Pandemic

Day 94 – June 18, 2020

Everyone has heard of Schrödinger’s Cat, but there’s a subtlety to that famous experiment that needs to be clarified… which is… it’s not that when you look into the box, only then do you know whether the cat is alive or not. It’s that until you look into the box, the cat is both dead AND alive. If that has you scratching your head, it’s because of course it’s a non-sensical scenario.

The issue has to do with mapping behaviour in the quantum world… to our visible, relatable world. And I’m not talking about the pseudo-scientific vibration energy healing quantum whatever… I’m talking about actual quantum physics, where things work differently at the subatomic level… and one of those things is that some particles, which can exist in one of two states, seem to exist in both… until you observe them, at which point they pick a side. For example, an electron… it has two levels, spin-up or spin-down. When you observe the electron, you can tell which state it’s in. But until you look at it, it’s spinning both ways. Or the polarization of a single photon… vertical or horizontal. And until you observe it, both. In simpler terms, imagine a coin. You flip it, and it falls to the ground. Now try to imagine that until you look at it, it’s both heads and tails… but the moment you look at it, it’ll pick one or the other. Bizarre.

There are problems with this sort of interpretation, and it’s one of many… but the thing is, this behaviour does exist, and it’s the foundation of the science that takes advantage of quantum mechanics. In a typical computer, data is stored in bits… and each bit is a one or zero. In a quantum computer, you have a Qbit… which can be a one, a zero… or both, simultaneously. A simple example, in a normal computer, a Byte is 8 bits, which can represent 2⁸ different numbers (from 0 to 255). But if that is a QByte (8 Qbits), you could theoretically evaluate all 256 versions at once, which on the surface implies a computer 256 times faster. And now imagine there isn’t just one QByte… but many.

Schrödinger had a problem with that, and came up with his famous thought experiment… which led to years of arguments with the greatest minds of the day, like Einstein, Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg (the theoretical physicist, not the meth cook).

At the end of the day though, what’s clear is that while these are all interesting theoretical discussions, and quantum effects can be exploited down at that level, as baffling as the experiments are (and there are trivially simple experiments you can do to actually see quantum effects)… the real world just doesn’t work this way. The “alternative facts” model of reality doesn’t allow for two things to be true at once, as much as some people would hope. The world’s issues aren’t waiting around for us to observe them before they tip in one or the other direction.

At present, depending how you wish to observe it, you might interpret this pandemic to be over. Or, of course, you realize it’s still very much going… and we need to be cognizant of that and respect it. You can’t have it both ways, but this seems to be what’s going on, depending to whom you listen. Schrödinger’s virus.

"If you look, the numbers are very minuscule compared to what it was. It's dying out.” — said Donald Trump, this morning. “No, it’s not”, says everyone else.

I guess it’s a good thing we’re not all subatomic particles, waiting to tip one way or the other. It’s good that while we understand there are indeed two (or more) sides to every issue, many of those sides don’t actually exist on top of each other. There’s some certainty to the fact that we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and there’s no version of political/pseudo-scientific hand-waving that’s going to change that… and we’ll see that in rising numbers as things open back up. Today, Canada went over 100,000 known cases. Let’s hope we’ve all learned something and stick with it… the idea was to get it under control, which, around here, we’ve done. The important thing is to keep it that way. Or we’ll have bigger problems than trying to figure out if some theoretical cat is dead or alive.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:25-07:00June 18th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Science of COVID-19, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |9 Comments
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Day 92 – June 16, 2020

A little after 10am on the morning of December 17ᵗʰ, 1903, upon Kill Devil Hills in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilburn and Orville Wright flipped a coin. Orville won the toss, thus putting him in the historical category reserved for people like Neil Armstrong. Wilbur was the Buzz Aldrin of this metaphor. It’s incredible to think that it was only 66 years between that first powered flight that morning (4 flights that day, Orville and Wilbur alternating turns at the controls), and walking on the moon.

The Wright Brothers had built their flyer in Dayton, Ohio, and secretly moved it to the coast in October, where they rebuilt it and tinkered with it until it was ready. What’s interesting, and what, to me, is perhaps an even better argument against the possibility of time travel (at some point, I wrote about how’d you materialize in the middle of outer space because the earth will have moved — a lot — even if you only travel a tiny fraction of a second), is that when they flew that day, there were only 5 other witnesses. If time travel were possible, what a “time-tourist-destination” that would be. Kill Devil Hills would be covered with millions of people hoping to see this with their own eyes. I’d be one of them.

Indeed, if you were given a time machine, but you could only use it once… go somewhere in time, and then come back today… would you go backwards, as per above… or forward, to see that the future looks like?

To me, it’s a no-brainer… I can read about the past from many different points of view and build some understanding. But the future? Like how incredible would it be to see where things are at in 1,000 years? I’d be all over that. Which brings us to a great word of the day…

Ellipsism: (noun) A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.

I think that’s what I felt this morning reading a very interesting article in The Astrophysical Journal, which talks about another interesting “way-out-there” scientific topic: Life on other planets.

These guys did a lot of fancy math, based on some well-thought-out premises and assumptions, and came up with the number of civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy capable of interstellar communication. That number turns out to be… 36. Plus 175 or minus 32… so, for sure, somewhere between 4 and 207. And take that “for sure” pretty lightly, because, at the end of the day, who the hell knows.

But man, would I love to know. As far as we know today, there’s almost certainly intelligent life out there. But what we also know, warp drives and other cool science-fiction technology notwithstanding, is that given the fabric of the universe, we may never know. Albert Einstein came up with some theories more than 100 years ago, and no one has managed to prove him wrong. Nobody is exceeding the speed of light anytime soon (ie, ever), so, at best, maybe a few radio communications… and we’ve been sending messages out, on purpose or not, for maybe 100 years. We’ve been listening too, but haven’t really heard much — with a few curious exceptions over the decades… unexplained, but not proof of anything. The best case scenario would be finding intelligent life 4.4 light years away, at our nearest star system (Alpha Centauri, made up of three stars and a bunch of planets). Many people have been listening in that direction, but we’ve heard nothing of interest.

It’s frustrating, because that’d the best case scenario, but it would still take almost a decade for a quick back and forth. And what would that even look like…

Us, in 2020: “Hello, hello, is there anybody out there….”

Aliens, in 2024: “⍝⌷⌿⍝⌵⍰⌼⌹⍊⍠⍏⍛⍘⍙⍎⍜⍁⍚⍎”

Us, 2029: “YES, HELLO!! WE ARE HUMANS ON EARTH!! WHAT’S UP!!”

Aliens, 2033: “⌻⌾⍊⌶⌸⍙⌷⍎⌺⍞⌶⍑⌼⍀⍁⍝⌺⍏⌾⍞⍝⍣⍰⍖⍚⍣⍏⍡⌼⌺⍋⍋⌼⍕⍏⌶⌶⍂⌻⍝⍟⍋⌽⍕⍏⍢⌿⌼⌵⍉⌼⍂⍖⍯⌵⍊⍣⌸⍡⌺⌮⌹⍡⌮⍝⍘⌸⍁⍒⌼⍏⌸⍒⍊⌺⍝⍋⍣⍁⍁⍢⍢⍕⌽⍏⍒⍏⍕⍯⍙⍚⍑⍟⍢⍣⍉⍡⍎⌹⌸⍁⍙⍙⌻⌸⌻⍚⌼⍑⍞⍘⌹⍉⍜⌼⍛⌽⍚⍒⌶⍜⍞⍒⍚⍚⍜⍙⌭⌻⌻⍖⍁⍟⍝⍊⌾⍚⍋⍖⌿⌽⍜⌭⌺⌭⍢⍜⍋⍕⍁⍑⍎⍋⍂⌼”

Us, 2037: (sigh)

And of course, the relevant and expected closing to an essay like this… how can we be searching for intelligent life out there when it’s already so difficult to find around here, ha ha. It’s interesting to think about, how on some alien planet a zillion miles away, aside from the scientific alien-searching intelligent brainy aliens, there are also stupid aliens. Conspiracy-theory-believing aliens. Aliens who won’t wear their version of a mask when out in public, during their alien pandemic. Yeah, that’s a zillion miles away. Much closer to home, 5,000 miles away, is Paris, France… where today, if the video I saw this morning is to be believed, things are “back to normal”. Crowded city streets, crowded cafés. I would’ve thought the video was from last Summer, except for the waiter wearing a mask. I am the first to say, I hope I’m wrong. I hope this doesn’t turn into a complete disaster. Paris had its worst of this in early April, and things look a lot better… but numbers are still going up, and we’ve already seen many examples where the “rush back to normal” is causing problems, so much so that lockdowns might have to happen again. In B.C., unlike many other places, slow and steady is winning the race. But with my daily dash of ellipsism, I really wish I knew how this is going to turn out.

 

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:26-07:00June 16th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Business & Economics, Science of COVID-19, Interesting Words, Travel Stories, Space & Astronomy, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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Day 87 – June 11, 2020

I grew up not too far from Oakridge Mall™… it used to be my go-to mall… but, just like the changes that have transformed Vancouver over my lifetime… the same thing can be said about that mall. It’s presently undergoing a massive renovation, and I’m curious how it’ll all look once it’s done. Until they started the renovations, it was still a go-to kind of mall. Great little hole-in-the-wall sushi place, great foot reflexology place, David’s Tea™ , Radio Shack™/The Source™. Renovations or pandemic; they’re all gone.

For those who’ve been around long enough, you might remember two things about that mall, and others that had a Woodward’s™ … things you haven’t thought about in years, but I’m about to remind you. Both have to do with the Woodward’s Food Floor™ , the ancestor of Safeway™. First of all, at a counter at the front… the best frosted malts on the planet. The most well-known bribe imaginable… kids don’t want to go shopping? Offer them a WFF frosted malt. Done deal. I’ve never been able to find anything like those; a Wendy’s Frosty™ is the closest thing, but it’s not the same. Who knows what gave it that intangible incredible taste. For all I know, it was mixing the malt with the non-biodegradable styrofoam cup that it came in, the kind where it makes that delicious scraping sound as you try to reach every last molecule of yumminess. If anybody reading this knows of a place locally that makes really good frosted malts… please… tell me!!

The other thing was the Parcel Depot™ — which sounds like something out of The Jetsons™ if you’re not familiar with it. You’d buy your groceries, which would always we be bagged by some kid… into paper bags. But instead of just handing you a shopping cart full of bags… or maybe schlepping them out to the car for you… what he’d do is put them in giant plastic tubs. Each tub had a number painted on it. Each tub also had a ratty-looking plastic shingle with the same number. The bags would go in, and the shingle (or shingles, if it was one of those massive haul sort-of trips requiring multiple bins) would be handed to the shopper. And then… the magic. The tubs would disappear underground, on a mysterious conveyor belt that took them into the abyss.

Actually, it wasn’t the abyss… it was an island in the middle of the parking lot, the Parcel Pickup™ where you’d drive the car, pop the trunk, hand the shingle to some other kid who’d find the appropriate tub that had magically materialized in said island… and load your trunk. Incredibly futuristic, in hindsight.

Around 30 years ago, I had this friend… who was dating a girl who was a hairdresser. She was really nice, and would cut my hair for free. I had to drive out all the way to New West, but so what… free haircut! And then, one day, they broke up. He was sad. I was sad too, because I lost my hair hookup. He’s laughing right now because he’s reading this. Hi Andrew.

And so, around 30 years ago but a few weeks later, I happened to be at Oakridge Mall™ and realized I desperately needed a haircut, and there was a hair salon place there. It was called Raymond Hair Design™ , located roughly where BMO™ and The Apple Store™ are today. I wandered in, asked for a haircut… I didn’t have an appointment of course, so they hooked me up with whoever was free — turned out to be a very nice young (we were all young back then) lady who cut my hair and did a great job with it. Good enough that when I needed a haircut next time, I went back to the same place and asked for her. And this went on for years, until one day she told me that she and a few of her co-workers were starting-up their own place… maybe I wanted to follow her there. Of course… where? Near Broadway & Granville. For sure… so for the next few years, that’s where the haircuts took place. And then one day, she said she’s going out on her own… she found a little place and signed a lease… maybe I wanted to follow her there. Of course… where? Near Broadway & Granville. Aren’t we near Broadway & Granville right now? Yes, indeed… it’s a couple of blocks away. Great.

So the haircuts moved over to the new place for several years… a kind of dark, below-ground little spot…but it did the job… until one day she said she’s moving again, to a bigger and brighter spot. Great, I said… where..? Near Broadway & Granville. Yeah…isn’t that where we are right now? Indeed… just a couple of blocks away. Heh, ok. See you there. And that’s where the haircuts moved to… and that’s exactly where I was a few hours ago, for the first time since February 24th. I typically cut my hair every few weeks… it grows quickly. It’s been 15 weeks…

I must say, I was really happy to go there. My hair desperately needed it, it was really nice to see her and catch up, and, of course, the feeling of restoring normality that comes with all of that. It was weird… we were the only two in the entire salon, she was wearing a mask… but still… so, shoutout to Jenny — she’s reading this too. I can’t seem to find the best frosted malts on the planet, but I found the best haircuts 30 years ago, so I’m sticking with it.

Speaking of sticking with it… you know, I can’t sign off without some sort of pandemic correlation… that seems to be *my* TradeMark™… but this one is easy… like I said, for us around here who’ve behaved relatively well, so much so that our numbers are allowing us the steps toward normality… this is the sort of reward that comes with it. It’s not a lot, but like many things we used to take for granted, it now comes with a new appreciation. I suppose like oxygen… it’s not a big deal and you never think about it… until the moment comes where you can’t get any. Suddenly, it becomes a very big deal, very quickly. Haircuts aren’t life-or-death, but neither was most of the life we were all accustomed to… it’s just nice to be heading back in that direction. Like I said, Stick With It™ … we’re getting there.

 

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By |2020-10-08T01:40:47-07:00June 11th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Follower Favourites, Business & Economics, Life in Vancouver, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , |31 Comments
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Day 86 – June 10, 2020

Back in 1992, I went to a rock concert — Metallica, at the Pacific Coliseum… the Black Album tour, arguably their best. A very memorable concert, but before the show… something just as memorable…

Back in those days, like today, you stood in line to get checked by security before going in. Back then, they weren’t looking for guns or knives, though of course those would be confiscated… they didn’t even care about drugs. But alcohol, and the bottles that would house it — that was the big no-no. My friend and I were good little boys, so no concerns. We waited more than 15 minutes for the line to slowly snake its way to the doors, but we finally got there… and then this happened: My friend went in first, and the security guy frisked him…. and frowned. “What’s this?”, he asked…. “Huh?”, says my friend…. “Oh… oh shit… uh… oh boy….” and reaches into some lower hidden pocket of his relatively thick winter jacket and pulls out… a grenade.

Not a live grenade, of course… just a $5 army-surplus “hey, that’s pretty cool” sort of grenade. I imagine if this were today, some undertrained overzealous security fill-in would scream out “GRENADE!!” and there would be pandemonium. But back then…

“Yeah, I’m afraid you can’t take that in with you.”

“No… no, of course not. I’m so sorry. I…”

“You’ll have to check it.”

“… check it?”

“Yeah, coat check… go in, turn left… far wall, there’s a coat check… leave it there.”

“…”

“…”

“…. Ok.”

So in we go, turn left, go to the far wall to the coat check… he puts the grenade down on the counter. Coat check older lady doesn’t bat an eye… she picks it up, tapes a number to it, gives him the corresponding number, and puts the grenade on the shelf behind her. He hands her $1. Surreal.

After the epic concert, we’re herded out along with the rest of the unruly mob… and we’re far from the coat check, on the other side of the building. “What about your grenade?”, I asked him, as we approached the exit. His response strongly implied he wasn’t too interested in retrieving it.

Every time I see a grenade (which isn’t too often, notwithstanding the Bruno Mars’s song 10 years ago), I think about that grenade. I wonder what became of it? Did it sit on that shelf for a while? Did it make its way down to the Lost-and-Found? Is it still in some “Forgotten stuff people have left behind” pile in some basement storage room? It probably made its way into someone’s home, and when that person is asked where it came from, I wonder what they say.

This is the sort of story that wouldn’t happen today. Even here in Canada, where we’re a lot more chill than south of the border, but still. At one point, I suppose it was ok. These days, no way.

While I’ve been around, Vancouver has gone through three growth spurts, timed with three relevant events… Expo’86, the late 90’s handoff of Hong Kong back to China… and, more recently, the 2010 Winter Olympics. All of them brought lots of people to the city… and many of those people liked what they saw, and decided to stick around.

Those three events shifted the identity of this city… growth, diversity… some degree of “world-class”ness… creating different versions of time and place. Context. A grenade today on a U.S. city street during a protest? Serious problem. 30 years ago at a concert in Vancouver? Not so much.

It’s interesting how I always manage to tie-in some distant historical curiosity of my life and make it relevant to this present-day pandemic. And, more recently, tie it into the societal changes that are occurring. There’s no magic in my writing… it’s just the simple fact that history repeats itself, more often than we think. In concrete terms, pandemics have been reappearing for as long as man has been around. So have protests. And concerts. Same old stuff, dressed-up to be relevant as the flavour of the day. And whenever these days, you’re finding yourself thinking, wow… this is unimaginable. This impossible. This can’t be happening.

Yes, it’s imaginable, possible and it’s happening… again. Because it’s happened before. And it’ll happen yet again. It might look different… H34N87. COVID-68. Civil unrest because the [X] people are sick and tired of the [Y]’s people treatment of them.

We are living in interesting times, but let’s be clear… we’re not that special. Most people have lived through their generation’s versions of the same things. The key aspect is… did they learn anything from it? Have we learned from what they’ve learned, or are we doomed to make the same mistakes?

Yup… some rhetorical questions answer themselves.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:04-07:00June 10th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Life in Vancouver, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , |14 Comments
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Day 85 – June 9, 2020

My old high school calls me once a year… to sit on a sort-of Dragon’s Den panel thing… where all the students in business classes come up with business ideas and business plans, and the top 5 projects get presented to a panel of Dragons, much like the TV show of the same name. They do their business pitch, and the panel decides on the winner. Fun, interesting… and encouraging. There are some very bright, and soon-to-be successful kids coming down the pipe.

The winning pitch a few years ago was an App — ringtones that only young people could hear. Those higher frequencies, above 17.5KHz… most of us can hear them when we’re young… but by the time you hit 40, the ability goes away. The older you get, the farther down that number drops… below 15KHz and downwards. The presentation and demonstration were great; a bunch of blindfolded kids all putting their arms up in unison when the ringtone was activated; the rest of us unable to hear a thing. But the thing has other uses too — I used to use it to annoy my kids or get their attention. For those who can hear it, it’s loud and annoying, a super-high-pitched squeal that drives young people crazy. And nobody else can hear a thing.

It reminds me… a technology that didn’t exist when I was a kid… and has now cycled through to obsolescence… CDs, which were designed so that nobody would miss hearing a thing… 44.1KHz means 22,500Hz per stereo channel, more than enough frequency range for any human, and even more than enough for dogs to be able to hear that final note in “A Day in the Life”.

It’s also interesting that the standardized length of an audio CD, around 74-80 minutes (650-700MB)… was decided-upon because someone insisted that a full recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony must be able to fit. Recordings of that Symphony range from 70 to 79 minutes, so it’s all good.

And what’s further interesting is that by the time Beethoven wrote that symphony, he’d already lost most of his hearing. It’s beyond comprehension… perhaps the greatest piece of music ever written… by someone who never actually heard it. There are many stories about the premiere of that piece, in 1824… where Beethoven himself insisted on conducting, the equivalent of a blind air-traffic controller armed only with binoculars and a megaphone. Nevertheless, it was Beethoven, so he was given the podium, and threw himself into the role with great relish. The musicians ignored him and kept their eyes on someone else, who quietly conducted from elsewhere. The result of that was… that by the time the piece was finished, Beethoven was still a few bars behind, caught up in the version playing through his head… and he was still conducting while the audience was giving him the first of five full enthusiastic, jubilant standing ovations. At some point, one of the musicians stood up and turned him around, so he could see and appreciate the well-deserved cheers and applause. He couldn’t hear it, but he could see it, including hats and handkerchiefs being thrown in the air, arms waving wildly around… the whole thing was a tremendous success.

Indeed, it’s possible to have great success, even when the conductor doesn’t know what’s going on. Even when all he’s listening to are voices in his head.

There are too many examples… heads of state… governors… Swedish head epidemiologists, etc… a long list of conductors that are out of sync with their respective orchestras… and this is where the metaphor breaks down, because there’s no other conductor off to the side. Because the music isn’t so great. While the varying orchestras may be marching to a different beat, at the end of the day, they sound like one voice. And what does that voice sound like? In many cases, it’s numbers… not notes. And not great numbers when you start looking around at places that haven’t managed things well, or that have started opening up before they should’ve. Yesterday saw surges or record highs in Oregon, California, Arkansas, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. Russia and India have seen surges. Also, Summer up here means Winter south of the equator. Brazil is a mess, and getting worse. Peru and Chile are seeing some pretty ugly numbers. Ugh.

Around here, some room for optimism… for Canada overall, over the last few weeks, a slow but steady decline in new cases. The Time To Double has gone from 53 days to around 130. Ontario’s TTD three weeks ago was around 39. Today it’s around 100. And both Quebec and B.C., over the last week, have averaged a TTD of around 175. All very far cries from the early days of this pandemic where TTDs of 3 were not uncommon.

Let’s just keep in mind… this symphony isn’t over. We may have reached the first pause, between the first and second movements. But let’s also remember the rules of classical music etiquette… you never applaud between movements. You wait until the whole thing is over before you stand up and give it the final applause of great success.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:04-07:00June 9th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Business & Economics, Travel Stories, Humour, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |11 Comments
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Day 84 – June 8, 2020

Recently (May 22ⁿᵈ, in fact), I wrote about my way of learning… how difficult I find it to just memorize something… how I actually have to learn it and understand it. And the flipside of that… how if I actually manage to memorize anything, it sticks with me forever…. I suppose because of the way I learned it; to some extent, I understand it… it’s not just a jumble of words.

Such is the case with my favourite poem of all time, one I learned over 35 years ago. A classic and a favourite, written about by countless students over the years. I learned it back then, I and I still know it… and next time we’re having a coffee or a beer or whatever, call me on it… I’ll be happy to recite it for you. And if you want a far better version, check out Bryan Cranston’s reading of it on YouTube. It’s incredible.

“Ozymandias” – by Percy Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

OK… great poem. Fantastic imagery. You can totally see it… and the symbolism and message is pretty clear. Some very powerful king, thousands of years ago (it’s understood this was Ramses II, who was Pharaoh around 3,300 years ago) built these colossal cities, huge monumental cities that will survive forever. And in the middle of it, a huge statue of himself, proclaiming to the world how great he is, fear him, worship him, etc. And… today, it’s all gone, except, ironically, for this shattered remnant of all that boasting. Look around at all my awesomeness… but there’s nothing to see. It’s all been swallowed up by the desert.

The conventional analysis has to do with us, 3,300 years later, softly chuckling to ourselves at the colossal ego of this guy, thinking his stuff would last forever. Ha Ha, silly pharaoh, don’t you get it, nothing lasts forever, ha ha, you narcissistic, pretentious ego-maniac. If you read my report, and those of my fellow students… and those of thousands of others who’ve had to analyze this poem, that’s what you’ll get. Every variation on that theme; the poem is about hubris, period.

I learned this poem when I was a kid. I thought about it when I started my first job, about how I was building a colossal city… for someone else. I thought about it a lot over the years, building my own cities, knowing full well that I’ll get to enjoy them while I’m alive and so will my kids and close friends and all that, but, of course, one day it’ll all be gone, or, better put — transformed into something else. Ozymandias’ empire crumbled to literal dust — the very sand from which it emerged. I’m now wondering about the present-day versions of that. What will become of these words… things that barely exist… ones and zeroes, which, in the right order — mean a lot, but scramble them a bit and you have nothing. And stuff… the house, the cars, whatever. All transient. Just stuff. And it made me realize something recently, after 35 years of thinking about this poem. That maybe Ozymandias wasn’t such a short-sighted inward-facing fool after all. Maybe what he’s proclaiming to the world is the opposite… it’s like, look around — all of you — everything you are doing today — for what? It’s all going to crumble. Look at me, and everything I built! Gone! All gone! Now there is something to despair about. He wasn’t throwing into our faces how awesome he was and how immortal he was… he was saying… jeez, people… look… if I can’t build something that’ll last forever, what chance do you have? None! It’s all for nothing. That is what you should despair about.

I wish I could go back to grade 10 and present that. Get a serious “wow” look from the teacher, who I would hope would see the genius in that interpretation and give it the A+ is deserves. As opposed to the C I got because, you know, “Mr. Kemeny, I find your effort lacking”.

What’s also lacking in effort, and arguably missing in action, is leadership south of the border. I’ve been bashing Donald Trump, and his response to this pandemic, for a while now. With good reason, in my opinion. I had thought it’d be the crisis that would define his failure as president. That’s going to be a smaller part of the story, as it turns out. Never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, he perhaps could have had some redemption in the proper handling of what now, no doubt, will become the defining issue of his presidency.

The masterful reading of that poem by Bryan Cranston is him speaking in relation to his character, Walter White. If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad — you’re lucky, because now you get to experience what’s arguably the best TV series ever made. Queue it up. Go watch it. Walter White starts off as a pretty normal high-school teacher. Then, you could say, he gets into drugs. And, over the next few years, things change dramatically. And, no spoilers, but… you could say, things don’t end well. Things crumble.

Donald Trump has literally built the sort of empire that’s meant to crumble. Towers, casinos, golf courses. Similar to those towers and ski hills and fake islands in Dubai… all will be swallowed up by the sand one day. And none of that matters. Nor should it. History will not judge him on how awesome his (now bankrupt) casinos were. It’s everything else. I look upon his mighty present-day works and despair. Fortunately, one day, every aspect of what’s defining this presidency will crumble, and the U.S. will come out of it in better shape than how things were when it all started… not because of this particular president, but in spite of him. And the students of the future will have plenty to discuss.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:05-07:00June 8th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |12 Comments
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Day 83 – June 7, 2020

Air travel has obviously been radically affected by this pandemic, but before everything went all to hell, it’s interesting to note that typically, there are so many planes (tens of thousands) flying around at any given moment, that it’d actually be impossible to ground them all; there’d be no room to park them. We caught a glimpse of that post 9/11 when, for a week, all air traffic over North America was stopped. Airports turned into giant parking lots — YVR was one of them, the taxiways and runways littered with an eclectic collection of livery. Another one of them was Gander, Newfoundland… a town with a population of around 10,000 people… and an airport that’s well-suited to emergencies, being the closest point between the U.S. and Europe… so when the call came in to every plane, “Get down now… anywhere… closest airport… NOW.” — every plane over the Atlantic, headed to the U.S… or every plane that had just departed, heading East… all of them set a course for Gander. The population of Gander almost doubled, for a week, when 38 planes carrying 6,700 people suddenly showed up.

And for a week, the air was clear — far clearer than it’d been for many decades, and it was an opportunity for scientists to gather data… to gather data that otherwise would never have been available. That was a very steep price to have paid for that data, one nobody would have wanted to pay. But since the opportunity presented itself, it obviously made sense to take advantage of it.

There’s the old saying… today is the first day of the rest of your life. And these days, until there’s a cure for this virus, today is also always the beginning of these rolling “5 to 14-day windows” where we get to see the after-effects of our activities.

We’ve come to learn a lot about the transmission of this virus, and how enclosed spaces for prolonged periods of time are a much bigger issue than being outdoors, being distant, and picking up the virus off a contaminated surface. Not to say that some of those things don’t pose a risk; they all might, but it differs… and effectively, the more exposed you are to the virus, both in time and volume, the worse it is.

The numerous protests going on around the world are a good example of these rolling windows, and everyone is keeping a close look at the outcome. It’s not an ideal experiment, but there’s plenty of data that’ll be made available; possibly very expensive data, as per the post-9/11 air quality numbers. In this case, the guinea pigs aren’t air particles… they’re human beings who decided to throw caution into the wind. While there are Covid-responsible ways of protesting… masks, outdoors, socially distanced… many people said to hell with it. We’ve of course seen many maskless crowded protests already anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Well — there will eventually be answers to that rhetorical question. George Floyd was murdered on May 25ᵗʰ, coming up now on two weeks. It’s hard to judge what effect the protests around the U.S. (and Canada) have had, especially south of the border where numbers weren’t slowing down to begin with. So, to be sure, they’re still rising… but are they rising faster than they otherwise might have? And to throw more variables into it, openings have been taking place in many different cities and states; how much is that contributing? Washington State was doing pretty well, but they had a significant spike a couple of days ago… a week after many new openings. Coincidence? Just a spike, not a trend? Time will tell.

Around here, time will tell as well — for now, it’s two straight days without real data… tomorrow’s update will backfill Saturday and Sunday.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:05-07:00June 7th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Science of COVID-19, Travel Stories, Humour, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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Day 82 – June 6, 2020

No new local numbers to report today… so… how about that thunderstorm early this morning…? 4:30am, I thought there was a photoshoot going on outside my window… then you do the “count the seconds” thing to see how far away it is… 3 seconds per km. or 5 seconds per mile. “One steamboat, two steam…” Ka-Blam!! Ohhh… ok, let’s not go outside. But eventually I did, to the monsoon… because thunder and lightning and rain aside, that is always the crispest, freshest air on earth.

After that, I lay awake listening to it… and guess what, there’s a word for that…

Chrysalism: the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.

Then I fell back to sleep and hod some seriously weird dreams. Well, I often have seriously weird dreams… but these days, who doesn’t… no doubt they’re being seriously influenced by the events surrounding us all. If anyone wants to try to analyze, it was this… I was riding a motorcycle (I’ve never ridden an actual motorcycle) inside a mall — like the third floor of a luxury mall (I really dislike shopping). The mall was completely abandoned, but most doors were open and the shops were all in perfect condition… so I was driving through these ultra-luxury stores.. fashion, shoes, purses, etc… never stopping… and at some point, the luxury stores turned into more normal stores… a hardware store, even a pet store, with lots of full aquariums. “Who’s feeding the fish?”, I wondered in my dream. And that was pretty-much it.

Interesting thing, back in the day of computer programming… computer memory (RAM) was a valued resource, and good programming meant keeping the memory load low, especially if you had to be sharing it with other tasks, and the operating system. This was back in the day when memory addressing had a limit… an actual physical limit. An 8-bit CPU with only 16-bit addressing can, at most, address 2¹⁶ bytes — 64K of RAM, like with the famous Commodore 64. These days… for example, this Mac has a 64-bit CPU and 64GB of RAM… exactly one million times as much memory, the vast majority of which never gets used. And, for what it’s worth, the CPU powering this Mac is probably idle 99.9% of the time.

But… back when memory management really mattered, a good operating system would have implemented in it a sort of “garbage collection” — where it would go around and find snippets of memory that had something in it, but that was no longer being used… and would free it up . These little fragments of memory could then be consolidated into bigger chunks of free memory, which could then be used by other programs. All modern operating systems still do this.

It’s been said that dreams might be some sort of garbage collection where the brain, while we’re quietly sleeping, goes around getting rid of fragments of memory you no longer need. And possibly, before turfing it into oblivion, you brain consolidates it all into one big pool, which by then of course will be a jumble of disjointed, unrelated thoughts… and combines them into something that your brain then interprets into the craziness that you wake up from thinking… “what was that??”

Given the state of the world, I guess it’s no big surprise that our heads these days are full of a lot of thoughts, a lot of emotion, and a lot of junk. Great ingredients for some crazy dreams.

Today is also the anniversary of D-Day — 76 years ago, the best that America, Canada and the U.K. had to offer… stormed those five famous beaches of Normandy, and embarked on a campaign that ultimately led to Victory for the good guys. It’s ironic that the same U.S. army that played such a key role in liberating the world of an oppressive maniacal tyrant… may now be called upon to suppress its own people, by a “leader” who applauds authority via violence, be it the military, the police, or just protesters whose views align with his. For him, that violence is ok. For those protesting that sort of oppression and violence… not so ok. A “leader” who forgets that we’re all supposed to be on the same side, fighting for what we know is right. Kind of like those guys 76 years ago. Or, these days, kind of like how we’re all fighting this pandemic. There was no confusion back then. There should be no confusion today. We are in this together.

So, on that note… here’s a another word for you, this one of Japanese origin:

Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.

How very on point. How very appropriate. A word for an emotion that we’re all feeling these days… despair/anger/exhaustion/resignation/tiredness… all fused into one convenient word that our brains can process in one chunk. A word that is probably pervasive in all of our dreams.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:06-07:00June 6th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Business & Economics, Life in Vancouver, Humour, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , |4 Comments
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Day 80 – June 4, 2020

I had a whole thing written out today… but it’s taken a sharp turn… and I ended up pulling the plug on the latter half of it. It might not surprise you to learn that I have a lot to say about all sorts of topics, and sometimes my personal opinion perhaps clouds my judgement… or let’s just call it objectivity. I have a pretty clear idea of what I think is right, but that’s never stopped me from trying to put myself in someone else’s shoes, to see how things look from their point of view. Everyone has their story, as incongruent as it might be, so let’s hear it. I might learn something from it.

I’m going to get a little technical for a moment. There are two techie things to understand: A Virtual Machine and a VPN. Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you know what those things are.

A Virtual Machine is basically a computer running inside a computer. A host computer runs the virtual machine, and the virtual machine (and everything running in it) thinks it’s running as a stand-alone computer. For example, this is being written on a Mac, my primary computer (and host computer). But off in the corner, at the moment, I have a tiny VM… running, of all things, Windows XP. I need to do this because I have some hardware that needs controlling and for which there’s no current software; the old stuff runs fine, so rather than having a whole computer dedicated to it, I have this 20-year-old operating system running inside a VM that makes it look like 20-year-old hardware. That operating system thinks it’s running on a computer with a Pentium 4 chip, 512 megs of RAM and a 5GB hard drive. Minuscule numbers for today, but they work just fine for the purpose.

A common use for a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is to establish a location different than where you actually are. Typically, VPNs are used to grant access securely to some remote resource, but people quickly figured out a convenient by-product… that often, those VPNs are based elsewhere. From there sprung-up a whole industry for people trying to bypass local controls. For the most part, a website can only tell where you physically are from the IP address you’re using. It’s a big no-no in some places in the world to connect to a VPN… like everywhere that the government controls access to the internet, because many VPNs allow you to select the location you want… be it a country, state or even city. Around here, people mostly use VPNs to watch US-based Netflix. When you connect to a VPN, you can “be” anywhere in the world that you want.

So a while back, I created a completely clean VM — like a brand-new installed operating system. I then set that VM to always connect through a VPN, in what we would all call a very red state. Serious MAGA country. Then I signed up for a new fake email address and then, Facebook. That FB profile had a fake name and fake credentials… no pictures of me… just many of American flags, Donald Trump, etc.

The intent here was research. I had no intent on engaging with anyone. I just started “Liking” lots of different groups, friending lots of American patriots, to see what my feed would look like. What would show up, and, more importantly, what “news” would show up? I just wanted to see what this world looks like from a very different lens… and you’d be surprised… slick and professional. Totally believable… so much so, a few times I had to go back and check other news sources to compare. What actually did happen today?

Near the end of the experiment, I made the mistake of engaging, because I was getting frustrated at all the crap I was seeing, and the same non-questioning, non-critical-thinking RaRaRa MagaTrump etc… there was such misinformation being posted that it begged asking… so I sent this blurb to a few people:

“I am curious about something — are you propagating misinformation on purpose? Are you just blindly copying/pasting information because it aligns with what you hope is reality? I apologize in advance if this comes off as a personal attack; it’s not meant to be. I’m just noticing a lot of people taking information that can’t possibly be correct and reposting it because it agrees with their version of reality, as warped as it might be. What you posted — do you know it’s bullshit? Do you not expect to get called on it? I’m genuinely curious.”

The result was what you’d expect, but far worse. It became impossible to manage.

I ended up shutting it down. I closed the FB account, closed the email, dragged the VM to the Trash. The whole fake identity no longer exists. Unfortunately, the reality with which that identity briefly interacted — it’s all still there.

I am desperate to see real change in the word, but I am incredibly discouraged by what I experienced. There is a whole block of population that simply can not understand, doesn’t want to understand, is unwilling to understand… it doesn’t matter how you word it. There are people who will post something so outrageous that it’s literally impossible for it to be true, yet they will defend it to the death. There is no logic that can be applied to convince them otherwise, because they don’t want to be convinced. They have their truth. So if you can’t convince someone who seems intelligent and educated… that their COVID-19 numbers, claiming a death-rate that would require the US population to be 15 billion people — are bullshit, how far do you think you’re going to get with more subtle, reasonable arguments… be it the pandemic, politics, racism, whatever. Their minds are made up, and nothing will ever change them.

As per the first sentence of this post… I’m cutting it here. My intent here is not to insult people, just inform… be it facts, or simply my opinion.

I talked recently about it being a steep uphill, but this looks like a vertical rock face. I do have my ideas, and perhaps I’ll eventually get around to sharing them… but honestly, at this point, I’m open to suggestions. It has to start with education… but how?

 

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By |2020-10-08T01:39:57-07:00June 4th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Follower Favourites, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |34 Comments
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Day 78 – June 2, 2020

One day, the COVID-19 pandemic will be gone. Because of our great efforts… or perhaps, in spite of them. There will be treatments, there will be a vaccine, it’ll burn itself out. One way or the other.

Other virulent infestations, society has shown us, will never go away on their own… the sorts of things that take education, understanding, compassion… and a concerted effort and buy-in from everyone. It’s a long road and it’s a steep uphill, but it’s a journey that’s long overdue.

#blackouttuesday

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:07-07:00June 2nd, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , |13 Comments
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