Advice for the Pandemic, or Advice for the Bear that Pooped on the Trail Near my House?

1) Berry-picking is a safe, enjoyable, and healthy outdoor activity that can be conducted in a low-risk manner, but excess berry consumption can lead to digestive surprises.

2) Being somewhat territorial is perfectly natural during these difficult times.  It is best to be clear about the boundaries that are important to you, while remaining civil and friendly to your neighbors from a safe distance.

3) Children are different from adults in several key ways.  While these differences may provide interesting avenues for study, they should not be used as a rationale to place young people at high risk or use them as guinea pigs.

4) Rapidly gaining a huge amount of weight in the coming weeks – enough to render you virtually unrecognizable under dense layers of rolling subcutaneous blubber -- is an excellent idea.  Your survival prospects will be maximized if you are semi-spherical before November.

5) Cultivating as much body hair as possible is also an excellent plan.  Try growing a dense, impenetrable pelt.  This will be highly desirable for mating purposes as well as very important for survival. 

6) Crowded indoor settings such as malls, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs are definitely to be avoided. 

7) If you are not wearing a mask when I encounter you, I will choose to believe that this is due to your own physiological limitations, rather than any ill-will toward human society.  However, if you then approach me, I reserve the right to become upset by your actions.

8) If you approach me too closely, I will calmly and slowly back away while talking in a reasonable but authoritative tone, never taking my eyes off you.

9) I will also raise both arms above my head, in an attempt to look as large and intimidating as possible.  I look very large with my arms above my head.

10) In some cases, especially when one or both individuals are breathing heavily, six feet of social distancing is nowhere near adequate.  Ten feet would be better, but to be perfectly frank, I’d really prefer several hundred feet, at least.  Maybe a quarter mile.  A distance best viewed through binoculars.

11) You should be able to find a comfortable and properly fitting mask in a size and style that suits you at numerous local retail outlets or online.

12) If toilet paper supplies become short, just carry on with your unrestrained crapping in the woods.

13) If food supplies become short, I would prefer that you do not eat my family.

Advice for the bear: 1-10, 12-13

Advice for the pandemic: 1-13

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COVID-Safe Schooling for Your Feral Child

Due to COVID-19 restrictions and the healthy limits you placed on screen time during quarantine, your children have likely spent several months playing in your suburban back yard, urban parks, or primeval woodlands -- where they may have acquired new habits that are counterproductive in a learning environment.  The following tips will allow for a smooth transition to the more structured environment of online learning or in-person schooling.

-- Remind your daughter that during Zoom meetings, inside voices are required.  Howling is frowned upon, even if it is a full moon.  Make sure she knows how to mute and unmute herself.  

-- Your son may become anxious if humans approach too closely.  Congratulations on instilling excellent pandemic safety training!   However, you may want to instruct him not to scamper up trees, screech, or throw spruce cones at teachers.

-- Wild berries and fresh Alaska salmon are part of a heart-healthy diet for adults and children alike, but excess consumption can lead to hibernation during class.

-- Many schools are offering outdoor sports.  If you have signed up your daughter for fall soccer practice, you may need to warn her not to growl and bare her teeth at teammates.  Save that for her opponents.  Those Laurelwood Lynxes are not to be trusted.

-- Remind your child that school rules prohibit sharpening fingernails and licking between toes during lessons on factoring polynomials.

-- Recess offers stress-relieving physical activities for children unused to long periods of focused attention.  Be aware, however, that the virus can be transmitted via activities such as tag, duck-duck-goose, grooming vermin from other students’ hair, and wrestling for alpha dominance in the pack.

-- If your child has spent his time in the wilds associating with ravens or other corvids – an easy mistake to make, depending on your autocorrect settings – you may find that he has taken to collecting shiny items such as earrings, coins, and Mr. Pumphrey’s gold teeth.  A guidance counselor will be calling you shortly.

-- Most schools are relaxing dress codes for distance education.  Be sure to check your district website for specifications regarding pajamas, spaghetti straps, fur, and feathers.  Antlers are to be discouraged, especially during the rutting season.

-- Good news: the school lunch program will still be offering meals during remote learning!  Vegetarian options are available, but no accommodations can be made for children who consume only raw voles.

-- Be sure to emphasize that although it is perfectly acceptable for your child to decorate her locker with personal items, she should refrain from marking her territory by spraying.

-- If your feral children have been fostered by halibut, trout, or sockeye, you have no cause for concern; fish do not exhale potentially infectious respiratory droplets.  Also, they take well to schools.

Danger, Danger

In my recent online time-wasting, I’ve been seeing colorful charts that categorize activities (Tennis! Casinos!) by COVID-19 risk.  There are several versions, but they all sport a color scheme ranging from calming green to ominous red, use qualitative terms such as “medium-low risk”, and are labeled with official-seeming numbers from one to nine.  People seem to really like them.  I get why: we all want clear guidelines to help us navigate the medical and sociopolitical plagues of 2020.  But these over-simplified charts give my inner logician hives.

My first gripe is that the selected activities are peculiarly specific, and seem to have been designed by people with a lot of leisure time and no job experience as baristas.   Is playing tennis equivalent to ineptly throwing a Frisbee around in a park?  Are casinos like community theaters, or are they more akin to the shared computers at public libraries?  

My second gripe is that the activities are frustratingly vague.  Yes, it’s possible to be too specific and too vague at the same time.  At the casino, is everyone wearing a mask?  Is it a sparse Tuesday morning? Am I visiting once for an hour, or gambling from dawn to dusk every weekend?   

My third gripe… gets nerdy. 

When I teach Natural Resources Measurement and Inventory at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, I start the first lecture with a discussion of measurement scales.  This is one of those things we all think we understand, but don’t.  (Later in the class we get into statistics, which is one of the things many people already know they absolutely don’t understand.)  Many types of scales are useful, but if you mix them up, you’re going to cause problems.

Ratio scales start at zero, and each increment is the same size as every other increment.  Six quarts is three times as much as two quarts.  We’re a bit less familiar with logarithmic scales.  Each increment is some multiple (usually ten) of the previous one.  An earthquake that registers at 7.0 has ten times the measured amplitude of a 6.0.  With interval scales, the increments are all equal, but there is no true zero.  If you wear size twelve shoes, your feet are not twice as long as those of someone who wears size six.  Some scales are merely ordinal – gold, silver, bronze.  The winner of a race might cross the line a hairsbreadth ahead of the second-place finisher, and then there might then be a laughable lag before third place arrives.

In the case of the colorful COVID charts, the scale seems like it might be a ratio scale.  In fact, it begs to be read as one – otherwise, why have numbers at all?  But it definitely isn’t. Three “level-three” masked trips to buy corn flakes and lettuce are not as likely to make you sick as one “level-nine” wild night in the mosh pit.  Going for seven different “level-one” jogs is not equivalent to attending “level-seven” junior high for a year.  To me, the one-through-nine scale seems closer to being logarithmic – maybe in binary, or base three? – but no way was it designed or calibrated that way.  Thus, all we can really say about the charts is that they are ordinal: two is worse than one, and eight is worse than seven.  But how useful is that in governing our choices, not to mention the apportionment of our limited angst supply? 

I’d like to create a model that uses something closer to real risk values to assign meaningful numbers to a wide range of activities, so that we can compare casinos to tennis in a way that warms my scientist heart.  But I have too many hobbies already, including sewing masks and endlessly scrolling online, so it might take a while.  In the meantime, it’s back to the basics, otherwise known as “knowing something about how COVID-19 spreads”.

Distance from other humans is crucial.

Length of exposure matters.

Air flow makes a big difference.

Masks help.  A lot.

Pay attention to the medical professionals.

Ignore the politicians who aren’t paying attention to the medical professionals.

Close the damn bars.

As noted, when I teach, I start with a lecture about measurement scales.  I end with one about the various ways in which graphs and charts can be misleading.  In this vein, I made a new chart.  It’s not any more useful than any of the others. 

You’re welcome.