Ken’s Blog

I have been having a number of conversations with friends in recent days about how particularly odd is this pandemic. It’s not that we haven’t gone through difficult times before — we certainly have.

It’s that no other tragedy in our lifetimes has utterly changed the nature of society. The very way that people connect has changed, in fundamental ways. Ways of personal connection that we thought were immutable have ceased full stop.

One topic that comes up often is how we will describe this time to those who are not yet born. It might be impossible to truly comprehend to anyone who has not actually lived through it.

I imagine it might be something like the dilemma facing soldiers who came back from the front in WWI and WWII. There was no way to truly convey what they had gone through, so in many cases they simply did not try.

The difference is, of course, that in this case the “front” is everywhere. So the question is not so much what we will tell our children, but how we will tell them.

This evening, tired of watching all the sad TV news reports about the current situation, I went out for a walk. It was a beautiful night, not a cloud to be seen, the sky opening up dark and beautiful above me.

Tonight is a full moon, and I bathed in the light of Luna in all her glory, as Venus shone like a precious Jewel in the sky, while Orion fairly leapt out at me, as I vmarveled at the strangely uncharacteristic dimness of Betelgeuse.

These majestic objects out in the universe provide so much beauty. Yet in their vastness and their majesty they are indifferent to both the triumphs and tragedies of human life down here on Earth.

For reasons I cannot quite explain, at a time like this I find their serene indifference to be strangely comforting.

For obvious reasons, I’ve been watching a lot more YouTube than usual. Which means I see a lot of ads.

Ads are weird. On the one hand, I appreciate them. Without ad revenue, the entire economy of “free” on-line videos wouldn’t exist.

On the other hand, the entire concept is strange. People are trying to sell things, so advertisers put enormous amounts of time and effort into making slick videos to grab the attention of viewers.

But all those viewers really want to do is skip the ads. At the earliest possible moment, a typical viewer will click on the button that skips the remainder of the ad.

So it becomes an oddly adversarial ecosystem. People put enormous amounts of effort in to making ads to lure in viewers, yet those same viewers hate the ads, and consider them a nuisance.

Isn’t it amazing that this is the basis for one of the largest sectors of our economy?

We just went through a period where most of the people I know left their abodes only for essentials, and even then with trepidation. A trip to the grocery required wipes, latex gloves, perhaps some face covering and a plastic spray bottle filled with antiseptic alcohol, ever on the ready.

But today that game has changed. The government is now telling us not to go out even for groceries. Order in if you can. If all else fails, get take-out from a restaurant.

Which means we may all be shut in for the long haul. We will meet each other socially on-line, do our double dates over Zoom, pretend to share a beer. But we won’t actually be in physical contact with people outside our household.

These habits will start to be ingrained, as they become integrated into our daily rituals. I wonder whether, after we are once again free to roam the earth, we will have found ourselves changed in fundamental ways.

Maybe we won’t enjoy the bar or restaurant crowded with strangers in quite the same way. We might get an uneasy feeling when packed tightly into a concert venue.

In the future, we might all acquire agoraphobia. But that’s not the strangest thing. No, the strangest thing is that being agoraphobic might simply come to seem normal.

I know two people who have started a practice of meeting each other once a week for a virtual lunch. Each time they agree to discuss a topic of interest.

They have established only one rule, by mutual agreement: There is one topic they never discuss.

I probably don’t need to tell you what the topic is. Here is a hint: You almost certainly have already heard this topic discussed many times today.

I think it’s a great idea. After all, in times like this we don’t just need to look after our physical well being. We also need to consider our mental well being.

Bill Kemp, the Governor of Georgia, just in the last day issued a stay-at-home directive for his state. But the astonishing thing is how he explained the lateness of his decision. Here is what he said, in his own words:

“What we’ve been telling people from directives from the CDC for weeks now that if you start feeling bad stay home, those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad. But we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.”

There is clearly something wrong with this statement. As we all know, the CDC made has been warning since mid-February about documented cases of asymptomatic transmission.

Which brings us to the most interesting word in Kemp’s announcement.

That word is “we”. When Kemp says that “we” didn’t know, who else could the governor possibly be referring to, in addition to himself? After all, Americans have been glued to the TV for weeks, so we have all been quite aware for some time that asymptomatic transmission of COVID19 is a very real and present danger.

I did some research, and came up with some candidates. At the governor’s mansion they have a German shepherd named Rhett and a golden retriever named Bailey. And at their farm in Athens, Georgia, the Kemps keep a horse named Lula, a goat named Butterscotch, and a sheep named Miracle.

So there you have it. If we simply expand beyond the restrictive category of “must be human”, we indeed find individuals in Kemp’s personal sphere who would not have known about the dangers of asymptomatic transmission. So I could be convinced to take the good governor at his word.

But it might take a Miracle.

Many years ago I attended a lecture at NYU by Stephen Jay Gould. The lecture was called “Life in the Age of Prokaryotes”.

This was a deliberately provocative title for a scientific talk. There is generally a scientific consensus that the “age of prokaryotes” — or single celled organisms such as bacteria — has long been supplanted by the age of eukaryotes, or multi-cellular organisms such as insects and humans.

But Gould’s point was that nearly every living being on planet Earth is a prokaryote. The number of prokaryotes dwarfs the number of eukaryotes by a vast ratio.

When you look at the prokaryotes this way, you realize that it’s their planet. We just live in it.

I hadn’t thought about this lecture in many years. And then these recent unfortunate world events put it back into my mind.

As humans, we possess a certain hubris. We have a tendency to believe that all of existence — this planet, this universe — exists only for our benefit and our greater glory. So there can be a certain satisfaction in rhetorically pitting us against our tiny little bacterial rivals in a fight for world dominance.

But then something like this outbreak happens, and it becomes clear that Gould did not go far enough. Turns out it wasn’t the prokaryotes we needed to worry about, but something even smaller and more primitive — and more deadly.

Today, for the first time I think, I was inspired to look up the history of April Fools Day. Turns out it goes way way back and is celebrated in various ways in many countries, sometimes with surprisingly strict protocols.

In some countries it is only considered acceptable to pull pranks until noon. In others newspapers run exactly one prank newspaper article — never more — always on the front page, and never as the lead story.

Some pranks were truly awesome. In 1957 the BBC convinced millions of British citizens, through an artful three minute fake documentary, that spaghetti grew on trees. Many viewers called into the station to find out where they could get those trees, so they could grow their own spaghetti.

It was so much fun to learn about all of these varied ways of celebrating April 1, and take my mind off our current troubles. I really should have just kept doing that all day.

Instead I made the damn fool mistake of turning on the TV. Turns out they were showing some sort of weird April Fools Day make believe news report.

As far as I can tell, it was about a major health crisis, in which millions of lives were at risk. The kicker was that the President of the United States was Biff Tannen, in full bloviating idiot mode.

Good thing it was only an April Fools Day prank.

In these times when the entire world is under a cloud, one looks for the silver lining. When you’re stuck at home, and maybe getting a little bit stir crazy, you start looking for things to do.

Today I realized I can finally take a little time out of every day to memorize all of those poems I had always been meaning to memorize. It’s something I’d been wanting to do for years, and now, with the strange rhythm of these stay-at-home times, I can do it.

One thing you realize — something I guess stage actors know — is that you can memorize things a lot better than you think you can. If you practice saying something aloud multiple times, and focus on what you are saying, your brain just sort of picks it up.

There are few things more satisfying than being able to recite an entire poem aloud without needing to peek at the text. I recommend it highly.

Just make sure to start with short ones.

I am thinking of implementing something when I get the time. It will be a text editor that collaborates with you.

You can type stuff into it, just like an ordinary text editor. But on the other side of the screen, as it were, a software robot is always running.

The robot looks for certain things you might type, and responds in smart ways. For example, you might type “make a table of this year’s Google monthly stock price.” In response, your robot collaborator will replace the text you just typed by the appropriate table.

A text editor with that sort of capability might be useful in many fields, including art, science, music, engineering and the humanities. The possibilities are endless.

Now I just need to find the time to implement the darned thing. If only I had a really smart text editor to help me out…