubble wand but again, it sometimes takes a Harvard physicist to cast these things in the proper context – bubbles don’t last very long. Seitz, via Science, notes “in nature, a bubble’s lifetime depends on the level of dissolved organic matter and nanoparticles, without which small bubbles rapidly shrink and disappear. If the water is too clean, the bubbles might not last long enough to be effectively spread over large areas.”

That said, it’s a grand idea. Summing up the possibilities of reflectivity with almost perfect elegance, Seitz explains “since water covers most of the earth, don’t dim the sun. Brighten the water.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons