Lisa Sieverts

I take some hope from this article, even though lungs are not brains. I do this research for a family member who has post-COVID neurological issues.

Some Signs of Recovery From Severe Covid Lung Damage - The New York Times

Doctors at Mount Sinai found that Covid doesn’t break down the lung’s blood vessels but rather dilates them, which makes the blood flow too fast for the oxygen to be absorbed, causing hypoxemia or low levels of oxygen in the blood.

Currently reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

Currently reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 📚

Well, that was a surprise this morning.

OMG this a day in the life project is AMAZING! I am loving seeing photos from ALL OVER THE WORLD. Such a bright ray of sunshine in weird pandemic times.

Finished reading: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan 📚A fascinating, thought-provoking, and beautifully written novel. Highly recommended, especially for all of us techies here. There’s an interesting alternative history subtext: “what if Turing hadn’t been essentially murdered by the uptight Brits?”

There’s still stuff going on in my town. 9:30 AM local time in Harrisville, NH, USA

#adayinthelife

A Day In The Life

My brother is a COVID-19 “long hauler,” suffering from brain fog and post-exertion malaise 6 months after he “recovered” from COVID. We’re trying to understand what’s happening to him.

The human brain vasculature shows a distinct expression pattern of SARS-CoV-2 entry factors | bioRxiv

At both the adult and fetal stages, we detected a distinct pattern of SARS-CoV-2 entry associated genes’ transcripts in brain vascular endothelial cells and microglia, providing a potential explanation for an inflammatory response in the brain endothelium upon SARS-CoV-2 infection

Finished reading: Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot 📚 Definitely worth reading. The story of a black woman, the only one in her class at Cornell in the 1930s, who goes on to medical school and becomes a renowned child psychiatrist. Useful perspective both from her daughter (the author of this book) and herself about living while Black in America. We have wasted so much energy on racism and prejudice in this country. You can see it in the energy her white male bosses put into thwarting her, and of course the energy she has to waste on being allowed to do the work she is so good at.

Quite the sky yesterday evening

Currently reading: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan 📚

Loving the new Sylvan Esso 🎶 album “Free Love” Apple Music link I think they are my favorite 2020 band.

Hey, I’m still doing the None To Run™ - Gradual Running Plan and App for Beginner Runners 🏃‍♀️program. On Saturday, I start Week 7. I’ve gone from only being able to run for 30 seconds followed by a 2-minute walk to running for 2 minutes followed by at 30-second walk. A miracle.

I’ve been a MailMate user for several years but have only recently personalized it to the point where email has become easy to manage.

Trick #1: when I look at my email, it always looks like this: completely empty, a veritable ocean of calm.

This is a two-step process.

First, I created a Smart Mailbox which has filters such that it is always empty. For example, if you have a Smart Mailbox set to show everything with a specific tag, then set the Empty Smart Mailbox to show everything in that mailbox which doesn’t have that tag.

Whenever I’m done looking at email, I make sure that I leave MailMate with that Empty Mailbox highlighted. Thus, it always appears that I have no mail.

Second, I use the built-in MailMate keyboard shortcut ⌃⌥⌘D which hides the sidebar that shows all the mailboxes.

By always having MailMate in this calm, empty state, when I need to write an email I can do so without being distracted due to seeing the new messages in my Inbox.

Here’s what MailMate looks like normally, when I haven’t done this trick.

Kenneth Rogoff assesses the state of the U.S. economy – Harvard Gazette

A third thing is that the stock market disproportionately represents larger companies. Small businesses aren’t in the major indexes. Sole proprietors are certainly not included. Yet, these are a major part of the economy and the part that is getting slaughtered. In fact, many large firms will see their monopoly power go up as smaller competitors and potential future competitors are going bankrupt because they don’t have the cash reserves to survive a shock of this magnitude.

I’m very curious about Andy Matuschak and his method of digital gardening. The new MB features around bookmarking and highlighting seem like an easy way of doing this. Here’s just one plant from Andy’s digital garden:

Write about what you read

Method

Our broad approach is an alternating cycle:

Collect passages that seem interesting and thoughts that emerge while reading

Process clusters of those passages and thoughts into lasting notes

Currently reading: Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot 📚

Stopped reading: Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America by Eliot Pattison 📚 Started and stopped in the same night. Read the first 30 pages, skipped to the last 10, said “Nope I don’t want to read this.”

Very excited about NK Jemisin receiving a MacArthur grant. Wondering what this amazing world builder will create.

MacArthur Foundation Announces 21 ‘Genius’ Grant Winners - The New York Times

Ms. Jemisin, 48, said she typically writes under contract, meaning that her books are held to an agreed-upon timeline. But with the financial freedom that the grant offers, she said that she now has the option to forgo those strictures and write on her own schedule.

“I will write my books first and sell them as I feel like selling them,” she said. “It presents me with a lot of freedom.”

Finished reading: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin 📚And Nabokov as translator redeems himself in my eyes with his excellent notes. Now I need to find a version in verse in English.

My very sane brother is suffering 6 months post-COVID

Nearly One-Third of Covid-19 Patients in Study Had Altered Mental State - The New York Times nytimes.com

Finished reading: Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike 📚

Currently reading: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin 📚

Started and stopped reading: Hyperion by Dan Simmons 📚 When the 6 main characters were introduced and 5 were men and the only woman was immediately subjected to the male gaze, I said “life is too short to read this garbage” and quit.

Finished reading: The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd 📚 I didn’t love it. The main character is so self-absorbed that she barely seems human.