In Refence to the Transit Museum Post
From Eric L., in reference to subway workers having badges specifying which hospital to be taken to in case of an accident:
Often when working below the water table, the area is sealed off with airlocks and high pressure air is pumped in to keep the water out. I normally read about this in the cassions around bridge footings on the riverbed, but wouldn't surprise me for some tunneling work too.
Just like in scuba diving, breathing compressed air adds more nitrogen to your system. One way to look at it is at 2 atmospheres of pressure you're effectively breathing 40% oxygen and 160% nitrogen. Each 33' of water is 1 atmosphere. At 100', you're at 4atm and breathing 80% oxygen and 320% nitrogen. (above 160% at 8atm, oxygen starts to become toxic, so deeper divers will breather oxygen mixtures that have lower than surface %s. At that same depth the 400% nitrogen becomes narcotic, making you drunk, so deeper divers often replace some of the nitrogen with helium to offset that. Lastly, for shallow (less than 100') recreational scuba dives, people often use "nitrox" mixtures with higher-than-normal O2 levels, with 32% and 36% being most common. Using this means you have less nitrogen in your air, so at say 66' with 32% you would have 96% o2 and 204% N2 instead of the 320% with compressed air)
If you do this for long enough you get super saturated with nitrogen in your body, and if you quickly go up to surface pressure of 1atm the nitrogen will come bubbling out of solution like the co2 bubbles when you open a can of soda. Those nitrogen bubbles hurt and can kill you, it's called the bends. To prevent this if you're down working for a full day, you exit into an air chamber that is very slowly reduced in pressure so you can offgas the nitrogen slowly not have it form gas bubbles.
To treat someone with the bends, you need to slap them into a hyberbaric chamber, seal it, and pressurize them back to the pressure they were working at, then slowly over many hours reduce it until you are at 1atm again.
Not every hospital has a hyperbaric chamber, so I am sure those badges were to tell the saturation workers where to go, don't just go to the nearest ER that won't be able to treat the bends.
I did some quick research and confirmed that Eric is right. Whatever limitations there might have been on hospital access for different races/religions back then, those badges were indeed to send the workers to a specific hospital for decompression sickness.
The Little Red Candy That Could
In the end, I never knew its name.
It was round and red, with a hard shell. Almost a Skittle, but not quite. Likewise, not an M&M.
What it lacked in branding, though, it made up in speed. And while I sat on the N train, headed for home, it was rolling all the way through the car.
This was brilliant. Spectacular, even, in the pantheon of interesting but not dangerous things that can happen on the subway.
As the candy rolled relentlessly toward me in a perfect, straight line, I realized there were two pieces of tissue paper about five feet in front of me, slightly staggered. It was a natural chicane, and I saddened thinking that the brave little candy was heading right for those impossible curves.
Still, it had been a good run. A great run.
Three feet in front of the tissues, the subway car shifted, and the little red candy that could proceeded to curve perfectly through the chicane. It was both impossible, yet it happened, and I had a front row seat.
The candy rolled to the very back of the car until it hit the wall.
"Did you see that?" I asked C. She did not, so I breathlessly filled her in on the details. She started laughing because it was so stupid.
It was. Stupidly brilliant, that is.
I took out my phone, hoping to get a video of the champion candy as it rolled back through the car. Through two more stops, though, it hadn't.
Oh, well. Lightning only strikes once, after all. Or something.
I sat there, idly watching the floor, when suddenly the candy rolled right past. me. "There it goes!" I shouted, both of us laughing at the same. It bypassed the chicane it had already conquered. Soon after, it reversed course and rolled past us for the last time, settling in for good against the wall.
What a grand, grand moment.
What if?
I've realized I have a what if problem.
It's not something I do on purpose, but my brain will drift to past moments in my life and wonder what would have happened if I'd made a different decision or made a little more effort or been more patient or or or or...
Not kidding, I can go all the way back to grade school doing this. I think it's a form of fretting, actually, and I've done it for years.
The funny thing is sometimes I do it thinking about Eli 24.8, too, which is utterly goofy, because he has the best and most satisfying life anyone could imagine.
I'm trying to stay conscious of this and stop myself when it starts, which is a challenge. But I'm trying.
Comparisons
I went to a cardiologist in Manhattan today, my first visit to one since I left Grand Rapids.
My previous cardiologist was excellent. I thought so, anyway.
This cardiologist, though, is 100% on point. She is so clearly far superior to my previous cardiologist that I questioned why I ever thought he was good.
The thing is, if someone knows much more about something than you do, they seem like an expert. Why would you doubt them? It's kind of a three-tier system:
1. They know much more than I do.
2. They know about as much as I do.
3. They know less than I do.
I realized, though, that this is a bad system. Knowing more than I do isn't enough. They need to know more than their peers. Otherwise, it's easy to assume someone is an expert when they're not. For many things, it doesn't matter, but it does matter when dealing with physicians.
With this new cardiologist, I have another point of comparison, and she knows far, far more--and is far more precise--than the fellow I was seeing before. So inside tier one, she's on another, far superior, level.
It's reminded me that I need to make sure I have more than a single point of comparison when it comes to medical professionals. If not, it can be extremely misleading, and could significantly compromise care.
Eight Feet To Eternity
I look at myself closely twice during the day. Once after I get up, and once after I shower (additional showers, if necessary, raise the total). Both for grooming purposes.
It's always discouraging, to a degree, like it always has been. Getting older, though, makes that discouragement more pronounced.
Today I looked at myself, as always, then happened to turn and look back from a distance. Much to my surprise, I looked pretty good! Almost like my old self when I was in my early 50s.
I stepped off the distance and it was roughly eight feet.
New policy: only look closely once, right after I get up. For the rest of the day, any looks must be from a minimum of eight feet.
New product idea: a mirror that makes it look like you're already eight feet away. Genius.
Samson
Samson came out today.
It's an open-world brawler from a studio founded by Christofer Sundberg, the creator of Just Cause. The second and third entries in that series are legendary open-world games and incredibly fun to play.
There are currently ten reviews on Metacritic. One is above 60. The overall score is 53.
It's impossible to understand how someone who was so intimately involved with Just Cause could screw up this badly. All you had to do was make Just Cause 2 or 3 again! Just put it in a different setting and make minor changes and the review scores would have been 30 points higher.
Of course, Just Cause 4 was a complete cluster and genuinely unfun (Sundberg left a year after its release), so maybe the magic was already gone.
It's just a long, long fall for someone who has such a strong pedigree. Knowing what is fun and then making something that isn't is such a waste.
NYC Transit Museum
Friday was my birthday, so on Saturday we took a field trip to Brooklyn and Manhattan.
In downtown Brooklyn, we went to see the transit museum, which--appropriately--is located underground.
I didn't know this, but the first leg of the subway (beneath Manhattan) was built in 1904. Over 7,000 workers for a 1.5 mile length of track.
Given working conditions back then, I don't know how anyone survived.
You can click on this (and any of these photographs) for a larger image:
Here's a selection of employee badges from many different eras (as the subway has been expanded almost continuously for the last century):
When I first saw this next exhibit, it seemed wild. Why would your employee badge have a designated hospital on it in case of compression sickness? Then I remembered--from an earlier exhibit--that Irish, Italians, and blacks were the primary frontline workers. Because of segregation and ethnic discrimination, I'm almost certain there would have been different hospitals for each group.
Here's a beautiful poem:
I don't remember who did this lithograph (I think it's a lithograph), but it's spectacular:
This is one of those underrated museums that seems to be around every corner here.
Memories of a Death
Mom 96.0 told me a poignant story on Sunday.
Her dad died when she was about four of a sudden heart attack. I'm not sure how old he was, but I'm guessing he was very young, probably still in his thirties.
Mom was so young that she doesn't remember much, but two details still stand out.
The first was chocolate cake. Everyone in the neighborhood brought food over, and one of the items was a chocolate cake. Mom had never had it before (she grew up in the Depression, when desert wasn't exactly a priority), and she said it was the most delicious thing she'd ever eaten.
The second detail was that in those days, the body was embalmed and then returned to the house for a few days. I know this is still done, at times, but it seems so chilling to me. You're four years old, your father died suddenly, and now he's in the living room for a few days? It sounds emotionally devastating.
This Doesn't Feel Like the Future
I worked with a developmental editor and she gave so much excellent feedback that the book will be much, much better after the next draft.
It's also going to be a ton of work.
The best part of working with her is that she understood the book. She knew exactly what it was trying to do, she was fully invested in the narrative, and she gave me enough praise to soften the critical blows.
I still think I'm looking at completion by the end of the year, but I now have a rare opportunity to improve the manuscript beyond what I thought was possible. Both her comments and my reflection on her comments have generated a ton of new ideas and connections.
I still have one thing in particular left to solve. I finally had an idea today that should move me in the right direction.
This shit is hard.
Queens
When I was in Austin, I only heard English (mostly) and Spanish (occasionally).
I'd walk down streets and hear person after person speaking English, and it felt strange. This is what happens when you live in the enormous melting pot that is Queens.
I missed hearing five languages a block. Not just a little, either.
I was walking back from somewhere on Saturday (after I'd gotten home) and saw a little strip center that is the epitome of this borough:
If you can't quite make it out, here are the stores (in order from left to right):
--laundromat (everywhere here)
--Irish tavern
--Chinese halal restaurant
--pharmacy
--Thai restaurant
--French cafe
--Moroccan restaurant
That's totally on-brand for what it's like here. If it was closer to where I live there would be at least one Greek restaurant, too.
