👨‍⚕️ let’s save some lives.

on the agenda this week: calculating the cost of a human life, fossil fuels and a secret society.

Oct 19, 2020

📖 reading time: 5m 07s.

xoup @Xouped

why is this cow so CRISP

hi :) happy monday.

tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain.

a special thank you to my paid subscribers: i appreciate the support.

👂 earworm: listen to golden vessel.

📚 word of the week:

`“``doldrums``”.`

a state of inactivity or stagnation, as in business or art.

a decade later, amid the doldrums of the 1970s, politicians were starting to worry about the financial implications of government regulations.

- wired, may 11, 2020

🧠 brain candy:

🧬 as a society we have historically been willing to incur costs to save lives and improve public welfare. “how much is a human life worth? that is the real discussion that no one is admitting, openly or freely—that we should” - andrew cuomo (new york governor).

🍽 study after study shows a strong correlation between quality of napkin and customer satisfaction, here’s why.

🧠 your ‘surge capacity’ is depleted — it may be why you feel awful. this is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. however this pandemic is different: it stretches out indefinitely.

🌍 with falling coal consumption and the rising use of renewable energy it now seems possible that global co2 emissions from fossil fuels peaked last year in 2019.

🤖 the legendary inventor of the playstation is taking on one of the hardest jobs in robotics. and he’s doing it for free.

🤪 mildly humorous:

sgt balls: wife respecter @Barknado69

my friend: hey can i get some advice on something me who got a matching tattoo with a girl on our first and only date: yeah sure

Colin Barrett @ColinBarrett82

Massive respect to everyone still experiencing time as a linear sequence

💡 longer reads:

👨‍⚕️ `let’s save some lives.`

there is no hope of outrunning the suffering that has settled into the hospital and the world around it, so andrew ibrahim laces up his blue waterproof sneakers and walks. in the time it has taken the daffodils to poke through the loamy soil and dapple ann arbor with pale yellow blossoms—about as long as it has taken covid-19 to kill some 4,000 people across michigan and over 60,000 in the united states—ibrahim, a seventh-year surgery resident at the university of michigan’s hospital system, has gone from a semi-oblivious commuter to a connoisseur of suburban sanctuaries.

in the same short timespan, ibrahim has also gone from surgeon in training to critical care doctor treating severely ill covid patients in a pop-up icu that he helped design in the university’s main hospital. he likens the metamorphosis to the tempering of an alloy: after the relentless pressure of a weeklong icu rotation, he plunges into an off-week of rest. toward the end of each cycle, he senses new flexibility and resilience within himself.

it takes a mile or two for ibrahim to shake off the anxiety, to convince himself that he does not need to be anywhere and that no one needs him. as spring gets off to an icy start with squalls and snow, he has taken to rambling ever farther from home on his days off from the covid icu—5.8 miles one day, 7.7 the next.

he walks slowly, temporarily liberated from the stifling masks that he must wear at all times inside the hospital—a surgical mask handed to him by a security guard the moment he steps through the hospital doors, an n95 any time he enters a covid patient’s room. he inhales the damp spring air deep into his lungs. for hours at a stretch, he follows the asphalt bike paths and muddy trails wherever they lead, discovering parks and ponds tucked away in neighborhoods he has driven through for years without ever knowing what treasures they hid.

staring out at the dull reflection of an overcast sky on tea-stained water, ibrahim considers the heft of the past decade—medical school, the grueling intensity of his surgical training now just three months shy of completion, a series of personal disappointments, and a family tragedy that nearly broke him. in his muddy blue shoes, with a few miles under his belt, ibrahim feels steady, as if everything in his life has prepared him for this exact moment.

👉 read more via wired.

`🕵️‍♂️` `the latitude society.`

it’s late. it’s dark. it’s cold, and none of us in the car know where we are, exactly. somewhere south of san francisco, in the pitch black darkness, our car glows, a solitary point of light that trundles along a street that becomes a road that becomes a dirt path. just outside our doors, a chilly crosswind blows in from the bay.

“is that the police behind us?” i ask, watching the bobbing headlights of two cars behind us grow in the side mirror. dori, my friend behind the wheel, pulls over. “i don’t know,” she says. she always plays it safe, and often stands as the voice of reason, much like she was doing right now. she has a real knack for finding structure in chaos and pointing important things out to us weirdos who spent way too much time with our heads in the clouds.

nobody else in the car answers. her mazda is packed with people, all of us wearing black. behind her sits albert, who was pretty quiet throughout the ride down into the city from oakland. behind me sits andrew, another friend of mine, and dori’s partner. he stopped fiddling with his phone a few miles back. we’d long given up on trying to play some music, something to get us all in the mood for whatever the hell it was we were supposed to be doing.

the approaching headlights begin to bloom, their radiance engulfing the rear view mirror until they float right past us, diving into the pitch black darkness of the unknown.

“at least we won’t be the first ones in,” dori says.

we didn’t really know what we were doing. when people asked what the latitude society was — and boy did they ever ask — no one ever had a straight answer. book club, bowling league, sewing circle, terrarium club… these were all excuses, a shell game hiding what was really going on in our lives. if i had to explain what we were doing, it would probably sound something like this: we met. we talked about lofty dreams of sharing magic and wonder in a world we thought could use them. sometimes we celebrated, we drank, and we cheered, and we dreamt of what the future might bring.

👉 read more via jessica lachenal.