Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Our world has "we brought this on ourselves" disasters, and then
it's got the dinosaur-killing comet variety of disasters.  
Climate-crisis disasters, and a pandemic like Covid-19, they both
get a lot of blameworthy finger-pointing, recrimination, and guilt,
but I kinda like the poetic, majestic purity of utterly nonhuman
disasters.

Last year,  the ill-starred MMXX, there was a big "Gamma Ray Burst"
through the solar system, known as  "GRB 204015A."  This was a
powerful split-second flare at 4:42am U.S. Eastern Time on April 15,
2020.  The flare missed the whole Earth but was detected by
satellite instruments out around the orbit of Mars.  It was a
neutron-star eruption so violent that it moved-the-needle even
though it arose from another galaxy eleven million light years away.
The "Sculptor Galaxy," which abides in a different group of galaxies
than the Milky Way's "Local Cluster."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculptor_Galaxy

So the Earth was attacked from another galaxy.   Okay, not any major
threat to us — it might disturb a phone call or two, or two million
phone calls, who knows — but I dread to think what that massive
disaster must have done to its own galaxy.  

The Sculptor Galaxy, it's a little livelier than ours, star-wise,
but it's a perfectly decent-looking, respectable galaxy.  Yet they
have a"magnetar" whipping around at insane speeds and basically
irradiating everything in the path of its wobbly, jittery
gamma-ray-beam — supernova levels of violence, but packed into a
firehose, more or less.
  

    


Imagine that you're an artsy extraterrestrial civilization over in
the  "Sculptor Galaxy" and this chaotic monster cuts loose on your
planet. Not a lot of wise policy decisions to be made about that
prospect, really. You don't need to fret much over your disaster
prepper supplies.

I wonder what that event would look and feel like.  Presumably it
just peels the sky off in a fraction of a second, so likely there
wouldn't be much grand, sublime spectacle to admire, but there's
something Miltonian, Dantesque about it.  It's so beyond normal
astrophysics that it verges on metaphysics; even your Elon Musk Mars
colony wouldn't escape the blast; probably even your Sun would be
sucker-punched by the beam and would never be the same Sun again. 
And all because of a genuine "bad star," you know, a literal
"dis-aster."
  

    

There's something calming about contemplating a disaster of this
truly grand kind.  I don't know why, but I can't find it
frightening.  It's like you're ranking the woes of your troubled
world on a scale of one to ten and you realize that somewhere else
there's a scale of a hundred thousand.  

Here's looking forward to State of the World episode 21.
  

    
I suppose, sometime in the barely imaginable future, someone will
build a pizza joint in the middle of the remains of that Sculptor
Galaxy neuron star.
  

    
The U.S. federal government has suffered a Katrina event. I hope the
recovery to come will be carried out better than the one in New Orleans.

There are disaster experts who show up after "natural disasters" (which are
only human disasters due to insensate natural processes). Do we have
competent experts on hand to advise us after this political disaster?
  

    
Another area where we have a significant event in our society is the
COVID pandemic.  There's a wide swath of the patient-facing sector
of health care that is under risk of PTSD and burn-out.  This also
would be true of first responders and outlying areas like
morticians.

Tomorrow morning it seems clear the US will have hit 400,000 deaths
and 24 million cases, and most likely 500,000 deaths by the end of
February.

I haven't heard of anyone or anything looking to address this
aspect.  It doesn't even get into the patients themselves or their
families.  
  

    
I can't imagine the sort of hours these people have worked, with
what sort of lack of equipment, and some of them have been asked to
do battlefield-type triage, due to lack of staff, resources or
oxygen.
  

    
When grim milestones are announced, I wonder if we've hit the
halfway point on deaths yet. I guess the halfway point will be close
to the end, when the exponential curve turns into something else. It
still looks exponential, though.
  

    
Possibly exponential, but hard to assess the impact of the vaccine
at this point, and of new strategies and tactics from the Biden
administration. OTOH we have potential increases in the R0,
evidently because of new strains that are more infectious. Not sure
how to model a prediction, given uncertainties.
  

    
The number of new infections grows exponentially as long as Rt, the
effective reproduction number, is greater than one. Rt is a factor
of the constant k in the growth equation: r(t) = e**kt + C
  

    
I'm definitely feeling a bit more hopeful today. And every time one
of us gets their shots, I cheer.
  

    
Jane, thank you for your kind words in #215; they helped me feel
better about the presentation, although I think it's a topic I need
to continue to work on and refine. It's difficult applying the logic
of academic rigor and rationality to a talk that is in part
critiquing same. 

One of the questions I got at said presentation (technical aside, in
case the idea is useful to anyone: after my talk the organizers put
me in a breakout room while the students discussed their questions,
organized them into themed groups, and chose spokespeople for each
theme, after which I was brought back into the main zoom) was
whether history repeats itself or we are living through something
new, and it seems an apt question to bring up here. My answer (like
my answer to the question of whether we're living in a utopia or a
dystopia) was both (or neither). One hundred-odd years after a
pandemic, looking at the newspaper articles from that time about
people wearing masks or refusing to, it's hard not to feel a certain
cyclicality; and yet, looking at, oh, vaccine timelines or virtual
work, art, and connections, or even the inadequate but existent
considerations of how to provide the vaccines for the countries
whose governments can't afford it, we are in a very different place.
  

    
Meanwhile, the inauguration is in a few hours, draped in extensive,
highly militarized security. I really hope that it will be free from
disruption and violence. 

If it is, there will be hot takes of the "See? The threat was
exaggerated" variety. Reactions like that after swine flu etc are
part of why we were so terribly underprepared for covid: "the
low-/medium-/high-probability disaster didn't happen this time
therefore it won't happen" is not solid reasoning.And of course the
preparedness itself affects how bad the impacts of the event are
(which is part of why emergency management/disaster risk reduction
is such a thankless job: if it goes well, no one notices). In this
case that's particularly true because of the heavy deterrence
approach.

Anyway, let's hope annoying hot takes are the worst consequence.
  

    
I woke this morning realizing that insurgents were unlikely to
attempt an attack when it's expected and when a deterrent is in
place. A lack of protest or rioting today won't mean we've seen the
last of them. On the other hand, the catalyzing presence of Q might
fade, and take with it some of the energy fueling the protests.

As Trump always said, "We'll see what happens."
  

    
Via email form George Mokray:

Italo Calvino meets Martin Luther King Jr
<https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/13/italo-calvino-racism/>

Calvino’s posthumously published writings on his visit to the USA
may be useful to a certain Texan in Turin, a sort of turnabout
mirror to mirror.
  

    
Via email from Kevin Gould:

I'm enjoying your eloquent rants and rambles. Please continue.
  

    
Joe Biden is the USA's new leader, and he's actually working pretty
hard. Looking at all he's doing and all he has to do, I fall into a
state of near exhaustion just considering it all. We've already
re-committed to the World Health Organization and sent (virtual)
Fauci to meet with 'em. Biden signed 17 executive orders his first
day, many of them intended to undo damage from the last
administration. 

Meanwhile there'll be no Trump china:
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/trump-white-house-china/index.html> This is too bad, because I was envisioning a "bull in the china shop" design.

Oh,well...
  

    
I have a vague curiosity what Trump will have for his official
portrait.  I don't suppose it would be one of Jon McNaughton
bombastic works, though that would be fitting.
  

    
It can be cold and quick: a poop emoji.
  

    
Personally I like this one:

<https://www.instagram.com/p/CKSDdCXh8w7/>
  

    
I thought we might have more to say following the inauguration,
hence the extension of the State of the World an extra week - but
we're not particularly active now. I want to thank <bruces> and
<malka> for joining and contributing, as well as all the others
who've posted here, and contributed via email.

Each State of the World conversation is in what we call a 'topic' on
the WELL, in what we call a 'conference' called <inkwell.vue.>. If
you're reading this and you're not a member of the WELL, but would
like to join conversations like this, please consider joining:
<https://www.well.com/join/>

We don't have to end the conversation now, though I think our guests
have dropped off. Members of the WELL should feel free to keep
posting observations here. If you're not a member of the WELL, you
can send an email to inkwell at well.com - we'll continue to post
those through Monday, January 25.

Let's hope for a relatively boring but consequential 2021.
  

    
amen
  

    
Thanks, Jon.
  

    
Nice to have some extra perspective during a tumultuous time.
  

    
Grateful to all here for the conversation, and Malka's closing
comment and passing along of the question without single answer--I
got caught up in inauguration watching and aftermath, and didn't see
it until now.

It is indeed such a great relief to see the new year finally fully
started. 

May the next State of the World conversation find some of the
current hopes bearing fruit.