Tag: quarantine

• Pandemic-era hand sanitizer

  The hand sanitizer that smells like bad tequila needs to go.

  — Brandon Donnelly (@donnelly_b) September 1, 2020

  I have been trying (albeit not very hard) to come up with the best way to describe the stinky hand sanitizer that is going around these days. Then today somebody in the office described it as bad tequila and I immediately thought, “yup, that’s exactly it. It’s bad tequila.” See above tweet.

  Turns out, there’s some science behind this stink. Here is an article by Gregory Han from the New York Times that was shared in response to my tweet. And here is the excerpt that explains where this stink comes from:

  “That off-putting smell—sometimes described as rotten garbage or tequila-like—is the natural byproduct of ethanol being made from corn, sugar cane, beets, and other organic sources,” explained Zlotnik. “[Ethyl alcohol] production is highly regulated. It stinks because these new brands—many made by distillers who’ve pivoted from producing drinking alcohol to meet public demand for hand sanitizer—are making and using denatured ethanol. This ethanol costs significantly less than ethanol filtered using activated carbon filtration, which would typically remove almost all contaminants and the malodor with it.”

  Those organic contaminants aren’t the only reason unfiltered and denatured ethanol smells downright foul. According to Zlotnik, denatured ethanol is also intentionally tainted with an unpalatable cocktail of chemicals (denaturants) such as methanol, acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, and denatonium to make it undrinkable. In other words: The base material is intentionally stinky.

  So now you can judge accordingly after you’ve cleansed your hands with rotten garbage tequila.

  On a somewhat related note, Jill Lepore has an interesting piece in this week’s New Yorker about the great indoors, and how quarantine has forced us to spend even more of our time indoors. (Though, that hasn’t been the case for me this summer.) Here’s a snippet:

  The Great Confinement varies by place and by wealth, and, historically, it’s new. “Over several millennia, humans have evolved from an outdoor species into an indoor one,” Allen and Macomber write. Citing E. O. Wilson, they explain, “We evolved in the African savannah’s wide-open expanses, intimate with nature and seeking protection under tree canopies,” and so “our genetic hardwiring, built over millennia, still craves that connection to nature.” To satisfy this craving, photographs of redwoods adorn hospital waiting rooms; you can pop into the Grand Canyon via Zoom. I used to think these dodges were better than nothing, but I’ve changed my mind. Zoom is usually not better than nothing.

  2020.09.01

• Personalities and places

  Here is an interesting study about personalities and places (Journal article here and study here). It is interesting because so many of us are working from home and away from our regular environments. But it is also interesting because a lot of us, here on this blog, are in the business of creating spaces. And these environments have an impact on all of us.

  The researchers for this study started by assessing the personalities of some 2,000 university students. The objective was to determine their baseline temperaments according to the “Big Five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Once that was established, the students were sent out into the world with a location-based app on their phone.

  Four times a day, the participants were asked to enter their current location, as well as answer a few questions about their current state of mind. The big takeway from this study is twfold and is as follows: “People actively select their environments, and the environments they select can alter their psychological characteristics [both] in the moment and over time.”

  The first bit is perhaps not all that surprising. We all have different personality traits and we choose environments that suit what we like. Extroverts, for example, tend to spend less time at home and more time at restaurants, bars, clubs, and at friends’ places. (Presumably this means that quarantine was a lot harder for extroverts.)

  The second part of this finding suggests that once we have actively chosen where we want to be, that environment then impacts how we feel at that exact moment, as well as over a certain period of time. You’ll have to read the study for the nuances around this. But it is fascinating to me because it helps me explain why I feel different now that I’m mostly working from home.

  Beyond poor video call connections and the lack of in-person collaboration, there also seems to be the psychological impact of not being in a particular environment. Not having to commute is a nice feature, particularly for some, but it also means not being around colleagues and not being able to meet for that impromptu craft beer. Turns out those things matter for our mental state.

  2020.07.09