A fun party exercise illustrates a mathematics theorem

I know, I know, that parties seem to have become extinct but let us assume that at some point we will again begin to have gatherings of more than just the people in our own households. When that happens, here is a fun exercise you can do. Define as mutual acquaintances as any two people who have met at least once before this occasion, and mutual strangers as any two people who have just met for the first time. It actually does not have to be done at parties but with any group of six or more people.
[Read more…]

Building slack into systems

What the covid-19 pandemic has revealed, at least as far as the US is concerned, is how delicately balanced the supply and distribution systems are. As long as things are normal, everything appears to run smoothly. But given a large enough disruption, the system can not only not cope, it cannot reconfigure itself quickly enough to meet the challenge. In this case, we have discovered that the supply of goods and services is highly dependent on a just-in-time supply chains for each item that are finely tuned for maximum efficiency and eliminate the need for costly stockpiling of supplies. But the sudden change in the way people live and work has resulted in shortages in some areas along with gluts in others, with no means for quickly redistributing the resources to reach a new equilibrium.
[Read more…]

Everything is now part of the culture wars

Trump’s policies on dealing with the pandemic have been disastrous from the start. After not recognizing the need to take action for about a month early on, a delay that is estimated to have resulted in about 36,000 additional deaths. He has also not provided funding for widespread testing, apparently fearing that would increase the numbers and make him look bad, touted bizarre and even dangerous treatments for covid-19, promised unrealistically quick discoveries of a vaccine, and urged the reopening the country earlier than health experts recommend.
[Read more…]

Solitude and loneliness

Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has written a book that argues that loneliness is a serious problem in the US and its negative effects are taking a physical toll on people as well, not just an emotional one. Although he wrote his book before the pandemic broke, the topic has considerable resonance now.

Murthy begins his story by detailing his travels across the U.S., where as surgeon general he encountered a disturbing theme: “There was something about our disconnection from one another that was making people’s lives worse than they had to be.” The stories weren’t always easy to unearth; many people were embarrassed by how they felt. “This shame,” he writes, “was particularly acute in professional cultures, like law and medicine, that promote independent strength as a virtue.”

[Read more…]

The time may be right for universal basic income

The biggest problem facing many people during this pandemic is the loss of employment. About 30 million people have lost their jobs and as I have discussed before and Hasan Minhaj highlighted so well on his show, this has knock-on effects that spread all through society. Not having any income means they cannot pay their rent or buy food or other things and that hurts businesses. Not paying rent means that their landlords cannot pay their mortgages or utilities or property taxes, which means that state and local governments lose revenue and can’t provide services. And so on. Congress has passed various stimulus packages but these require people to jump through all manner of hoops to get aid, is insufficient, and does not cover everyone who has been affected.
[Read more…]

Sports in the age of pandemics

Sports have always been a peripheral part of my life and so I have not deeply missed the absence of big-time sports contests. But there seem to be many people who are suffering from sports withdrawal symptoms even if they were just viewers and not participants and they are yearning for its resumption. It was the abrupt canceling of the basketball season just before an NBA game began, that was soon followed by all the other major leagues canceling their seasons, that made everyone realize that this pandemic was serious stuff. It is one thing for public health officials to issue warnings. Those can be shrugged off. It is something else entirely to cancel a sports season. That gets people’s attention.
[Read more…]

Reusing masks

Up until very recently, I have not been able to get any face masks and hence have not entered any public place such as a store. Last week, my daughter mailed me a few and so I was able to go to the local Asian grocery store and buy stuff that was running low. Some stores no longer allow you in without a face covering. Since I had a limited supply, I had wondered about the advisability of reusing face masks that were supposed to be disposable. While the recommendation is that one should not reuse them, it seemed wasteful since it would consume items that should be saved for people like health care workers who need them on a daily basis and need to shed them frequently
[Read more…]

The problem with videochats

These days some of us are spending more time videochatting with friends and family using one of the many platforms that are available. While they come closer to a semblance of physical contact than a phone call, they are still deficient in one area as Christina Cauterucci, who has been growing increasingly disenchanted with video gatherings, explains.

My internal alien has identified the lack of normal eye contact as one central pitfall of the video-chat experience. Talk to someone over FaceTime or Zoom, and they’ll never quite meet your eyes. They’ll spend the call looking at their screen, a few inches below or to the side of their camera, giving you the perpetual feeling of trying to get the attention of someone who’s ever so slightly preoccupied. Once, on a Skype call many years ago, a friend looked directly into her camera to say something heartfelt to me with the approximation of true eye contact. The effect was jarring: I didn’t fully realize that we hadn’t been making eye contact until she was suddenly staring straight into my soul from inside my screen. She was gazing at her computer’s eye, not mine, and could actually see less of my face than when she was looking at her screen, yet I felt strangely, uncomfortably exposed. When I recently tried it on a video call with my niece and nephew in an attempt to make them laugh, it gave me the unsettling impression of carrying on a conversation with HAL 9000, who’d been watching me watch the kids throughout our call. (FaceTime, perhaps even more eerily, has a new feature that attempts “eye contact correction” to make it appear you’re looking directly at each other, even when you’re not.)

[Read more…]

How stuff spreads through contact

We have been told the importance of washing our hands to prevent the spread of viruses. But how easily do viruses spread? An experiment done by the Japanese public broadcast TV station NHK looked at what happens in public places where people congregate, such as at a restaurant buffet. They put some invisible fluorescent paint on the hand of one person and after 30 minutes used black light to find out where it had ended up.
[Read more…]