Archive for the ‘Measuring’ Category
February 20th
Here’s another great environmental resource: Slate’s Green Lantern series, which debuted last fall and answers one very concrete, practical question each week. (Are manual transmissions really better for the environment? What kind of tree should you plant in your backyard to soak up the most carbon?)
The answers are typically fair, balanced, and—as I realized when I read this week’s piece on the environmental merits of fresh vs. frozen orange juice—they almost always illuminate the real difficulty of pinning down just how “eco-friendly” something is: it’s not just the transportation but the production that counts. (It’s for this reason, in a well-publicized example, that environmentally sensitive Britons are better off buying imported lamb from New Zealand than they are consuming the home-grown variety.) And then, of course, there’s the matter of packaging and waste disposal, which further complicates things…
Of course, as this week’s article points out, “changing your mode of orange juice intake isn’t going to save the planet.” But it’s still nice to understand the many factors that go into these small, daily choices.
February 19th
Arts & Letters Daily is one of my favorite websites. Edited by Denis Dutton, a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, it brings together an eccentric selection of articles, book reviews, and essays from all across the Internet—from a meditation on creating fictional characters to an examination of the explosive growth of the Chinese and Indian economies.
Now Dutton and his colleague Douglas Campbell have started a new resource devoted exclusively to making sense of the science behind global warming. Climate Debate Daily links to scientific articles, news stories, economic studies, polemics, editorials, and more, and gives equal voice to dissenting views as it does to calls to action. The objective: “to allow readers to form their own judgments based on the best available information.”
A timely idea, indeed…
February 13th
Here in New York, snagging a good restaurant reservation is always a competitive affair, but the struggle grows particularly fierce when Valentine’s Day comes around. Tables book up weeks, if not months, in advance, and woe to the hapless souls who wander in on the spur of the moment, hoping to be seated at 8:00!
Personally, I’d rather stay home and cook (or get takeout), anyway. Why stress yourself out for a holiday that’s supposed to celebrate love? Some things are better left un-planned.
If you don’t have anyone to cook for (or get takeout with), on the other hand—and you live in the New York area—you can order your meal from FreshDirect, an online grocery delivery service with a special menu “for the brokenhearted”:
From bitters (to match your mood) to thyme (said to heal all wounds) these items might just cushion the bumpy trip from your blind denial all the way to newfound acceptance of single life.
What are you doing on Valentine’s Day?
February 11th
A couple weeks ago we received the following suggestion by a visitor to the Quo Vadis website: “Have you ever considered making a planner ‘Specifically Designed With The Truck Driver In Mind’?”
This product will greatly help drivers in their daily routine, where they can record daily records to reflect back on their maintenance, deadhead mi., trip routing, advances, fuel stops for each trip, po#, pick up ID# and so on. There is still a need for simple products instead of high tech products.
I’m not sure it’s ever occurred to us that truck drivers were interested in our planners, but I’ll second the suggestion that simple products can still triumph over technology. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a small set of shelves on eBay, and the UPS package they were mailed in had a typo in the address—the ZIP code was off by a single digit. Everything else was correct, and what’s more, that wrong ZIP code was all of 7 miles away from my house, in a different part of Brooklyn.
Ok, I thought; no problem. I’ll just call UPS and sort it out.
So I called, every day, for a WEEK, and was told, variously, that the correction had already been made, that the local center would call me back, that the package had been lost, that it would be there within a few hours, etc. Meanwhile I followed the tracking number on the UPS website and could see that it would go out for delivery each day, only to come back every night undelivered (fortunately, there was no street by the same name in that other part of Brooklyn). In the end, I had to ask the sender to ship another package, while the first one was returned to her as “undeliverable.”
So much for sophisticated logistical systems—a map and a pencil would have sufficed!
February 7th
Happy New Year!
Chinese New Year 4706, which begins today, is the Year of the Rat, which holds a place of honor as the first creature in the 12-year cycle of the Chinese lunar calendar.
Legend has it that the rat was the first to arrive when Buddha summoned 12 animals to name a year in each cycle after each one of them. The rat was followed by an ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
“The charm and innovative personality of the rat is legendary - he did not become the first sign of the cycle without good reason,” Theodora Lau wrote in her “Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes.”
The Chinese lunar calendar is based on the cycles of the moon, and is constructed in a different fashion than the Western solar calendar, with the beginning of the year falling somewhere between late January and early February, according to the Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco. In China, the horoscope is often consulted to learn how to deal with a difficult boss or understand different personalities.
The Steamy Kitchen, a blog featuring modern Asian cooking, can help you get ready for tonight’s feast.
February 2nd
Punxsutawney Phil, our official Groundhog, predicts six more weeks of winter.
Here Ye! Here Ye! Here Ye!
On Gobbler’s Knob on this fabulous Groundhog Day, February 2nd, 2008, Punxsutawney Phil, the Seer of Seers, Prognosticator of all Prognosticators, Rose to the call of President Bill Cooper and greeted his handlers, Ben Hughes and John Griffiths.
After casting a weathered eye towards thousands of his faithful followers, Phil consulted with President Cooper and directed him to the appropriate scroll, which proclaimed:
“As I look around me, a bright sky I see, and a shadow beside me. Six more weeks of winter it will be!”
Groundhog Day has been celebrated for a long time in the United States. Back on February 4, 1841, a Morgantown, PA shopkeeper named James Morris wrote in his diary…”Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas Day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”
January 31st
I noticed this year that we were receiving a lot of requests from Quo Vadis customers for extra address books. We even got a few emails from people asking us to sell address inserts online.
I gave up my address book when I started using a Palm Pilot back in the late ’90s. It worked great–except when I tried to use it in a cold office (it didn’t work) and when I missed replacing the batteries in time. I lost 15 years worth of addresses because I hadn’t backed it up on my computer. (I admit, big mistake.)
After that horror show, I cooled to technology for awhile and went back to saving business cards, addresses written on scraps of paper, and address labels in a hanging file in my desk. After awhile the volume of paper was getting to be too much to shift through. I decided to go back to a staple of my work life years ago - the Rolodex.
The Rolodex was a prized possession. It was more than a network of contacts at your fingertips. It was a storehouse of relationships that spanned years; people you met, worked with, could call on for information, advice, support, referrals. The different pen and pencil colors on the cards measured the years as the numbers and titles changed.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on Rolodex affectionatos, most of whom also rely on BlackBerrys and other computer-based address books.
“More than 20 years after the digital revolution that forecasted the paperless office, the “rotary card file”–best known by the market-leading brand name, Rolodex–continues to turn. As millions of social network users display their connectedness on their Facebook pages, a surprising robust group of people maintain their networks on small white cards.”
January 30th
I’ve never had the discipline to keep a daily diary; for one thing, it’s always seemed like such an enormous commitment of time, and I also suspect I’d soon grow bored with my own ramblings. I do carry around a couple of notebooks where I jot down random thoughts and observations (an idea for a short story, for example, or a funny conversation I overheard on the train). But it’s hardly a regular thing.
Nonetheless, I love learning about the methods people use to preserve their daily lives. In a comment to last week’s post about the new QV Memoriae journals, I found out about a service called LifeOnRecord, which enables would-be diarists to create an audio journal by calling in their thoughts on telephone. For some people, blogs serve as informal online diaries. So do scrapbooks.
And then there are the diary hybrids. A friend’s grandfather used his diary to painstakingly record each purchase he made that day. My own grandparents shared a diary in which they took turns narrating various milestones of their children’s lives: “Today Inga climbed up the stairs by herself for the first time”… “Today Harald’s first tooth broke through on the bottom right side of his jaw” (by the time they got to their fourth child, they’d pretty much abandoned the practice). A family friend encouraged people to write down a couple of thoughts in her notebook every time they visited; she lived alone, and that way she could read what they had written whenever she got lonely.
January 22nd
Traveling from Phoenix to Tucson, Arizona, I took a detour off I-10 and went to visit Casa Grande.
Built by the Hohokam, it is the largest prehistoric building in North America. The large and vibrant community surrounding it in 1350 AD vanished without a trace. We don’t know what became of the people or the purpose of Casa Grande.
Because the windows and doorways align with the sun and moon at significant times of the year, and at extreme points in their cycle, the building may have served as an calendar and observatory.
Why and for what use the Hohokam developed this elaborate system is still a mystery. Since the ruins of a ball court are nearby, the amateur archaeologist in me believes a relationship can be found with Aztec or Mayan temple complexes hundreds of miles to the south in Mexico and Central America.
December 19th
Last week’s New Yorker had a fascinating article about how a simple medical checklist is transforming the complex, high stakes arena of intensive care. One of the most common complications in intensive care are so-called line infections, or contaminations of the synthetic tubes that doctors insert into patients’ veins in order to administer fluid, medication, or nutrients. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people each year in the U.S. alone, writes the author, Atul Gawande, and they are fatal between 5% and 28% of the time.
In 2001, a Baltimore doctor named Peter Pronovost designed a five-step checklist to help prevent line infections. The list is shockingly straightforward; doctors are instructed to:
(1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in.
The final step? Instructing hospital nurses to ask doctors whether or not any lines need to be removed each day. In the hospitals where Pronovost’s checklists have been implemented, they have made a remarkable difference. (In one hospital, the line infection rate dropped from 11% to 0 over the course of a single year.) The success, Pronovost speculates, is not just about mundane memory recall, but about making explicit “the minimum, expected steps in complex procedures.”
In the face of such intricacy, it’s amazing how simple life can be.
