As of this afternoon, there’s one reported case of Coronavirus in Baltimore County. They cancelled the St. Patrick’s Day parade in town. I’m working from home indefinitely. Maryland is shutting schools down for two weeks beginning Monday, which means we will be dealing with a bored, lonely daughter who does not understand the meaning of the word QUARANTINE but knows exactly where all the emo anime cartoons are on Netflix.
I’m also scheduled for a cancer checkup on the 23rd, so I’ve contacted the hospital to find out what my best course of action should be. They moved the oncology center into its own building two years ago, so my chances of coming into contact with infected patients is lower than it would have been, but I’d really like to avoid this.
Working from home has been pretty seamless so far. We’re using a mixture of technologies to videoconference—Skype for Business, Zoom, Slack, and Teams. SfB is a giant steaming pile of shit, but to its credit we had a conference this morning with 80+ people connected and it worked pretty well. It spins up the CPU on my MacBook like a jet engine and sometimes the audio kicks in and out, but it didn’t crash. Zoom works much better but I don’t trust the company after their shitty software opened a backdoor to malware last year. Slack is slick and the sound is 100% better than SfB but it only works amongst the people in your channels. And I used Teams with my CTO last week and it looked and sounded great—something I never would have expected from that company.
Because the work I do is spread out amongst many groups, vendors, and internal clients, I have to manage many different channels of communication on a daily basis. There’s email, where many things go to die in my inbox. I have a WRI Gmail address because I can’t stand Sharepoint, which is Microsoft’s asinine answer to Google Docs. There’s Skype, which has a chat function several people in my company use, but I don’t leave running because it’s a CPU hog. My team and several others use Slack, which just works, and is full of animated Simpsons gifs. We use Asana for project management, which has the ability to send email alerts. There’s Basecamp, another project management system which several vendors use, that also triggers email alerts. The company is going to move to Microsoft Teams and away from Skype for Business, which is good because SfB is, as mentioned above, shit, but bad because Slack works just fine.
As a result I’ve been scrambling to keep up with all of the ongoing projects, requests, and responsibilities all filed haphazardly across ten different software environments. Ten years ago I used to bitch about email, but these days, if that was the only place I needed to go to stay in communication and find the things I needed, I’d piss myself with happiness.
Sink fixtures are in place upstairs, but the hardware I bought to connect the drain to the wall pipe didn’t reach. On the way back from Sylvan Finn and I bought some extra hardware to make that happen over the weekend. Once the drain pipes are sorted out I can hook up the water leads, and we’ll have working sinks up there.
Here’s something I’ve been working on for a couple of (months? years?) at WRI: a visualization of worldwide carbon emissions by sector in 2016, the follow-up to the famous 2005 version. It took years because we got the data from a partner, who used a different methodology for some of the sectors.
I think I started this in the bottom half of 2018 and noodled on it until this past December, when we finally got the updated data and were cleared to use it. Building the interactive Sankey was fun; building the static version was an exercise in patience.
We met the new neighbors on Tuesday. After more than six months of intrigue, random realtor showcases where carloads of strange people showed up to the house and wandered around the neighborhood shouting (yes, this did actually happen) and long periods of inactivity, a very quiet couple moved in soon after we got Hazel. Jen met them one day when she had a stoned dog out in the backyard after she’d been hit by the Prius, and couldn’t really talk to them much. She resolved to properly welcome them to the neighborhood with some flowers. We walked over after dinner and rang the bell; they invited us in and we stood in the foyer of the house and talked to them for about 20 minutes. They are lovely people and we got along very quickly. We agreed to organize a dinner with them after the holidays and get to know them a little better.
Renie was in town on Wednesday courtesy of the FAA, and she was able to get a hotel very close to the office. We met up and got some dinner at Union Station on Wednesday night and did a debrief from Thanksgiving; it was great to get some quiet time to catch up with her where we weren’t making food or driving somewhere or cleaning up something.
Carni, my lead designer, left us on Friday after over five years with WRI. Back when I was the whole design department, I knew I needed to hire someone to help with the rapidly increasing workload. After looking at a pool of over 200 applicants, his work stood clearly out above the rest, and I was lucky to get him. An incredibly capable designer, I leaned on him a lot for many different things while I was focusing on the larger picture and learning how to be a manager. As he grew into a larger role, I made sure to get out of his way and let him run with the things he wanted to tackle. He’s moving to a local studio that focuses on data visualizations, which is where his interests have been for several years, and I couldn’t be happier for him. But now I’m scrambling to find someone who can do a quarter of what he could, and I’m going to have to fill in for the rest.
One of our awesome Advent activities this year was to meet up with the Morrisses and make sock monkeys at the American Visionary Art Museum. The girls did this two years ago when I was laid up in the hospital, and they had a great time together, so we put it back on the calendar. At the top of the back warehouse there’s a huge open room where the staff had set up scores of tables with basic necessities—bags of stuffing and some directions. You are expected to bring socks and scissors, and they supply thread, buttons, and other decorative elements. We found a table and got to work, making friends with a young woman who was sock monkeying solo. It’s incredibly satisfying to sit and stitch something together with friends; I can almost see the allure of a quilting group (but there’d need to be copious amounts of alcohol). I chose a striped sock and used the most basic of stitches, while Jen used a hook-and-loop and made hers more professional. Three hours later we realized we were all famished (somehow it got to be 1PM without us noticing). We packed up our monkeys and drove down Key Highway to Little Havana and chowed down on delicious cuban-inspired food. It was great to hang out with them, and I have to say, my sewing skills were not too bad!
Sunday morning I spent tinkering around the house getting small tasks done; I ran the Scout up and realized the 11-year-old battery is probably due for a replacement. I straightened up the backyard and cleaned up the garage, then went downstairs and organized a bunch of stray boxes. It’s at the point where I need to put proper shelves in along the wall in the ice room, because we’re out of wall space for racks and there’s no clear floor space. Another holiday break project will be building a longer laundry sorting area and organizing the shelves on the west wall.
Johnathan Franzen published a sobering column in the New Yorker which basically says he doesn’t believe humans can stop climate change.
Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.
Scientific American published a rebuttal in a blog which basically tells him to STFU.
But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the Universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens.
Reading it for the first time, I wanted it to be written more as a point-by-point rebuttal. When I re-read it, I realized the author chose to focus on words of hope rather than scientific diarrhea—a welcome shift from the stuff I read every day. Climate scientists know better than any of us what’s probably coming in our future, and it’s not pretty. I’m taking comfort in the fact that she can still be optimistic.
WRI has been in the news this week for various reasons, some of them troubling. One of our board members hosted a fundraiser for Trump last week, and took a lot of heat for it. Another member resigned this week after being linked to the Epstein scandal. While I wouldn’t characterize the state of things as “upheval”, I know there are a lot of concerned employees who are looking for answers, and it forces us to look at our practices and expectations for inviting high-profile figures to advise and guide our organization.
Another excellent article on the growing water crisis popped up in my Flipboard feed, this one from NPR. Go WRI!
I’m proud of everything we do at the World Resources Institute, but yesterday was a banner day for the Water team: a story on water stress was featured as a front-page story on the New York Times. For a relatively small group of people, our reach is long.
This is pretty cool: The New York Times did an interactive piece on food affects climate change, and vice versa. It liberally references two WRI reports we published recently: Shifting Diets For a Sustainable Food Future and Improving Aquaculture.
Here’s your Idiot (the guy on the right) with the CEO of the World Resources Institute (definitely not an idiot) getting his 5-year tenure award. 5 years!
I’m a little rough around the edges this morning; I was out last night with a bunch of work friends saying farewell to a couple of coworkers and didn’t get home until midnight. We walked a few blocks away from the office and sat around a fire pit at a place called the Wundergarten, an outdoor beer garden surrounded by gleaming new highrise buildings in the H street district.
Leaving WRI are two friends who predated me by a year or two; I’m still shocked by the fact that I’ve been at WRI for over five years now. We warmed ourselves around the fire and told stories, and the second beer I had knocked me on my ass: some kind of seasonal winter beer that tasted more like whiskey and which someone told me was around 10% ABV.
I miscalculated the schedule and missed the 9PM train, which meant I had to hang around Union Station until the 10:40, the last one headed north. I picked up a Shake Shack burger and fries and listened to podcasts until it was time to board.