20
Oct 20
Oct 20
A note from there, to here
The family and holiday questions will be tricky.
Here, we’re simply decisive about Thanksgiving. Others’ plans are starting to enter the national dialogue: Anthony Fauci is telling people to not do Thanksgiving now. His kids are at all four corners and the travel would make it a bad idea. The CDC, it seems, is gearing up to push these unpleasant messages.
We’re about to hit a third Covid case peak any minute now. Maybe a travel holiday makes a fourth? No thanks. My worry, and may it go unrealized, is that we see bad numbers by the third week of December based on Thanksgiving. Christmas is already going to be maudlin in that not-normal way, but it’s potentially going to be like that under the specter of “We were that dangerously impulsive over dry turkey?”
There are two primary problems. Say I get a cootie in my day-to-day professional life. Say I took it to people who didn’t have the cooties. People who are older, who have worked hard to stay healthy. I would, of course, never forgive myself for endangering people I care about. That’s the personal problem. The other is travel. For some, who’s family is just across town, getting there probably doesn’t expose yourself or endanger an entire community. Simple car ride, done. To see my mom, that’s somewhat more risky. I’m gassing up at least once, making a bathroom stop or two, and picking up take out along the way. If you were getting on a plane, doing rest stops, making big travel plans, running travel errands, having to hit restaurants along the way? Wholly different model.
Recently, TSA cleared a million travelers for the first time since the spring. Eventually we get to a critical point of mass. People bring their behaviors, their errors, their accidental transference, and it adds up. That airplane the sick guy is on, the people on his flight potentially take the cootie home to others. From the airport bar where he waits for his connection, someone catching a red eye pick it up, and takes it home to their aunties. Same for the guy making the drinks at the airport bar.
It’s not just my trip, but every joker out there doing the same thing, its compounding interest.
If big events — like Sturgis and political rallies and Rose Garden announcements — are super spreaders, then the next level is the travel spreaders set, the micro-event set. I might be coming from a hotspot to a cooler place. Or vice versa, pending my return. Consider whatever your bunch normally does, 25 people in a house the family outgrew two generations ago? No thanks. I’ll give my thanks from afar.
It boils down to degrees of selfishness. I could do Thanksgiving. Or I could try my darnedest to not risk myself, or others, getting sick.
The more vigilant I am now, the slightly more confident I can be that I’m not gambling with the health of my family if I properly isolate myself before Christmas: I have been cautious.
Which is what the holidays should also be right now, cautious. I can continue to be cautious for myself, and others.
Not everyone can stay in as much as I’m able. I appreciate that. Not everyone is built for it. Introverts will inherit the earth. But I can make the considerable, deliberate choice to not travel, to limit my time in public, for a greater good.
My employer has taken great steps to create a proactive safety culture (and an astoundingly successful one, so far) and is spooling up massive amounts of testing to that end. My job isn’t especially forward-facing after we’ve scaled down on-campus operations and I am diligent about limiting my time outside of the house. It’s worth honoring those efforts and my good fortune.
I am fortunate. I can limit time out to help avoid making a lot of stupid, human mistakes. (Just two so far!) It doesn’t guarantee my health, but it reduces my risk. I have been afforded, and undertaken a great many steps to help create, a fair degree of safety. None of that means I feel especially comfortable risking someone’s health at Thanksgiving.
Like all spring and summer, this remains an easy and small and helpful thing we can do right now: avoiding the unnecessary. Sadly, the usual holiday routine falls in there too. It’ll be harder and bigger and families will feel fractured, but nevertheless, it’s the helpful thing we can do.
The considerate thing.
19
Oct 20
Oct 20
The heights of things
This was the sky on Saturday. We were at the post office and I shot this through the sunroof.
Some days you feel like you can reach the clouds, and some days you feel like you need a great big ladder.
Some days you feel like you can reach the clouds, and some days you feel like you need a great big ladder. After lunch we went for a bike ride. I include this picture because I love this face. It’s her mean face, and it’s so stinking cute. Also, it means she’s going to ride fast; that’s a very aero mean face.
It was hard and windy and would have been fast, except it was hard, and windy. I was grateful for the turnaround spot, because we stopped to take a picture, and I could briefly catch my breath.
On the back half of the ride the air started to feel a bit cooler. No weather monitoring station reported it. All the numbers I could consult stayed at a steady 62 degrees, but I was out in it; I could tell the change. I got to the house and was happy to get inside, which was instantly when the bronchoconstriction began.
It was painful to breathe for a few minutes. The worst of it was “Would getting on the ground be better for this?” and “How can I tell if this is getting worse?” But it did not get worse. It hurt to breathe fully in, but I could get air. My heart rate was fine, considering the bike ride. I did not have any muscular or cognitive problems. I had a shock to the system, which began improving by the time I made it to the shower.
By last night it just hurt a bit to breathe all the way in, your classic this-was-irritated-yesterday feeling.
Watched this, with some interest, today. It’s New York, 1896. And not all of this is gone.
The upload and upscale is using a software treatment called neural networking. Mathematical functions, artificial neurons, are transforming the lower sourced input values into a higher quality output. The parameters can be altered because the networks are trained with high-res images that are down-sampled. Eventually, photo pairs, thousands of them, get analyzed and the process helps restore lost details. The information is filled in from what the network has learned. The network sees a face because it has been taught “that’s a face!” and it can flesh it out. A low-res building can show off individual bricks. Definition and depth comes with experience and exposure, just like the rest of us.
Then you speed it up, add some sound for ambiance and give it a little post-concussion color and you’re suddenly back in time. Sorta. Almost. It’s tantalizingly close to close.
Here’s a digitized version of “the original footage.” That’s Trinity Church in the background. By 1896 it was the second tallest building in New York City. It was built in 1846 and held the top spot for the best part of five decades. It gave up tallest building honors just before this footage was made to the New York World Building. (The World Building would come down in the 1950s for better car access to the Brooklyn Bridge.)
You can’t even see Trinity Church from that location today.
If you back up, down Broadway, you can guesstimate where, apparently, Alexandre Promio himself was standing when he filmed that.
Now, this footage was shot in New York City just five years later, in 1901. I think all of this is gone. But as interesting as the buildings and the signs and the carriages can be, the people — the guy that walks into, and then out of, the shot, the kid who isn’t yet sure if you’re supposed to mug for the camera, and then the couple at the end — they are what you’re here for.
… Someone will dig up some social media company’s servers in 2140 or so and figure out how to hook up real technology with this stuff we’re working with and then pioneer a way to extrapolate holograms from 1080 and 4K phone video. Won’t that be revealing …
Probably we’ll never know for sure, but I’m going to assume this camera was set up just to the left, on the sidewalk here. There’s a subway stop at this intersection, but just to the left are a series of those air grates there.
If the date on YouTube is correct, New Yorkers are between the first and second American car show right about there. The New York baseball Giants were bad. That September, William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, and Theodore Roosevelt would become president. The subways were coming along nicely. Everything was beginning to really surge. This is what Manhattan looked like from out in the Hudson about that time. A few blocks back downtown you’d find the city’s tallest building in 1901, the Park Row Building, a proud 391-feet tall, is still with us.
Today, 391-feet puts you … nowhere near New York’s top 100 buildings, of course. Some days you feel like you can reach up and touch 391-feet, and some days you realize you’d need that ladder. Harry Gardiner, the human fly, needed no such help to climb the Park Row Building in 1918. He did it in a suit, too.
