Critter Encounters

 I've been working in rural Florida this summer and have been impressed by the determination of all sorts of small creatures to get into my house. There are hordes of insects, frogs and geckos that congregate on the windows at night to look in at the light. A few frogs have made it in and I was once surprised to feel a frog jump onto my head while I was working at my desk. There is always one earwig in the shower, never more, never less. And a mouse, the smartest small creature here, took up residence in my kitchen, where I saw it licking my silverware clean late one night. I later opened an unused drawer and saw that the mouse had made its nest there out of some fluffy white material from who-knows-where. The mouse was home at the time and stayed perfectly still as we looked at each other-- it probably didn't know that the drawer could open, an unfortunate trait for a mouse house.

My car, parked in the shade outside, is apparently a mansion for small frogs. They settle under the hood by the windshield wipers and in the lining around the trunk. At least one has found its way to the interior, as I discovered while going 70 miles an hour on the interstate. It jumped onto my neck and I felt the cool moistness of its feet (distinct from the scratchy dryness of an insect) for a second before I spasmed it off and managed not to swerve out of my lane.

I had another instance of critter-caused distracted driving today, also on the interstate, when I reached down for my drink and felt a sudden sharp pain like a needle-prick. I was confused for a few seconds until I looked down and saw a large wasp that must have been trying to share my drink and had stung me on the palm. It was a real shock and the best I could do to react without crashing the car was to open all the windows and hope the wasp would fly out. Instead, it crawled up the dashboard and into an air vent, which I closed behind it. Now, I imagine that the wasp either made it out of the ventilation and is living happily ever after, or that it built a nest somewhere and I can expect dozens of wasps to come out of my air vents sometime in the near future.

This is why I work with plants: while they can have all sorts of thorns and poisons and irritating hairs, I've never had a plant jump on me in the car.

My Pandemic Experience

I'm eating a thanksgiving dinner alone today, like an unusually large number of people this year, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. On March 25, near the beginning of coronavirus spread in the US, I wrote the following as the start of a blog post on the topic:

"The number of COVID-19 cases is on an exponential trajectory at the moment, and it seems like a good idea to write a bit about the situation now because it's something I may be fortunate enough to look back on in the future."

At that point, I put off writing for another time, as with most of my other blog posts in the past few years. Luckily (in a very narrow sense), the pandemic is as relevant today as it was in March, so despite my procrastination I still have time to reflect from the midst of the event.

So far, I have been as fortunate as I hoped; my personal experience this year only involves the indirect effects of the virus. I was able to work remotely, and I was able to go and bunker down with my parents for April and May, the great lockdown. The highways were as empty as I had ever seen them when I was leaving Atlanta in late March, and the electric highway signs were flashing ominous messages like "Coronavirus: stay home" and "Wash hands. Cover cough." These highway signs have evolved over the months of pandemic; later in the summer I saw "Wear a mask, it's the right thing to do" and "Keep gatherings <10 people" and "Protect the vulnerable."

There was a lot of uncertainty in the early days. Masks weren't officially recommended yet and we weren't sure how paranoid to be about things like disinfecting groceries and receiving mail. As the months passed, we got a better handle on how to manage and mitigate risk to stay safe without going crazy. The phrase 'new normal' gets thrown around a lot these days, and I think it's a testament to human flexibility as to how normal pandemic life has gotten. Going shopping with a mask on feels natural now, and social gatherings have generally contracted in size or moved outside or online. I was perhaps better prepared than some to spend an inordinate amount of time in isolation; I've had a good deal of previous practice and if I'm going crazy I haven't noticed.

There's been good news about vaccines recently, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel and hope for a post-pandemic life in the not-too-distant future. Among other things, I'm looking forward to relaxed restaurant meals and in-person conversations with my coworkers.

Pedestrians and horses

If Atlanta is a city for cars, Oxford seems to be a city for pedestrians and maybe buses. Parking lots are few and far between. Today, I saw two policemen on horses. Maybe they can get places more quickly than their car-bound counterparts.

Some research on mounted police revealed that the sight of horsed patrols "boosts levels of public confidence in police." When it comes to displaying a police presence at public demonstrations during times of unrest, "a trained Mounted Officer on a trained horse can be as effective as a dozen officers on foot."

Walking Thoughts

For the past month or so, I've been living about a fifty minute commute away from the place I work. It's not ideal, but it means I have almost two hours each day to think while walking or on the bus.

Some thoughts aren't worth much, like when I think about how long it'll take me to get home. I'll reassure myself that I'm five minutes closer than I was five minutes ago, and then try to remember how I felt five minutes ago when I had so much further to go. I'll try and guess what time it is and then look at my phone to see if I'm right.

Sometimes I hum a tune, the sort of thing I used to put down on paper or on my computer as soon as I got home. I still try and work out what the notes would be if were to write it out.

The rest is hard to describe. I think about things I need to do, planning out emails to send and schedules to follow. If I'm hungry, I think about what I'll eat. Sometimes I think about ideas I disagree with and try to identify why I disagree. It's easy, of course, to win arguments in your head. I forget a lot of what happens on my commutes, but if I arrive and time has passed quickly, I know I've had a good think.

Knee-jerk Banana Response

Do you want bananas on your cereal?

If someone asked me that, there's a good chance I would say "no thanks" right away. It's not that I don't like bananas-- I like banana ice cream, my favorite dessert is made with bananas, and eating raw bananas isn't messy. I even like the taste of bananas on cereal.

I say "no thanks," then, as a habit developed over many breakfasts in highschool. I must have decided that breakfasts should be low-effort; no time for chopping bananas. Once I started turning down offers of bananas, there was no going back. My parents, however, kept kindly offering fruit for cereal probably until the day I left for college.

Saying "no" as a default response isn't restricted to cereal toppings. I've missed a lot of opportunities by saying no to things before properly thinking about it. Thankfully, new chances do appear, and by acknowledging my biases I can try and change them. If I had breakfast with my parents today, they would probably ask if I wanted fruit on my cereal. 

And I would say "no thanks," because really, who has the time to spend 30 seconds chopping up a banana?

Slow or No

Some of the most powerful forces on Earth work on a long time scale-- the moving of tectonic plates, the erosion caused by wind and waves, and more. Even a steady drip of water can do a lot if it lasts long enough.

Here's a question I've heard passed around: is it better to have slow internet or no internet? You can get a lot done with slow internet, but constant buffering and disconnects gradually chip away at your patience, especially if you've experienced fast internet in the past. There's a certain indecision involved: after a few minutes, you think, "is loading this page really worth it?" Compared to that, the finality of no internet might be relieving.

One of my least favorite things to feel is buyer's remorse, and that's why I never look back after ordering at a restaurant. Once the food has arrived, only unhappiness can result if I wonder if I should have ordered X instead of Y. I can admit there might be better food on the menu, but I won't spend any time wondering what it is. This system is working out pretty well at the moment; the last restaurant meal I remember regretting was a hot dog a bit over a year ago.

Cooking Beans

I've been cooking a lot of dried beans recently and was impressed with how long they take to become edible. Why do beans need to soak before cooking?

The soaking apparently shortens cooking times, removes toxins in some cases, and preserves nutrients and texture. I suppose it's worth it.

What about rinsing, though? One source said that beans should be rinsed because they're dirty-- any sort of rinsing or washing during processing and packaging might make the beans sprout. The beans passed my personal test of looking clean and smelling clean. Could there be bacteria? Probably, but by now I assume there's bacteria on everything that hasn't come out of an autoclave in the past five minutes. I was eating yogurt while thinking about this, so I decided to think about something else.

I found a small rock mixed in with my pinto beans, which made me think of home. Just like bacteria and yogurt, it's an experience all about context: a crunch fine with hard-shell tacos, but when your rice and beans crunch it's a whole other deal.

One article mentioned pesticides on un-rinsed beans, and I ended up deciding that rinsing beans would be easier than learning about pesticides.

Sleep and Other Choices

For many, college is a place to ask new questions and think of things in new ways: what is the role of the individual in society, and what authority structures best facilitate this role?

More practically: if the first obligation of the day is in the afternoon, what should you do in the morning?

Class is at 1pm. At 11pm the previous night, the class-free morning is 3 hours of potential work. At 9am in the morning, however, the class-free morning is 3 hours of potential sleep. Two major decisions are in play here: at 11pm, should the student sleep and leave work for the morning, and at 9am should the student sleep or do the work?

The path of least resistance, of course, is choosing sleep in both circumstances. I personally find that my 9am self has less willpower than my 11pm self, so it's usually a better idea to work late into the night and wake up late (but still before 1pm) the next day.

Moderation, however, is worth pursuing. I leave non-essential work for the morning: this provides motivation to get up, but is not so vital that sleeping instead will ruin my day. There's only one day each week that I have a free morning, and it's worked out reasonably well so far.

Thoughts on Groceries

What happens when a student, after a week of hard work and thinking, starts Spring Break and then tries to write a blog post? With that in mind, let's scrape the bottom of the idea barrel and talk about the groceries I bought today.

Bread is a good start-- filling, but not too expensive. The next logical step is finding something to put on it. Here in the dorm, there's a good chance that anything stored in the fridge is likely to never be seen again, so keeping things cold is out of the question. I got a jar peanut butter because I like peanut butter, some spreadable meat because I know someone who doesn't like spreadable meat, and a can of spam because it makes me think of the time I was in a romantic relationship.

I'm beginning to realize that writing in this condition might not be a good idea, but I might as well go on with the grocery list. I got two boxes of pop-tarts, which are great snacks in my opinion. They don't remind me of anything besides eating pop-tarts. My friends and I were about to leave the grocery store when we walked past the two-liter bottles of soda that were selling for 99 cents each. I was surprised enough to buy a bottle of cream soda. It might be enough to make me pause the next time someone tries to sell me 50 cl of soda for a dollar.

And that's the station where my train of thought stops for today. I just need one more sentence to round out my conclusion.

Size of the Internet

How big is the Internet? It's a difficult question to tackle-- the Internet as a whole isn't owned or moderated by any one body. First of all, let's measure size by amount of information. As it so happens, a Dutchman named Maurice de Kunder has attempted to answer this question of size, and his results, while inevitably inaccurate, can be found here.

What I found most interesting was some of de Kunder's methods. As far as I understood it, one procedure was to determine the frequency of certain words in a huge sample of text. The example given was the word 'the' being found in 67.61% of pages. The word 'the' is then searched in Google or another search engine, and the number of pages found can be divided by the percentage (converted to decimal), giving the total number of pages out there.

I can't think of a more fascinating way to statistically measure the Internet, so I'll go ahead and take a philosophical view. If we define the size of the Internet as '1', that is to say, the sum total of information on the Internet, the size of any individual page becomes effectively nothing. In this way, the information added to the Internet doesn't increase the size of the Internet, but the insignificance of all other information on the Internet. If you take this idea to its extreme, the point at which the Internet contained all information in the universe, an infinite amount of data (consider the digits of pi), would be the moment it ceases to exist, each page having a significance of zero, and the sum of an infinite number of zeroes being zero.

With that begins the game of 'find the flaw in logic'. Isn't the Internet an interesting thing?

Seawater and Inquiry

Hi, Benjamin here. For a long time, I've thought that one of the most disappointing things about nature is that drinking seawater is unhealthy for humans. Up until now, I've accepted that as truth, but a semester in college has taught me about the importance if inquiry. Is drinking seawater really bad? What if you drink other liquids as well as seawater? Is it just the taste that's bad?

And thus I went about my research, id est, a Google search (id est Google translate as well). While I looked up "id est" on Google translate, it dawned on me that the abbreviation i.e. probably stands for "id est". Things began to fit together.

That's one thing I really like about scientific inquiry-- accidents or distractions during the pursuit of one idea can lead to completely new and different discoveries. As inexperienced as I am, I would guess that this is because of the fundamental structure of the universe, i.e. everything is linked in some way. Also, drinking seawater is unhealthy, or at least not beneficial, because the human body uses more water to get rid of the extra salt than the volume of seawater imbibed.