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**DONOTDELETE**
04-09-2002, 04:03 PM
Well, I brought my toys to work today. I decided to see how much one spray from my atomizer would actually be. There have been a lot of calculations on how many mg\'s of pheros were being applied, but I never thought much about it because of the lack of precision that was inherient in the methods used. So I got my stuff out and did the measurements on the expensive balance at work and solved the math at hand and here is the results.

Using an atomizer from the bath and body works, a mix of 0.5 mg pheros / 5 mL of EtOH, one spray worked out to be a little more than 0.005 mg of pheros. The calcs are Posted here (\"http://ogre.ucdavis.edu/calcs.html\") and should be taken with a grain of salt.

I want to stress that this number is really only relavent to the atomizer I used. But, I thought for kicks I\'d do the math and see what would happen.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-09-2002, 04:36 PM
Dude, you have a scale that measures to 0.1 mg, and can weigh things up to 15 grams?! You can answer a lot of questions for us!

1. You should definitely calculate a standard deviation based on 10 or more sprays. The consistency of the spray is just as important as the average amount.

2. Get some stats for dabs, drops, and inches of roll!

You can report everything in ml, since the mg of pheros depends on the concentration of the mix. The forum will thank you!

By the way, your spray works out be be about 0.04 ml, which is 1/3 as big as Scientist reported for the Edge bottle. That doesn\'t surprise me too much. That does case some doubt on how much is in a spray for various bottles though. Highly variable.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-09-2002, 05:01 PM
Well Truth, there are a couple of problems with some of the ideas here. I don\'t really want to spray 10 shots of pheros on me at one time images/icons/smile.gif And the roll of SoE would be tough, I dunno how much I have in my bottle anymore. I could use the density of alcohol (or the one I measured, damn things are temp dep.) Also, I am using 95% EtOH, and things change quite a bit as the composition changes (ie 50% EtOH is going to give different results) Same thing goes with the sprays from the atomizer. If you use different compositions of solvent, it will spray different masses. It is a complicated mess with too many varibles to get a value that would work for everone.

Yeah, the 0.1 mg balance is nice. It cost a fargin\' mint, so the lab had better get some nice use out of it. It\'ll go up to 110 grams, but mind you, the sucker can be tempermental. I have another balance that will measure 0.01 mg, but the error involved is bad (it is physically hard to measure that kind of mass.)

**DONOTDELETE**
04-09-2002, 05:13 PM
Walter/Truth:

You ain jes a kiddin\' on those balances. I was an analytical chemist (PWB plating/cleaning/metals) in a previous life (before I discovered the soft life of geeking computers) and had a lab full of .1 mg (and a couple of .01mg) balances. The phase of the moon weighs more than .01mg images/icons/crazy.gif

Re: spray bottles - I did mine the hard way - 100 sprays into a jar and measure with a calibrated syringe. The main things I found - if you are spraying only once or twice, the dried crap in the sprayer will give you fits. If you are spraying _more_ than a couple of times, loosen the cap! The vacuum created by emptying the contents will _seriously_ affect the results. I was getting .07 ml sprays with the cap on, and closer to .13 ml sprays with the vacuum broken - these on the Calgon (see previous posts) sprayer.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-09-2002, 10:27 PM
BassMan, I understand where you are coming from, while I am now a Physical Biochemist (I know, it is an oxymoron) interested in lipid bilayer dynamics, I used to work in a GC lab. I could tell if I had had one too many cups of coffee with the results from my samples on the GC. But, the newer balances (them there electronic thingies) really do work very well, and are extremely accurate if you set them up correctly (calibrate them with the certified masses.) The bigger problem I find is, well life. The amount of spray that hits you, the consistancy of sprays, and so on. The calcs I put up (with a disclaimer in the title) are for ballpark estimations of that type of atomizer. If I am off by 50% in either direction, it is a few 100ths of a mg. Needless to say, it does give me an idea of what I am doing. As Truth stated, I should have done a bunch of sprays, and hashed out the statistical info. But honestly, to me that is splitting hairs.

For anyone else out there, I have thought about a few other tests to try. Please remember, I can only measure mass here. It is possible to get info on say a 2 inch swipe of SoE. Not much fun on my part, but if I am curious about it, I can do it. I can figure out how much mass is lost for a dab of AE, and so on. In all cases, it is a pain on my part. I have to remove the contents from their bottles, clean the bottles, and add back a specific volumn, all of the time weighing everything at each step. One last note, while I am giggling and fidgeting with curiousity about obtaining all this info, it is my stash of pheros, so progress is not going to be all that quick (I ain\'t going to OD, and I ain\'t all that into wasting things.) More news later images/icons/smile.gif

**DONOTDELETE**
04-09-2002, 10:43 PM
Well, if you have easy access to your scale everyday before you put on the pheros, you can just record the data after each application. This would actually emulate real life dosing better, since sprays and drops are not taken consecutively.

In terms of sprayable mixes, I think most will be at least 4:1 cologne to phero, so you can probably spray alcohol to get a good estimate.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-10-2002, 01:08 AM
Truth, it doesn\'t work well to do that. For accurate measurements, you need to know the mass of the liquid, and it\'s volumn. You cannot make calcs without that info. I guess it is the techno-weenie in me, but those two facts are required for the info to be relevant.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-10-2002, 01:36 AM
How different in density can the ethanol mixed with pheros be? It\'s probably pretty close to the density of water, right (i.e., 1 g/ml)?

Walter, most of us don\'t even know if we\'re in the ball park of what we think we\'re applying. If you can get us an average value within 10-20%, it\'d already be a huge improvement! For instance, your measurement that the body works atomizer gives only about 0.04 ml per spray tells everybody who\'s using the atomizer that he\'s applying 1/3 as much as he had thought (based on higher estimates from the Edge bottle).

**DONOTDELETE**
04-10-2002, 04:24 AM
The density of EtOH + pheros is not _real_ close to the density of water, but I\'ll bet it\'s not far off from that of pure EtOH, and _that_ will be in the handbooks.

Irish
04-10-2002, 06:24 AM
Uh, the engineering vs. science approach:

Measure out 2, 3, 5, whatever ml Everclear into your atomizer. You can measure with a syringe or even those handy plastic medicine cups for a dollar at the drugstore. Spray until it\'s all gone, counting the sprays. Divide the original ml\'s you put in by the number of sprays: that\'s the ml/spray for your atomizer. Plenty of precision for what we\'re doing, esp. since evaluating phero results on \'targets\' is almost completely subjective anyhoo.

Repeat it a few times and average the results if you\'re worried about it. I made a game of it by spraying the Everclear into a coke and drinking it. Now I also knew precisely how much Everclear I had consumed, and noted the effects in detail for future reference.

Since we know the concentration of the stuff we\'re using, just multiply phero concentration [mg/ml] times spray amount you just figured out [ml/spray] times number of sprays to get the total dose of phero delivered to your skin.

By the way, as a sanity check, my month-long survey of the literature (don\'t ask me to justify it with citations - I found a half dozen papers and rigged up working numbers to get a feel - didn\'t keep track of the details) gave a typical naturally-occurring distribution of none on the skin, in the hairy areas of the body, to be about 0.005 micrograms per sq in. That\'s micrograms, not milligrams!! If you spray a shot of TE at a typical distance you\'re distributing over say, 10 sq in of skin, about 300 TIMES what would occur in nature on the skin (in the scent-producing hairy areas of your body). Plus you\'re probably applying it to your head where it\'s even more noticeable than in the natural places of armpit/groin/etc. So this business of telling young guys they produce enough none without supplement is nonsense, if we are applying HUNDREDS of times the natural amount to notice \'results\' in an open non-intimate environment...To tell a young guy none supplement is pointless is the same as telling an older guy that he should dilute TE one part to 300 and that\'s strong enough - he doesn\'t need any more...we know that\'s bogus.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-10-2002, 07:50 AM
Uh, I thought I\'d posted this earlier today, but I guess I got distracted.

Baker EtOH: 0.790 kg/l 20C, 0.743 kg/l 70C.

**DONOTDELETE**
04-10-2002, 12:51 PM
I agree with everyone about the EtOH density thing, I was just concerned about if water is in the mix. The chem kits come with 50% EtOH for diluting, and lord knows how aromas are put together. I imagine that anyone trying to make a profit would want to cut their mix with as much water as they can get away with, it\'s cheap. And the density of water will mess things up.

Next up, on the atomizer. I agree whole heartedly that more numbers on this would give better results. No arguement there. But, the spray that was measured was a full one. I don\'t think that 10 sprays will change the numbers all that much. As for half sprays and so on, guestimate from your starting number. I also mentioned that the atomizer itself is most likely responsible for how much is sprayed. I have an Edge atomizier somewhere, and I\'ll try to get some numbers for everyone. Also, I just wanted to say that the raw info will probably be as good as it gets. As much fun as I am having getting all techno weenie here, I still believe it is an art not a science (application that is images/icons/smile.gif )