I think of a standard contra dance as running 8pm-11pm: three hours is a nice amount of time for dancing, and 8pm is late enough that dinner isn't rushed. Looking over the 136 regular Free Raisins dances from 2010 to 2019 matches my impression: 85% were 3hr, 62% started at 8pm, and 51% did both.

I think this is out of date, however, and dances now tend to be earlier, shorter, or both. For example, in the Boston area the regular dances are:

I make breakfast for the kids most mornings, and one thing I didn't realize before I started playing with an air quality monitor was how much this puts smoke in the air. It's not like cooking Naan or searing meat where if I don't put a fan in the window the smoke alarm will go off, but apparently it's quite a lot of particles:

Before our oldest went lactovegetarian I used to make eggy crepes, boosting protein by adjusting the recipe to maximize egg content without giving up crepe flavor and texture. With our youngest, however, I have now (by this metric) the optimal crepe:

Ingredient:

• One egg, beaten

In general, you're not supposed to wear a beard with a respirator mask (N95, P100, etc), at least not in a way where you have facial hair under the seal:

But how much worse is the fit? A P100 with a beard is going to filter less well than a P100 without a beard, but does it do as well as an N95? Or is it hopelessly compromised? And is stubble as bad as a full beard? Does length matter? In an emergency where I really need my mask for protection should I shave?

Bottom line up front: with my rough DIY test setup I got 80% filtration with a long beard, 92% with a short one, and 99.7% with stubble. But see my note at the end about a weird effect I saw.

In the aftermath of a disaster, there is usually a large shift in what people need, what is available, or both. For example, people normally don't use very much ice, but after a hurricane or other disaster that knocks out power, suddenly (a) lots of people want ice and (b) ice production is more difficult. Since people really don't want their food going bad, and they're willing to pay a lot to avoid that, In a world of pure economics, sellers would raise prices.

This can have serious benefits:

• Increased supply: at higher prices it's worth running production facilities at higher output. It's even worth planning, through investments in storage or production capacity, so you can sell a lot at high prices in the aftermath of future disasters.

• Reallocated supply: it's expensive to transport ice, but at higher prices it makes sense to bring it in from much farther away than would normally make sense.

• Reduced demand: at higher prices people who would normally buy ice for less important things (ex: drink chilling) will pass.

• Reallocated demand: if you have a chest freezer full of food, you get more benefit from a given quantity of ice than I would with a mostly empty fridge. All else equal, you are willing to pay more for ice than I am.

On the other hand, raising prices in response to a disaster is widely seen as unfair:

My neck is not great, and spending a lot of time looking down at my laptop screen really aggravates it. After damaging my screen a year ago I used a stacked laptop monitor that folded up, and it worked well. The main place I tended to use at full height was call booths, since otherwise I was usually at a desk with a real monitor or in a meeting with people where I wanted my monitor not to block my view.

My laptop eventually died, and the new one has a screen again. In many ways this is pretty great: my backpack is lighter without carrying around an extra monitor, walking to a conference room I don't have to worry I forgot my monitor, I'm not fiddling with cables. But I do really miss it on calls in the phone booths.

The booths at my work have a kind of soft material that works great with velcro, though, so I decided to try sticking my monitor up that way. It works great: