A friend shared this piece by the late actress Portia Nelson.
Chapter 1 I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost….I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2 I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the side walk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter 3 I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I fall in….it’s a habit…but my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.
Chapter 4 I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.
Chapter 5 I walk down a different street.
The arc of this story is beautiful – she managed to say so much with so little.
As humankind entered the 1980s, small pox was eradicated, and polio and cholera were in retreat. However, malaria was still impacting hundreds of thousands of people.
A group of scientists came up with an ingenious experiment. They started with 36 mosquito nets – some of which were for double beds and some were for single beds.
Half of these were soaked in Permethrin (a powerful insect repellent). And half had holes torn into the nets to simulate wear and tear. They expected most nets to be torn – and for the owners to not have enough money to replace them.
In sum, there were 9 nets each with combinations of treated/untreated and torn/intact. Those treated with Permethrin were all laid flat in the sun for 90 minutes and then installed in 24 huts.
These huts had mosquito traps – some were designed to catch mosquitos inside the house and some as they left.
Between 8pm-6am for 6 days a week, volunteers slept in the huts. Mosquitos were collected 3 times during the day and live mosquitos were kept under observation.
After 21 weeks, 4,682 female anopheles mosquitos (Malaria vectors) were collected.
The researchers were expecting the Permethrin treated nets to be very effective. However, they were skeptical about the performance of the torn nets.
The results were astonishing.
The Permethrin treated torn nets reduced mosquitos entering 70%, increased mosquitos leaving the hut from 25% to 97%, and reduced the blood meal between 20%-10%.
This was unexpected as these tears in the net were large. And what’s more, even after 5 months, the Permethrin was still highly effective
It proved to be a breakthrough. The widespread use of impregnated bed nets stopped Malaria mortality from increasing and started to decline. These nets were twice as effective as anti-malarial drugs and sprays… and were responsible for almost halving the death rate from Malaria.
This was such an elegantly designed experiment – a beautiful illustration of the scientific method in action.
Plastics have negative externalities. The cost of plastics don’t reflect these negative externalities – so we all end up paying for them. There’s a story we like to believe about plastic recycling. However, most plastic isn’t recycled.
So we end up with microplastics and nanoplastics – in our food and our water – that end up in our bodies. It isn’t easy yet to just phase out plastics from our life. They’re cheap and ubiquitous.
The single highest leverage thing we can do is ask our elected officials to ban single use plastics. But, in the absence of that, here are 4 things we can do at home:
(1) Steel water bottles instead of plastic bottled water: Plastic bottled water, it turns out, is a great way to eat plastic. We don’t need that. Just keep steel water bottles with you – they’re better in every way.
Soft drink companies are going all in on marketing these as people reduce soft drink consumption. But plastic bottled water is a farce in developed countries where tap water is high quality. And, if we’re very picky about our neighborhood water source, we can use a filter.
(2) Refuse to take new plastic grocery bags: That will ensure we either bring cloth bags or reuse our existing plastic bags. Both can work.
(3) Replace plastic detergent and laundry pods: These are very convenient and innocent looking. So much so that I didn’t even realize they were plastic (duh). Liquid laundry detergent made of natural materials is an easy replacement.
Plastic-free dishwasher detergent can be harder to find – we’ve found Blueland’s pods very good so far.
(4) Use the compost bin: All food material and paper can go into the compost bin. “Hold On” has good 4 and 13 gallon compost bags that can be used together (depending on the size of your bin).
These are all small ways in which we can contribute to reduced microplastics.
I’ve loved reading Matt Ridley’s “How Innovation Works” so far. A point he makes emphatically is that the nature of innovation is always misunderstood.
Crucial innovations are often thought to have been accelerated by war. However, most innovation has happened incrementally and has been driven forward by many people.
For example, aircraft fatalities have gone from 3000 people per trillion miles to 50 people per trillion miles between 1970 and the 2010s. An incredible advance – it is 700 safer to be on a jet vs. to drive a car.
This happened not because of one person -but because of many experiments in manufacturing and crew communication best practices.
This is how the jet engine, the car, the electric bulb, and so many other inventions became part of our daily life.
I’ve sometimes heard grown-ups share their frustrations about “kids these days.” This always comes with a story about how kids are (mis)behaving in ways they wouldn’t expect.
This is generally the point in the conversation when I jump in to point out it isn’t “kids these days,” it is “parents these days” – i.e., it’s us. No need to point those fingers elsewhere.
For example, I’m seeing a lot of kids in our neighborhood zoom around in what looks like a combination of e-bikes and e-scooters. Seeing groups of middle school aged boys ride at speed on the road, on the sidewalk (often in the opposite direction), etc., is scary to watch. It always feels like an accident waiting to happen.
Ultimately though, it comes down to a decision their parents made. It defies logic. Why wouldn’t you let kids burn their energy riding a bike? Why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to learn how to stay fit at a young age?
Similarly, there’s always news about bad electronic habits. But that second grader with the Apple Watch didn’t walk into the Apple store and swipe her card. Neither did the fourth grader with the iPhone. Or that kid who gets unlimited access to YouTube because there’s a TV in her room.
Sure, they might have asked their parents for it. Begged even. But kids ask for a lot of things…
My wife shared a public review of our neighborhood middle school recently. It was from a parent who shared that her kid had had a rough time. But she went onto explain that the school and teachers were just fine. The kids were fine – left to themselves – too. The issue was parents who seemed to be intent on buying the affection of their kids.
I’ve been reflecting on Daniel Kahneman’s note on “wishing for optimism” over the past few days. In a conversation with an insightful friend, we talked about how self-confidence and optimism often go hand in hand.
I define confidence as the ability to look ahead at a challenge and say “this might not work… and that’s okay.”
Optimism is a pre-requisite – else we wouldn’t believe everything will turn out okay.
Optimism inspires self-confidence. Self-confidence gives us the mental strength unlocks to take on and make it through the hard stuff.
It is the skill that unlocks the good life. A skill worth building.
A few interesting charts that got me wondering about cause and effect.
The first is a marked decline in drug overdose deaths. I wonder if all the attention to and regulation around the likes of Oxycontin have begun making a dent.
Interesting to also see violent crime from Realtimecrimeindex.com down from those pandemic highs. It made me wonder if real cause was frustration from being stuck in their homes.
Next, it was nice to see that groceries are back to being as affordable as they were pre-pandemic. Inflation has gone down and interest rates are about to come down as well.
Perhaps that’s the driver of increased optimism about business growth from small business owners?
Finally, and since everyone here knows I love a good renewable energy investment chart, I’ve shared posts in the past about Texas’ impressive investments in renewable energy capacity – a result of their deregulated energy responding quickest to the exponential decreases in costs.
This chart, however, was wild. Over the next 18 months, Texas is going to invest in more renewable energy capacity than the next 10 states combined.
In the 1920s, “whooping cough” killed 6000 children per year. Infected citizens were expected to quarantine. However, the time required was unclear.
Pearl Kendrick had studied Bacteriology while a teacher. She now worked at a Michigan State lab at Grand Rapids, Michigan. She recruited Grace Eldering – another researcher with a similar background.
She asked her boss if she and Grace Eldering could research whooping cough as an extra project. As a starting point, she and Eldering laboriously created a cough plate onto which people in the community coughed. If the Pertusis bacteria grew, they were infected.
Soon, they established people were infectious for 4 weeks. That led to a more specific recommended quarantine. However, they didn’t consider their work done.
As they continued collecting data from the community, they saw the impact of whooping cough first hand. It strengthened their resolve to develop a vaccine.
They followed a step-by-step systematic vaccine creation approach that took them 4 years. Eventually, the vaccine they developed involved a killed version of several strains of the bacterium. They started testing on mice and eventually tested on themselves. Once they were sure it was safe, they needed to set up a clinical trial.
Now, again, they didn’t want to set up a control group with the established practice at the time – with orphans who were excluded. Instead, with the help of local authorities and Kent County statistics, they found a control group with similar demographics who had missed out on the vaccine for various reasons.
4 of 712 kids in the treatment group had whooping cough in the following months whereas 45 of the 880 unvaccinated control group did – a ~10x reduction!
When they announced their results, they were met with lots of skepticism. A renowned Johns Hopkins doctor even visited their lab twice to inspect their trial to then declare there was nothing wrong.
Kendrick then wrote Eleanor Roosevelt who came down to Grand Rapids and spent 13 hours with the team. This helped them get funding for a second trial. This time, they had a stronger vaccine administered with 3 injections instead of 4. The results held again.
In 1940, Michigan mass produced their vaccine. The world followed.
It is estimated that their work saved hundreds of thousands of lives were saved in the US alone. And many millions the world over.
The rise of vaccine skepticism in the US has seen a rebound of this disease. However, the 18,617 cases and 7 deaths pale when compared to 215,343 cases in 1932 (when the population was roughly a third of what it was today).
Kendrick and Eldering received very little recognition and reward – in fact, they actively shunned it. They shared their methods and formulae with everyone in the world. They did everything right – at every step.
They never became rich or famous. By all accounts, they continued staying in a home in Grand Rapids, hosting friends, and taking care of each of other into their old age. All the while, they saved the lives of millions of children at modest cost… secure knowledge of that fact was the reward they chose.
I often think of two ideas about values. The first is that value are values only when they cost us money. And the second is that it is easier to fight for our values than to live by them.
Theirs is a story that has gotten me reflecting on both of these truths about values while inspiring me to examine my own.
(That’s Grace Eldering on the far right watching a colleague administer the vaccination)
H/T: How Innovation works by Matt Ridley, The Smithsonian Magazine’s excellent article
A Learning a Day 