Meditations On Probability

After almost six years since the start of the pandemic, I finally caught COVID. Since Pica and I are two of those rare people who still continue to take infection risks seriously (e.g.. we avoid indoor gatherings, and are scrupulous about masking in public indoor spaces), I have been pondering the nature of rare events. Or given enough repetitions of a low probability event, it is not surprising to see it occur eventually.

Here is the timeline. Pica spends three weeks back east with her family, During this period I am not venturing out much, except for walks and a weekly trip to the grocery store. Pica returns on Saturday 4 October. Because she passes through the infectious soup that is modern air travel, we follow an isolation protocol for five days: she sleeps in the spare room of our next-door neighbor, and doesn’t come inside our house without being masked. (The weather is nice, and we can eat outside happily).

On Tuesday 7 October one of our two cats Esme starts sneezing a good bit. I wonder if she picked up a leurgy from Pica’s luggage still sitting in the living room.

On Thursday 9 October I feel a touch like I’m catching a cold, and by the morning of Friday 10 October I am clearly crook with what feels like a mild cold. Pica meanwhile Thursday tests negative for COVID, and we exit our isolation protocol. I’m wondering if I picked up a cold from Esme, who was still sneezing a lot. Though on Saturday I read that cat-to-human cold transmission doesn’t in fact occur.

On Sunday it still feels like a mild cold but since I had a dental appointment on Monday I decide I had better test for COVID. Oops. The antigen test comes up positive, as does repeating with another test kit from a different manufacturer.

Based on the timing of things, it was likely I was infected sometime between Saturday October 4 and Monday October 6. The possibilities I come up with are all low probability events:
a) On Saturday I went to the co-op to pick up some groceries. But the co-op is well-ventilated, and I am masked with an N95.
b) On Sunday I pick up takeout burritos from Chipotle. But this is a two minute task, and I am wearing an N95.
c) I pass through somebody’s infectious plume on one of my walks. Perhaps this was when I was sketching the jazz band on Sunday.
d) Somehow Pica’s return introduced COVID to the house, although she’s been asymptomatic throughout. Fomites on the luggage?

As for Esme, cats do in fact get COVID, and there has been at least one documented transmission event of COVID from cats to humans. I don’t think that’s what happened here though. She is not sneezing now, and is leaping up the walls with high energy.

I am isolating now in the spare room, and feel quite fortunate that I got my annual COVID booster almost three weeks ago on 18 September.

Puzzles

My mother collected postcards from wherever she went throughout her life, and used them in her latter years to send notes to people where she lived — notes about who has the bridge scorepad, or enclosing some of her recent writing, or just happy birthday. She offered me a huge stack of postcards when I was there last year, which I took happily (Postcrossing is a passionate hobby of mine).

There were lots more, though, which I picked up and deposited in the box I was sending back to Davis last week. One was partially written to “Pete.” I think I know who Pete is: her date at a dance, the only person tall enough to dance with her, or maybe he wasn’t, but he later went on to work for NASA or somewhere fancy. She was traveling around Europe with her friend Marianne, and this postcard is of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, black and white, serrated edge. In her cryptic style (which got ever more cryptic as the decades passed), she writes: “Dear Pete – Am ver’ sorry I haven’t written in such months but what I have to say would burn up the page – so I’ll tell you all about the rivers valleys and sunsets again & let you guessabout the rest. We have been to Nice which is ideal for peoples like you – there are islands all over & you can sail between them till you get out into the Mediterranean” [text ends abruptly here, though more than half the available space is left, no address is written in]. I’m guessing the year is 1954.

I don’t think she liked Pete much, and I’m wondering if this was a draft of a dear John postcard, which I can’t imagine her sending, because that’s like breaking up with someone by text (which everyone including the mail carrier can read). I wish I could ask her about this, but this is my life now: wondering about things (mostly trivial) I could have asked but never did. Whoever you are, Pete, I hope you found a good life partner, someone who respected and valued you. And I hope you respected and valued them.

A Zettelkasten Adventure

A major part of my eighth grade English class was being taught how to write a research paper. In my recollection, there were two big elements to what we were taught: the first element was developing a formal outline for the content, with topic sentences for each major and minor point, and the second element was a system of notetaking using notecards, where we would write out individual ideas and quotes from our sources on separate notecards and later be able to sort them into an order that made sense for writing out the paper. In retrospect, I don’t think this notetaking system differs much from what nowadays goes by the name of the Zettelkasten method.

(I was quite happy with how my research paper turned out, by the way. I was very interested in World War One aviation then, having spent a lot of time playing the boardgame Richthofen’s War, so my paper was on fighter tactics in World War One. I was pleased because I knew enough to be looking at original sources, especially pilots’ memoirs.)

There are lots of variations on the Zettelkasten method, but a couple points seem key. First, each notecard contains a single atomic concept. Second, there is an indexing system in place to allow individual notecards to link to other notecards; that is, it’s a hypertext system.

Some of the practitioners of the Zettelkasten method in the analog era would accumulate massive collections of notecards, for instance the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann created a Zettelkasten of about 90,000 notecards which he used in writing 50 books and over 600 articles. The digital era makes the process much easier, with a number of different software systems available for creating Zettelkasten, and if nothing else one doesn’t end up needing to get cabinetry to store all the notecards.

I have just started a new Zettelkasten since I have many research ideas but am a long way from turning these into essays and the like and need to be taking a lot of notes. (A current research project is learning about empires and the rise and fall of the nation-state.) For now I am using a software package called Zettlr, though there others I might explore as well. I’ve used Zettlr previously to help me write my last paper when I was working at the university. One thing that is nice about Zettlr is that it integrates well with citation management systems such as Zotero, which I have been using for many years.

With this Zettelkasten I am beginning a new practice: make sure to write a couple notes into it every day. This could be taking notes on an essay or paper, interesting quotes, or just general thoughts. We’ll see where this all goes in a little while.

Lessons From My Mother On How To Die

a) understand exactly what you want
b) communicate this, over months or years if necessary, to your loved ones. Repeat.
c) continue to learn your options because they change over time and over your health condition(s)
d) keep a sense of humor about it all
e) filing? damn the torpedoes… (actually, no. Don’t damn the torpedoes. Mum’s filing system must have made sense to her, but we are continuing to find surprises)
f) try and keep your marbles; it expands your options (see item c) above)
g) write your own obituary. Ask for help if this seems overwhelming.
h) be clear about who you want to be present, and almost more importantly, who you DON’T want to be there. Appoint a gatekeeper if necessary.
i) let there be ice cream.

What I wish:

Is that she hadn’t told us all not to cry. As Gandalf says, “not all tears are an evil.”

The Call of the Loon

This past week has been very busy with getting things packed up, distributed to various places, visits to lawyers and accountants and funeral homes, all the kinds of things that need to be done and nobody much feels like doing.

We did take a break, though, on Friday morning, to distribute mum’s ashes along with the remaining ones of my father. As we walked silently back to the car, a couple of loons began to call.

Mum kept her sense of humor to the end: writing “sayonara” on her calendar to all future doctor’s appointments, she really left on her terms and on her schedule. I will be making a donation to Maine’s Death With Dignity foundation.

Goodbye

Yesterday we took my mother to Paul’s Marina on Mere Point Road in Brunswick. We sat outside and watched the ospreys fishing, the boats turning into the incoming tide, and my mother greedily eating two scoops of peanut butter pie ice cream.

This morning, she was gone, surrounded by all of us and doing it exactly like she wanted.

Farewell, mum, good travels. I have so much to thank you for. (Not sure who I’ll call now with bridge questions, but we’ll manage.)

Horoscope Reading: A Short Play

M: D, Scorpio, here’s yours: you need a break. [Laughter]

M: A, Virgo: get ready to roll up your sleeves… [interrupted by howls of laughter]

M: Me, Capricorn: get out. [Laughter so loud tears stream down faces]

L'Shana Tovah!

Apples and honey for a sweet new year 5786.

In addition to being Erev Rosh Hashana, today also was the autumnal equinox. This combination seems like a pretty rare event, seeing as how Rosh Hashana moves around from being as early as 5 September to as late as 5 October. I did a little research and found no reliable source to tell me when was the last time this occurred.

Podiatry Visit

I’ve reached the age where regular visits to the podiatrist seem to be part of my life. I can’t successfully cut a few of my toenails and I have a corn which needs to be shaved with a knife and which is in a very awkward place to do myself.

I did go to get pedicures a lot while I was working. Different feel, the podiatrist’s office. I’m glad I’ve made the shift. My feet have a lot of issues and they deserve the care.

The Plumbers Are Coming! The Plumbers Are Coming!

Several weeks ago the sewage backed into our shower. This is awful but at least it was contained in the shower so was easy to clean, plus it had drained on its own, I think because I was running the washing machine. At any event, the plumber came and with the help of a camera determined that the cause of the problem was tree roots that had broken through a bend in the main pipe rather than something clogging the drain. Two large trees (the apricot in our yard and the almond next door) were cut down recently and doubtless the roots of one of them were the culprit.

The plumbers returned today and replaced the pipe, after some jackhammering and arduous work with a pick. A job that was supposed to take about four hours ended up taking over seven, and they still need to come back tomorrow after the cement has dried to tidy it up.

I retreated to the trees outside the Senior Center in order to work on a pitch for a comic idea… I don’t like jackhammers. (But as my neighbor Barbara says, at least they’re better than leaf blowers.)