Tempurpedic

Often, getting a good night’s sleep only needs a few adjustments on your part. It begins with a simple task of mattress flipping. Have you done this recently?  Flipping the mattress regularly keeps it even and helps its longetivity. Mistupid shows you how it can be done.

Then, purchase a good fabric spritz to freshen it up. There are plenty of these at the supermarket. Fabreeze is one such product.

A dandy tip from the DIY Network, which involves the use of garbage bags to turn your mattress:

Flip a mattress by first pushing garbage bags in under one side. When you pull the mattress toward you, it slides right over to plastic. Alternate between turning it side to side and end to end. Turn the mattress twice a year.

Via DIY Network

Apparently, mattress flipping is an applied mathematics concept. I didn’t realize it can be that complicated. But in an article written on American Scientist, flipping a mattress involves a “mythical combination (which is) a mathematical ‘golden rule’”.

Mathematically, there are four ways to rotate a mattress so that it ends up aligned with the bed. Hayes uses the symbols I for the Identity rotation and R, P, Y for the nautical terms Roll, Pitch and Yaw. No matter how creatively you manipulate your mattress, once it’s back on the bed you will have performed one of the four operations I, R, P, Y shown in the figure. Each of these operations has the property that if you repeat it, you end up where you started. So you will have missed two of the configurations.

Here is how someone scientifically views the process of mattress flipping.

To make sense of all this turning and flipping, the first thing we need is some clear notation. A mattress can be rotated around any of three orthogonal axes. I could label the axes x, y and z, but I’d just forget which is which, so it seems better to adopt the terminology of aviation. If you think of a mattress as an airplane flying toward the headboard of the bed, then the three axes are designated roll, pitch and yaw as shown in the illustration to the right. The roll axis is parallel to the longest dimension of the mattress, the pitch axis runs along the next-longest dimension, and the yaw axis passes through the shortest dimension.