Ezra Klein's interview with Annie Murphy Paul explains why I hate online school so much-- Paul's new book "The Extended Mind" dismantles the "computer model" of the human brain; computers are neat-- wherever you put them, as long as it's not too hot, they compute the same answer . . . your computer can be by a window, among lots of smart people in a coffee shop, on the floor of an industrial slaughterhouse, whatever . . . it will compute-- but our minds are extensions of what is around-- other people, a lovely landscape, white noise, an open office, gunfire, etc.-- and that totally influences our thoughts-- and being alone in a room staring at tiny muted icons of students on a screen destroys whatever creative groove I might occasionally find myself in . . . we are not designed to sit still (although school and work are often systemically based on this supposition) and we need a lot of tricks and stimulus and motivation to concentrate for any length of time . . . which is exactly what school is for: group work and making posters and switching classes and writing on the board . . . and-- for em-- pacing around, reading stuff aloud-- that's what I like to do (I did realize this finally, and put my computer on the counter and then paced a bit while I read something, and the students rejoiced but it's not the same) and while our classrooms need to reflect these ideas more, so that kids can learn better, online school doesn't reflect this at all . . . it's a mess and I hope we are back next Monday.
Here We Go Again?
The world is getting weird yet again because of the pandemic; yesterday I was tailgating at the Jets/Tampa game . . . partying with tens of thousands of (mainly unmasked) people, watching Tom Brady shatter dreams once again (he threw a game winning touchdown with 15 seconds left) but today I will be teaching on a computer, as my school has gone virtual (mainly due to lack of staffing, apparently not only do loads of students have COVID, but also loads of teachers and bus drivers and nurses, etc.)
Dave's Book List for 2021
1. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
2. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes To a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
3. Mooncop by Tom Gaul
4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
5. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
7. Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill (with Jake Rosen)
8. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh
9. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
10. A Children's Bible by Lydia MilletFinal Pub Night of 2021
The final Thursday pub night of 2021 was oddly reminiscent of a pub night a year ago-- but there were some notable changes; we started at Ashley's for some smoked cheese and liquor-- he's got some glass contraption that you stick stuff under and it gets all smoky and Ashley-- who works in healthcare and was once nervous about the consequences of COVID, has now given up worrying-- his daughter just had it but Colleen and him didn't contract it from her and then we went to Steakhouse 85 for drinks and burgers and despite the record-setting COVID numbers, the place was packed and then we headed to Dan's for a fire and the release of another paper lantern balloon . . . something we did a year ago when we were in full lockdown and the bars and restaurants were not open (indoors) and I think we're calling it a day on this pandemic in New Jersey, the Omicron variants seems pretty harmless and most of the state is testing positive for it (or have been exposed multiple times) so I am hoping we can take out masks off and move on with out lives.
Four Bridge Day . . .
Yesterday my wife and I walked to the train station to catch an 8 AM train to Newark-- so we crossed the bridge over the Raritan to the train to the PATH to the Oculus-- and we went to the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit at Pier 36-- very immersive and very psychedelic, certainly dose yourself a bit with the drug of your choice before you go in-- and then walked across the Manhattan Bridge into DUMBO-- and the Manhattan Bridge was empty save for a couple fo diehard runners and we had great views of the city and Brooklyn-- and then went to Evil Twin Brewery for some delicious beers and ate lunch at another branch of the Westville Diner-- excellent vegetarian fare-- and then we saw lots and lots of people taking some iconic photos of the Manhattan Bridge and we walked back to the Oculus across the Brooklyn Bridge-- holy shit! what a difference from the Manhattan Bridge-- packed with throngs of people-- and they let you climb up over traffic?-- and people REALLY like taking pictures on the Brooklyn Bridge . . . and then back through the Oculus, back on the PATH and it would have been a perfect public transport day except there was an old dude on the single lane escalator and we were sprinting up it for the train and he was not walking and he wouldn't let us pass him until it was too late and the train pulled away as we got up the steps . . . so we had to wait a few minutes for the next one and then we walked back across the Raritan Bridge and collapsed.
Too Much of a Good Thing = Not a Good Thing
My wife wouldn't let me have any of the salad dressing in her Trader Joe's salad dressing packet because she wanted the rest for when she used the rest of that particular salad mix so she suggested that I use the blue cheese dressing but I informed her I had already put actual crumbled blue cheese on my salad and that I couldn't put blue cheese dressing on top of crumbled blue cheese, as that would be akin to wearing a Pixies shirt to a Pixies concert, very gauche.
In The Afterlife, You Could Be Headed for Digital Strife
I just finished Neal Stephenson's newish novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell and I read a good 750 pages and then I finally had to do some skimming before I read the final couple of chapters; the book tackles the subject of eternal digital life-- folks get their entire connectome-- or synapse map-- scanned right when they die and then upload this into an increasingly complex virtual reality-- but Stephenson deals with this in both a very realistic fashion-- the quality of your digital afterlife is really going to depend on how much computing power is available-- and in an entirely fantastic fashion: the digital afterlife grows in Biblical and surreal stops and starts, as the processes learn to control and traverse the land they create-- and some digital processes have more power than others . . . it's a giant mess of a book, with lots of wild ideas and a lot of words and a lot of descriptions and a lot of sub-plots and while I'm glad I read it, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a Neal Stephenson junkie.
Socks: Are They Conscious?
After some mild trepidation and complaint, the boys and I agreed to my wife's project: we poured out all three sock drawers onto the floor and while we watched Friday Night Lights, we paired up socks; disposed of threadbare socks, and traded socks . . . and-- for now-- all the socks are in their proper places . . . for now.
A Wonderful Boxing Day
Some people love the holidays and some people love the day after the holidays-- and I fall into the latter category; I went to the dog park early this morning, then Cat and I headed to Hacklebarney Park for a hike-- but we left the dog home so we could stop for a leisurely lunch . . . and we left the kids at home as well, because they were sleeping late (Alex went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and then stayed up very late last night building his Lego Seinfeld set) and so after our hike, we stopped in Somerville at the Village Brewery for a beer-- and I had the fried chicken banh mi sandwich and it was absurdly good and then we stopped and watched the boys playing tennis-- they were at Johnson Park-- and I was very happy that they were playing together without fighting and then I turned on the Giants-- bad idea-- and then Ian called me and asked if I wanted to play tennis because they DID end up fighting-- which always happens-- but I took a nap first and then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights-- it was still fifty degrees and when we were leaving, Alex and his buddy were pulling up to the courts to play and we have leftovers from Xmas Eve for dinner so no one has to cook so it's a very successful Boxing Day.
Happy Hyper-capitalist Environmental Destruction Day!
Although we consumed some wrapping paper and exchanged a few materialistic gifts this morning, my wife pointed out that one of our Xmas presents is environmentally conscious and we will use less plastic: a home-seltzer maker . . . so we won't go through so many bottles of seltzer; we also had a lovely Xmas Eve here with my parents and cousins and a few of my older son Alex's friends--but my brother and Amy and Amy's kids were laid up at Amy's house, quarantined, because Marc has COVID for a second time-- he's not very sick but still-- he's very annoyed-- and my friend Connell tested positive for a second time as well . . . so hopefully we'll avoid the virus for the winter break but who knows?
Winter Break!
An oddly festive school day considering New Jersey clocked over 15,000 positive COVID tests (including my brother, second time) as there was some lovely choral singing and orchestral music in the terminal hallway-- we all crowded together (masked) to listen and then a bunch of folks from the English department headed out to the Grove for a very early Happy Hour, including a very very pregnant Allie, and there was much talk of stretch marks and post-birth sepsis and umbilical strangulation and other exciting female topics and then we went on our merry way.
Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse . . .
School is pretty weird right now: I'm getting paid to cover classes almost every day because there's a staffing shortage due to covid and quarantines; we're missing a lot of students; my union rep handed me a N95 mask because I have "cafeteria duty" where I hang out with 700 unmasked students (I've yet to use it though, I can't breathe in those things) and now-- because a teacher died in a locked bathroom in a nearby district-- they've removed the locks from the inside of the two faculty bathrooms on our hall, so that they can be opened from the outside with a key-- and if 500 kids are walking down the hall it's going to be hard to hear someone knock, so the teachers are worried about being exposed to the masses.
Moderna! Summer is Winter in Florida
I was all for Pfizer when I got my first two shots, but yesterday I got a Moderna booster and I'm not suffering any side effects (besides a sore arm) and it turns out Moderna seems to fight off the Omicron variant-- so I'll switch teams to Moderna!-- because who cares, really, unless you bought some stock . . . also, Florida has really low case numbers right now and New Jersey is through the roof-- this could be because in Florida, summer is kind of like winter up here-- everyone congregates inside (in Florida because it's so hot . . . and right now in Florida, you can do everything outside, it's balmy, while we're congregating inside because of the cold) so perhaps some scientist needs to investigate this.
Dave Thumbs His Thumb at Resolutions
Aside from my usual New Year's Resolution: doing more of the same, I'm going to add a bonus resolution-- I'm going to try to text all year using my left thumb instead of my right thumb . . . yes, I'm a one-thumb texter (and I believe it's hurting my score on the mini) so I'm going to switch thumbs and then perhaps next year, I'll be able to text fluidly with both thumbs.
Pandemic Stuff
Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is not satisfying reading but it's sure as hell informative and interesting-- it's not satisfying because there's no end to this story in sight, and our country was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and barely organized in its response to the COVID pandemic; you'll learn why certain things went the way they did and you'll also learn that there isn't a "cabal of people at the top controlling this entire thing"-- which is what an old guy at a wake told me last Sunday-- because all the decisions came from the bottom up-- often from state and county employees referred to as "L6" because apparently, the answer to big problems doesn't come from top administrators-- you've got to go six levels down until anyone knows how to actually do anything . . . one piece of logic I learned was that when that first person died of COVID at the end of February, it was all over . . . because COVID kills about a helf of one percent of people and it takes a while to die from it, so that meant that 200 people had COVID 3-4 weeks before that person died-- so the genie was way out of the bottle, there was no reason to close the borders, the virus was rampant, no one had been contact traced and the rest was history . . . if this isn't enough, Sam Harris just did a major take on the lessons of the pandemic, and here are some highlights from the book:
The CDC was avoiding controversy
Charity could see that the CDC’s strategy was politically shrewd. People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.
In a pandemic, you've got to utilize utilitarian thinking
Ahead on the tracks, you spot five people. Do nothing and the train will run them over and kill them. But you have an option! You can flip a switch and send the train onto a siding, on which, unfortunately, there stands a man named Carl. Do nothing and you kill five people; flip the switch and you kill Carl. Most college freshmen elect to kill Carl and then, wham, th professor hits them with the follow-up. Carl has five healthy organs that can be harvested and used to save the lives of five people in need of them. All you need to do is shoot Carl in the back of the head. Would you do that, too? If not, explain the contradiction . . .
All Thinking is Flawed
He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,”
Carter poked fun at the way Richard walked around saying important-sounding things, like “All models are wrong; some of them are useful,” but he felt the alchemy in their interactions.
Richard viewed models as a check on human judgment and as an aid to the human imagination. Carter viewed them more as flashlights. They allowed him to see what was inside a room that, until now, had been pitch-black.
My Job is a Hot Zone
“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit. To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
You Need to React Quickly
“Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” the piece revealed, for the first time, the life-or-death importance of timing in the outcomes of 1918.
Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.
Charity Dean Came From Another Planet: rural Oregon
They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.
It Could Have Been Worse
So little about it was known that a trained pathologist had stared at a picture of it and mistaken it for human immune cells. It had been detected only a few dozen times since its discovery—once in a dead four-year-old girl. No one knew what it ate when it wasn’t eating the brains of mandrills or humans. Asked to explain what he’d found, Joe would only say, “Balamuthia is an amoeba and it eats your brain, and there is no cure.”
Politics Played a Role
But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that moment on, the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states. The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement.
Sometimes You've Got to Light a Fire to Escape
“Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It,
In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:
You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.
It Wasn't Just in Italy
On March 1, it announced that the United States would screen people arriving from other countries for symptoms of the virus. “I wouldn’t waste a moment of time on travel restrictions or travel screening,” Carter wrote. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe.”
Most of Us (Including Me) Had No Clue
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”
Charity Dean realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were.
half of 1 percent of the people who get the disease die, you can surmise that for every death, there are 199 people already walking around with it. That first death—which California already had experienced—was telling you that you had two hundred cases a month earlier.
In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.
Sometimes You Need the Government to Take the Lead
Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.
The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies. In this market, Americans vied with Americans for stuff made mainly by the Chinese. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, flew in a planeload of materials from China to the UCSFmedical center with boxes of functional, though less than ideal, nasal swabs on board.
American government, circa April 2020, was just how different appearances on the outside could be from the understanding on the inside. Inside California state government, inside even the Trump administration, there was some logic to everything that happened;
“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which
You have this burden of maintaining optics. It’s all optics.”
He finally more or less gave up on the state. “There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery.
Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.
Happy Media Manipulation Day!
600 kids were out at my school today (and it was the same percentage of kids out in Highland Park, my own children reported) due to some TikTok meme promising school shootings today . . . despite the fact that New Jersey has the lowest rate of school shootings of any state in the nation; they should call it antisocial media (but at least order has returned on the illness front, Lola is pooping solid again and I got a negative result for my Covid test).
Chinese Democracy?
A Chinese algorithm is proving to be excellent at school shooter terrorism . . . and many of us have let it happen, we opened the door with open arms, installed TikTok on our phones, and let our children do the same.
Covid Ruins Sick Days
I was really tired two days ago and went to bed at 7 PM and then I felt lousy yesterday and it turned out I had a 101.5 fever-- so I slept in the basement, in case I had covid, and I scheduled a PCR test for 9 AM this morning and then I woke up this morning and my fever is gone and I feel fine-- but I still went for the test and stayed home from school because that's what you're supposed to do now . . . but the imminent threat of covid certainly ruins what used to be a regular sick day (and the dog is sick as well, she puked all over the house two days ago and had diarrhea yesterday on the kitchen bench cushions-- so they are in the trash-- and now she's on rice and water and she got me up at 3 AM last night to go out . . . so maybe we have the same virus . . . is that possible?)
Do Animals Understand BEEP!
I was driving up South Adelaide Avenue early this morning-- it's a narrow street and it was still very dark-- and a deer darted from the shadows directly in front of my car and I reacted exactly as if someone had cut in front of me without using their blinker . . . I slammed on my brakes and beeped . . . BEEP! and then I realized how ridiculous it was to beep at a hoofed ruminant (but it did work-- the deer got out of the way and we didn't have a collision).
Weddings and Funerals . . .
Some people know how to wear a suit and a tie, but I am not one of those people (I have a thick neck or something).