Michael E. Gruen

I wonder if there are categorizable styles for toweling off.

Every time I exit a shower, bath, or pool, I dry myself off in a consistent, particular manner. How did this come about? Do other people use their towels in as a consistent manner as I do? I hope so, because then we can compare towel-usage with heat maps. 

I use three sizes of towels: a bath sheet (60″ × 35″), a bath towel (52″ × 27″) and a hand towel (30″ × 16″). I was curious not only how I was using the towel, but if changing towel size changed the usage pattern. So, I took three showers and dried myself off once with each towel.

The darker areas indicate higher use. The patterns represent both sides of the towel, in aggregate.

Bath Sheet (60″ × 35″):

Bath Towel (52″ × 27″):

Hand Towel (30″ × 16″):

From the maps, we can see I’m a very symmetric towel user, with a focus on the center. I also tend not to evenly utilize my towel’s drying power.

Perhaps I could optimize.

How do you use your towel?

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Some stories wonderfully capture family tradition. This one frames mine nicely.

Last night, my family sat for passover seder. If done “correctly”, seders can last hours. Ours takes ten minutes– tops. We’re big on shortcuts. 

My grandfather distributes the Concise Family Seder, a tome used by nearly all secular jews. “Page 1.” He speaks to no one in particular. He motions to my aunt, “Janey, care to start?”

“Sure. Mine’s got annotations.”

“Oh,” I say, “that’s my copy. I crossed out all the boring stuff and condensed everything when I ran seder five years ago.” 

Beat. Part pinball machine, part middle-school volleyball player, my uncle lurches for the annotated copy and flings it over to me. No one is surprised. Looks like I’m in charge.

“Page one” I begin, ” is crossed out… as are pages two and three. Alright, Janey, bottom of page four, where it reads, ‘A participant continues’. You’re a participant. Continue.”

We read some, skip most, dip eggs in salt water, and charge through the ceremony. Though we unabashedly compress most of the seder, we pause for my grandmother’s speech. Probably the most important part of our seder, she reflects (at great length) on how wonderful it is that we’re together, the tragedy of the Holocaust, how the message of Passover reflects on modern times, and so forth.

As she often does, Grandma brings a prop. She motions to a brass cup, placed on the center of the seder table and filled with wine, found at a flea market in Germany.

“This cup of Elijah was an heirloom of a German Family. It’s engraved, dated [somewhere around 1930]. … It was cared for over all these years, and now we use it as our cup of Elijah.”

Janey examines the cup and whispers something in my uncle’s ear. My grandmother continues, “Why are you talking over me? Anyway, Daddy [my grandfather] insisted we have this seder. … He believes it’s an important tradition that we should carry on. … like that German family showed, seders are important. …” and so forth. After five minutes of this, she stops.

“Mom,” Janey says, “that cup is a first-place trophy for a ski competition.”

She was nearly right. The cup reads:

1. PRIES
SCHLITTLI RENNEN
ENGELBERG. JAN. [12th 1930]

Which roughly translates as:

1st Place
Toboggan Run
Engelberg. January [12th 1930]*

We’re big on shortcuts. The truth shouldn’t get in the way of a good story or powerful teaching.

Perhaps this is the true meaning of passover. 

More: Engelberg – Translation: “Angel Mountain”

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*I forget the actual date. To boot, chances are good it belonged to a Nazi.

I wonder what the exchange rate is on Dunbar’s number.

Popularized by Tipping Point, Dunbar’s number suggests that there’s a limit to social cognition. Roughly speaking, 150 people can form a tight social group; any larger and closeness suffers. Inasmuch, we sacrifice intimacy and trade familiarity for breadth. Is there an optimal social mix?

I’m not critiquing Dunbar’s accuracy or claiming we cap our friendships at 150 people. (My 800 Facebook “friends” might think ill of me for saying so.) But, I inherently feel a physical limit to my intimate capacity: it’s impossibly difficult to know — to really know — a certain number of people. 

To achieve such feats in friendship, I trade intimacy for connectivity. There are ten people I have always been close with (family included), and another twenty or so that are close friends. Call it thirty.

Using 150 as a benchmark, this leaves 120 slots. Using my 800 Facebook-friends as an indicator of my extended network, this means that 800 fit into those 120 intimate slots. Very roughly speaking, I trade one close friend for 6.67 acquaintances.

By comparison, consider someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble. Assume each has thirty close friends. Both hit the 5,000-friend limit on Facebook. That’s at least 42 acquaintances per close friend slot. That’s a lot of people. Both are connected to thousands more.

I wonder at what point, between the 800 I have and the 5,000 (and more) they have, can they not keep track of, let alone remember, those acquaintances.

What if I were to try to know — to really know — those 800 people I’m connected with. How far could I get?

Or would I just lose intimacy with everyone?

Is that what we’re doing to ourselves?

More: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes