What Shall We Become

The train rolled through my small city. I heard the whistle and the steel wheels. I turned in bed and looked at the bedside clock. It displayed 3:00 AM. I watched until it changed to 3:01. I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight.

For some reason, J Robert Oppenheimer was on my mind this past evening. Specifically, I reflected upon his thoughts upon witnessing the death of his creation (and the birth of a new terror) in the New Mexico desert. (I credit Oppenheimer, although he led a team of physicists.) His creation’s code name was Trinity; Oppenheimer gave it that name. Oppenheimer later recalled his thoughts: 

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

But as for that, the end has not arrived. The world may yet end; we have the tools to make it happen. Those tools await the touch of foolish humans. Vishnu, in the form of almost 8 billion of us, may still become the destroyer of our world.

Crossroads

My home life as a child was very stressful. Not just parental arguments (which were daily), but shouting and threats and occasionally the cops showing up, things getting broken, holes punched in doors, that kind of thing. It was a daily occurrence (the constant fighting, not the out-of-control violence). I think it affected me in ways I probably don't understand. My father was an alcoholic and sometimes I had to be the adult in the house. I remember on more than one occasion thinking, "If I don't go crazy I must have the strongest brain in the world." And then I had to go to school and be around kids and pretend everything was fine in my life. Some kids had it worse than I did. Life is a lottery.

One day my school teacher, Mrs. Peck (I was probably about 10 or 11 years old) gave us a paper to have signed by our parents and returned the next day. As usual, Dad was drunk and he and Mom were fighting like cats and dogs. The next morning Dad had left for work and Mom was rushing around trying to get ready to catch the bus to work, no time to sign school papers. Mrs. Peck called me up to the front of the class and berated me for not getting that paper signed by my parents. I felt totally humiliated, but couldn't explain to her the insanity going on in my house. I remember that incident vividly to this day.

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I read the above paragraphs to my friend CyberDave. He's an insightful guy and I wanted his opinion on whether my young life would make good blogging fodder. With his astute insights and penetrating wit, CD could be a blogger. Oh wait, he is a blogger. His blog is on one of those o-t-h-e-r blogging platforms whose name shall not pass my lips because it is a direct competitor to my blogging platform. But there is nothing in the Bloggers’ Code that says I can’t type the URL and embed it into a hyperlink. Like so: CD’s blog. What follows is CD’s comment on my blog post.

CD: That was a crossroads for you ... a watershed moment.

Me: Why do you say that?

CD: Because you made a choice. You could have signed your mother's name, how would the teacher know? You chose honesty.

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And yet, I really didn't choose honesty. I was taught honesty. In fact, forging my mother's name on a school paper was something that would never have occurred to me. Honesty wasn't a choice; it was my default position on (almost) everything. Let me tell you a story about an exception.

When I was a child I loved sci-fi novels, especially the ACE double novels. It was pulp fiction (the double novels) but I was a kid so naturally I loved it.  Paperback novels cost about 35 or 40 cents. One day I ran across a book that cost 60 cents. It was non-fiction, a book about the Universe. What to do, what to do? I did a dishonest thing. I took the book to the checkout, and when the cashier saw it she asked, "How much?" And I replied, "Thirty-five cents." The cashier didn't blink. She rang up 35 cent paperbacks all the time. So she rang up the phony price.

That minor dishonesty, a mere 25 cents, has bothered me to this day. I don't think about it on a daily basis, but the memory hasn't faded. The memory returns when something triggers it. Maybe the tongue-lashing I received from Mrs. Peck was payback for that minor theft. But was the theft in the past or in the future of my encounter with Mrs. Peck? Can you receive payback now for something that you will do tomorrow or next week? I don't know. It's karma, and there are things I don't know about karma. People who have been to the “other side” and returned to tell the tale say that time doesn’t exist there. Maybe. Sometimes I feel I’ve been given far more payback than the number of bad deeds I’ve committed.

And what about CD? Did he ever sign his mother’s name on a school paper? In fact, he did. Once. And he got caught. Parents’ signatures were on file at that school—allegedly. That’s what the teacher told CD. I find it difficult to believe a schoolteacher will run 30 or 40 kids’ signatures against a “paper database” of signatures to find a kid who forged his mother’s signature. She probably looked at it and thought “that’s a child’s handwriting, but he’ll deny it unless I make him believe I have his mother’s signature on file.” I think the teacher pulled a bluff, and CD should have called her bluff and said, “It’s her signature, so let’s have a look at your file.” I think of all the angles.

Today, and for as long as I’ve known him, CD is honest as the day is long. But maybe that single instance of cheating and getting caught was his crossroads. Sometimes a seemingly insignificant thing has unforgettable consequences. It becomes a watershed moment. We do something we know is wrong. It’s not the size of the deed or the size of the theft that matters. What matters is: we know we are doing something wrong and we do it anyway. That must go ten-fold for youngsters in their formative years.

The first crime is trivial, but the path diverges. The next time you are tempted, you can choose honesty. But if you take the wrong turn, each succeeding transgression becomes easier. I like to think God, or the Universe, or the Next World was sending me a signal. “Go ahead, kid, lie about the price of that book. It’s a trivial matter, but you will find out what it feels like to be a thief.” If that is what happened, the lesson was well learned.

The poet Robert Frost wrote a beautiful poem titled “The Road Not Taken.” It is one of my two favorite Robert Frost poems (the other poem being “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”). “The Road Not Taken” is,  according to people who should know (Google) the most popular poem in America. The poem’s copyright has expired, so I can include it here.

There are only 4 stanzas of 20 verses. But it is the first and final stanzas that speak to me and are relevant to this blog post. Robert Frost wrote this poem as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. Frost and Thomas frequently hiked the countryside together and whenever they came to a diverging path, Thomas had great indecision about which path to take and frequently regretted whatever path the pair took. That became frustrating for Frost. Hence, the poem came to be. Frost was gently mocking his friend’s indecision. The poem has multiple levels of meaning, depending on the reader.

When Frost gave his first public reading of the poem, he was quite disappointed when the audience took his poem seriously. If this is a sample of Robert Frost’s humor, he should have written more humor. However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” So who knows?

      The Road Not Taken

          by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We’ve all traveled different paths to get where we are, and we’ve all made mistakes. None of us are perfect. Alexander Pope, in his "Essay on Criticism", said “to err is human; to forgive, divine.”

Mistakes don’t make us bad people; they make us human. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes. If we don’t learn, we are destined to repeat them, again and again. That cannot end well.

Random Stuff at Midnight

The clock is ticking past midnight. For no particular reason, I considered my meals today.

Breakfast: Mostly chopped cabbage with pomegranate dressing.

Lunch: Deviled ham on toast.

Dinner: Raisin Bran cereal. I didn’t put milk on it because I don’t drink milk. Usually I put almond milk on cereal, which is modestly better than plain water, but I didn’t have any almond milk. So I put the cereal in a bowl and ate it dry. I have to say, it was pretty good. (I’m not particular when it comes to food, as you might have guessed.) For dessert, I ate a 4 ounce snack cup of chocolate pudding.

Bedtime snack: a banana and a couple tablespoons of peanut butter.

All in all, I feel I ate a well-balanced diet today. If I had alcohol in the house, I would drink a few too many drinks and go to bed. But I have no alcohol. Thank you, Dry January.

I was thinking about the Navy Captain who was “relieved of command” (fired) because he asked for help with an outbreak of Covid-19 on his ship. SecNav said the Captain copied his request for help to too many people. I imagine the Captain tried using the chain of command first, and when that didn’t work he grew frustrated and went around the chain of command. SecNav said the Captain used poor judgment. I think he used great judgment and he accomplished what needed to be done to protect his crew. He was fired because he embarrassed some higher-up, and that person wanted payback. I don’t know who was embarrassed but my money is on SecNav himself.

If the Captain had done the “right” thing and waited for the slow-moving Navy brass to act on his request, and if, as a result, some of his sailors had died, then the Captain would be blamed for that. He was in a no-win situation. When you’re in a lose-lose situation, you take the path that does the least harm, and that’s what the Captain did. Kudos to Captain Crozier.

Almost 1 AM now. Goodnight all.

Another Day in the Pandemic

Lying in bed in my dark bedroom, I heard the train whistle. I heard the rumble of the wheels. The rumble went on and on. I knew it was a freight train; passenger trains aren’t that long. I rolled over in bed and looked at the clock. It read 3:53 AM. I had not yet gone to sleep. I knew sleep would not come and I might as well get up.

Coronavirus: almost a million cases confirmed and 47,273 deaths worldwide. In the US, almost 217,000 cases confirmed and 5,137 deaths. It will soon be higher, the experts say. Much higher.

I canceled a doctor appointment yesterday. It was a routine annual visit, so it wasn’t important. Why chance it? The last person to enter the clinic might have coughed into his hand before opening the door. Then I come along and grab the same door handle, and now I have his germs on my hand. Later I’m sitting in the waiting room and my nose itches. Without thinking, I scratch my nose with my germy fingers. Next thing I know, I’m in the hospital. That’s one way the pandemic can get you.

I ponder going to the grocery store. I’m out of chocolate chip cookies. Is it worth risking death for chocolate chip cookies? It might be. I can’t decide.

People ask me how I’m handling the isolation. They don’t understand that isolation has been my lifestyle for years. And as for “stocking up” on supplies, I’ve never done that. If the store is out of one thing, it will have another. You “make do.” Maybe you can’t make the meal you’d like to make, but you can still eat. You open cans or boxes and throw odds and ends together and make something entirely new. You “get by.”

You can live without eating meat. You can live without eating vegetables. In fact, you can live without eating anything at all for longer than you might think. After three days, you quit being hungry. I’ve done it. But you must drink plenty of water. If you don’t, you will get dehydrated, and then bad things can happen and you can end up at the ER. I’ve done that, too.

It’s 4:40 AM now. Time to hit the Publish button. To all my readers, have a nice day and be careful out there.

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.