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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Masks don't make you rebreathe all your air: a simple at home experiment

Masks don't make you rebreathe all your expired carbon dioxided air.* The air you breathe out comes out the sides and top and bottom in a typical mask because this is the path of least resistance. This is why glasses fog when you wear a mask: because it's directing your humidified expired air straight up into your glasses instead of in front of you. Masks with a good seal across the bridge of the nose still let air out the sides and bottom. Masks with a good seal all around like an N95 let out the air directly through the mask material (or a valve, if your mask has one). This is because you inhale and exhale a higher volume than is in that little dead space between the mask and your face.

This would probably be better done with a TikTok or something but the only thing worse than taking selfies of myself would be taking a video of myself, so here's a blog post instead. If someone sees this and wants to video themselves doing this with their more beautiful face please do.

Anyway, here's the best picture in this whole post, of the supplies that are getting some nice, natural light coming through the window:


So first I exhaled as normally as possible into a sandwich sized ziplock bag. It's hard to breathe normally when you're thinking about breathing, and it's really easy to try to blow up your bag like a balloon. I chose a ziplock instead of a balloon because they have very low resistance to being filled with air, unlike balloons which require a bit of force to stretch. I didn't want to breathe through a straw and affect the flow of exhaled air that way, so I unzipped a small area in the corner of the bag and sealed my mouth under the overhang above the zipper. I wanted to underestimate how much I was exhaling rather than overestimate.

So here's my beautiful face doing that:


Here's the bag completely deflated to start:


Here it is inflated by one exhale:


It doesn't look very inflated and it isn't! But it does have air in it:



Then I folded the baggie to try to fit its entire volume fit under the mask, like what would happen if all your air got trapped behind it:


So here's what that looks like:




It's hard to even fit the whole bag behind the mask. And here's what wearing a mask normally looks like, for comparison:


And here's with my cloth mask, which is a little bigger, but still has parts-of-the-bag-sticking-out-the-sides problem. And the lower ties are much looser than how I usually wear them, with the edge of the mask in front of my chin instead of tucked slightly under it:



And here I am wearing it normally, without an actually-suffocating bag of plastic in the way. I even got to tie the lower ties tighter without the bag in the way:


Anyway, I promise that when you inhale/exhale you're exchanging air from around the outside of your mask.

*Inhaled AND exhaled air is actually mostly nitrogen, and exhaled air is still 16% oxygen, which is why you actually can breathe your own exhaled air for a short time, and why mouth to mouth resuscitation provides oxygen during CPR. But this is a tangent.

Saturday, January 19, 2019

I mean really, why are men allowed to be in charge of anything?

Y'all.

I cannot with the NYT article Why Jeff Bezos' Divorce Should Worry Amazon Investors.  And also most of the media's breathless anticipation of a public argument over the divorcing couple's money.

It's not that I don't believe that there could be a bad situation in which a successful businessperson who created a profitable company could lose control of said company and then less business savvy people could take control of the company and run it into the ground with bad decisions.  It's just that the (female) ex spouse of the majority shareholder obtaining half of "his" shares is unlikely to be that situation.

A good example is the one used in the NYT article for the company that is allegedly crippled because of its founders' divorce:


Indeed, let's look at the history of those shares since 2014 (not sure why this date is important since the divorce happened in 2010):



Ah yes, the shares have dropped by pretty much half since 2014 and look at that big dip (after a brief continued rise) when Mr. Wynn steps down as chief executive.  It's clear that this divorce really hurt those shares.

(Papers shuffling, coughs) Oh gosh you guys, I'm sorry.  That's the wrong chart: it's the stock prices of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., another company similar to Wynn Resorts.  Here we go with the real chart:


There you go, I mean this undoubtedly shows that investors should really, really care about...

(Fidgeting, sweating) Oh em gee, so.  You are not going to believe this, because--it's actually pretty funny--but this isn't Wynn Resorts either, it's Melco Resorts & Entertainment, another company in the casino field of business.  Just give me one moment to get to the real one here:


I mean you can't argue with that clear drop since 2014, the stock has only gone down since Mr. Wynn left, clearly his lack of influence in the company lead to...

(Brief hyperventilation) Um, ahem, again, so, so sorry, but that last one was actually Caesars Entertainment Corporation.  I know what you're thinking, how could I get those last graphs confused when we are clearly looking for the graph of a company whose founders got divorced and split their shares between them.  A graph that shows investors, those super-smart intellectuals, the risks of investing in a company affected by divorce.  Investors who shouldn't be picking a very diverse assortment of stocks in order to decrease risk.  Investors who should be looking critically at a majority shareholder's prenup in case a...woman he marries becomes a major shareholder in her own right with her own...decision making capacity separate from their marriage.  That's the sort of thing that's really going to make you the big bucks.  I mean, what if women are bad at business, and insist on having a say in the company despite not knowing what they're doing?  We all know women love stoking their egos more than they love money.  What if they purposefully tank a business out of spite?  We all know that women love spite more than money.  What if they take all of their shares of a successful company and sell them to an activist investor?  We all know women love giving warehouse employees bathroom breaks more than they love money.*  Anyway, here's the real graph with a label so you know I'm not lying this time:


And here's a history of the shares that includes 2010, a point from which the stocks have improved, probably because that was peak financial crisis:


It's almost like regulating the banking system is more important to stock prices than whether your founderS are controlling the company as a united married front or separately because one of them (the male one) is abusing employees.

There are more arbitrary ways to come into a large share of a company than getting divorced after supporting your partner through its founding--like receiving an inheritance as the child of wealthy parents, or just being lucky.  Most people want to keep making money, and the idea that a divorced woman is some chaotic threat to investment is ridiculous.  If (IF) MacKenzie Bezos gets half of Jeff Bezos's shares, she's most likely to do what she's done for the past 25 years--whatever makes her (and therefore investors) the most money.

*I don't really know what an activist investor would be, I assumed this would be it.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Fall into the Gaps

God of the Gaps


Here is Neil deGrass Tyson explaining "God of the Gaps,"and his opinion that this can be both limiting to one's faith as well as scientific progress:



"The day you stop looking because you're content God did it, I don't need you in the lab."



"Science" of the Gaps


Lately it seems that there are a lot of defenders of sexism and racism who claim that they're simply promoting scientific inquiry and advancement.  

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” --Bari Weiss, Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web


My own brilliant conclusion: Group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yetknow quite what the balance is. -- Andrew Sullivan, Denying Genetics Isn't Shutting Down Racism, It's Fueling It 






Evolution does not necessarily reward the intelligent.  With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent an endangered species.--Idiocracy, which I know is fiction but so many people refer to as "totally so true!" despite the fact. That. It. Is. Literally. Eugenics.

The big question is, "Why is there inequality?" And for many people, the answer is "Because it's meant to be this way, because some people are inferior (weaker, dumber, lazier) to others." 


And to paraphrase Neil DeGrass Tyson, they are so content in that answer, that they no longer had curiosity to learn how it happened.


Of course there are biological differences between men and women, and intelligence is heritable.  But why is there inequality? 


The first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States was told that she was denied admission because women were intellectually inferior.  In 1970 less than 10% of women were physicians, while today it is over 30%, and women make up 50% of medical school students.  A recent study suggested that women physicians are not only equal to their male counterparts, they may have lower mortality and readmission rates.*


So now when someone writes a memo declaring that there are intellectual differences in men and women that account for, say, the uneven distribution of genders in tech, they should probably make sure they're not making the mistake of medical school admissions offices of the 1800s.  It's not that talking about differences between sexes and races is completely verboten, but that declaring a group inferior has implications that is just not an innocent discussion of controversial scientific research.  It creates at best a hostile work environment and at worst, promotes ideas that get pretty freakin dark.



Believing that you can know who is inferior and that that inferiority is intrinsic is an excuse to not look any further into actual scientific biological differences between people and find actual environmental differences between populations.  It is a fake science of the gap that explains inequality and allows people to stop progress.  These are literally ideas that supported the Holocaust and slavery, and looking at intergenerational poverty/lower education/other status and declaring it to be Fate Written By Your Genes is making the same mistake, even if the end result is not mass murder

*I owe a lot of this paragraph to this article.

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Most people are good but...

Listed in order of likelihood to make you say "Oh No!" out loud while reading:






Saturday, March 3, 2018

The AR in AR-15 stands for "annihilating rabbits" and if you know anything about guns you know that it has the exact capabilities of your grandfather's rabbit-hunting gun



















Sunday, February 11, 2018

I bought the new Kesha album





Keeping the "high note" an octave or two lower when covering the song or singing it live is smart, and it still sounds pretty good:



My favorite Ke$ha performance is probably this one, where the audience didn't react as expected to the American flag cape and she keeps going with the performance and actually kind of recovers some energy from the room.  As much as you can recover during a song about being out all night partying with astronauts as your back-up dancers.  A lot of people hypothesize that this is evidence of a record company making an artist be weird on purpose, trying to imitate Lady Gaga.  But I think the weirdness may actually be Kesha's thing, and it's the partying in the club persona that was put on for fame.  *Deep thoughts.*



Either way, I like her new album's weirdness with songs like this one:

Friday, February 2, 2018

Politics

This article came out shortly before 9/11, and I kept a paper copy of it around because it seemed ironic that soon after it was written we were in land wars in Asia.  To be fair, the point was not that we would never wage war in literally the part of the world affected by the Medieval crusades*, but that American politics proceeds peacefully within the country, which was and is still true.  This article makes me nostalgic for a time when politics did really seem low stakes, while also reminding me to be grateful that things are not much, much worse.  


Politics seems to get more and more divisive, but this video also helps to remind me of what's really important.  (There's lots of cussing.)





*Well, technically a little further east.  Or a lot further east, if you consider hundreds or thousands of miles to be "a lot."