The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

How shelter-in-place has affected sleep

Fitbit reported earlier this month that, following shelter-in-place orders, people go to sleep later but sleep more:

Based on our review of aggregated and anonymized data, we saw that in locations with shelter-in-place mandates, bedtime and bedtime consistency shifted. 

For the most part, people are going to bed later but getting more sleep, as well as more quality rest. For those whose quality of sleep has improved, they have been spending more time in deep and REM sleep.

Even though sleep duration has been longer, it is still important to maintain bedtime consistency for many health reasons. While going to bed later and waking up later makes sense for now, it will be important to try to keep up that consistency even when our schedules change.

According to my Fitbit, I've increased my average night's sleep by 4 minutes and got to sleep an average of 9 minutes later between Decemeber and the last 30 days. My "sleep score" (a proprietary Fitbit metric that ranges from 0 to 100) also went up an average of 4 points also. I'm actually trying to increase my average night's sleep by another 10 minutes, but it's harder than it seems.

We may be flattening a bit

Illinois' doubling time for Covid-19 cases has increased from 2.1 days to 7.9 days, as of yesterday.

In other news:

And finally, I'll leave you with this touching performance of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" by its composer, Curt Smith, and his daughter Diva:

The president's assault on the military

Retired US Army Colonel Jeff McCausland rings an alarm about the president's politicization of our apolitical armed forces:

Officers are taught from the beginning of their military careers that the profession is apolitical. The oath they swear is not to the president, despite the fact that he is the commander-in-chief. Rather it is to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” This forms the basis of civil-military relations, and it has served America well for over two centuries. It is likely that few Americans realize the United States is only one of handful of countries that has never experienced a serious military threat to civil authority.

Not coincidentally, the nation’s Founding Fathers were very suspect of the military. They viewed it as a threat to civil authority and the democracy they were attempting to create. Consequently, throughout most of our history the standing military remained relatively small. At the onset of World War II, the U.S. military was the 19th largest force on the planet — smaller than Portugal. But in that conflict’s aftermath, American political leaders accepted both global leadership and the associated responsibilities that required a large standing military force.

Is it not likely that during this moment of national crisis an erratic president, concerned by his sinking popularity, might be tempted to further politicize the military to support his re-election? Could this result in his exporting the national political divisions that have sustained him to the military? Could the leadership climate that resulted in the USS Roosevelt fiasco reach a point where the espoused political affiliation of not only civilian leaders, but also military officers, have more to do with his or her advancement than their ability? Sadly, this is not just the story of a political appointee who allowed his ambition to override his good judgment. Rather it is a warning about a growing threat to a foundation of American democracy.

I've said similar things, as have every military officer I've ever spoken with on the subject. Let's keep our armed forces out of politics, mm kay?

Because life wasn't interesting enough right now

Two forest fires near Vladimirovka, Ukraine, have caused radiation levels in the region to spike:

A fire covering around 20 hectares broke out on Saturday afternoon near the village of Vladimirovka, within the uninhabited Chernobyl exclusion zone, and responders were still fighting two blazes on Monday morning, Ukrainian emergency services said in a statement.

"There is bad news -- in the center of the fire, radiation is above normal," Egor Firsov, head of Ukraine's ecological inspection service, wrote in a Facebook post alongside a video of a Geiger counter. "As you can see in the video, the readings of the device are 2.3, when the norm is 0.14. But this is only within the area of the fire outbreak."

His measurements refer to the microsievert per hour (μSv/h) reading; the maximum allowable amount of natural background radiation is 0.5 μSv/h, the emergency services said, but Firsov's reported amount was nearly five times that.

Vladimirovka sits within the deserted 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone, which was evacuated after the devastating 1986 blast at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant that sent radioactive fallout billowing across Europe and exposed millions to dangerous levels of radiation.

The region has since been taken over by nature, and forest fires are not uncommon.

While researching this post, I discovered that Google has Street View photos of Pripyat and Chernobyl. How did they get permission to do that?

How does this end?

Writing for Vox, Ezra Klein looks at three major plans for re-starting the economy, and how difficult they would actually be to implement:

There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.

All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.

The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin.

The AEI proposal is the closest thing to a middle path between these plans. It’s more testing, but nothing approaching Romer’s hopes. It’s more contact tracing, but it doesn’t envision an IT-driven panopticon. But precisely for that reason, what it’s really describing is a yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.

This, too, requires some imagination. Will governors who’ve finally, at great effort, reopened parts of their economies really keep throwing them back into lockdown every time ICUs begin to fill? Will Trump have the stomach to push the country back into quarantine after he’s lifted social distancing guidelines? What if unemployment is 17 percent, and his approval rating is at 38 percent?

For the time being, we'll stay in our homes and away from other people as much as we can. But wow, even for me, an introvert with a dedicated home office, it's very trying.

And how long will it go on? A while. National Geographic says a vaccine may take a lot longer than a year.

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright

Architects may come and architects may go, but usually their houses sell for more than the value of the land alone:

Twelve and a half years after it went up for sale, a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Elmhurst sold yesterday for about the value of the land it’s on.

Built in 1901 and known as the Frank B. Henderson house, the five-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot house on Kenilworth Avenue sold for $825,000. It first came on the market in September 2007 at nearly $2 million.

The house won’t be demolished. An easement in the deed prohibits that, and the buyers are longtime Wright fans who confirmed to Crain’s today that they plan to move in. Nevertheless, the sale of a work by the 20th century’s best known architect, a house filled with his distinctive patterned windows, banded woodwork and oversized brick fireplace, for the mere value of the land is notable.

It’s the latest evidence of the ongoing phenomenon of artful Wright houses selling for below the overall market. The Elmhurst sale comes on the heels of the December sale of a Wright house in Glencoe at a little more than half the going rate for comparably sized homes in the town.

The house is on a 22,800-square-foot 2,200 m² lot, which breaks the sale price out to $375 per m². In January, a church a block away sold a buildable piece of its parking lot for $447 per m² to a family who plan to build a new house there.

Five other pieces of land or obsolete houses sold as teardowns, all in Elmhurst, have sold for between $208 per m² $20 and $479 per m² in the past several months, according to Crain’s analysis of real estate records.

Having toured a few Lloyd Wright houses, I know why: they're dark, weirdly laid out, hard to maintain, and often come with uncomfortable furniture he designed to fit in the houses. I'm not alone in thinking he was overrated, being too inflexible and narcissistic to listen to people who knew more about living spaces than he did. It's like he took the prairie style developed by his mentor, Louis Sullivan, and took it to such an extreme that no rational person would want to live in one.

So, great news for the buyers who got the house for a song. They will own it for about 10 years longer than they want to, I'd wager.

Is it July yet?

An Andy Borowitz bit from last year is making the rounds again: "Trump Comes Out Strongly Against Intelligence." More evidence of why that's true after these two videos. First, the Ohio Department of Health demonstrates social distancing:

Second, the Lincoln Project, a Republican organization headed by George Conway, has put out this ad:

And now the roundup of horror promised above:

Finally, 50 years ago today, Paul McCartney announced the Beatles had broken up.

Oh wait: here's another cool video.

17 million unemployment claims in 3 weeks

Unemployment claims jumped another 6.6 million in the US last week bringing the total reported unemployed to 16.8 million, the largest number of unemployment claims since the 1930s. Illinois saw 200,000 new claims, an all-time record, affecting 1 in 12 Illinois workers. And that's just one headline today:

After all of that, why don't you watch this adorable video of skunks chattering away as they investigate a cyclist?

Chill, folks

After Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign for president earlier today, New Republic's Walter Shapiro has some simple advice for the Democratic Party: "Stop panicking about Joe Biden."

What the Democrats fretting about Biden’s lackluster TV performances fail to understand is that virtually every presidential candidate spends weeks—sometimes months—wandering in the wilderness after wrapping up the nomination. After the tension of the early primaries, everything comes to a grinding halt once there is a de facto nominee. Suddenly, the only one surefire way to make news is to announce a vice-presidential running mate. And that banner headline is traditionally reserved for the days leading up to the convention or for the convention itself.

Biden has more than four months to fill until the delayed Democratic convention. An out-of-nowhere VP choice might be enough to generate a boomlet of media attention, but there are limited options. By announcing that his running mate will be a woman, Biden is left sorting through an obvious list of worthy contenders, such as Whitmer or Senators Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren.

Biden boasts advantages that some of his predecessors lacked at this point in the calendar. After nearly a half-century in public life in Washington, the former vice president doesn’t have to worry about introducing himself to the American people. And in the midst of a pandemic, voters already know that their lives are on the ballot in November—even without Biden resorting to bitter attacks on Trump.

Biden undoubtedly still remembers that in June 1992, Clinton—that “helluva candidate”—was running a distant third in the polls behind both Ross Perot and George H.W. Bush. Of course, in November, Clinton romped home with 370 electoral votes. Even before the pace of politics accelerated with cable TV news and social media, it was a long, long while from April to November.

Exactly. And many of the next 208 days will generate new images of Donald Trump completely botching the most important job of his lifetime, saying stupid things in general, and honking off 50% or more of the electorate every time he opens his mouth. Could Biden win against Reagan? Probably not. Against any other Republican in my lifetime? Probably so.

I just hope we're out of quarantine by then.

Day 22: in which our hero suffers a poignant loss

...as I took the last squares of toilet paper from the roll this morning. I had to dig into the Strategic TP Reserve just to meet ends.

Before I round up the depression and sadness from around the world this morning, I would like to point out that yesterday's high temperature of 27°C at O'Hare was the warmest we've seen since the 30°C we had on October 1st, 189 days earlier. I opened all my windows, and Parker got his pace up just a little bit. Today's forecast calls for perfect spring warmth (21°C) and thunderstorms during what we used to call "rush hour." (I will probably have all my windows open when the rain starts and have to close them very quickly.)

So what else has the world thrown at us this morning? In addition to the usual drumbeat of deaths and Republican malfeasance, this:

  • Just now, Bernie Sanders has ended his presidential campaign, leaving Joe Biden as the last remaining candidate. One hopes his supporters come back home before November 3rd.
  • Comfort foods, aka that crap your parents didn't want you to eat when you were a kid, have made an amazing comeback as people shelter in place.
  • Today is the 30th anniversary of Twin Peaks' debut.
  • For the first time ever, people have adopted every single animal from Chicago Animal Care and Control. I really, really hope people keep them.
  • The much-noted environmental benefits of shutting down a quarter of the world's economy seem great, but environmentalists have some pessimism about our return to full production when the emergency ends.
  • Paul Krugman likens the government's crisis response to "learned helplessness."
  • President Trump fired the inspector general just made responsible for overseeing the $2 trillion disaster-relief package, citing "bias." Of course Glenn Fine has a bias: he believes in evidence and government accountability. That makes him prima facie unacceptable to Trump. This comes days after he removed intelligence IG Michael Atkinson for similar reasons.

Well, now that I'm thoroughly pumped from reading the papers, I'm going to document an API while watching Schitt's Creek.