Lawn-Mowing Season

When I moved into my central-Virginia home, lawn-mowing season began in early May. After two or three years passed, I had to mow in late April. Then mid-April. Then early April. Then late March. You get the idea. Every two or three years, lawn-mowing season begins a little earlier.

This year, lawn-mowing season began on March 9 (technically still winter). The lawn needed mowing again ten days later but I procrastinated—partly because it’s what I do, and partly because we’ve had rainy weather on and off. Today, March 29, I mowed again. The day was hot so I waited until late afternoon, when the outside temperature had cooled to 89°F (according to the National Weather Service).

In 2015, Senator James Inhofe declared global warming was a hoax and for proof he held up a snowball in Congress. While that day happened to be very cold in the eastern US, 2015 overall ranked as the hottest year ever recorded globally (a record we broke again in 2016). I want the senator to come to my house one late winter day and tell me my grass is not tall. I imagine he’ll say, “Your grass is not tall; it’s merely very un-short.” And bring your snowball, senator. Where I live, we don’t see many of them any more.

Grocery Shopping in the Era of Hoarding

I stay indoors in self-isolation for the week. (Not because of the pandemic. It's just my lifestyle these days.)

Then comes Saturday and I feel the need to run out to the grocery store. I know Walmart will be slammed, so I go to a Food Lion. Business there is so-so, but I have to wonder...

Do people in this city not keep anything in stock at their homes? These shelves held toilet paper and paper towels. Notice they are empty.They were fully stocked this morning. Is there an epidemic of diarrhea?

And this freezer held ... who knows what? It's all gone now. Nothing left but price tags.

I suppose this is the way it is all across the country. Hoarders come into the store and buy up everything. Even when their own home is groaning under the weight of months worth of food, toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, and more, the hoarders are not satisfied. I hear their chants:

Must have more!
Must have all of it!

Covid-19 Update

On February 3, I wrote this:

At this moment, there are 17,496 cases confirmed worldwide, with 17,308 of those cases in China. There are 11 cases in the US. There have been 362 deaths from Coronavirus, all of them in China.

Now, 53 days later, the above statement needs amending. The new statement is:

At this moment, there are 595,953 cases confirmed worldwide, with 81,905 of those cases in China. There are 104,007 cases in the US. There have been 27,333 deaths from Coronavirus, with 1,693 deaths in the US.

The US has passed China to become the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. This chart shows cases in the US as of March 26.

Is it time to panic? No, it’s never time to panic. But it is past time to get serious about doing what the CDC tells us to do.

This is also a reminder of why the US should have universal healthcare. Do we really want sick people spreading a deadly disease because they can’t afford medical care?

Chart created by John Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE).

Behind the Curve

The problem we have with the impending Covid-19 epidemic in the US is that the Chief Executive is neither a mathematician nor an aviator. Chances are that he’s never given a lot of thought to the math behind exponential growth, nor has he ever heard the expression “behind the curve.”

A pandemic spreads because of a factor called R0 (pronounced R-naught). R0 is the average number of people who will catch a disease from an infected person. So if R0 is 1, then 10 infected people will infect 10 more people. The original 10 people will get well or die, removing themselves from the pool of infectious people, to be replaced by 10 new infected people. So the number of infected people is stable, neither growing nor shrinking.

If R0 is 2.5, then 10 infected people will infect 25 more people. The original 10 people will get well or die, to be replaced by 25 new infected people. Therefore the number of infected people jumps from 10 to 15 (the 25 new people minus the original 10), an increase of 50%. That 50% increase might occur in a few days, or a week, or a month. Mathematicians call this “exponential growth.” It drives financial growth for people who invest their savings carefully and regularly. Over a long enough time period, their small monthly investments can become a very large amount of money because of compound interest. Now imagine that the “investment” is not money but sick people, and the interest rate is R0, and the compounding rate is how long it takes for an infectious group to infect a new group. The result is exponential growth of infection—an epidemic driven by the rules of compound interest. Except instead of money in bank accounts, we have bodies in cemeteries.

Another example I prefer from the world of aviation is the expression “behind the curve” or “on the back side of the curve.” The curve in this expression is the so-called power curve (or power required curve) of an airplane. The power curve is a curve on a chart that displays aircraft engine power on the vertical axis and airspeed on the horizontal axis. The curve is approximately U-shaped or J-shaped. Pilots try to keep their aircraft on the front side of the curve, ahead of the curve’s minimum point on the chart. This is the region where increased engine power produces increased airspeed and, conversely, decreased engine power produces decreased airspeed. But if the plane’s airspeed continues to drop, engine power will eventually reach a minimum value. A further decrease in speed requires more engine power to remain airborne. Further decreases in speed require further increases in engine power. This counterintuitive region of flight is called the region of reversed command. If the plane has plenty of altitude, it may experience an aerodynamic stall and begin to fall, which leads to increased airspeed, which leads to stall recovery and all is well. However, if the plane is close to the ground (as it is on takeoff) and the pilot does not have enough altitude to bring the nose down and get to the front of the power curve, then a crash is inevitable.

What does this have to do with the coronavirus? The reason doctors and medical experts have been aggressive about stopping the spread of the virus is because they know if they are not sufficiently aggressive now, then by the time it becomes obvious to everyone that we should have done more, sooner, it will already be too late. In the fight against the virus, the country will be “behind the curve” and a disaster becomes unavoidable.

The Senior Expiration

This headline is from a news website:

Older people would rather die than let Covid-19 harm US economy – Texas official

They’re writing about Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. He seems to think seniors would rather die than allow Covid-19 to hurt the US economy.

I wonder if he’s right about what seniors would want. Let’s run a hypothetical scenario through our collective minds. But we’ll replace the slow, agonizing death from disease with a much faster death.

You’re a senior. You’re in your house when there’s a knock on the front door. You open the door. A man from the government is standing at your door and he’s holding a loaded revolver. He tells you he must kill you so that the economy will continue to function well—so that everybody else can have a bigger paycheck and buy more expensive toys and drive a newer car.

“Are you cool with that?” he wants to know. Because it’s up to you. If you are selfish and want to live, then he won’t kill you, but there will be definite consequences. The man ten houses down the street whom you’ve never met will lose his job and will no longer be able to afford both a wife and a girlfriend. The street urchin who always uses your yard as a shortcut to his mall hangout will have to forego an upgrade to his phone and therefore won’t be able to use Zoom to chat with his homies. And the unknown vandal who broke out your car window one night just for fun will have his government entitlements reduced by ten percent. So what do you tell the government man with the gun?

Lieutenant Dan might be right. After reflecting upon the above scenarios and perhaps a few similar ones that occur to you, and after giving them due consideration, you might indeed tell the government man, “Kill me now.”

The TP Escalation

With recent panic-buying, hoarding, and consumer-inflicted shortages of various products, toilet paper and possible shortages of it have been in the news of late. This blog post isn’t about any of that. I just want to complain to the toilet paper industry about something that’s been happening to toilet paper in recent years. This seems like a good time to do that, while TP is in the news.

The rolls are getting smaller. For years, the diameter of a roll has been shrinking while the diameter of the tube the paper is wound on has been getting larger. This has led the toilet paper industry to invent a new kind of toilet paper product. I call it the virtual roll.

Consider, for example, this package of toilet paper I purchased. It’s small enough to fit comfortably under my arm, and yet the toilet paper industry would have us believe I just bought 72 rolls of paper. The package contains 18 rolls of paper but the toilet paper people want us to believe each roll of paper is really 4 rolls.

Dream on, toilet paper people. We buy your product because it fills a need, not because of your ridiculously inflated numbers on the package. You can say 72 rolls all day long, but we all know the package holds 18 rolls of paper. Why not leave it at that and quit pretending your customers can’t count past 18, and we’ll pretend you have at least a modicum of respect for your customers’ intelligence.

Heaven

To cope with my self-imposed isolation (which, frankly, gets easier to bear after the first ten years have passed), I began pretending I’ve died and gone to heaven. Of course, there’s no one else there. (Heaven has strict entrance requirements.) Wait—it just occurred to me—does the real heaven have Internet? Probably not. How would you get a computer into heaven? You can’t phone the computer store (assuming heaven has phones) and order a PC with a shipping label that says “Deliver To: Heaven.”

Or maybe you can. Many years ago I was an engineer at a company that manufactured mobile robots. Occasionally, we shipped a robot to a customer in another country. One day I wandered into the shipping department and the man in charge was getting a robot ready for shipping. The robot was packed inside a sturdy wooden crate. I noted the address label glued to the side of the crate. The label read (I’ve replaced the consignee’s real name),

Deliver To:
Mr. John Smith
The Netherlands

That was it. The consignee’s entire address was “The Netherlands.”

Maybe you’ve heard of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and The Hague. Those are cities in The Netherlands. That’s right: The Netherlands (sometimes informally called Holland) is a country of over 17 million people.

After I lowered my eyebrows to their normal location, a very short conversation ensued between me and the Shipping Department Guy.

Me: “That’s the address you’re giving the freight company?”
Guy: “Yes.”
Me: “Where’s the rest of the address? The city, the street?”
Guy: “That’s all I have.”
Me: “Oka-a-a-ay.”

I spun an about-face and walked out. I decided to take the Sgt. Schultz approach. I see nothing … I was not here … I did not even get up this morning. I could see a shipping fiasco in someone’s future.

But where was I? Oh yeah, heaven. I think we can conclude that heaven doesn’t have Internet. Nor does it have bars, beer, wine, whiskey shots, hot waitresses, Nascar, Super Bowls, or any manner of sex. In fact, the list of things heaven won’t have is a very long list. So what does Heaven have? According to pop culture, it has clouds to sit on, halos to polish, and humans with wings. I suggest we all go there with low expectations, then maybe the boredom won’t kill us all. Oh right, we’ll already be dead. Just as well.

Oven Trouble

The day is 87°F and sunny and breezy in my central Virginia city. The front window near me and the back door are open, allowing a nice draft to pass through the room.

Last night I was heating a frozen dinner when the microwave oven died. The hour was late and parts stores were closed. So I moved the partially heated dinner to a skillet on the stove and finished heating it. I put a little avocado oil in the skillet, set the temperature to medium, and plopped the dinner into the skillet. I let it heat for 20 minutes, and every few minutes I added a small amount of water and stirred the dinner. It tasted fine. Best of all I had no symptoms of food poisoning, and that’s always a plus.

This morning I removed the oven’s sheet metal housing, then I removed the main fuse and checked it. It was blown, as I expected. So I drove to a nearby store and bought a new fuse for a dollar. I returned home and installed the fuse and replaced the sheet-metal cabinet back on the oven. I placed a glass of water in the oven and ran the oven for 15 seconds. I checked the water; it was hot. Mission accomplished.

Microwave ovens have become inexpensive. If an oven quits working most people will throw it away and buy another. Even if you have a warranty it probably covers only the cost of parts, not labor. But if I can repair it in 30 minutes, including driving to a store for a part, and if that 30 minutes saves me $100, then I have done the financial equivalent of working a half hour at a pay rate of $200/hour. At that pay rate, I can’t afford to not make the repair.

Although, this same oven went down just over two years ago and I repaired it. So this was the second repair. If it goes down a third time, it’s on its own. I hope it knows that.

Hoarding

Humans commonly do things that are against their best interests. Humans will do one thing in order to avoid another thing, but their avoidance behavior sometimes brings about the thing they were trying to avoid.

For example, people become afraid that stores will run out of TP, so they rush to the stores to stock up on TP, with the result that the store runs out of TP. Something that was plentiful with no danger of shortage suddenly vanishes from the shelves for the simple reason that people were afraid that it would vanish from the shelves. There is a name for this phenomenon: it’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. A thing becomes true because we act as if it is already true.

There are numerous kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. One kind is called the Pygmalion Effect. In this, our beliefs about ourselves influence our actions toward others, which impact others’ beliefs about us and thereby causes their actions to reinforce our beliefs about ourselves.

Hoarding is something that might be good for the individual but is bad for the community. I say “might be good” for the individual, because it’s possible for a hoarder to be impacted by another hoarder who is buying up things the first hoarder hasn’t thought of. It’s a “what goes around comes around” situation.

Hoarding and prepping are things modern people do. There was a time when people lived off the land. They hunted, they fished, they trapped. They carried enough food for a few days. Now it’s modern times and folks “stock up”.

I’ve got a few extra cans of beanie weenies, and a few cans of tuna fish. Other than that, I’m relying on food stores. But if the food stores fail me, well … the woman who lives across the street has way too many cats. I doubt she’ll miss a few.

Early Morning

Covid-19 is in my county now. Notice I said county (not country). It’s probably been here for weeks but now it’s officially here, as certified by the CDC. Am I worried? No. And that worries me. Because, shouldn’t I be worried? Lots of other people are worried, though it appears they’re mostly news people. And stock market people, who worry about everything.

I used to be a stock market person. I got out of the market because after a while, I noticed that my investments always shrunk. My understanding is that this is common. What usually happens when you invest in stocks is their value goes down. Then it goes down some more, and then some more, and finally you bail. You sell the investment and that makes the stock price go back up. It didn’t take long for me to get tired of that game.

I got up at 5AM today and made a BLT sandwich for breakfast. It was delicious. Then at 9AM I made a salad. It had red and green cabbage, cauliflower, kale, arugula, cherry tomatoes, bleu cheese crumbles, pecan pieces, and honey mustard dressing. And it, too, was delicious. Here’s a photo:

The salad appears small in the photo, but that’s because of two factors. One, the bowl is large. And two, the salad is small.

It’s 9:30AM and I’ve eaten two meals. I’m beginning to see why I’ve been gaining weight lately.

Goodbye Television

Soon I will lose all my TV channels. I’ve lost NBC and ABC. Tomorrow I will lose CBS, Fox, and PBS. That’s all the channels my TV receives.

I’m a cord-cutter—I gave up cable TV a long time ago. I don’t watch a lot of television, and antenna TV satisfied my TV requirements. Because all the local stations were on the UHF band, I didn’t need an outdoor antenna. A small UHF antenna the size of a book is parked in my front window and it’s all I need for local stations.

But the FCC has reassigned my local stations to the VHF band, which is lower in frequency than the UHF band. To receive those VHF stations I will need a larger, rooftop antenna. There was a time when almost every house sported a rooftop antenna mounted to its chimney. That time is long past and I’m not going back.

What bothers me is the lie being propagated by the FCC that we don’t need to buy any new equipment. They tell us all we need to do is rescan our TVs. While that may be true for some TV owners who live close enough to a transmitting antenna, I (and doubtless others) will not receive TV signals without a VHF antenna. For me, that means buying an antenna with a rotor. My brick chimney is old enough that I fear the mortar might be damaged by the stress of a chimney mounted antenna and rotor, so I’ll have to find another method of mounting an outdoor antenna—most likely, I’ll have to attach an antenna mast to the end of my house, a method that comes with its own set of challenges.

So no over-the-air TV in my house for a while. But there’s the Internet. Some TV shows are available there, though not necessarily on the day they are aired. And if worse comes to worst, there are books. Remember those?

Why People Like Trump

If you’re old enough to remember the TV show “All in the Family,” then you remember Archie Bunker. I’ve come to realize that Donald Trump is the Archie Bunker of presidents.

People liked Archie. He was cranky and crotchety, he was a little racist and a little homophobic, and I’m sure he thought women belonged in the kitchen.  But people liked Archie because he said things out loud that many viewers could only think of saying. If you didn’t see a part of yourself in Archie, you probably saw someone you knew: a father, an uncle, a neighbor, a co-worker.

I liked Archie. Despite his faults, he was an amusing and likeable character. But I didn’t want Archie to be our president.

Donald reminds me of Archie in certain ways. When Trump isn’t giving us his thoughts on something he knows little about, he’s giving us his thoughts on something he knows nothing about. Sometimes he’s right despite himself. The problem is, as the proverb goes, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Maybe Trump will be the exception to the rule. Maybe he’ll be the Archie Bunker who does the right thing for the wrong reasons. We’d better hope so, because we’re all in this boat together and Trump is steering.