Covid finally catches me

Last Tuesday night (ie., a week ago), I started a cough and felt that I had a fever so I took a test on Wednesday morning that confirmed that I had Covid. I am pretty sure that I know how I got it. I have been very conscientious about wearing my N95 mask in all indoor public settings but on New Year’s Eve I attended a party. While I wore my mask almost all the time, I removed it to eat and I expect that that was when the virus snuck in. My symptoms started three days after that event. I have been isolating myself since then.

My symptoms were mild. In addition to the slight cough, I had a fever of about 101F. Three days after my test, by Friday, my fever had gone and I felt back to normal but I will continue to isolate for another week just to make sure that I am not contagious. Friends and neighbors who became aware that I have Covid have been very generous with offers of food and to run errands.

I am now part of the nearly 700 million people globally who have had the virus. I wrote earlier about the kinds of personal risk-benefit calculations one makes. I had on a few occasions removed my mask in indoor public spaces in order to eat and had not caught Covid. But it is always a gamble. You can reduce the risk by taking precautions but can never make it zero.

The link between machismo and climate change denial

Not being well versed in popular culture, I had never actually heard of Andrew Tate before his Twitter exchange with Greta Thunberg made news headlines last week. I was in a discussion group where the topic of the tweets came up and one of the participants enlightened me on who he was and the odious views he espoused, adding that he has become ‘the Jordan Peterson for the incels’.

Rebecca Solnit goes beneath the surface of the Twitter exchange.

There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.

“Men resist green behavior as unmanly” is the headline for a 2017 story on the phenomenon. Machismo and climate denial, as well as alliance with the fossil fuel industry, is a package deal for the right, from the “rolling coal” trucks whose plumes of dark smoke are meant as a sneer at climate causes to Republicans in the US who have long opposed nearly all climate action (and are major recipients of oil money).
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The myth of the rich genius

I have written many times before about the strange tendency of people to ascribe qualities of cleverness and depth, even genius, to very wealthy people. This makes the media pay undue attention to the utterances of such people, even on topics that they know nothing about. The examples are too numerous to list. The deference given to them. by the media and the constant presence of acolytes who feed their egos in this way, seem to result in them actually buying into the myth themselves.

Calder McHugh writes about this tendency but be warned that his essay contains spoilers for Glass Onion. The following passage is free from them.

In reality, rich people are no smarter than everyone else; their plans and even downfalls are simple. Peter Thiel is funding artists in New York City and politicians in Arizona because he thinks they’ll influence culture and politics toward his vision of a new right. Neither is going well for him. FTX founder and large political donor Sam Bankman-Fried at some point bought the boy-genius myth that he was selling to everyone else, lost a lot of money and landed himself in court. Musk made an offer for Twitter because he was addicted to the platform and thought it would be good to have an even bigger megaphone and now, his companies and his own brand seem to be in freefall. Donald Trump ran for president so that he could watch himself on cable television more, stumbled backwards into the job, tweeted through it and is now hawking NFTs while he tries to dodge prosecutions. Ye, better known as Kanye West, embraced shocking behavior until it lost him lucrative business deals and, reportedly, billionaire status.

At some point, all of these men accrued enough capital that they found themselves surrounded by people who fanned their egos in the hopes of a kickback. But as they settled into these carefully constructed worlds that were built to reinforce their supposed genius, any creative spark or understanding of business or American culture that helped them in their journey to the top is bound to dim.

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US life expectancy drops again

For the second straight year, US life expectancy dropped, according to the CDC. It is now the lowest it has been in 25 years.

As per the 2021 data, Americans are expected to live 76.4 years, down from a peak of 78.8 years in 2019.
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The finalised numbers confirm preliminary ones released by the CDC in August, in which the health agency predicted the worst two-year decline of life expectancy on record in the US since 1923.
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Life expectancy in the US remains lower than the UK, where the average is 80.8 years. It is also lower than neighbouring Canada, where life expectancy as of 2020 is 81.75 years.

Of both countries, the US spends the highest amount of money on healthcare. Per capita, the US pays $12,318 (£10,217), while the UK spends $5,387. Canada’s healthcare spending, in comparison, sits at $5,511 per capita.

Covid-19 and drug overdoses are being blamed from the drop.

“COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74%, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50% of the decline from 2020 to 2021.”

Drug overdose deaths are also a factor. They now account for more than a third of all accidental deaths in the US, the data shows. Overall, overdose deaths have risen by 16% from 2020.

This includes deaths involving fentanyl, which increased by 22% in 2021.

While the pandemic effect should slowly decrease, there’s no sign that the drug issue will follow.

Unwarranted anxiety over memory lapses

I am at the age when people begin to worry about the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. It does not help that this topic keeps surfacing in conversations among age-peers in one’s family and friends and acquaintances, thus keeping it at the forefront of one’s mind. But it is easy for people who are not clinicians trained in the symptoms of these diseases to become unduly alarmed over things that are merely the effects of normal aging and not signs of serious cognitive decline. Misplacing items, being unable to recall the name of an object or an actor in a TV show or film, forgetting why one went into a room, are among the things that cause unwarranted uneasiness.

This article tries to dispel some of those concerns, by distinguishing between normal aging-associated memory loss and mild cognitive impairment. Every year about 10-15% of people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia.
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Masking is being advised again

Last week, for the first time since the pandemic started, I went into a public place without wearing a mask. It was the occasion of some friends of mine visiting from out of town and the five of us went to a restaurant. It felt a little strange at first to be without a mask but the restaurant was only about half full and there were no people at the adjacent tables.

I am one of the few holdouts who are still wearing masks. But health experts are warning that we seem to be heading for some months where cases will rise for three kinds of viral infections (Covid-19, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), and flu) and are recommending that people wear masks again in certain situations. This is going to be a hard sell since most people around the country (and apparently the world) have given up on them and live as if infectious diseases are things of the past.

But others share my concern.
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A community in American Samoa leapfrogs into solar energy

I have been reading several books on anthropology recently and decided to revisit a classic, the 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. This was Mead’s first book, published in 1928 when she was just 27 and was based on nine months field work in 1924 on the island of Tu’a in American Samoa and it made her famous. She was investigating whether the conflicts that seemed to arise in the US between adolescent girls and their parents after they reached puberty was biologically based or was because of the cultural context in which they grew up.

Mead was part of the anthropology program at Columbia University and Barnard College directed by Franz Boas that claimed that evidence showed that race, sexuality, and gender were not fixed, biologically determined categories but were fluid and a product of culture. Boaz expanded on these themes when he wrote in the Foreword to Mead’s book, “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.”
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The Copernican Myths by Mano Singham

Given the discussions generated by yesterday’s post about how the location of heaven changed with advances in science, I decided that an article that I published back in 2007 in Physics Today on December 2007, p. 48-52 might be relevant because it discusses why it was that the idea of a heliocentric universe led to the inference that the universe might be infinite and thus left no room for a heaven. (Doing so continues my program of putting on this blog my published articles for easier access.)

The Copernican Myths.

How did heaven first end up in the sky and then nowhere?

One of the things that made me into a disbeliever in the existence of gods (and anything supernatural) was the fact that science seemed to have ruled out any location where such things might exist. The answer usually given that ‘God is everywhere’ but could not be detected seemed like a cop out. And the idea of dead people’s souls wandering around that could observe you but you could not contact (except through people with special powers) also seemed weird.

But during the time that I was a believer, I did struggle with the question of where a god and heaven could possibly be. In this article, Stephen Case explores how ideas about heaven have changed over the last two millennia.
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