Pandemic Silver Linings

The pandemic has been horrible in so many ways. Lives have been lost. Jobs and businesses have been lost. Education gaps have widened. Friends and loved ones have been isolated from one another. 

But allow me to call out a few silver linings:

Seeing Heroes: Nurses. Grocery store workers. Truck drivers. Meat packing plant workers. Farmers. Restaurant staff. The list goes on and on. The rank and file is full of under-appreciated heroes who have stepped up during this crisis. These are the heroes who are pulling us through this -- not our venerated athletes or CEOs.

Appreciating Missing Critical People: Many parents now have much better understanding of what every teacher deals with every day. What about people who clean houses and cut hair and so many other tasks that we value, but were put on hold? During the lockdown, we have been living the old adage that you don't properly value what you have until it is taken away from you.

BLM: George Floyd wasn't the first. Black and brown people have been victims of police brutality before, so why did these protests really gain traction? I think we can thank the pandemic. 

1. Logistics: Traffic is light and parking is easy. 
2. Free Time: Movie theaters and gyms and most other athletic/entertainment venues are closed. Plus, unemployment is around 20%.
3. No Distractions: There are no sports or new movies or other distractions to replace it in the news cycle. The BLM movement is flourishing in the open space created by the pandemic.

Inspiring Change: The wheels of progress in education grind incredibly slowly. The pandemic has the potential to add a big jolt of innovation as schools and educators try to figure out how to make virtual and blended learning work. I imagine that necessity is driving innovation in other areas as well. 

Seeing Flaws in Our Systems: People who depend on their low-paying jobs for their healthcare are either showing up when sick (e.g., Smithfield plant) or losing health coverage. Many CEOs and Presidents and other leaders have made it explicitly clear that they care more about money than they do about the health of the people who toil to enrich them. The pandemic is a stressor that helps us see the flaws in our systems. It doesn't point the way to fixing them, but understanding that something is broken is the first step.

None of these silver linings provide succor to those who have lost loved ones or businesses or jobs or security or comfort. As a society, I am hopeful that we will make changes to our mindsets, relationships, and systems so the legacy of the pandemic will include some good outcomes.

Higher Ed Reopening Decisions

A lot is going on right now, so I'll spew forth some ideas on various topics in the coming weeks. I've chosen this topic partly because it is relatively easy for me to be dispassionate about it. I am intellectually interested and only somewhat impacted. There are more important things going on in the US, but this is where I'm starting.

As colleges and universities around the country weigh how they will reopen this Fall, various voices are being heard. Here are just two:

• Brown University's Christina Paxson in the New York Times: College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It.
• USC-Beaufort's Deborah J. Cohan in Psychology Today: Pandemic U: What's the price of opening campuses in the fall?

What are some of the factors that schools are weighing (whether they admit them or not)?

Faculty and staff: Students are generally young and have few preexisting conditions. On the other hand, faculty and staff are older, and many have family members with significant risks. Bringing students back puts the faculty, staff, business owners, and all their families at risk. Honestly, this seems like an OSHA issue to me.

Revenue: When I originally looked at the university bill I paid in January, I just focused on the bottom line: How much am I writing a check for? Now, I look at every line and wonder: Will there be an athletic fee if the gym is closed? What about the meal plan? If everything were virtual, the bottom line would be VERY different. For me, all of those are distinct costs, but for the university, they are all important revenue streams.

The higher education value proposition: I'm not going to wade too far into the "is college worth it" debate, but I found this article by Susan Svrluga at the Washington Post particularly interesting: Is college worth it? A Georgetown study measures return on investment — with some surprising results. One thing this points out is that not all schools (even within a particular university) are equal financially. Most vocational schools such as law and business and engineering will survive this regardless. Those departments that can go virtual well probably should. But what about schools of liberal arts? What about those philosophy and religious studies and sociology departments? They are in a tougher spot. Faculty in these areas care about their health, but they also like having jobs. Honestly, this probably requires its own blog posts, but what if I just go with word association: community colleges, gap year, University of Phoenix, the humanities make us human.

Students without privilege: Many students are barely able to afford college. They scrape by thanks to on-campus jobs and scholarships and loans. This upheaval will make the college dream unattainable for many of these students. Without a job in the dining hall or at the athletic center, some students can't afford to live on campus. On the other hand, some students have home lives that aren't compatible with distance learning. Internet access, child care, loud siblings, space, and a plethora of other issues make virtual learning virtually impossible for many students. It's a lose-lose proposition for them.

College towns: There is no Blacksburg without Virginia Tech. What about Ann Arbor without the Univeristy of Michigan? Oberlin, OH? College Station, TX? State College, PA? You get the idea. Hechinger Report has Little-noticed victims of the higher education shutdowns: college towns

With students dispersed by the pandemic, towns that depend on them are struggling.

Students with privilege: First of all, I have put students last because they (as a population) are not particularly at risk, and they are resilient. If they all had to live at home and do this virtually, most of them would figure out how to do it well. That said, I'm sure my son is not alone in wanting very desperately to get back to campus (I'm trying not to be hurt). 

Let's be honest and admit that faculty and schools come at this from radically different perspectives. Faculty care about the health of their families, while schools are confronting an existential crisis. Many schools probably worry that going virtual will crush their bottom line, degrade the educational experience, and open themselves up to competition from challengers they never had to worry about before. 

So... what should schools do? 

1. No school or jurisdiction should open without a solid test-trace-isolate strategy. This May 15 article by Alex Tabarrok and Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver at The Washington Post: We could stop the pandemic by July 4 if the government took these steps lays out solid strategies.
2. Blended Learning: The importance of this is two-fold: Blending can help reduce class sizes (which improves safety), and can help prepare for going to more virtual strategies. 
3. Flexibility: How will you deal with a surge in cases on campus? How will you re-imagine your traditional gatherings? 

Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

End of Life Revisited

Discussions about healthcare consistently get me thinking about end of life issues. I have discussed this stuff before. Notably, in The Ugliness of Modern Death, but now I am past some personal situations involving death and so am more capable of thinking about these issues.

DyingWell.org is not a cheery site, but it is an important one. I recently bought Dr. Byock's Dying Well and really am looking forward to the read. It's morose, but critical.

Ramble: Rx for Latin and Innovation

I had no idea that all that gobbledy gook on my prescriptions was a bunch of Latin abbreviations.

Understanding Your Prescription has a handy table so you can understand your prescriptions. I think it's kinda cool (but also kinda odd and scary) that doctors still use Latin abbreviations on prescriptions.

On a different topic, ClinicalTrials.gov is "a registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world." Basically, if you have a medical problem and want to know what researchers are trying to cure or treat it, then this is the place to look.

A Quick Push-up Update

I have heard that after reading this post, a couple friends of mine are trying the 100 push-up thing. As I have documented a couple times (including this post), push-ups are great for you.

Try the Push-up Challenge to see how you can do.

Running and Knees

I was a decrepit old man in my thirties. Any time I played soccer or tennis, my heels and feet caused me incredible pain. It got so bad that I finally stopped playing altogether. Without any exercise, I became a big, fat, ball of goo.

It became so bad that I couldn't keep up with (then five-year-old) Boy Kid or (then one-year-old) Girl Kid. Eventually, I realized that:

• Carrying Girl Kid up the stairs left me winded.
• It took me a couple days to recover from coaching soccer for a team of kids who where three feet tall.
• When watching a video that was filmed at my office, I saw some guy who looked like me in a fat suit. The fat guy was me.
• My size 40 pants were getting really tight.

Anyway, I finally went to the local running store and had them watch me jog and analyze my gait. They recommended Asics Gel GT-2010's. Once I had the right equipment, it took me weeks and weeks to be able to run a mile without taking breaks, but now I am able to run 3-5 miles about three times most weeks. Apparently, running in a straight line is not a problem for me (I am not fast--my top speed is somewhere between a saunter and a mosey), but the real culprits were the turning and changes of direction that came with soccer and tennis.

Gretchen Reynolds' New York Times article Can Running Actually Help Your Knees? is interesting. It gives me hope that I will be able to keep this up for a while. I like being healthier. I can keep up with Boy and Girl Kid, but only if they are running in a straight line. Once they discover my weakness, it will be all up to Mrs. Kid to keep up with them.

Health Care Pessimism

As I hear about Obama and Congress's plans for health care reform, I am encouraged by the fact that people seem interested in discussing these important issues, but remain pessimistic that the most important issues will be addressed. I was ruminating on this recently when I read a piece in the Washington Post: Focus on Health Savings Obscures Other Issues.

It seems to me that there are three major parts to our health care issues:

Coverage: Obama's efforts seem focused on coverage. Small government Republicans will probably resist any single-payer or pay-to-play efforts that give government more control over how coverage happens. From the administration's perspective, the upside to selling this sort of reform is that it doesn't impact the entire health care industry. It simply changes how the bills are being paid.

Inefficiency: We pay more than any other nation for health care, but do not get the best health care in return. I call this lack of correlation "inefficiency." The fact that other countries are getting more bang for their health care bucks implies that we should be able to decrease our spending and improve our results at the same time. Improving the efficiency of the system seems like an obvious goal, but the problem is that many corporations are making money from this inefficiency. Inefficiencies do not result in money floating off into space. Inefficiencies result in more people having unnecessary jobs. Inefficiencies also result in more executives and managers having fancy cars, houses, boats, and vacations than they should have. Improving efficiency is not difficult because it is hard to identify strategies. It is hard because the people who benefit from inefficiency like their jobs, cars, homes, and vacations.

The Tidal Wave: Health care costs are going to increasingly grab a huge share of GDP and the federal budget. Note that these are two separate issues. One (the GDP side) is tied to efficiency in general, while the other (the health care share of the federal budget) is tied to entitlements. The entitlement issue is a tough one: As the government works to increase coverage, that will put upward pressure on The Wave, while efficiency efforts will put downward pressure on The Wave. Ultimately, it seems to me that the only hope is to find ways to increase efficiency so much that increased coverage is more than paid for.

Note also that increased coverage (if done smartly) can drive efficiency up. For instance, providing better prenatal care could prevent costly post-natal issues. Providing better services to decrease obesity could prevent costly diabetes, back, and heart issues. Preventive care is efficient and makes sense, so why hasn't it been done more? Jobs, cars, homes, and vacations. We need to find ways to incent organizations (governments, hospitals, doctors, and corporations) to innovate in ways that drive efficiency up.

Addressing all these issues will be tough, but improving our health care system is a moral imperative that cannot be ignored.

Longer Life, but at a Cost ...

The husband of a friend and colleague was quoted in an LA Times article: Permanent Diet May Equal Longer Life.

Page 1 of the article is all about how eating less is a great idea, but my favorite part is the quote from my friend's husband:

When UCLA evolutionary biologist Jay Phelan put mice on caloric restriction, he got the distinct impression that they didn't appreciate it.

"They bit people and were more agitated," he said. In contrast, the mice who ate a normal diet "would just sit around and let you pick them up."

So, eating less could extend my life by a couple years, but I'd be irritable. The way I look at it: "I'd live longer if I never again ate ice cream, but is it a life worth living?" Moderation is good. Starving myself is bad.

No More Crunches; Do Push-ups for a Healthy Back

Newsweek had an article Stop Doing Sit-ups: Why Crunches Don't Work.

Now they tell me. I have been doing crunches for a while, with little effect on my gut. I feel stronger, but the gut is still there. On the other hand, push-ups rock. I need to increase the number of push-ups I do because they are better for my entire body. Leg lifts are also good, so I am starting to work more of them in to my routine.

Yes, I know that cutting back on cookies and pies and cakes is another strategy, but what can I say? I gotta be me.

TED Talks, Volume 1: On Creativity

I've always wanted to attend a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference. The closest I will probably get is watching videos of some of the talks. This is the first of a series of posts with links to talks I have found interesting.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
Academic ability has become our idea of intelligence, but that is a very narrow way of looking at it.

Yves Behar: Creating objects that tell stories
This guy does amazing design. Listening to the story behind designs really adds a new dimension.

Stuart Brown: Why play is vital -- no matter your age
I need to play more. Playing with Boy and Girl Kid is great, but I need to do more.

Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do
He makes excellent points. Kids need to be exposed to things with which they need to be careful.

The Ugliness of Modern Death

Craig Bowron's The Dying of the Light was a sobering glimpse into the state of dying in America. As he says:

To be clear: Everyone dies. There are no life-saving medications, only life-prolonging ones. To say that anyone chooses to die is, in most situations, a misstatement of the facts.

And later...

If we can be honest and admit that we have no choice about dying, then the only thing we do have a say in are the circumstances.

Don't get me wrong: I want to watch Mrs. Kid grow older (though she will forever be my child bride). I want to see my kids grow older. Maybe someday I will have grandchildren. Regardless, every day is precious. On the other hand, Quality of life is important.

I don't want to live a life that is so full of indignity and pain that death would be better. I don't think it makes sense for society to spend tons of money prolonging the lives of people who are ready to have nature take its course, while kids are going hungry. As modern medicine keeps on getting better at prolonging life, we are losing touch with natural patterns of life and death and that has its price.

Holiday Eating

A week or so ago, someone at the office sent me a list of Holiday Eating Tips. These are great, but I'd add one more to the list:

11. Bread is for suckers. That's how they get you. You can have bread any day, so why take up valuable stomach space with something so mundane? Save the room for more eggnog and pie.

Anyway, over the past couple years, I have dropped a couple pant sizes, but those old pants are sitting in my basement. Some say that keeping those big pants is a defeatist attitude, but I say it's planning ahead. I am all set to ramp up a size this week, then another size next week as I watch college football. I'll trim back down in the new year, but I like the idea that I am prepared for the ramp-up.

Note: I am ignoring this article until the new year.

The Right Way to Warm Up Before Exercise

When I was a kid in P.E., we were taught to bounce as we stretched. Imagine a gym full of kids bent at the waist bobbing down trying to touch our toes like a bunch of drinking birds.

This was clearly stupid. It's amazing that none of us ever snapped a hamstring like a cold rubber band. When we started to just hold our stretches for a twelve or twenty count, we were clearly doing it right. Some of our favorite stretches were:

• Hurdle stretch (lean forward, then lie back)
• Neck rolls (all the way around)
• Straight-leg toe-touches
• Torso twists

Mmmmmm... feel the stretch.

OK, so then it turned out that all of these stretches were risky, so we stopped doing them. Frankly, it's a miracle that we didn't end up in traction after all that dangerous stretching. Some of these stretches were modified (don't lean back in the hurdle, don't roll your neck back, torso twist slowly), but we eventually ended up with a good list of safe stretches.

So then it turned out that starting out by stretching was just plain dumb. Who came up with that idiocy? Clearly, the right strategy is to do some warm-up (perhaps a short jog) before stretching. Stretching is clearly important, but you have to get the muscles warm before you can stretch them well. Finally, we had this stretching thing figured out: start with a warm up, and then perform safe stretches. Just hold them--no bouncing.

Now it turns out that static stretching isn't the best way to prepare to exercise. The New York Times broke the news in Stretching: The Truth. It turns out that dynamic stretching is the way to prepare for exercise. Static stretching is now relegated to your cool down after you have finished exercising.

To summarize: static stretching used to be the first thing you were supposed to do, then it was the second, but now it is the last. My how the mighty have fallen.

In another fifteen years, Boy Kid and Girl Kid will marvel at the fact that I was so stupid that I thought dynamic stretching was a good idea.

Beers & Bone Marrow for Brez

A family friend's daughter was recently diagnosed with Leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. Beers & Bone Marrow for Brez is an opportunity for you to find out if you are a bone marrow match for Michele.

I don't know Michele well, but her mother (Faye) is an incredible teacher and person. Twenty-six years later, I'm pretty sure I could still do pretty well on her final exam if I took it today. Faye kicked cancer's butt back in 1987 and now it's Michele's turn to do it, but she needs bone marrow to do it.

Just like everyone should give blood often, everyone should also get into the bone marrow registry. It only takes a quick cheek swab to test for a match.

Nine or Ten Months?

I have been writing about the Presidential race for a while now, so how about if we mix it up a bit?

When I was at a party this weekend, I ended up in a disagreement with a pregnant woman. It is an old argument I have had with several women over the years: Is a woman who gives birth to a baby on her due date pregnant for nine months or ten?

The general rule is that gestation lasts for 40 weeks. Women who think gestation lasts for ten months are assuming that the average month has four weeks. This is fine if you are using a lunar calendar, but the calendar on my wall is Gregorian. The average Gregorian month has about 30.5 days, which is about 4 1/3 weeks. If you count 9 of these months, you get 39 weeks. That means that 40 weeks is nine months and one week.

But wait! The clock starts ticking for the 40 weeks on the first day of a woman's lunar cycle (if you get my drift.) This means that for several days of the time counted in the duration of the pregnancy, it is quite impossible for the woman to be pregnant. Ovulation doesn't generally happen until at least day 10, so we have really lost that extra week and some change.

Here is Babies Online's response to this question.

Let me be completely clear: However long it lasts, pregnancy is not for the weaker gender (that's us guys.) If men had to go through it, our species would have died out eons ago. Pregnancy and the first months following pregnancy are way too tough for any guy to handle it. I just don't buy the argument that pregnancy lasts 10 calendar months. It's 9 months that no man could ever relate to.

Sorry to go all biology-geek on you, but I wanted to get that off my chest. Now that I have, I no longer need to argue with a pregnant woman about this. I can pass the URL for this post to her significant other and leave it at that.

Watching Weight: Supply and Demand

A bunch of women at the office are doing Weight Watchers. I am impressed by their willingness and ability to allow such structure to guide their daily eating habits. I could never do it.

Over the past year and a half or so, I have worked the supply (food) and demand (exercise) sides of my body's metabolism to become healthier than I was. I'm in decent, but not great shape and I have lost about four inches off my waist, but still have a gut. Still, I am healthier than I was a couple years ago and that's a good thing.

Here are some tips culled from WebMD:

• Exercise every day
• Eat breakfast every day
• Don't drink much soda--even diet soda

If you are trying to lose weight or get into shape, I wish you luck. Big, short-lived change is easy--anyone can lose a few pounds in a couple weeks. Lasting change isn't easy. Keeping weight off and keeping an exercise regimen going are not easy tasks. If you can work the supply and the demand sides of your metabolism, I think you will make a holistic change for better health.

Blogging for My Health

A Scientific American article: Blogging--It's Good for You reinforces what I have said about this blog's therapeutic nature.

Research shows that it [blogging] improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

They're not sure why, but blogging (like any expressive writing) seems to be good for you.

Is Google Making Me Dumber?

The Atlantic's July issue has an article by Nick Carr entitled: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr casts a wide net as he looks for people's thoughts on similar technological changes in the past (Lewis Mumford on clocks, Socrates on written language, Nietzsche on the typewriter, etc.) and makes some very interesting points about the nature of the human intellect and the nature of technology's connection to and influences on our intellectual abilities and ways of thinking.

I like that the Internet can be an extension of my knowledge base, but am fearful that it erodes my basic thinking ability. I feel like there are two types of problems the Internet causes for my brain:

1. Easy answers: When I am trying to remember something, I can google it. Even when on the road, I can google from my blackberry. There is no reason to store much information in my mind because I always have answers nearby. Will this lack of effort cause my brain to atrophy? How bad is the atrophy it has already caused?
2. An informational firehose: On the other side of things, I use Google Reader to provide a steady, massive flow of new information. This rich flow of information is incredible, but is probably oversaturating my brain. My mind is becoming a thin, wide crepe.

So, is Google making me dumber? Probably. Am I going to stop using it? No, but I continue to look for ways to manage the information and keep it from managing me.

Soundtrack: Yes (Fragile, The Yes Album, Close to the Edge)

Well, *&$%

I played in a couple softball games last night and have the injuries to prove it. I was on first when the batter after me hit a grounder. At the urging of my third base coach, I tried to take an extra base when the other team didn't field it cleanly. Unfortunately, I am neither fast nor good at sliding, so I really should have stayed at second. This is the last time I trust a third base coach known as "Stinkie."

Anyway, I slid awkwardly into third base, and then as he tagged me, the third baseman fell toward me and stepped on my right hand. He must have weighed 220 pounds and was wearing baseball cleats. My reaction was to yell a really bad curse word.

The umpire told me at the time to watch my language. This annoyed me, but I brushed it off. Later, when I was settling in behind the plate as catcher in the bottom half of the inning, he repeated his admonition. This really got me. I am not someone who curses often and in this case, I certainly wasn't cursing at anybody. I was in acute pain and yelled out. It was 10:30, so there were no kids around and I didn't repeat it or become confrontational. There is a time and place for everything and lying on the ground with a 220-lb man in cleats stomping on my right hand seemed like the right time and place for a nice F-bomb.

So here I am with an aching hand, a sore butt, and the feeling that I have been chastised by a pedantic jerk. Last night's umpire made me miss the ump from our games on Saturday who only had about 6 teeth, but was reasonable and nice, and I'm pretty sure he would have had more empathy for my pain.

Soundtrack: Lalo Schifrin (Thx1138)

Points for Effort

A colleague (let's call her Royal) sent around a link to this article. The point of the article is that a recent study shows that kids who breast feed are smarter than kids who don't. This didn't make one of our office mates (let's call her Slice) happy. Slice had tried unsuccessfully to nurse her son, so this really wasn't a happy subject for her. When Royal made the comment that nursing was "so easy," I couldn't keep quiet any longer and stepped in with some thoughts on the subject (who better than a man to discuss breast-feeding?)

Breast-feeding is beneficial in many ways, and it is natural, but it isn't always easy. Mrs. Kid had big challenges with nursing Boy Kid. In those first few weeks, she had blocked ducts and nursing gave her pain that felt like needles shooting through her certain parts of her skin. When she then pumped, the milk was pink because of all the blood that was coming along with the milk. It was a real low point. She was depressed and Boy Kid was unhappy. With the help of doctors and a lactation consultant, Mrs. Kid worked it out, but it was a physically and emotionally painful journey.

I know several women who have had problems with breast-feeding, so I know it's not always easy. Mrs. Kid has said to me that I shouldn't judge women by what they do with breast feeding, but I do anyway. In this area, I judge on intent and effort. For instance, Royal gets points for intent, but none for effort. Slice gets points for intent and big partial credit for effort. Mrs. Kid gets extra credit. She wanted to do it and persevered through great pain to get it done. Any woman who gets to that painful place and backs off still gets partial credit.

Aside from physical challenges, there can also be great logistical challenges. For instance, a mother who returns to the workplace has to pump and that is really not easy. I had an office-mate who pumped three times a day. This was logistically incredibly difficult, but she made it work. I acted as bouncer at our office door while she pumped behind me (the whir-whir-whir of the pump is the soundtrack of those months for me.) It still fills me with great joy that I was able to help her out in some little way.

So, I'm sure I have pissed off women who didn't breast feed, but such is life. Anyone who wanted to do it and really tried (through physical and/or logistical challenges) gets big points in my book. I'm sorry for anyone who wasn't able to make it work.