Inside, Out

Jess and I haven’t left the apartment for about 48 hours now, and, thus far, I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ve been productive working from home during the day, and we’ve been cooking up a storm, and watching our way through The Crown, in the evenings.

Still, by Friday, we’ll have eaten most of our perishable food items, and I’m trying to leave the few weeks of stuff we have in the freezer and pantry untouched, just in case things take a turn for the worse. I had hoped to get groceries delivered going forward, but Whole Foods is still wildly low on inventory, and it’s far more difficult to order around that in the abstract than it is to adjust plans on the fly if you can actually look at the shelves. Similarly, I considered going back to Fresh Direct, which I used some years back, but they literally have zero available delivery slots in the next week.

So, it appears, I’ll be venturing back out into the world at some point soon. A block or so off, there’s a Key Foods, which remained fully stocked this weekend even as the neighborhood Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s largely sold out. (I suspect that’s a function of the largely Black and Latinx customer base; there’s a lot of privilege inherent in hoarding.) But, it’s also relatively teeny, with close aisles that back up with even just a handful of people in the store, and the selection of fresh foods is relatively sparse. Conversely, our neighborhood Whole Foods is fairly wide open, and seems to be full of vegetables (at least per Instagram). So I’m weighing out options, as well as crafting a shopping list ordered by aisle, so I can show up at either store as soon as it opens, and charge through in minimum time.

Today, I’m also considering possibly heading out for a run. The Upper West Side looks sparse out my window, and I usually run along the street, next to the parked cars, rather than on the sidewalks. So, I think, I should be far enough away from any other pedestrians to keep the risk low. Right?

Either way, still puzzling through this semi-quarantine, and the life logistics it’s going to entail. Though, as I suspect it will extend on until at least the end of next month, I should have plenty of time to figure it out.

March 17, 2020

Pand(emic)emonium

I’ve been worrying about the novel coronavirus for nearly a month, for most of which time people seemed to think I was kind of nuts and overblowing the situation.  Obviously, the tide has turned on that in the last few days, with government-mandated shutdowns, and people buying out entire supermarkets as they prepare to hunker down in social distancing mode.

Still, I don’t think measures have gone nearly far enough.  And, given how spectacularly we’ve also dropped the ball on testing, I don’t think people really understand how bad things are about to get, nor for how long.

Part of that is a limitation of human brains: we’re terrible at emotionally understanding math, especially when it involves exponential growth.

Take the famous birthday paradox: how many people do you need to have in a room before there’s a better than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday?  Most people guess about 180 people – about half the number of days in the year.  In fact, the answer is 23.  In a room of 23 people, there’s a 50-50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.  And in a room of 75 people, the odds are 99.9%.  Which, even after you’ve learned the underlying math, just doesn’t seem to make any intuitive sense.

So, in talking with people about this pandemic, I’ve often fallen back on the metaphor of lilypads in a pond: imagine that you have a big pond, with a single lilypad in it on the first day.  On the second day, it doubles to two lilypads.  Then to four lilypads the day after.  On the 100th day, the pond is entirely covered with lilypads.  When is the pod 50% covered?  Despite the simplicity of the math, surprisingly few people seem to realize it’s the 99th day.  And almost all are shocked to learn that, on the 95th day, the pond is only about 3% covered.

All of which is to say, when things are growing exponentially, they get bigger much faster than we expect.  So, even having thought a bunch about this all, and even understanding in the mathematic abstract what’s likely coming our way, I was still more than a bit shaken by this chart I recently stumbled across:

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Pair that with a recent video showing what those numbers mean in terms of newspaper obituaries:

Between the two, I’m definitely not feeling great about the next few weeks.

March 16, 2020

Seder 2020

Spent most of today arranging life logistics to weather an extended lockdown.  Realistically, I think this gets worse for at least two more months, unless the government starts to step up in a way that it certainly hasn’t thus far.

So, I suspect, we may not be headed to NJ or Long Island this year to kick of Passover with either of my mother’s siblings as we normally do.  Instead, we’ll be celebrating at home.  With a seder that looks something like this:

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March 15, 2020

Homework(out)

While just two days back I was unsure of whether to cancel live training sessions, by now it seems like the obvious choice.  So, with far less preparation than ideal, I’ve lept into converting Composite’s beta into something geared for digitally-served, at-home training (which was always part of the roadmap, though substantially further out), rather than human-trainer-delivered, in-gym training (as it’s been thus far).

If all goes well, I’m hoping I should be able to roll out something by early next week.  At which point, I’ll be posting more info here.  So, even if you’re not in NYC, if you’re stuck inside, and looking for ways to stay fit (and sane), circle back then as you’ll hopefully soon be able to sign up for the beta.

Back to coding, and to hiding out from the world as much as possible.

March 13, 2020

Love in the Time of Corona

Back in 1999, I was running my first tech company, and also completing my junior year at Yale. So, on the one hand, I was closely following all of the tech news (and the related tech industry apocalypse prep and panic) around the Y2K bug, while, on the other, living most of my daily life surrounded by people blithely unaware of the impending potential crisis.

Of course, in the case of Y2K, all that worry ended with a whimper rather than a bang; the new year rolled in almost entirely problem free. So, admittedly, that ‘boy who cried wolf’ lesson is a bit on my mind these days, as I’ve been following news on Twitter about the growing COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet, unlike with Y2K, where the threat was entirely theoretical beforehand, here we already have concrete evidence of a serious disaster unfolding. Reading about the situation in Italy, and seeing how closely the spread of the disease in the U.S. seems to be following precisely the same path, simply two weeks behind and with no substantial attempts to intervene in changing that curve, has been more than a bit worrisome.

And especially so, given the logistics of my life here in NYC. First, the city is incontrovertibly a hot-spot for the disease. And, second, working with fitness clients live to test out Composite programs, I end up on the subway to and from Midtown Manhattan daily, then spend hours a day standing next to people who are breathing heavily, as well as picking up and handing off to them weights and equipment that dozens of others have handled in the hours before. So, basically, about as far from the advised ‘social distancing’ as humanly possible.

At some point, I could put all of my live training and testing on hold, retreat back to the Upper West Side, and simply send digital programs to clients to bang out at home on their own. But, as I haven’t really built the logistics to handle that yet, the move would likely come at a big cost, both in terms of dollars and progress.

So, in short, I have absolutely no idea what to do at the moment. Keep slogging ahead? Give it a few more days and then roll up the drawbridge? Or get outta Dodge right this second?

As I weigh it all out, the Y2K experience is still in my brain, but so is the news unfurling across my Twitter feed, as well as an understanding that people tend to wildly underestimate the power of exponential growth. All of which, together, makes me think I’m already maybe pushing my luck. But, possibly, doesn’t make me think that strongly enough to yet take real and drastic action.

In the meantime, puzzling through, and sending healthy vibes my readers’ way.

March 11, 2020