I'm working out the logistics for trialing triethelyne glycol for pathogen control at a contra dance, and I need something to put the liquid glycol into the air. I'd initially been thinking of using a fog machine, but after discussion with friends who work in the area it sounds like an ultrasonic humidifier would work better. Instead of using heating and cooling, these use vibration, and put out much smaller droplets.

I got a random cheap humidifier on Amazon ($30) but (a) TEG is more viscous than the water its designed for and (b) its output is probably higher than I need. I decided I'd dilute the TEG to resolve both of these.

Before having kids I thought teaching them to clean up would be similar to the rest of parenting: once they're physically able to do it you start practicing with them, and after a while they're independent and do it reliably. You invest time and effort up front, but it pays back reasonably quickly with benefits for both you and the kid. While we've (n=3) had good success in some areas (street safety, microwave usage, walking to school, tooth brushing, ...), tidying has not been one of these.

Early on I tried a lot of getting them to clean up, but it was very slow, tended to dissolve into battles, and didn't seem to be getting much better over time. Instead, we've mostly moved to finding specific places where they can take on a bounded responsibility. The goal is to give them practice without overwhelming them, and to use natural consequences to avoid fights:

I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time, and when I taste one it's already getting too mushy. I decided to run a small experiment to get a better sense of how cooked I like pasta.

I decided to use Market Basket Rigatoni. [1] It's a ridged cylinder, and I measured the ridges at 1.74mm:

I play by ear, and when I write tunes I normally save them by making a recording. This isn't ideal for sharing, though, especially with people who are more comfortable learning tunes from dots. I last had a go at this ten years ago, and decided to give it another try.

BIDA has now finished its second year alternating between mask-optional and mask-required dances. What effect does this have on attendance?

I tried to look at this in January 2024, but with only eleven dances it was hard to say. Now that we have four times as many, we can get a better sense:

Cross-posted from the BIDA Blog

As we go into winter, we're thinking about infection reduction. Our primary approaches are requiring high-filtration masks at half our dances (which we'll run another survey on in early Fall) and bringing in large amounts of outside air, but we're interested in exploring a variety of options. Two promising candidates are far UVC and glycol vapors, and we'll trial both at our September 7th dance.

This is primarily a logistical test: we won't be able to tell whether these are working for pathogen control (that's what the studies linked below are for). Instead, we're trying to get a sense for how well these fit our particular space, and how practical they would be for regular use.