I highly recommend ignoring basically any trendy item you see on Instagram or TikTok. I find that high hopes usually give way to an inevitable letdown when you open that package from Temu and realize some $12 piece of questionably food-grade plastic isn’t going to save your relationship with your estranged uncle. Unless that package contains the Snackle Box.

It is with surprisingly little regret that I inform you that the ‘Snackle Box’ is good. Maybe great. All those Instagram moms and TikTok matriarchs might be wrong about raw milk and sinister underground pizza joints, but the idea that an easily cleanable and collapsable portable snack device will change your life is real.

Yes, I am talking about a rectangular snack box with removable snack pockets like this one on sale for $9.95 on Amazon (as of this writing). I know it sounds a little crazy. There are plenty of ways to snack and transport snacks. Why is this so much better? I have a theory.

What Is The Snackle Box?

The Snackle Box is a verbal play on the tackle box, which most of you are probably familiar with from fishing with your dad. The difference is that this one isn’t filled with rusty lures designed to send you to the ER (sorry Dad). Instead, it’s filled with tasty snacks!

There are numerous variations out there, but it’s this specific one pictured above that I’m talking about. For some reason, the world has decided that the ideal configuration is a clear plastic rectangle that’s about 11.5″ x 8.5″ x 3″ with a removable, top clasping lid and vaguely beige coloring. Inside are eight equally-sized cups that can be removed and put in the dishwasher.

@jenniesuk

snack boxes on airplanes is the best idea ever ???????????? #snackbox #flighthacks #snackideas #snacklebox

♬ original sound – Ruthie21???? – ꧁ Ruthie ꧂

In the TikTok video above (or linked here) a woman got 6 million views for bringing one of these identical boxes on a plane with her. She went with a classic mix of sweet and salty treats with a double-load of goldfish crackers (she edits it out, but you can see she also put a folded-up paper towel under the lid, which is a pro-level move). I’ve only used the Snackle Box for sleepovers and road trips, but I get the appeal of taking it on a plane.

I know how this sounds. It sounds dumb. It sounds obvious. When the Snackle Box first appeared at my place I discounted it as another supposedly life-altering item that would end up shoved in a cabinet along with our Soda Stream and poach pocket. Friends, I was wrong.

I’m not too big of a man to admit that. I’m not hangry about being wrong. In fact, I’m not hangry at all … on account of the access to snacks.

My Theory Of Why The Snackle Box Is So Hip

There are a few reasons why I think the Snackle Box has taken off on social media lately. My first theory is purely about commerce. Amazon and other retailers will pay, via a special link, if people buy a product you recommend. Everyone does this, from the New York Times all the way down to your aunt who has a podcast about herbivores. This post contains such a link and we do, sometimes, tag links (although rarely considering that much of our competition has whole sections devoted to it). This is something cheap so I imagine the real money is made on volume.

However, people recommend crap on the Internet all the time. Why, suddenly, is this popular? I think it’s because it actually works on a similar emotional level to what makes it work for social media algorithms.

The portability of the Snackle Box is high, but there are plenty of other snack containers that are even more easy to wield. The little pockets are supposedly dishwasher safe, though I wouldn’t put the outer plastic shell in there with your plates. I found this out the hard way when we deformed one of the lids.

I think the key to the Snackle Box is visibility. Its transparency is the magic piece here. It’s one thing to know that you’ve got a bag full of snacks, it’s another thing to see them all laid out like this. It makes every little shell of goodness in there look so appealing. In a way, the 4×2 grid mimics the grids on social media.

Is it possible that our brains are so broken that we now see the whole world like Instagram or TikTok?

@brooklynrreidhead

roadtrip ready???????? these are so fun to make!! #asmr #asmrsounds #snacklebox #snacks #aesthetic #restock #asmrrestock #restockasmr #snackideas #foryou

♬ original sound – brooklyn reidhead

Probably!

The Snackle Box is also great if you have kids. You, as a normal adult, might be happy to have a bag of pretzels as a snack. Your kid is probably happier with three pretzels, six M&Ms, eight goldfish, one baby carrot, and 26 Nerds. Kids, whether at home or on a road trip, crave attention and variety. I’ve found that the Snackle Box has kept my daughter from asking for a snack every 18 seconds since she can get it for herself.

Also, I’m like an eight-year-old and I might be happy with one bag of Zappos, but I also would rather have a fun mix of salty and sweet.

Another perk of the boxes is that the size allows you to swap certain sections for items that are better left in their packages, like juice boxes and seaweed snacks:

Those are Thin Mints btw. I’ve also experimented with shoving protein bars in there for long road trips so I’ve got something to keep me going.

Have you purchased one of these? What works best for you? If you haven’t, what would you put in these for your ideal road trip snack? Let’s get snackin’ folks.

The post The Snackle Box Has Revolutionized The Road Trip Snack Experience appeared first on The Autopian.

Many people may be surprised to learn the proper procedure for taking a blood pressure reading—because of how different it is from what happens during their doctor's appointments.

According to the American Heart Association and other medical experts, getting an accurate reading requires following a strict set of preparations: You must not eat, drink, exercise, or smoke within 30 minutes of a reading. You must have an empty bladder. You must sit straight up in a chair with back support. Your legs must be uncrossed and your feet must be flat on the ground. The arm to be measured must be rested on a flat surface so that it is at the same level as your heart, not lower, not higher. You must sit calmly, without talking for five minutes to relax before the reading. When it's time, an appropriately sized cuff should be wrapped around your bare upper arm, right above the elbow; it should never be wrapped over clothing. At least two readings should be taken, with the average recorded. Ideally, readings should be taken in both arms, with the highest readings recorded.

Credit: American Heart Association

Deviations from this protocol have the potential to significantly alter your blood pressure reading—and your blood pressure category. For instance, putting the blood pressure cuff over clothing can raise your reading as much as 50 mm Hg. That's enough to make someone with early stage hypertension seem as if they're in a hypertensive crisis, at imminent risk of a stroke or heart attack. If you have to pee, the reading can be 15 mm Hg higher. Talking can raise it by 10 mm Hg.

And, according to a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine, the all-too-common practice of having your arm in a position lower than your heart can raise your systolic blood pressure reading (the upper number) between 4- and 10-mm Hg. While those numbers may not seem dramatic, they're enough to push some patients over the edges of blood pressure categories. And these inaccurate readings are thought to happen often enough that they may lead to significant overdiagnosis of hypertension. In fact, the authors of the new study—led by researchers at Johns Hopkins—estimate that as many as 54 million people in the US may be misclassified as having hypertension simply because of the way their arm is positioned during readings.

Not using the correct arm position "has the potential to lead to substantial hypertension overdiagnosis, unnecessary patient follow-ups, and overtreatment," the authors conclude.

The study echoes previous data on inaccuracies from incorrect arm positions, but goes further by investigating the most common incorrect arm positions and using a gold-standard trial design.

For the study, researchers took blood pressure readings from 133 people with a mean age of 57 years. Each person had their blood pressure measured in four arm positions—with all other blood pressure reading preparations and positioning aligned with recommendations. The four arm positions were: one, with their arm properly resting on a desk (desk 1); two, with their arm incorrectly resting in their lap; three, with their arm incorrectly down at their side; and four, with their arm properly resting on a desk (desk 2). For each position, blood pressure readings were taken in triplicate, for a total of 12 readings from each person.

Under pressure

Before participants took readings in any of the positions, the researchers had them simulate walking into a doctor's appointment. They walked for two minutes and then sat calmly in position for five minutes before taking the three readings. Before moving onto the next position, they got up and walked again and sat for another five minutes. The participants were also randomized into groups that took the first three readings (desk 1, lap, side) in different orders, with all groups ending on desk 2.

The researchers then compared the differences between desk 1 and desk 2 to differences between lap and desk 1 and side and desk 1 for each participant. The desk 1-desk 2 differences captured intrinsic variability of blood pressure reading within each participant. The comparisons to lap-desk 1 and side-desk 1 captured changes based on the improper arm positions.

In all, there was little difference in the desk 1-desk 2 comparison, with participants having a mean difference of -0.21 mm Hg in systolic blood pressure and 0.09 in diastolic. But, the improper arm positions had significant effects on the readings. Lap arm position resulted in a mean increase of 4 mm Hg in both systolic and diastolic readings. Side arm position led to systolic readings that were 6.5 mm Hg higher and diastolic readings that were 4 mm Hg higher. For those with high blood pressure readings—about 36 percent of the participants—the wrong arm position caused yet higher readings, with systolic readings about 9 mm Hg higher than desk readings.

The authors speculate that simple physiological mechanisms likely explain the increase in blood pressure when the arm is lower than the heart—more gravitational pull, compensatory constriction of blood vessels, and muscle contraction may lead to higher pressure. As for why health care providers are known to sometimes use these wrong arm positions, it may be a lack of awareness, training, equipment, and/or resources.

The authors of the study call for more training and education about proper blood pressure measurements, which are essential for appropriate management of hypertension and prevention of cardiovascular disease.

Read full article

Comments

It seems that a popular way of converting a string to uppercase or lowercase is to do it letter by letter.

std::wstring name;

std::transform(name.begin(), name.end(), name.begin(),
    std::tolower);

This is wrong for many reasons.

First of all, std::tolower is not an addressible function. This means, among other things, that you are not allowed to take the function’s address,¹ like we’re doing here when we pass a pointer to the function to std::transform. So we’ll have to use a lambda.

std::wstring name;

std::transform(name.begin(), name.end(), name.begin(),
    [](auto c) { return std::tolower(c); });

The next mistake is a copy-pasta: The code is using std::tolower to convert wide characters (wchar_t) even though std::tolower works only for narrow characters (even more restrictive than that: it works only for unsigned narrow characters unsigned char). There is no compile-time error because std::tolower accepts an int, and on most systems, wchar_t is implicitly promotable to int, so the compiler accepts the value without complaint even though over 99% of the potential values are out of range.

Even if we fix the code to use std::towlower:

std::wstring name;

std::transform(name.begin(), name.end(), name.begin(),
    [](auto c) { return std::towlower(c); });

it’s still wrong because it assumes that case mapping can be performed char-by-char or wchar_t-by-wchar_t in a context-free manner.

If the wchar_t encoding is UTF-16, then characters outside the basic multilingual plane (BMP) are represented by pairs of wchar_t values. For example, the Unicode character OLD HUNGARIAN CAPITAL LETTER A² (U+10C80) is represented by two UTF-16 code units: D803 followed by DC80.

Passing these two code units to towlower one at a time prevents towlower from understanding how they interact with each other. If you call towlower with DC80, it recognizes that you passed only half of a character, but it doesn’t know what the other half is, so it has to just shrug its shoulders and say, “Um, DC80?” Too bad, because the lowercase version of OLD HUNGARIAN CAPITAL LETTER A (U+10C80) is OLD HUNGARIAN SMALL LETTER A (U+10CC0), so it should have returned DCC0. Of course towlower doesn’t have psychic powers, so you can’t really expect it to have known that the DC80 was the partner of an unseen D803.

Another problem (which applies even if wchar_t is UTF-32) is that the uppercase and lowercase versions of a character might have different lengths. For example, LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S (“ß” U+00DF) uppercases to the two-character sequence “SS”:³ Straße ⇒ STRASSE, and LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FL (“fl” U+FB02) uppercases to the two-character sequence “FL”. In both examples, converting the string to uppercase causes the string to get longer. And in certain forms of the French language, capitalizing an accented character causes the accent to be dropped: à Paris ⇒ A PARIS. If the accented character à were encoded as LATIN SMALL LETTER A (U+0061) followed by COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT (U+0300), then converting to uppercase causes the string to get shorter.

Similar issues apply to the std::string version:

std::string name;

std::transform(name.begin(), name.end(), name.begin(),
    [](auto c) { return std::tolower(c); });

If the string potentially contains characters outside the 7-bit ASCII range, then this triggers undefined behavior when those characters are encountered. And for UTF-8 data, you have the same issues discussed before: Multibyte characters will not be converted properly, and it breaks for case mappings that alter string lengths.

Okay, so those are the problems. What’s the solution?

If you need to perform a case mapping on a string, you can use LCMap­String­Ex with LCMAP_LOWERCASE or LCMAP_UPPERCASE, possibly with other flags like LCMAP_LINGUISTIC_CASING. If you use the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library, you can use u_strToUpper and u_strToLower.

¹ The standard imposes this limitation because the implementation may need to add default function parameters, template default parameters, or overloads in order to accomplish the various requirements of the standard.

² I find it quaint that Unicode character names are ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS, in case you need to put them in a Baudot telegram or something.

³ Under the pre-1996 rules, the ß can capitalize under certain conditions to “SZ”: Maßen ⇒ MASZEN. And in 2017, the Council for German Orthography (Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung) permitted LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S (“ẞ” U+1E9E) to be used as a capital form of ß.

The post A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase appeared first on The Old New Thing.