We contain multitudes

Fascinating article in this week's Economist about the role of the 100 trillion bacteria in our body, and the roles they play in keeping us healthy and making us sick. Hints that the microbes may even play a part in conditions like autism and multiple sclerosis, now thought to be genetic.

I've heard talk of our "metabolisms" and how they affect our appetite and weight gain. Looks like there may be more going on inside that we thought.

Toast for Grandma

On Friday, my mother asked if I would make a toast for my grandmother's 100th birthday. I had some memories prepared, in anticipation of there being an opportunity for speechifying, but the toast called for something different. I decided to keep it  simple--a summary of the significant events of her life, along with some historical context. Here's what I wrote. Somehow I said "Brooklyn" instead of "Brockville," but in my defense, the great cities are often confused:

Anna and her namesake

Let us celebrate this moment, where past and future are gathered to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Anna Mcglade. No-one has seen all that she has seen or done all that she has done, but all of us have been witness to parts of a remarkable century. Begfore we raise our glasses to celebrate 100 years and look forward to the years to come, I want to look back a little, and to provide some context for people who may not remember that there was a world before Internet.

Anna Shortall was born in 1912 in Pittsburgh township. She moved to Gananoque in 1916. She had two sisters, Mary and Maragaret, and a brother, Eddie. That same year featured the first National Hockey Association game, the Bull Moose party nominated Teddy Roosevelt for president and the beginning of the Balkan War, which led to WW I.

In 1929 she graduated from Brooklyn Business College. The same year women were recognized as persons under Canadian law, and, important to Jason, the yo yo made its debut.

In 1934, after her father was killed in a tragic car accident, she took over running the Shortall Coal company, providing the fuel that helped people keep their homes warm during the cold Gananoque winters. That same year, Hitler and Mussolini met to discuss their plans for world domination and Babe Ruth hit his 700th home run.

In 1939 she married Hugh Mcglade and in the 1940s, the years of ww ii she had three wonderful children, Helen, Larry and James. In 1946 she moved to the house on Stone st—the house where her children grew up and that her grandchildren came to love.

In 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial, the coal company was sold to the co-op, and in 1973, almost forty years ago, Hugh died. In 1976 Anna retired from the co-op, giving her the opportunity to travel to Europe, and to spend more time with her growing brood of grandchildren.

In 1992, Anna sold the house on stone st and moved to pier i, still keeping, and maybe even improving her view of the river. In 1999, she welcomed the first of 8 great grandchildren, and 10 years ago celebrated her 90 th birthday, riding in style, in horse and buggy, from her apartment.

And now today, 4 generations come together, to celebrate a remarkable person; a business woman, mother, grandmother, great grandmother. A friend to many in town and at church, and someone with much to be proud of.

And so the root
Becomes a trunk
And then a tree
And seeds of trees
And springtime sap
And summer shade
And autumn leaves
And shape of poems
And dreams
and more than tree.

So let's raise our glasses and say happy 100th birthday Anna. We are glad to come together, and we look forward to the years ahead. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

**The poem is by Langston Hughes. I stumbled on it, reading The Warmth of Other Suns on my way to St. Louis. I see in it more celebratory echoes of one of my favourite lines from Four Quartets: "We, content at the end, if our temporal reversion nourish (not to far from the yew tree) the life of significant soil."

High Camp (Finale)

So we're back (except for the OG, who is visiting her Virginia cousin until the weekend), slowly beginning the transition from summer to school year. The extended weekend, centred on my grandmother's 100th birthday party in the 1,000 islands hamlet of Gananoque (more on that tomorrow) involved a ridiculously complicated ballet of pick-ups and meet-ups that, for the most part, ended in success.

The story begins with my 13 hour drive from the Triangle to Gananoque. I left at about 8 AM, armed with music and talk on my Ipad, as the connection on my Iphone cannot seem to abide the use of a mini cable plugged into the AUX jack on the radio. After I lost WUNC, near the Virginia border on I-81, I discovered that the ability to shuffle through my entire music collection (and to thus be surprised with evocative glimpses of past lives) was not as readily available as it is on the phone or the Ipod. So to pass the time, I called up a Genius playlist I had assembled awhile ago, inspired by Edwin Starr's classic 25 Miles. I must admit that, whether due to clever algorithms or lucky guesses, this set is a classic. If you ever want to introduce someone to Motown and 70s-era soul, or to go a little deeper into the genres, I highly recommend this playlist:

So that got me to Virginia, where, while stopping for gas, I learned, via smartphone, that, although the helpful folks at Apple would prefer that you do all of your shuffle-type playing using the genius (which destroys the delightful possibility of highly unlike songs you love being paired together), there are ways to shuffle through mp3s the way our forefathers did.

Beyond one more stop for gas and food in the afternoon, a couple of brief roadwork delays and a series of cloudbursts that slowed traffic to a crawl for ten minute increments, the trip was as smooth as any I've made in the past; and the border guard, on learning that I was headed to a party for a centenarian, expressed no interest in inspecting my luggage, which of course contained two clandestine magnums of champagne.

I arrived at my parents around 9:30, giving me time to socialize, and the freedom to sleep late and relax the following day, before heading off to St. Louis to pick up the BG from Animal Camp. I was scheduled to arrive Friday night, to stay at an airport hotel, and to drive the 2 hours to Rolla Missouri in the morning, where I would be treated to a tour of the facility, an introduction to her chinchillas, and a return to Syracuse, where we were scheduled to meet up with Worldwide, returning from Cambodia.

This is when things started to go agley. I got a message on Friday morning, informing me that my flight was delayed, a fact, which would probably cause me to miss my connection. After talking to an agent, I decided to hope for a commensurate delay on the Cleveland flight, and, barring that, a flight out the next morning, that would still get me to the camp on time.

For reasons known only to United Airlines, the one hour delay in Syracuse turned into four, and I did not get into Cleveland until midnight. I also found out, that, since I had booked my St. Louis hotel through a booking agent (which all of the top links on a Google Search for airport hotels seemed to be), I was obligated to pay for one night of my planned one-night stay. Note to self: I will never do that again.

So I paid for a second hotel, warmed up my first-ever "Hot Pocket" from the Hilton's "Pantry" (disappointing) and went to sleep in Cleveland. For the second time in two tries. The next morning, I caught the 7 am shuttle to the airport, boarded the plane on time, and then sat on the tarmac for 90 minutes, while the airport staff tried to figure out how to get the conveyor belts moving again, so that they could load the bags.

That delay means that I was going to miss the tour, and that the BG and I would be hard pressed to get back in time to catch our 4 pm return to Syracuse. I called the camp to let them know that I would be arriving late, and jumped into my rental car, silently thankful for the state's embrace of the 70 mph speed limit.

I got to the camp at noon, where a teary BG was none too happy about being the last kid picked up. Luckily though, the counsellors, who were surely anxious to get out as well, had packed her up completely, and in ten minutes, we were back on the road, arriving at the airport with enough time for a sit-down lunch and an ice cream cone before our flight left. We made our connection through Chicago (thankfully avoiding Cleveland this time) and Worldwide was there to meet us in Syracuse, groggy from the Phnom Penh-Tokyo-Chicago-Syracuse journey, but happy nonetheless.

We retrieved the car I had driven down on Friday, and drove up to Gananoque for two days of parties, followed by a drive down to DC on Tuesday, overnight at the in-laws', and a return home on Wednesday, after Worldwide finished a morning meeting in Dupont Circle. I did all the driving, as she was still not entirely in the Eastern time zone, and I am awfully glad that it's behind me now.

One can only imagine how we will top this next summer.

Egypt and the Narrative Fallacy

A story this morning about military helicopters in the Sinai reportedly attacking people who might be associated with the recent attack on government posts got me thinking about Egypt today. On a number of occasions over the past two years people have asked me about events there, and I think, by and large they have been unsatisfied with my answer, which has been something along the lines of "Good question. It's hard to know." With so much written about the Arab Spring, the Facebook revolution, loosing the yoke of the repression and cronyism of the Mubrak regime, the rise of a secular Islamist party and the reluctance of the army to cede power, there is a tendency to want to see a story emerge, whether it be the rise of democracy, the voice of a new generation, the gift of freedom, or the winds of change.

But lurking behind all of those possible threads, is something known as the narrative fallacy, the inclination of our brains to seek out a story to make sense out of the uncertainty. As Nassim Taleb explains in the Black Swan:

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

A piece in the Financial Times (via Farnam Street) further explains:

We do not often, or easily, think in terms of probabilities, because there are not many situations in which this style of thinking is useful. Probability theory is a marvellous tool for games of chance – such as spinning a roulette wheel. The structure of the problem is comprehensively defined by the rules of the game. The set of outcomes is well defined and bounded, and we will soon know which outcome has occurred. But most of the problems we face in the business and financial worlds – or in our personal lives – are not like that. The rules are ill-defined, the range of outcomes is wider than we can easily imagine and often we do not fully comprehend what has happened even after the event. The real world is characterised by radical uncertainty – the things we do not know that we do not know.

We deal with that world by constructing simplifying narratives. We do this not because we are stupid, or irrational, or have forgotten probability 101, but because storytelling is the best means of making sense of complexity. The test of these narratives is whether they are believable.

People with guns and helicopters make me very nervous. There are so many arrogant knuckleheads who are sure that their actions, whether it be blowing up government stations, kidnapping tourists, deploying attack helicopters or appointing the head of the army Minister of Defense in the new government, will produce the intended results; when, in fact the future is far less certain and much more subject to random events.

I still have no idea where this is going, but it will be interesting to see how the conclusion, which will undoubtedly be viewed  as inevitable and predictable, will come to pass. 

Don't Turn Me Into a Cheerleader

i.e. GET ORGANIZED.

The  Times decodes some of the jargon that is au courant at New York's finest restaurants

What Can Doctors Learn From Restaurants?

Like my recent experience at the Olive Garden, Mr. Checklist, Atul Gawande, has dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, and comes away impressed. The chain has successfully commoditized haute cuisine, bringing affordable fine dining to the hoi polloi. He suggests in this week's New Yorker that the same approach can work in the delivery of health care:

Reinventing medical care could produce hundreds of innovations. Some may be as simple as giving patients greater e-mail and online support from their clinicians, which would enable timelier advice and reduce the need for emergency-room visits. Others might involve smartphone apps for coaching the chronically ill in the management of their disease, new methods for getting advice from specialists, sophisticated systems for tracking outcomes and costs, and instant delivery to medical teams of up-to-date care protocols. Innovations could take a system that requires sixty-three clinicians for a knee replacement and knock the number down by half or more. But most significant will be the changes that finally put people like John Wright and Armin Ernst in charge of making care coherent, coördinated, and affordable.

I had been toying with reading the Checklist book, but, after listening to his TED talk on the way to the gym this morning, I think I've learned enough.

Thankfully, we haven't had much interaction with the health care system over the last decade, but what little we have has left me unimpressed. My Honda dealer seems to know more about my car than my pediatrician does about my children, and there's something about that statement that gives me pause; to say nothing of the incomprehensible billing system that my health insurance provider employs.

A lot of the current presidential campaign seems to focus on health care reform. As someone who had to buy his own health insurance both two and a half years previously, and four months ago, I can say that nothing seems to have changed in the interim. Let's hope that the new exchanges spur more competition when they come online in 2014. But I wouldn't bet on it. I very much enjoyed the recent book on the Garfield assassination, not least for its grisly depiction of the state of medicine in the 1880s, when doctors recoiled at the idea of washing their hands and using clean instruments. I wonder if a hundred years hence, people will look back at our system, and its freewheeling drug use, 5 minute doctor visits and byzantine cost structure, with the same morbid fascination. I certainly hope so.

Rock Creek Park

How many of my DC peeps are doin' it in the park?

Blackbyrds: Rock Creek Park