My management level at work has a 10:00 huddle every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This is a photo of the meeting from Friday.
That’s my boss in the lower left corner.
Yes, he made a Lego version of himself that is built to sit on top of the screen of his MacBook Pro.
And this is why he is Nerd Boss.
People have weird ideas about luck and hard work. We attribute to hard work the accretion of of systemic advantages. We attribute to luck random forces in the universe put into motion by the choices of other people over which we had no control. We also have weird ideas about what actions and choices create or destroy luck.
When someone is dubbed as being “lucky” it means that things have a tendency to work out for them. These events seem random when in reality they are often the result of a subsconscious ability to see connections or opportunities that the person with the ability doesn’t even realize they have. And no, I’m not talking about ESP or anything like that.
A huge portion of human communication is non-verbal. Amy Cuddy, a psychologist at Harvard University, has a popular TED Talk backed up by a peer-reviewed paper that shows how you can use your body to influence your level of confidence. But there is a difference between “power posing” to boost your confidence and the random things we associate with bad luck.
Those are just a few of the old saws about luck that I learned as a child. Only that last one about walking under a ladder makes any practical sense. Someone’s working up there and they might drop something. The rest are just plain superstition. Glancing at the calendar is what got me thinking about this.
Why do we consider 13 unlucky in Western culture? And why is a Friday the 13th considered particularly unlucky?
It all goes back to that lovely, lovely book of myths from a tribe most of us don’t belong to: The Bible.
Thirteen got its reputation for being unlucky because of the number of diners at the last supper, according to this article on MSN.com. Friday got its reputation in a similar way given that we are told the Romans crucified Christ on a Friday.
Apparently, we’ve based an entire belief about luck, something that doesn’t exist, on the much translated, politically motivated stories about a man who probably didn’t exist either.
You have to do you. I will continue to pick up pennies when I find them, pet friendly black cats, and refrain from throwing salt on my floor that I will just have to clean up later.
I’ll stay out from under ladders, though. No one needs a concussion.
Back in March, about a million years ago in QuaranTimeâ„¢, when we were still afraid of our cereal boxes and soup cans, TGF and I made a decision that we would finally go paperless on the bills.
There’s no marginal amount of irony in us going paperless now. I spent 15 years working in the environmental non-profit space. You’d think that we’d have gone paperless a long time ago.
The thing about paper bills is they function as a physical reminder that I need to pay that company. I see them, handle them, and am bothered by them much the same way I am bothered by the pip on my email program that tells me how many new messages I have.
Paperless bills seem to make sense from an environmental perspective too. Activists have been screaming for years about deforestation across the globe.
The Amazon rainforest has lost close to 20% of its mass in the past 40 years. Trees are, in fact, one of humanity’s best allies in fighting climate change.
You’d think it would make sense to go digital for bills. But there’s the thing: digital isn’t free.
We think of digital – those email notifications from credit card companies, insurance companies, and utilities – as existing <waves hand> in the cloud, nebulous and not corporeal.
Digital is real. The cloud takes storage capacity and that capacity lives in massive server farms in the American Midwest.
Those server farms take energy. Lots of it.
In a report card published in December 2019 , Wired said the top three cloud providers – “Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — account for about two-thirds of the rentable computing services.
That means almost every email, streaming service binge watch session, web search, or online bill paying activity most likely goes through one of those three companies.
And it’s not just more modern services like video streaming taking up space.
Analysis by KeyCDN based on data provided by the HTTP Archive shows that the average web page size increased from 702 kb in 2010 to 2,332 kb in 2016. That’s a jump of  218% in just 6 years, mostly due to images and video.
I’m old enough to remember when access speeds were so restricted that if your web page file, because there were no content management systems or externally loaded CSS or JavaScript files back then, edged toward 50 kb you were pushing your luck.
The idea that on average video takes up more than triple that in size boggles my mind.
Digital isn’t free. It contributes to the climate crisis in a massive way even beyond those giant data centers.
That device that we all have glued to our hands, the one with more power than the computer that sent humans to the moon for the first time, is a leading factor.
Going paperless hasn’t been the boon I expected. During the transition I missed at least three payments to three different credit card companies, primarily because I get about 800 emails a week.
I recently decided to destroy the updates tab in Gmail. I bulk selected everything and moved it to my primary tab. And when I was done I had 1,400 emails to sort through. At least only 857 of them were “unread.”
Starting now I’m going to tie knot in the digital firehose.
It isn’t much work to recall the smell of that morning, that particular combination of old paint, overheated air, and slightly damp synthetic fabrics that permeated very classroom in my Fairfax County, VA middle school on Fall mornings in the 1980s.
We didn’t have Veterans Day off as a school holiday. It was too close to Thanksgiving break probably. Keeping us in school was also a way for local school systems to give our federally and Fed-adjacent employed parents a day off free of children.
I remember that day because it was one of the earliest times I’d paid attention to what Veterans Day means. Most likely because we were discussing it in Social Studies or History, which is the class I had at the time we took our 11 minutes of silence.
Eleven minutes where an entire middle school paused. Didn’t talk. Didn’t move. Just sat quietly as a group to honor the sacrifices made by our military veterans on our behalf.
Even as America spent the last 20 years becoming more jingoistic than ever, the meaning of Veterans Day has slipped away.
The Veterans Administration tells us that Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919 the first commemoration of the ceasefire between the Allied nations and Germany “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” the previous year. This ceasefire is widely regarded as the end of “the war to end all wars.”
Wilson said “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”
It took the U.S. Congress another seven years to to officially recognize the end of World War I. In June 1926 Congress passed a concurrent resolution that recognized that 27 U.S. states had already declared November 11th as a legal holiday and called upon all people in the U.S. to “observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.”
It wasn’t until 1938 that “Armistice Day” became a Federal holiday in the U.S. and in that same year Dwight Eisenhower issued the first “Veterans Day Proclamation (pdf).”
It’s only taken 100 or so years for us to lose sight of the horror that World War I brought.
According to multiple sources, the last potential witness to direct combat during World War I was Frank Buckles, an American man who died in 2011 at the age of 110. Buckles, by the way, also had the unfortunate luck of being taken by the Japanese as a civilian prisoner in the Philippines during World War II.
The last known veteran of World War I, a British woman named Florence Green who died in 2012 at 110 years-old.
My friend Joe, whom I would have dubbed least likely to join the military even out of the creche of conservative, military studded Northern Virginia in the 1980s, served 8 years in the U.S. Navy.
Twice a year he gets on social media and reminds people that Memorial Day is a solemn day to remember those veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country while Veterans Day is a time to honor and celebrate those veterans who are still with us.
In the last 20 years, we have distorted what today is supposed to be about.
In typical human fashion, made even more typical by our American lack of attention to detail and our inability to see the fabric of things as they relate to each other, not only have we lost that today is meant to remind us of the horror of The Great War and to honor the effort and selflessness of those who fought int it we have expanded the meaning of today to include first responders – doctors, nurses, teachers, EMTs, firefighters.
And while those folks rightly deserve our thanks and even our praise, maybe a better way to do it would be to get them the supplies they need, pay them a living wage, and ensure they have the health care everyone deserves.
Veterans Day should remind us of the horrors of war. I say this on the vague, slight chance that maybe we’ll learn from past mistakes and not do war again. I say this knowing full well that Veterans Day 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of the Gulf War, the first war my age cohort was old enough to fight in. The first war that claimed at least a couple of my high school classmates.
Being in the military has its rewards. And at this point anyone who serves does so voluntarily. I don’t believe most of them do it informed, though, given the amount of mythology around our military, its rituals and customs, and its meaning.
I’m going to leave you with these statistics:
I will probably pause today around 11am if only for a couple of minutes. If only to remember the folks I know who served.
Just because we finally have an adult ready to lead the country doesn’t mean we can relax.
There’s still a pandemic going on. It is still “these unprecedented times.”
<waits while you take a shot>
We know a lot more now about how you can catch coronavirus than we did seven months ago. Remember back in April – I know it’s hard since it’s about 15,000 years ago in PandemicTimeTM – when we were all frantically wiping down our groceries?
Remember that doctor from Michigan who thought it would be a great idea to tell us to wash our vegetables with soap and water? (Hint: Do not do this unless you want massive digestive upset). Remember when he thought it would lend him credibility to do his first “how to sanitize your groceries” video wearing hospital scrubs and everyone freaked the fuck out because they judged clothing that had been in a hospital where patients with active, severe COVID-19 infections were being treated to be more dangerous than a can of soup or a bunch of oranges from the average Mejier?
As reported in USA Today, the U.S. CDC says “because of the poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely a very low risk of spread from food products or packaging.â€
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still things you need to do to protect yourself, the people you live with, and the people you are in contact with every day.
6 feet or 2 meters. Doesn’t matter how you measure. And always a challenge in a society where men think one inch equals a mile.
Multiple sources state that the average woman in the U.S. is between 5’3″ and 5’4″ (about 161 CM) tall as of 2016. I’m about 5’9″ (175.25 CM) tall.
If I could lay down with my feet where I am standing and stretch my arms above my head and touch the person in front of me in line I am too fucking close.
Yeah, I know that’s over 6 feet but that recommended distance is the minimum.
The CDC recommends regular hand washing to help you from spreading or getting SARS-COV2. They say especially after you have:
Or before you:
The US CDC’s guidelines for hand washing kinda suck in my opinion. They hit the basics, sure, but the instructions aren’t clear at all. I much prefer the ones from the World Health Organization (WHO), which come with some good visuals.
And if you’re tired of “Happy Birthday,” you can use Wash Your Lyrics to generate your own poster with lyrics instead of the written instructions.
I wear a mask to protect you. You wear a mask to protect me. It’s the simplest expression of the social contract.
Lots of things that we though would make good masks back in April – bandanas, old t-shirts, a discarded pair of tighty-whiteys – don’t really cut it.
Two layers of high thread count cotton are probably the most effective thing you can make a mask out of at home. And as much as I heart Spoonflower, custom printed fabric can be hella expensive if you need to make a bunch of masks in a hurry.
If you feel like you need to buy masks be prepared for masks with earloops as this is the most common design commercially available. And if you do need to buy commercially, try buying from a Black-owned business. Etsy has a wealth of Black-owned shops making masks.
If you aren’t happy with ear loops or just want to make your own masks you can do what I did: Buy high thread count cotton sheets on sale. “Black Friday” is coming up and I strongly recommend The Company Store cotton percale flat sheets as a good source for this. These are 300 thread count.
If you want something more interesting than a plain color for your outer shell, you can look for patterned sheets on their site or you can mix and match with fabrics from other places.
The pattern I like is the Olson mask (pdf). You can choose to do ear loops or, like me, you can use a single, 36 inch shoe lace for a tie.
I’d link you to an easy video for how to make these but for some unknown reason YouTube has determine the tutorial violates their terms of service.
Just please, please, keep doing these things. And if you haven’t been doing them, start. Our daily case count is going in the wrong direction.
It’s going to be a long, cold winter.