Director of the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
jefftk
Karma: 22,721
Boston Secular Solstice 2025
this is (slightly) better for humankind in the long run
We don’t have to get into this here if you don’t want to, but flagging that I’m not convinced of this.
It isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison … do worse by a factor of about 10
Thanks for looking into this! I am pretty skeptical of studies that don’t explicitly compare the two options, because there are really quite a lot of variables that can go into measuring absolute effectiveness that are nicely factored out when you measure relative effectiveness.
The way it’s supposed to work is that going from n95 to n100 should get you from 95% to 99.97% on the worst performing non-oilborne particle size, and then n100 to p100 would get you coverage for oilborne (which we don’t expect to need for a pandemic, but is useful in industry). But I haven’t looked into studies to verify that it does actually work that way in practice.
Please support your local hardware store over Jeff Bezos if you can!
Why?
You might still need to order the right kind of filters online.
Standard p100 filters should be sold anywhere these masks are, so I doubt that would be needed.
the devil tells you to make a train that’s 500 times more deadly than average
Run the train where there are 500x the people?
Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous
The big advantage of far UVC (222nm) is that you don’t have to point the lamps up, because, at least in moderation, it’s safe to shine on people.
With traditional UVC (254nm) that kind of upward pointing installation is very common. Or, at least as common as UVC, which is to say, not very common.
Assessing Far UVC Positioning
SecureBio is Hiring Software Engineers
Better yet, donate.
This takes you to a GWWC page that says:You can donate to several promising programs working in this area via our donation platform. For our charity and fund recommendations, see our best charities page.
But if you click through those links you can see there isn’t a biosecurity fund, and the list of biosecurity-related programs you can donate on GWWC are just NTI and CHS. Which are not bad options, but as someone in the field they’re not where I think funding would go farthest. It would be really great if there were a bio fund, or a bio evaluator!
(Disclosure: I run a project that would plausibly be funded by such a thing)
Attending Your First Contra Dance in a Fragrance-Compliant Manner
massive overestimate
Added something to the end of the post based on a survey I did a few years ago.
I don’t understand either. It’s common within the contra world (ex, from one of the central organizations) to claim that these policies are needed by 30% of people, but as far as I can tell this is a massive overestimate.
My guess is that this comes from having a strong desire to be welcoming and open to all, and the people convincing dances to adopt the policies not being clear about the scale of the request they’re putting on the attendees. And probably some sense that there’s no amount of minor inconvenience to some people that outweighs preventing harm to other people.
Fragrance Free Confusion
All the cases I can think of were for valved masks in situations that required everyone to be wearing unvalved masks; is that also what you’re thinking about?
If there’s another serious pandemic, wearing a slightly larger mask isn’t going to cost many weirdness points.
I don’t know, I felt too awkward to wear a big brightly colored respirator during COVID, even taking into account that I’m a weird guy (I walk around barefoot in cities, I post here) and I was making substantial sacrifices to avoid infection (isolating with my household for over a year). If it were clearly much worse than COVID I think it would be different, but in some cases (ex: a stealth pathogen) there might be a large difference between how worried I was and how I expected others to view it.
Survey Results: Far UVC and Glycol Vapors
The first one on this page, the ElastoMask Pro, filters bidirectionally. I have one and like it, very breathable, good deal. Though it’s one of the worst for intelligibility.
The best is to try them on and see how well they fit your particular face. But very roughly the bigger the distance between your chin and the bridge of your nose is the bigger a mask you need.
Aren’t those less effective at protecting other people than using a mask without a valve?
Yes. On the other hand they have less condensation, are easier to breathe in, and are generally much easier to find in higher protection factors (I’m not aware of any valveless 99%+ efficacy masks)
How many people do you think this is each day? If it’s 1,000 (train runs through busy areas, but most people don’t cross tracks illegally) then the annual cost is ~3.7M minutes.
The the average person killed by a train would have had maybe another ~12M waking minutes [1], so fences that prevented even a death every three years would do more good than harm. And the number of tracks-crossers would have to be super high for fencing not to be worth it.
(But adding signaled crossings or overpasses could be worth it!)
[1] 60 min / hr * 16 waking hr / day * 365 day / year * 35 years