The Kit

I’ve always loved the idea of cataloging what is in a person’s purse. The necessities, the surprises… I love that there are people who bring those “just in case” things. It makes our civilization better.

Who doesn’t love a kit with “everything you need to…”?

I no longer carry a purse, just my phone with my drivers license and a couple of credit cards in the case. On my person, I need one pocket for my phone one pocket for my glasses… But if I have a computer bag or a back pack, I carry this mini purse with my current go-to kit. It contains everything I need to happily survive for 24 to 48 hours. I’m documenting it so that if I lose it, I can recreate it more easily. It might also serve as inspiration for others. 🤓

One rule of the kit is that everything has to be able to pass through a TSA screening, so no liquids, gels, or sharp items. As much as I would love to include moisturizer or a pocket knife in “the kit,” it is against this rule.

The pouch itself was a handmade gift from my mom, is about the size of a paperback novel, and has three zipper compartments of graduated sizes. For me, the purpose of each pocket, from largest to smallest, has evolved to be:

• Eating
• Hygiene
• Technology

Eating

The largest, top pocket contains

• Salt in a tiny soy sauce bottle
• Miniature Tajín salt-lime-chili mix
• Tiny four-sided spice dispenser with curry, paprika, salt, and ground pepper. Boiled eggs will never be dull!
• Knife, fork, and spoon. I originally had a really sweet, matching, set of metal utensils, but one by one they got taken away by various airline security checks. The knife was the smallest, roundest knife you can imagine, with tiny little teeth. It was the metal teeth, I was told, that were the no no. The fork survived the TSA, but not the local small aircraft in Costa Rica. Some plastic utensils have broken over the years. What has survived is the current mishmash of items: a bamboo serrated knife and a plastic fork and spoon saved from some take-out items.
• Foldable cup
• Reusable, washable coffee filter because you never know when you are going to need one and it is such a simple thing, and yet frustrating when you have to do without.

Hygiene

This middle pocket contains

• Tweezers
• Folding nail clippers, so far TSA approved
• Ear plugs
• Q-tips
• Dental floss—can also be used as string or thread for repairs. Floss cutter on the top can be useful for cutting threads without scissors. Oh how much I would love to be able to add a pocket knife!
• Rubber flossers—can double as cleaners for charging ports, etc.
• Dry toothpaste tablets to comply with no liquids and gels rule.
• Foldable toothbrush where the handle serves as its own cover/case.
• A small credit-card sized comb—this one has proven to be very durable!
• Hair ties

Technology

The smallest, bottom pocket contains

• 5v USB plug adapter
• Lightning USB cable, 6ft
• Headphones with mini audio jack and audio jack to lightning adaptor
• Cleaning cloth
• USB pen drive
• Stylus

It is amazing how much will usefully fit in this small pouch.

What items would you add or leave off?

Check this out: a better low-tech faucet design

Automatic faucets in public restrooms (and more and more in our homes as well), the kind that “sense” your hands are okay. Actually, kind of “meh.” They often don’t work that great and they require a source of power.

However, I do love being able to get my hands wet, turn off the water, soap up, wash, then turn on the water to rinse, all without touching the faucet. That is the ideal.

And now I have been seeing more and more of these long-handled faucets in public restrooms. You can use your wrist to easily turn the faucet on and off mechanically, no high-tech “sensing” necessary! Simple and functional, I am a fan.

I hope to see more of these around in future. 

Ventilation

(an unfinished sketch)

According to José-Luis Jimenez, it has been clear since the start of the COVID 19 pandemic—since the March 10, 2020, Skagit Valley choir incident [1]—that this disease is spread by aerosols, or small airborne particles. It is not so much spread by larger droplets, or touch, or contact with surfaces that have been touched. It is spread by air.

The Skagit Valley Choral knew there was COVID (as yet unnamed, but known to be a novel respiratory virus) in the community, so they set up their rehearsal very carefully and thoughtfully in a gymnasium with social distancing. It was documented where everyone was positioned, for how long, and in what size of room. They were singing, so everyone was exhaling large amounts of air into the room. After the rehearsal, 53 of the 61 people attending got sick with COVID 19 symptoms and 2 people died. Tragic.

Since the amount of time, volume of the room, and location of individuals was known, they could model how the virus spread. According to Jimenez, the easiest fit was airborne transmission.

It has taken the public health community a long time to come around to this view. Plexiglass screens were put up and social distancing was recommended to protect from droplets. Surfaces were sanitized to protect from touch. Masking—a way to filter the air—was late to come in to the recommendations. At first, good masks were not available. By the time effective masks were widely available, many mask mandates were coming to an end.

Ventilation has never been highlighted by the public health authorities as a key factor in the spread of COVID 19, even though it is known to be a key factor in airborne transmission and appears to be the primary method of COVID 19 spread. The resistance to embracing the evidence that COVID 19 is transmitted via the air has a long history. After the germ theory of disease transmission came to the forefront, public health officials worked hard to downplay the previous belief that disease was spread by ‘bad air.’ For example, the disease ‘malaria’ was thought to be spread by bad air. Instead, with knowledge of germ transmission, public health messaging promoted washing hands and covering your cough, but not ‘good air.’ This ‘anti-air’ focus persisted into the 2020s.

As Jimenez says, to protect yourself against transmission of aerosol-borne disease, first, protect yourself with ventilation. If ventilation is not an option, use filtration such as MERV-13 filters or N95 masks.

This is a simple protocol to follow but very different from social distancing, washing your hands, or covering your cough.

The ventilation of a space with people in it can be assessed relatively simply by measuring carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. People exhale CO2, so the amount of CO2 in a space is a proxy for how much of the air you are breathing in was expelled by other humans. If it is your own expelled air, there is little concern, but if the expelled air comes from a large number of other people, and this air is not filtered by masks or air filters, then your risk of inhaling and contracting COVID 19 increases.

Baseline CO2 levels from outside air are about 420 parts per million (ppm). A high CO2 level in a space means there is more exhaled air than fresh air.

Some countries, such as Sweden and South Korea, have long seen clean air, or good ventilation, as a health priority. Those countries have fared relatively well in the pandemic. Some countries, like South Korea and Japan have CO2 monitors posted in restaurants and movie theaters. Patrons can see at a glance how good the ventilation is.

One interesting piece of history I recently learned was about the required French lunch break. In France, you are required to leave the building and go out and have lunch. You are not allowed to eat lunch at your desk. Usually this is seen as part of the French culture of a hot lunch as a sort of human right. If you do not have a leisurely, sit-down, hot lunch, you are somewhat uncivilized. Bag lunches, or “brown bags” are not much tolerated.

It turns out that the reason a lunch break is required is not because of some cultural culinary tradition, but because of ventilation! It was so that factory workers would leave the building and it could be aired out. The French lunch break was for health.

Clean air and health are still very much connected and ventilation in buildings in the US is highly variable. Some children attend schools with good ventilation while others do not.

Good ventilation is something worth paying attention to and worth fighting for.

[1] Miller SL, Nazaroff WW, Jimenez JL, Boerstra A, Buonanno G, Dancer SJ, et al. (March 2021). "Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by inhalation of respiratory aerosol in the Skagit Valley Chorale superspreading event". Indoor Air. 31 (2): 314–323. Bibcode:2021InAir..31..314M. doi:10.1111/ina.12751. PMC 7537089. PMID 32979298.

 

Atmosphere

(an unfinished sketch)

I am listening to an interview about the evolution of animal sound with David George Haskell who wrote the book Sounds Wild and Broken: sonic marvels, evolution’s creativity, and the crisis of sensory extinction.

“For hundreds of millions of years, nature was silent. No birds chirping, no insects buzzing. But then, things changed.”

For sound to be meaningful, Haskell says, something has to first be listening. So making sound is not enough, it needs to be heard.

And then I got to thinking about why we have sound in the first place, and a lot of it has to do with the density of particles in the atmosphere. In space, where particles are sparse, there is no sound because there is too much nothingness to vibrate.

The reason we have an atmosphere is because we have a magnetosphere—and the reason we have a magnetosphere is because there is a molten core in the Earth that, when spinning, creates a positive and negative charge that makes a magnetic orb around our planet. The magnetosphere protects the atmosphere from being blown away by the solar wind.

Mars no longer has a molten core and doesn't really have a magnetosphere. It has an atmosphere, but not very much of one. One theory is that after Mars lost its magnetosphere, due to having a solid core, the atmosphere is slowly getting blown away, lost, by the solar wind and solar storms. It is more difficult to hear sounds on Mars (though we have recently heard recording sent back to Earth from Mars rovers).

I also learned that Mercury has a magnetosphere (molten, spinning core), but no atmosphere… So we have examples of atmosphere, no magnetosphere (Mars), magnetosphere, no atmosphere (Mercury), and magnetosphere with thick atmosphere (Earth).

So on Earth, there were all these dense particles that allowed sounds to be transmitted, and so hearing evolved. Hearing could be useful to avoid predators or to find prey, for example. But when did hearing become a social thing? I can’t remember all the details David George Haskell outlines (read the book to find out!), but I remember him saying that animals that could move far, quickly, like frogs or birds, were more able to use sound because they could move before predators could use the sound to locate them. Perhaps that is why frog song and bird song and insect songs are so varied and complex.

Evolving inside of an atmosphere not only lets sounds be heard, but also filters out much of the electromagnetic energy released from the Sun—the solar spectrum. Again this filtering is protective for us. There is a huge range of “possible” spectra, but much of it, like radiation, is deadly to us. 

It is not a coincidence that the small part of the spectrum that we humans call “visible light”, the part that we perceive as a rainbow of colors, accounts for the bulk of the spectrum allowed to filter through the atmosphere. The part of the spectrum that we have evolved in, the part created by our atmosphere, is the part that we see.

And this evolution thing is amazing. It is because of our magnetosphere and atmosphere that life probably evolved in the first place. It is because of our atmosphere that we can hear sounds and see the colors that we see. From this has come bird songs and symphonies and paintings. The atmosphere bathes our senses.