The View from the Hermitage, Day 344

We've hit the magic half million deaths from covid-19. Given that we are surely under-counting cases and deaths, we really hit the mark some time ago, but I'll stick to what is known. This morning's Washington Post offered three ways in which to visualize just how large 500,000 is. I like the one showing how large a monument analogous to that for Vietnam War deaths would be; to see it, you have to scroll past 61 of the 9,804 tour buses it would take to hold 500,000 tourists. It is also thought-provoking to consider how quickly we got to this milestone. We hit the 100,000 mark in May 2020 and the 200,000 mark in September 2020. Then things sped up with 300,000 reached in December 2020; 4,000, in January 2021; and 500,000 just one month later or now. If cases were not slowing down to the extent they are, I'd propose a family pool on when we will hit 1,000,000 deaths. (We're actually doing one on when the first student at the local university dies from covid-19.)

There was a column in this morning's Guardian asking a reader to consider life as it was a year ago and then reflect on what he or she missed. It was a harder exercise than I thought it would be. Some things that immediately jumped to mind as being missed, when given thought, dropped off the list or became more specific. "Coffee or a meal with friends" became "coffee or a meal with (insert names here)." I do miss seeing my mom on a regular basis. I think about her a lot and wonder how she's doing and how that fits with how she tells me she's doing. I do miss travel. I miss the ability to take a winter holiday far enough north to see the aurora, or a trip to Maine to see my brother and good friends, or a grand adventure to somewhere The Professor and I have never been. I miss the ability to call for a medical appointment I can keep; my last foray into the world of medicine was a mammogram on March 17, 2020. I do miss regular hair appointments and the occasional pedicure. I was getting manicures as well pre-pandemic, but I can't say I've missed those. Maybe that's an average number of things missed; I don't know how many things other people say they have missed. 

At the juncture of psychology and politics are the results of a Cambridge University study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B reporting that people with extremist attitudes tend to view the world in black and white and struggle with complex tasks that require intricate mental steps. They are also not good at regulating emotion, acting more impulsively and seeking out "emotionally evocative experiences." Finally, participants prone to dogmatism actually have problems with processing evidence even at a perceptual level. The black and white versus shades of grey difference makes sense to me. I'm still thinking about the part about regulating emotion. I know some pretty liberal (for lack of a better word to be the opposite of extremist) who seem to seek out "emotionally evocative experiences." And I need a bit more detail about what it means to process evidence at a perceptual level. 

Finally, and totally not related to anything else in this post, a shipment of breakfast cereal being shipped from South America to Hong Kong was seized after the discovery that the sugar coating on the cereal was not sugar but cocaine. The article listed some other creative ways in which cocaine has been transported including under wigs or under the habits of fake nuns, in hollowed out pineapples, and my personal favorite, in fake buttocks. Of course, since thinking that I have been unable to un-think of the Sir Mix-a-Lot song "Baby Got Back." I hope I have not just given you my earworm.