Lessons in counterintuitive time and energy efficiency
I once was recently asked why I had on the window sill above my sink three partially full squeeze bottles of the same dish soap.
My rationalization of an answer is that I'm terribly efficient. You see, when I'm running low on dish soap, I make sure to buy more and set it next to the old. I'd like to use the old soap before I crack open the new, but when time is of the essence the newer bottle serves my needs much better. When I have the time to wait around a bit, I'll use up the old one. If I pick from my three choices of soap bottles according to time availability, in the end I'm using the same amount of dish soap but saving precious time, so as a system it works out well. Now if I happen to buy varying scents of dish soap, then I can also factor that into the choice according to my immediate tastes, but that's a level of complexity I'm not sure you're ready for.
This all reminded me of a system I discovered long ago, one that I would recommend to any and all: that is when I dry off after a shower, I use at least two towels in succession. Everyone knows concurrent exchange is for suckers, and that's exactly what you get with one towel. As the towel soaks up more of your wetness, the less able it is to do its job, and you're left in the middle of the saturation range, still damp and very sad.
But if you do a quick wipe with one towel and jump to the next, you're throwing in multiple iterations of concurrent exchange for a radical step-wise attempt at countercurrent exchange, which any good lesson in ichthyological physiology will teach you is the real deal.
"But then you have to wash your towels twice as often, negating the benefit of your short-sighted instant gratification!" you (Matt) might say (have said before). My first retort here is that you're spreading the 'towel use' among both (or more) towels you use, so the total usage of the towels remains the same. My second retort is that, you know that these towels are being used to wipe water off of you right after you get out of the shower, right? How dirty could they really get? Washing towels probably has more to do with them being too damp and growing some sort of mold, algae, or phytoplankton--which should be reduced in my design, due to the fact that each towel gets less wet than it would if it were shouldering the whole load itself. So, if anything, this system should also result in less towel washing, especially if you have four or more towels and you rotate through them like you're tightening bolts around an oil pan.
So follow my plan, and you'll find yourself with loads of extra time, which you can use as inefficiently as you like--say, in writing an extraordinarily long-winded blog post about some really insignificant stuff.
My rationalization of an answer is that I'm terribly efficient. You see, when I'm running low on dish soap, I make sure to buy more and set it next to the old. I'd like to use the old soap before I crack open the new, but when time is of the essence the newer bottle serves my needs much better. When I have the time to wait around a bit, I'll use up the old one. If I pick from my three choices of soap bottles according to time availability, in the end I'm using the same amount of dish soap but saving precious time, so as a system it works out well. Now if I happen to buy varying scents of dish soap, then I can also factor that into the choice according to my immediate tastes, but that's a level of complexity I'm not sure you're ready for.
This all reminded me of a system I discovered long ago, one that I would recommend to any and all: that is when I dry off after a shower, I use at least two towels in succession. Everyone knows concurrent exchange is for suckers, and that's exactly what you get with one towel. As the towel soaks up more of your wetness, the less able it is to do its job, and you're left in the middle of the saturation range, still damp and very sad.
But if you do a quick wipe with one towel and jump to the next, you're throwing in multiple iterations of concurrent exchange for a radical step-wise attempt at countercurrent exchange, which any good lesson in ichthyological physiology will teach you is the real deal.
"But then you have to wash your towels twice as often, negating the benefit of your short-sighted instant gratification!" you (Matt) might say (have said before). My first retort here is that you're spreading the 'towel use' among both (or more) towels you use, so the total usage of the towels remains the same. My second retort is that, you know that these towels are being used to wipe water off of you right after you get out of the shower, right? How dirty could they really get? Washing towels probably has more to do with them being too damp and growing some sort of mold, algae, or phytoplankton--which should be reduced in my design, due to the fact that each towel gets less wet than it would if it were shouldering the whole load itself. So, if anything, this system should also result in less towel washing, especially if you have four or more towels and you rotate through them like you're tightening bolts around an oil pan.
So follow my plan, and you'll find yourself with loads of extra time, which you can use as inefficiently as you like--say, in writing an extraordinarily long-winded blog post about some really insignificant stuff.
posted by Peter at
10:09 PM
4 Comments:
wow, that's some good advice .. i don't know how I've been living mono-towely all my life..
My favorite part about this post was how I was thinking "But then you have to wash your towels twice as often, negating the benefit of your short-sighted instant gratification!" before I even read it. Then I was shocked at how predictable I must be. Then I was shocked to learn that I've actually said that before. Then I remembered saying it.
Anyway, I was going to say that I completely stick by it. I was going to start out by saying that studies have shown that the drying your hands with a towel is an essential part of the washing process since the soap and water separates the germs from your hands but doesn't get them all off. I even found corroborative evidence of this on Wikipedia: "It has been shown that the use of a towel is a necessary part of effective contaminant removal, since the washing action separates the contaminants from the skin but does not completely flush them from the skin - removing the excess water (with the towel) also removes the suspended contaminants." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_hands#Effectiveness) But then I did some research, and found only one paper on the subject and it indirectly rejected this hypothesis by showing that towel drying was as effective as using evaporation. (http://www.servu-online.com/PDFFiles/Blogs/restaurant-equipment-information-nonspecific/handdryers-worlddryer-3.pdf)
I'm still not completely convinced, however. I have to get on a plane right now, but I'll try to remember later to explain why I'm still not convinced.
First, thanks to Nancy, apparently a fellow Spring Valley to Berkeley transplant, for reading and commenting. I hope you take this idea and run with it (if it suits you as well as it does me).
As for Matt - I know it's your way to disagree with anything I put on the internet (at least this time you're acting somewhat sensibly, and trying to back your contentions with evidence), but until you come up with something really good, I'll always be able to fall back on the fact that there is tangible benefit to short-sighted instant gratification (see: orange trend on the graphs), the accumulation of which will be hard to beat down by whatever ridiculous theories you propose.
As we both know, bacterial growth occurs at an exponential rate. Let's make it simple and say that a growth equation is
N(t) = [N(0)]*[2^(t/R)]
N = number of cells
t = time (we'll use days here)
R = doubling time for a given bacteria (which we'll take to be 1 day to remain simple)
For our starting variables, we'll say that wiping down exposes your towel(s) to 2 cells of bacteria and that the threshold bacterial colony before a towel needs a wash is 16 cells.
In my system:
16 = 2 * [2^(t/1)]
t = 3
Therefore, I have to wash my towel after day 3
In your system (for each towel)
16 = 1 * [2^(t/1)]
t = 4
Therefore, you're washing 2 towels every 4 days instead of 1 towel every 3. Bam.
So I simplified this by pretending that you only wash on day 1, and let it sit. I don't think that would change much, but again I could be wrong. I leave that to you.
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