Masks, again, this time for sure. Quack.

I tried to take pictures of each step along the way.  The goal here is to make a durable, “washable” (soak in boiling water, or alcohol; I don’t think detergent is good) mask that filters very well and also breathes pretty easily, seals well, will not collapse if you breathe hard, and muffles your voice somewhat less.  I tried making one of these with no fabric, just filter material, and that is not strong enough to last; the interior layer is necessary (and feels nicer on your face).  The filter media I use here filters well — it looks good on paper, and when the west coast smoke blew into Boston, it stopped the smoke smell (it does not stop smaller smelly molecules).  For reference, from that paper, here’s the graph of filtering effectiveness and breathing resistance (which is high).  It’s the pink lines at the top, just under never-washed N95:

The difference between this material, and medical N95, is that those use electrostatic charge, which is magically good till it wears off because you washed it (note that this chart quits at half a micron, so it is not the whole story).  Not using magic electrostatic properties means that the filtering survives exposure to alcohol, but also that the breathing resistance is much higher.  Nonetheless, I manage, most other people should as well.

The mask is shaped like a duck bill, beware, and there’s a tradeoff between area (ease of breathing) and volume (rebreathing of CO2).  The pattern itself is parameterized, so that you can adjust its size somewhat for your own personal face and your own personal preferences for ease of breathing vs rebreathing CO2 (we have varying lung sizes) vs ridiculous appearance; I put a program on the web to do this; it creates the pattern in two halves, which you print on card stock, cut out, and tape together (as seen below).  I’ll update it from time to time; notice how the pattern below printed “elastic” in the wrong place (fixed), labels one of the darts wrong, and I really wish it had a QR code that would let someone reproduce the mask without retyping parameters.

This is the 4th iteration of a design that started with one from the UF School of Anesthesiology.

Materials

• Cummins Filtration EX 101.  This comes in packs of 50.  I can send smaller quantities to friends and family, the rest of you have your own friends and family.
• Heat shrink tubing for capturing wire ends in the nose wire, and for holding the coffee stirrer nose brace together.
  2:1 shrink ratio, 90 degrees C activation, 1/8”, 3/16”, 1/4” (I use NTE clear from Digikey).  You can use tape for the brace joints, and if you have some other way of making a nose wire, you don’t need this.
• 5.5” Coffee stirrers (Amazon link) for the nose brace.
• Wire for nose wire (I use 19-gauge copper wire that I rescued from the side of the road after a lawn mower ran over a phone wire bundle).  I did once try 19-gauge stainless wire from the hardware store, it is not comfortable.
• Cord/shoelace and cord lock for neck strap.
• Elastic for head band.
• Fabric — I use linen or hemp for the interior, whatever for the exterior.  Goal is both should breathe easily (the filter does the filter work), interior should be strong enough to deal with cords and braces, exterior (which is actually optional) should protect the filter from abrasion, perhaps have an appearance.  So while you can use old T-shirt for the exterior, it’s probably wrong for the interior because it is too stretchy.

Photos of steps (high-res album version):

Nose wire first.  This is 9.5 inches of copper wire, alternately use 2 pieces 4.5 and 5.5 inches long with the longer wrapped around the ends of the shorter.  To bind it all together, use heat shrink tubing, fold in a piece of fabric, then apply an iron, blast a few times with steam.  It will stick slightly to the fabric, which is why you wrap it in fabric because that is better than sticking to the iron or the ironing board.

After doing the ends, also.

Filter media and pattern.

Pattern just fits the filter media, this is by design.  For the filter, don’t bother with any flaps or tabs, and don’t do the darts yet either.

Foreshadowing: this is the ultimate destination of the nose wire.

Pattern traced.

Pattern cut, precisely around the face, with slop around chin and nose, to be trimmed later.

Pattern on the interior layer, which gets all the tabs, flaps, and alignment marks for the elastic and cords.

Traced

Cut, again with some slop.  The flaps will fold down, and then iron to make it easier to sew.

Exterior layer, which is a used tie-dye T-shirt.  No marking for cord attachment or tabs. Cut this with a fair amount of slop.

And cut:

Here’s an extra bit of more T-shirt to go inside the nose-wire flap, to help cushion the nose.

Sewing the nose wire flap.  This is the only place where pins are appropriate, once the filter is in the mix, use clips instead because holes in the filter are to be avoided as much as possible. I have access to nice clips because my wife sews very well and my mother-in-law is a fiber artist (it was her that sent me the original pattern from UF) but bulldog clips get the job done and I have also used those.

Sew along the bottom to leave a channel.  This will get narrower when the filter and exterior are sewed to this.

Trim away the excess.  It doesn’t need to be super pretty, nobody will see this.  The nose wire goes inside, just shown here on the outside to show how it will be positioned.

And with the pockets sewed.  These will also be sewed across the bottom, later.

Recipe for stacking the layers.  This part is important, I copied it from older instructions for another pattern.  Steps will appear below.  The filter “outside” has more dimple-y dimples, bright light helps for telling them apart.

First put the interior together, using clips to get the cords positioned right.

Align the exterior layer on top; it’s good to get the patterns aligned for later, but this one is mostly for show, and excess will be trimmed soon.  One problem with too much extra fabric is it gets in the way of aligning the filter (one top) and the interior layer (own the bottom), which is what really matters.

Carefully position the filter.  Goal is that its face edge (the part that curves up, around, and down from left to right) is well-aligned with the interior layer at the bottom.  Apply lots of clips to keep everything from shifting.

One big stitch from lower left around the top to lower right.  I take my time.  It just now occurred to me, if I had no machine, could I sew this by hand, and I think the answer is “yes”.  It would be tedious, but it is entirely at the edge and I think you could whip stitch it, just fold the exterior up and on top and bind it all together.  I might start in the middle and then go to one edge, then the other.  The pockets and nose flap would be more work, but you can use more fabric there and take your time, that’s just sewing fabric.

Use fingers to keep everything moving together, don’t want cords to shift.

Done, from the top of the stack. (Links to high-res)

Done, from the bottom of the stack. (Links to high-res)

Prepare to flip interior around.

Flipped, looking at interior and cords.

NOW use the pattern to put the darts on the mask.  Align the pattern with the filter, which is hidden under the exterior in this photo.,

Marked.

I sew it somewhat more generously than the mark, probably ought to reflect that in the pattern.  Note that the clean side of the sewn dart goes against your face, for better comfort and better seal.  Design of this mask, most people won’t see the underside of your chin anyhow.

Both darts done.

This is the relatively tricky part and is probably subject to some further improvement.  The two chin edges need to be brought together, and then sewed.  I’ve left the pattern un-cut in the nose because there is always some imprecision here and this lets me even things up at the nose.  The clip here marks where the sewing stops.

Finish the chin with a stitch across the darts and the center.

After sewing the chin, need to sew the nose.  The mark on the pattern shows where.

After sewing across the nose, clip off the excess.

Next need to make the nose brace.  This is pretty much by eyeball, and I got the short one in the nose too long the first time.  I cut the coffee stirrers to length with some wire clippers, then use sandpaper to take off the sharp parts.

To join the coffee stirrers together I use 1/4” heat shrink tubing.  I’ve also used gaffers tape, probably fabric adhesive tape would also work.  Again, wrap in scrap fabric and use a steam iron to shrink.

I use two layer of heat shrink tubing — this is the completed brace.

To fit, anchor the ends but do not fit the nose.  Put the not-in-nose angle in the chin, then push into place.  If this seems impossible, shorten as necessary.  If you need to shorten the center, either pull it apart or razor off the tubing.

Brace in position.

On my face. This is a lot of mask, I am trying to figure out how to fit a restraining thread through the middle of the bill to reduce its volume, that will still allow me to remove/replace the brace if I want to,  To wash this thing, take out the nose wire and brace, and either soak in boiling water or alcohol.  I tried a washing machine once, and to me it seemed to increase the breathing resistance until I washed it again in boiling water.  I’ve used one of these (not this one, but very similar design) to ride a bicycle 6 miles home from work, when we had the nasty smoke blow in from across the country.  I did not ride 100%, but I rode fast enough.  I also used a smaller one for a few hours on an airplane — it would not be adequate for exercise, but worked fine for sitting.

Masks, again

I assume that until this bug is over, it’s not over, and until then I will wear a mask around other people, and I would like it to be a good one. I keep reading papers. I’ve learned that an earlier paper about the goodness of high-thread-per-inch cotton had a flaw, where they failed to neutralize the charge on their test particles, which made it (very) easy for a mask to trap the particles and this overstated the effectiveness of tight cotton weaves. More recently, I read about the performance of mask materials over time, and that was depressing; if you use an medical N-95 mask very much at all, it probably loses a lot of its ability to filter small particles because the electrostatic charges on the fibers go away. Medical wrap (Halyard H600) has the same problem. This is especially true with alcohol, which is a polar solvent that can conduct electricity.

What this chart says is that for the best protection, you want a new N-95 mask; nothing else is better, and the different between 99% percent efficiency and 98% percent efficiency is twice as many particles, so a real N-95 really is much better. If, however, the mask is worn more than once, especially if it is exposed to alcohol in small amounts (for example, from hand cleaner) then it might not work nearly as well. For a mask that I’m going to wear more than once, “EX101” looks interesting; it turns out to be a high-grade air filtration media used to make air filters for diesel engines. It does, however, resist breathing more than other materials.

Two other things matter, a lot, in a mask. One is how much it resists your attempts to breathe through it, and the other is how well it is sealed to your face. Once you get to 99%-of-particles-filtered efficiency, small gaps can reduce the relative performance of the mask by a lot. In masks I’ve made in the past with high-thread-count cotton, if they get damp from sweat or condensate, they fail in both ways; their resistance to breathing goes way up, and when you exhale, the elastic cannot keep them sealed to your face and you blow unfiltered air out the sides (you can feel it, it is very annoying). On the plus side, this is a validation that the mask design I use can seal tight. I’m a little nervous about masks that only hook on ears; I’ve worn some of them, and they don’t feel like they’re sealing that well, and shopping, a few times I have seen people wearing such masks where from the side I could see between the mask and their face, all the way to their lips and nose.

Another problem with mask made of materials that resist breathing is that they can collapse onto your face, which reduces their surface area and makes inhaling even harder. It also feels disgusting if you’ve been wearing the mask for a while and there’s some amount of condensate in/on it. However, I figured out how to modify an existing design to let me prop it off my face with coffee sticks, and I’ve since improved it; the coffee sticks are inside now, which looks better and is a little simpler to sew, and more of the seams are on the inside, not the outside

So, this is how I got to where I am now, making masks from two less-filtering fabrics surrounding an inner layer made from EX101, and washing them with alcohol as necessary. I wear those masks whenever I go indoors, and for short/slow bicycle rides. For long or fast bicycle riding, the breathing resistance is too high, so I either don’t do that, or wear a mask that is less good (but I am outdoors, moving quickly, and staying away from other people by default).

Here’s the pattern and the instructions, 2 pages, print single-sided, the first page on card stock if you can, and a series of photos from me making a mask using these instructions. Cummins filtration sells 50 packs of EX101 filtration media (it’s about $45). There’s other mask information at the University of Minnesota, where they have other designs that use this filtration media.

And to the obvious question, why am I doing this, why am I not buying a mask instead? Two reasons. First, any N-95 mask that I know is trustworthy and good, I am probably taking out of the hands of someone who needs it. You might say, “but I see a lot of those for sale, I don’t think there’s a shortage”, but that may just mean that we have different levels of trust. Second problem is, how much do you trust the people selling you the mask? Anyone can claim anything, I look for signs that they are or are not thinking about what a mask is supposed to do. When I look at the masks that are for sale, if I see one with ear loops — I don’t really trust it, because an N-95 that isn’t sealing, isn’t really N-95. Or I see a mask (STILL!) with an exhale valve on it, which means that they’ve completely lost the plot with respect to stopping this epidemic. Or I see a mask that claims to have an insertable filter, but it just looks like a cloth pocket, and really, is that going to seal to my face? There’s no regulations about what is sold to the general public, there’s standards, but is anyone checking claims? We’re very much in the land of caveat-emptor capitalism, and right now the way I caveat, is I read papers, buy supplies from trustworthy sources, make my own masks. (Do I trust Cummins Filtration? Pretty much, especially given the independent research into their filter media. It makes plenty of sense that an engine air filter would work for a long long time.) This is a market failure, government could help, but for a little while longer, our government is crap.

Anyone that knows me, if they sew, if they want some of the filter media, I currently have more than I need, ping me. Either research one of the U Minn mask designs (there’s a weird open-source license they want you to do, it’s odd, but harmless, just takes a few steps) or I’d recommend mine. No guarantees, of course, only I did my best in the time available to do it, my evaluation is it fits my face, I can tell when it leaks, it doesn’t collapse when I inhale, I can get enough air through for moderate physical activity. If I could figure out how to give it more non-collapsible surface area without adding too much to the volume, I would, but this works well enough.

Here’s a newly-made mask using the design above, showing the two props, the interior seams, and the loops for attaching laces/elastic:

I’ve done a few experiments along the way. Here’s a picture (below) of one such experiment; it’s a mask that I use for longer/harder biking, that has no filter and so outdoors only, stay away from other people. I had just finished biking a few miles outdoors in mid-30F weather, so there’s a lot of condensation (much below freezing, long term, expect ice — that’s what ends up in my facial hair in a normal winter. Facial hair, bad for a mask seal). Experimentally I tried to use more props, on the theory that (1) aligning them with the elastic/cord attachments would be “better” and (2) two props per side would do a better job of keeping the mask from collapsing. I decided against this; I didn’t particularly notice “better”, and the prop higher on my face can actually be a little irritating because it rides directly on top off my cheekbones and is still a little hard through the fabric. This photo also shows how much condensate ends up in a mask doing physical activity in a cold outdoors. I’m not too surprised by the wet/dry condensate patterns, except that there’s more than I expected down near the bottom where it catches my chin.

Recommendations for some winter clothing

This came up at work, where we’re all still WFH and probably will be all through the winter, that Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real thing and likely to bite harder than usual this winter, what with so many people almost entirely at home.

One approach to this is to get fancy lamps and that’s probably not a bad idea, but another, and also this dovetails with how to socialize safely given COVID, is to spend time outdoors. But it’s going to be cold, winter is that way. How do we do this comfortably?

As it happens, I have been riding my bicycle 6 miles to and then from work year-round, near Boston, since early 2015 (and 2+ days every week before that, since 2006, 10 miles one-way). I have some experience staying warm, though it is biased a bit by physical activity and my inherent toaster-ness. However, I know how to round up and have also been out on a bike in single digits, and my advice involves buying stuff from a guy who lets you dial up the warm to levels that have me covered in sweat. Seriously, I have a hat, it has never, ever, failed to make my head sweaty. I call it the dammit hat, as in “dammit, my head and ears will be warm”.

And obviously, tons of people know how to cope already (lots of people work outdoors in the winter, after all), but tons of people are also aghast that I bike in the winter and wonder that I am not frozen when I do. I can only guess that they don’t spend much time outdoors in the winter.  The point is not to endure the cold, but to be warm enough that you don’t care.

“The guy” is Lou Binik, who has a business called FoxWear. He/his minions sew stretchy technical fabrics into things. The ordering process is distinctly old-school, I have always exchanged a few e-mails, the result is at minimum semi-custom for things like tights. I typically pay by USPS-mailing a paper check.

For me, the three best things he makes are (1) tights (2) hats and balaclavas and (3) socks/oversocks. My default fabric choice is stretch polar fleece, he calls it “Power Stretch”, you get your choice of colors and thicknesses. 2.5mm is the thickness of the dammit hat; if you’re willing to settle for black (it is always in style) you can get 3mm. I’ve never tried “double sided fleece” or “Retro-X” but those are even warmer options.

The tights just work, and they’re easy to take care of, just throw them in the washer and then throw them in the dryer (I do tend to use the low heat level in general, to reduce the risk of accidents). They work as an underlayer, too.

For tights-ish pants that are somewhat less stretchy, but more wind, water, and snow repellent, choose “Power Shield” or perhaps “Wind Pro” instead. You’ll need to be sure that it’s not undersized in waist/butt/thighs, because it’s less forgiving there and you may end up feeling like a sausage if they’re undersized. One pair I eventually decided was too tight (my thighs got bigger from the new commute), I gifted them to someone with skinnier legs (For reference, my thighs are 65cm at their largest, so if you’re in that ballpark and ordering pants in this fabric, you might want to mention it). Wearing these, you can go out and shovel snow or run a snow thrower or whatever for a few hours, stomp your feet before you come indoors, and all the snow falls off, your legs are still warm, dry, and comfy.

The socks are a peculiar compromise; they’re not as stretchy and comfy as nicely knit socks, and there’s a seam down the bottom. But, they are super durable, warm, perform well even when (very) wet, and their durability extends to washing and drying; these are fire-and-forget.

Oversocks are a weird thing — super-oversized socks, you pull them on over your shoes. They are unusually helpful for keeping your feet warm, I do not know why. If you actually go for this, you may want to treat the bottom with Plasti-Dip — for that you put a shoe in a thin bag, put the sock on the shoe, find a pan/tray you don’t care about, and then “dip” the bottom of the sock in the Plastic-Dip (more detailed instructions and pictures).

Get the hats with earflaps. Ears get cold, right? If you’re up for a balaclava, you should get one, a stretch polar fleece balaclava is great. Know what your hat size is when you order, that matters.

Another thing to consider is a jacket. I ordered one once, and for me, it’s actually too warm, I almost never wear it biking and instead my son uses it. It’s light on pockets, but warm, comfy, and not incredibly bulky. Looking at the site just now, I see a Snowboard Jacket, and that looks really warm, and it has pockets.

So, my plan for cold winter days when I want/need to just hang around outside, is to wear a pair of thicker tights, the dammit hat, the boots I already own with a couple of pairs of socks (no overstocks), a scarf, and perhaps order myself a Snowboard jacket, with additional wool layers underneath as necessary. If that’s not enough, I have a yellow Land’s End stadium parka to toss over the whole mess that I’ve owned since forever. Gloves, I have some ski gloves for biking, those work. I’ve done this before on Boy Scout skiing trips to Northern Vermont, the goal is not just to survive the cold, but to be comfortable, even just standing around in it.

Laziness and convenience

I’ve long felt that I am basically lazy, and have only learned to do anything in a timely fashion because I’m going to end up doing it anyway, might as well feel virtuous for finishing before the absolute last minute. But I’ve also learned that another way to look at “laziness” is “preferring convenience” — if you want something to happen, make it “convenient”, so that “lazy” people will do it. We’re sometimes reluctant to increase convenience because it looks like “rewarding laziness”, and we all know that laziness is bad, right?

I mention this because failing to realize the importance of convenience is keeping people in cars, and out of mass transit, off their feet, and off of bicycles. This would be no big deal if cars didn’t kill thousands of pedestrians in crashes, cause tens of thousands of early deaths with their particulate pollution, contribute to global warming, and clog city streets with traffic — but they do. And since most of these problems are problems for other people and not so much us when we are driving, we still find cars to be pretty convenient, and thus use them to excess, even to the point where it affects our health and shortens our lives — we’ve made it really easy to be lazy. If we want to change this, either we have to find a way to make cars less convenient (that’ll be really popular, there’s nothing people love more than inconvenience for their own good) or to make everything else more convenient.

Consider transit. One big reason for driving a car is because it keeps the weather off. Standing by the side of the road waiting for a bus does NOT keep the weather off; if we expect people to wait for buses, there should be something to block the wind, rain, and sun. People driving get to sit; there should be a bench. It shouldn’t be optional, and it shouldn’t be regarded as “extra spending”. One problem with buses is that they’re not always reliable because they get stuck in other traffic; that can be fixed (making buses more convenient, from the point-of-view of scheduling) by giving them a reserved lane, and allowing them to trigger green lights so they don’t wait at intersections.

Or consider bicycling. There are many reasons people give for not riding a bicycle, but even someone who really wants to will be put off if it is too inconvenient. Bicycle parking should be convenient — in particular, it should be more convenient than car parking, because it’s cheaper and more compact. That means there should be so much that it almost never runs out. And because it is so compact, whenever possible it should be located close to the ultimate destination, and not in some remote corner. Ideally it’s also covered to keep the weather off, because a wet butt is Not Convenient. Yes, people can carry little seat shower caps with them and put them on every time they park their bike, but adding extra steps for people is less convenient.

It’s also possible to make walking more convenient. For cars, we have traffic sensors to ensure that green lights are triggered when someone needs to cross — nobody expects drivers to push a button for a signal. If we could have signals for pedestrians, we should, it usually happens automatically, and traffic flow is even studied to so that lights can be synchronized. Or, have you ever noticed that every traffic light everywhere always defaults to green for cars traveling in one direction or another? No matter how low the automobile traffic, the default is never for pedestrians. Such a light would be all-ways red, changing to green for cars only after one is detected.

This extends to safety devices. For whatever reason, we’ve somehow made bicycle “safety” in this country inconvenient. You’re probably already thinking, “bicycle safety, that means helmets, surely those aren’t inconvenient?” Yes, they are. Every time I go to ride my bike, I find the helmet, untangle the straps, put it on, make a vague attempt to adjust it. It almost always makes my head a little sweatier than it needs to be. When I get off the bike, I have to store it somewhere; it’s an extra step. And every summer, I sweat enough that I need to wash the helmet pads, because they get nasty otherwise. Have you noticed that car seatbelts don’t even require adjustment, that they automatically tension themselves? That’s because it was too inconvenient for people to adjust their seatbelts properly, and thus they didn’t and it was less safe than otherwise (I learned to drive in a car with aircraft seatbelts, the first time I flew in an airplane it was amusing to me that people needed instruction in how to adjust and fasten their seatbelts, I’d been adjusting seatbelts like that for years). People in cars could wear helmets — despite five-point harnesses and roll cages, race drivers wear helmets, and despite airbags and seatbelts, head injuries are a major cause of car crash death, and car crashes are a major cause of traumatic brain injury in this country — but they don’t. Helmets aren’t convenient. (Note that taking the time to answer questions about why you’re wearing a car helmet is also not convenient).

Or, “always wear hi-viz”. That’s not convenient either — it’s another piece of clothing to keep track of, it doesn’t always fit well, it can get dirty and need washing. It might not be appropriate for where you’re going, you’ll need to put it somewhere.

The safety devices I like, that I always and happily use because they are convenient, are built in to the bicycle. When I started commuting regularly, I knew myself well enough (and batteries then were needy enough) that I knew that I wouldn’t keep battery-powered lights charged, and besides, what a pain to attach your lights before every ride and then remove them at every stop, either because of theft worries, or because they needed charging. So instead I went for sidewall generators, and eventually generator hubs. If the bike rolls, the light is on, it’s a safety device that always works despite my laziness. The relatively fat tires on my bicycle are another no-effort always-present safety device. In this country we bizarrely associate skinny tires with “serious” cycling, but fat tires are better in several ways. They don’t require frequent reinflation, which is a delight to a lazy person. They don’t rely on my constant vigilance to protect the bicycle rims from potholes; within reason, they can handle whatever our town (a Boston suburb locally famous for its terrible road conditions) can dish out. Lazy people like me are not constantly vigilant. Fat enough tires don’t even fit in sewer grates or cracks in the road; again, with constant vigilance, I can be sure to hit those at an angle so they don’t grab my skinny tires, or I can just use fat tires and lazily dispense with the mandatory vigilance. (Fat tires also have lower rolling resistance, if their tread is designed for that, and since I am so lazy, that’s what I use).

My bicycle is designed for laziness convenience in other ways, too. I don’t usually use pants clips; instead I have a chain guard. Pants clips are inconvenient. Besides the lights, I tend to excess on the reflectors, because I’d rather not carry around a special piece of clothing just to be more visible. I used to use special shoes that clipped in to special pedals, but no more, it’s much more convenient to just ride in regular shoes, instead of either changing shoes at my destination, or walking around in unfashionable shoes that go click-click on hard surfaces and aren’t really that comfortable to wear all day anyhow.

I do in fact own two pairs of the funny pants, both because I raced when I was a kid, and because every year or so I ride dozens of miles in some sort of recreational event and for that distance they’re nicer than cotton underwear and pants. But I practically never wear them otherwise, because changing clothes just to ride a bicycle is not convenient.

Perhaps you think I’m crazy to be so picky about convenience, why would anyone worry about that, let along spend money on it? After all, you don’t see car manufacturers dressing up automobiles with silly gee-gaws like automatic chokes, automatic transmission, power brakes, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, power antenna, keyless entry, keyless start, remote start, air conditioning, cruise control, seat warmers, and backup cameras, do you? What sort of lazy person would want all that?

Bell Curves

No, not the racist bullshit artist’s book.

One thing I realized a few years ago is that for human attributes, bell curves are everywhere. The standard examples are things like height and weight, but why not, say, strength, or patience, or organizational skills, or empathy? Some people have more, some people have less, and there’s no particular reason to treat them as much different from (say) physical strength; something that we possess in different quantities, and something that we can improve within bounds, but that improvement itself takes work, and the bounds are real.

“Work” generalizes similarly. We can get tired of walking, of lifting, of thinking, of maintaining a pleasant attitude, and so on.

Another corollary is not knowing which parts of my own personal experience are typical and which are not.  If I’m in the middle of the curve for some particular relevant thing, typical, if I am off to one end or the other, not so typical.

Bike share does not need helmets.

I guess people think I am tedious on this subject (people on Facebook think I am tedious on this subject), but bike share is very safe. By design, it can count the number of trips. We’re pretty good at counting deaths, too. In over 100 million trips there have been two deaths. (Death #1)

On “normal” bicycles, we’d expect to see 20 deaths in that many trips. In cars, we’d expect to see 9 deaths in that many trips. Instead, two. (As a sanity check on those rates, Canadian statistics are similar.)

We ought to decriminalize drugs, just like Portugal

I’ll just put these articles out here.
Note that we count overdose deaths per 100,000, Europe counts them per million.
Our best state in 2015, Nebraska, had 69 overdose deaths per million, or back of the pack for Europe. Portugal, with decriminalized drugs, had 3 per million.
Here’s the European stats referenced in that article.

Reading List

Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow
How complex systems go wrong, or not.

Influence, Robert Cialdini
How we get conned / how to con.

The Control of Nature, John McPhee
Hubris wins, but it’s close.

Waves and Beaches, Willard Bascom
For mitigation of hubris, and there’s interesting mathematics happening right in front of us at the beach.

Bicycling Science, David Gordon Wilson
More than you’d ever want to know about the most efficient means of human travel.

Roxana’s Children, Bonfield and Morrison
“Because they’re always writing about the men”, and reverse nepotism. Roxana’s my great-great-great-grandmother, married twice, raised nine of her own kids and two stepkids, all lived long enough to marry. (Morrison is my great-aunt).

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
Because I keep re-reading it and enjoying it. Time travel with bits of Christie, Sayers, and Wodehouse.

The March North, A Succession of Bad Days, Safely You Deliver, Graydon Saunders
Because I keep re-reading and enjoying them. A friend of mine doesn’t like them, maybe you won’t either, but I did. Emerging interesting theme: “we’re changing, so what do we want to change into?”

Yesteryear I Lived in Paradise, Myrtle Scharrer Betz
Florida before air conditioning and the crowds it has now. I grew up sometimes messing around in boats on St. Joseph’s Sound behind Caladesi Island, where she grew up.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, Braungart and McDonough
Read it once at the recommendation of my uncle, it made a real impression on me, and got me permanently thinking about the asymptote, after we’ve sucked up all the cheap-and-easy resources.

The Winner-Take-All Society, Luxury Fever, Robert Frank
Introduces you to tournament economies and relative-status utility functions (deriving satisfaction from your status relative to others screws up the mathematics of market economics; free markets can easily yield suboptimal results under those conditions).

There’s probably other books that I’ve forgotten, and at least one that hasn’t been written, about how flaky and weird our mental engines are, and why we shouldn’t just be content with how we’ve made ourselves, and how we could be better people (not smarter people, not longer-living people, but more considerate, less biased, more careful).

Biking and cold weather

One thing I didn’t understand growing up in Florida was how people could bike in cold weather.  Now that I live near Boston, I do it all the time, and I understand how.  I will share these secrets with you.

People will live in electric vans

Reading an article about people in Silicon Valley living in cars (didn’t save the reference, go look for it) and noticing that there was no plan to build new housing fast enough to meet demand, it occurred to me that (necessity being the mother of invention) there would be innovation in the world of cars-for-living-in.

I thought about this a little more, and realized that electric vans (camper vans, minivans, step vans, not sure exactly what) were likely to hit the sweet spot for this. So many things go better with electricity, especially nowadays. Electricity runs lights, computers, fans, phones, electric blankets, in a pinch it can even run air conditioning. And it does all this quietly, with no smells. Gas powered cars can supply a little power for a little while from their batteries, but they’re small, and the usual way to recharge them is to run the engine when there is otherwise no need. Mechanical constraints to get power to the wheels usually force the floor of the car (or van) relatively high above the ground, reducing interior headroom.

Electric cars have comparatively huge batteries, and will certainly be able to refill at charging stations (and some employers even provide these for free, at least for a little while more), or at relatively low cost from someone else’s electric power, and there is always the option of solar (especially in sunny places like Silicon Valley), especially on the squarish roof of a van. Rooftop solar wouldn’t provide enough energy for a lot of driving, but it would cover consumption by electric amenities. Because power can be distributed to the wheels through wires instead of mechanical axles, the floor of the van can be relatively low to the ground (this is a really good idea anyway for a delivery van) which provides a lot more headroom inside.

It’s possible that a self-driving van could also dodge overnight parking restrictions by driving very slowly on low-traffic streets, automatically pulling over whenever faster traffic approached from behind (5mph or less, to conserve energy, minimize motion for sleeping passengers, and maximize safety).

If I can think of this, I’m sure someone else is already working on this. Anywhere that artificial restrictions on housing supply cause prices to spike, this could be an option.

After a little more thought, this: “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles”. A weight budget of 3000lbs, but no need for a high-strength frame or collision crumple zones gives you room to work with (old VW vans weighed much less than that).