A humbled Venice

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay.

Six hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world.

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Recap — New coronavirus projections, quarantine talk dominate

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When people need timing calibration

If you’ve ever found yourself unable to get a word in edgewise, or doing all the talking around someone frustratingly taciturn, it’s probably because your cultural timings are ever so slightly miscalibrated for each other, points out the linguist Deborah Tannen.

Source: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch


It's better to give people more time and space to talk than less. If the silence feels awkward, that amount of time may be just what the other person needs in order to feel comfortable talking.

Teen sleep schedules

Recognizing the importance of deep NREM sleep in teenagers has been instrumental to our understanding of healthy development, but it has also offered clues as to what happens when things go wrong in the context of abnormal development.

Many of the major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and ADHD are now considered disorders of abnormal development, since they commonly emerge during childhood and adolescence. …schizophrenia deserves special mention at this juncture.

Several studies have tracked neural development using brain scans every couple of months in hundreds of young teenagers as they make their way through adolescence. A proportion of these individuals went on to develop schizophrenia in their late teenage years and early adulthood. Those individuals who developed schizophrenia had an abnormal pattern of brain maturation that was associated with synaptic pruning, especially in the frontal lobe regions where rational, logical thoughts are controlled—the inability to do so being a major symptom of schizophrenia.

In a separate series of studies, we have also observed that in young individuals who are at high risk of developing schizophrenia, and in teenagers and young adults with schizophrenia, there is a two-to threefold reduction in deep NREM sleep. Furthermore, the electrical brainwaves of NREM sleep are not normal in their shape or number in the affected individuals.

Faulty pruning of brain connections in schizophrenia caused by sleep abnormalities is now one of the most active and exciting areas of investigation in psychiatric illness.

Adolescents face two other harmful challenges in their struggle to obtain sufficient sleep as their brains continue to develop.

The first is a change in their circadian rhythm. The second is early school start times. …the complications of early school start times are inextricably linked with the first issue—a shift in circadian rhythm.

Unborn world

Have you ever entered a world of seemingly limitless opportunity? That's what it was like. It was so exciting. Things were developing so fast. There was so much freedom to explore, test limits. One could hear all kinds of different sounds.

For a while it seemed as if there wasn't even an awareness of all that was going on in the world and the new entrances to be made in preparation. Eventually hints appeared here and there that more opportunity and development was on the way.

A terrible realization

There are realizations which come to us all painfully; mostly, however, such as pertain to ourselves; that we are growing old, for instance; and, more terrible, that we must die.

Source: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace


That, however, need not be the end. There is a worse realization still, that a man falls short of the righteousness and righteous requirement of God. There is salvation available from the consequences of that deficiency.

Sociable on short acquaintance

We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco.

They said it was two hours, by carriage to the ancient city of Bergamo, and that we would arrive there in good season for the railway train.

We got an open barouche and a wild, boisterous driver, and set out. It was delightful. We had a fast team and a perfectly smooth road.

How to defrost a To Do list

Contrary to the opinion of some, being thrown off work that requires in-person interaction is not limited to blue collar work, and certainly not racially based. It can hit a lot of people, all while defying expectations, bias, and prejudice along the way. Plenty of people don't want work that can be done from home.

Nonetheless, as many have become homebound, we would do well to do what we can to find work and other things that can be done from home. Don't want on Congress to meet your needs.

For some of us, there have been several things we've wanted to do from home for some time. If we knew we could turn them into self-sufficient work from home we would, but our confidence level has not been there to fully focus on trying to make that option work.

Now, given circumstances beyond our control or choosing, we're at home with a golden opportunity to focus on those things we've wanted to get done, maybe for years. Time to put the news away for part of the day and get to work.

The question then becomes, Where to begin? The To Do list has a lot of things on it. Some of them are quite large, and need some extended focus time. They've been frozen there for a long time. Which ones do we take on first?

I took a few steps today that I found helpful in this regard.

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When a word insufficiently loses meaning

If you didn’t encounter “dear” enough for its meaning to wash out, and the post-letter-writing generations may not have, it feels oddly like calling your boss or your professor your darling.

Even if individual people adopt “dear” for older correspondents, as I did, it’s doomed in the long run if people aren’t using it among their peers, as I would never, never do.

A message for Americans who are scared

At the White House press briefing on the coronavirus today, reporters asked, “Do you have a message for Americans who are scared?” Multiple times, multiple reporters, asking multiple people that same question.

In some ways an answer had already been given in that briefing. The President and his team come before the public each day with the information they have on how they're handling the crisis. And yet the fear persists as the crisis continues.

Congress is working on phase three of legislation to address the needs of the medical industry and other large sectors of the economy directly and severely affected by the coronavirus, and also to provide a cash infusion for people out of work and with suddenly diminished income, this writer included.

People's fears are two-fold. They fear the virus itself, and they fear its economic consequences.

There's a lot of uncertainty. Things upon which many relied have now become uncertain, at all levels with all magnitudes. A sense of dependency has invaded every corner across the land. Thank you, Captain Obvious, right?

There are some things not much said publicly yet which are of utmost relevance to this situation—a message every American needs to hear.

The origins of sleep-deprived residency

All of us know that nurses and doctors work long, consecutive hours, and none more so than doctors during their resident training years. Few people, however, know why. Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way?

The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD, who was also a helpless drug addict.

Lincoln vs. the trend of the 19th century

Exactly what gives its real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century; repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,'

to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this: 'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so on.

I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never have overthrown a slave state.

Source: What I Saw in America by G. K. Chesterton

The readiness of power

Power, you know, is a fretful thing, and hath its wings always spread for flight.

Source: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace