Ash Wednesday, Valentine's Day and Parkland, Florida

Ash Wednesday. Valentine's Day. 17 dead at a school shooting in Florida. What will I do this time.

I keep saying when will somebody do something. Politicians, religious leaders. When will "they" do "something". Meanwhile I rant and rage and fume and scroll Facebook looking for opinions I agree with mine to say Hell Yes to or opinions I disagree with to stew on or argue with or mute or unfriend.

And nothing changes. And nothing will as long as I wait for somebody to do something.

The messages I heard at the Ash Wednesday service yesterday told me to return to the Lord with all my heart, with fasting, weeping and mourning (Joel). The Book of Common Prayer invites us to observe Lent

"by self-examination and repentance;
by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and
meditating on God's holy Word. And, to make a right beginning
of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now."

This is where I am headed for the next few days. I don't know where the journey will take me. I am sure that God puts too much on my heart each time this happens to be satisfied with virtual "shouts" for somebody to do something.

Amen

Farewell Reading List

I officially gave up on one of my New Year's resolutions today. I resolved to read more intentionally; to focus on my list of books for 2018. I even laid out a plan for my books on my Goodreads page.

And now here we are, barely a month into 2018, with neither of my first two books on my original list.

The first was The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, which led me to write my first blog of the year. And now I have Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates, which has given me a perspective on growing up, living and raising a son as a black man in America that I have never allowed myself to be exposed to before. After I finished I sent a note to my daughter's high school lit teacher suggesting she add it to the class reading list. It's a short read, and even better in the audio format as it's read by the author.

So the 2018 Reading List is done. I may refer back to it here and there, and there are a couple of books I do want to be sure to read this year. But I'll be back to roaming the aisles at the library, Read it Again, and Goodwill (a great place for cheap books).

The Ghost Map

I’ve almost finished reading The Ghost Map by Stephen Johnson. It tells the story of the London Cholera outbreak of 1854 and how how Dr. John Snow, an anesthesiologist, used data collection techniques and information design to develop a compelling map of cholera deaths that helped to isolate the source of the disease, stop the spread of that outbreak and ultimately change the understanding of how cholera is spread.

As the title suggests, much of it comes down to a single map. I’ve included two versions of the map here.

A few thoughts:

1. A picture is worth a thousand words. The first map, slightly enhanced to make the key information stand out (red lines for cholera deaths and blue circles for water pumps), clearly shows the proximity of deaths to the Broad Street Pump, which was ultimately found to be the source of the contaminated water containing the cholera bacteria. 
2. TMI. There is such a thing as too much information. Prior versions of the map were tossed because the key information was obscured by other data. Focus on The Essential
3. Get granular. The top map is compelling. When you overlay the line where the Broad Street pump was the closest water access (bottom picture) the conclusion jumps out at you. The key to the second map (a voronoi diagram, new to me) is knowledge of the local foot traffic patterns. The line was drawn not from a simple radius around each pump, but from an understanding of which pump was the closest walk to each residence, gained by speaking with residents, with the help of Rev Henry Whitehead, a local parish priest. 
4. Conventional wisdom is entrenched and often wrong. Dr. Snow’s finding were not widely adopted in his lifetime. The competing and widely held “miasma theory” (that the disease was in the air) held on for another 20 years before it came to a definitive end.
5. Having the courage of your convictions. Much of the data Snow and Whitehead gathered was from being in the midst of the cholera outbreak when the most widely held belief was that the disease was in the air. 

One of my intentions for the new year is to cut down on random reading and focus on my list, but I'm glad I stumbled across The Ghost Map. I highly recommend it, but be warned, much of the early part of the book covers the lack of sanitation in 19^th century London. You’ll learn about “night soil” and dozens of other terms for shit. It’s a well written, educational and entertaining read. 

Hell Yes

In the past when I've done my resolutions as I start to write them out I've always asked myself "what else"? My approach to 2018 is different. 2018 is the year of the Hell Yes. Part of this line of thought is the usual December thoughts of wrapping up the year and thinking about what I want to accomplish in the year ahead. This year has an additional consideration; my looming 50^th in January. 

As an aside, I had to laugh last month when some co-workers received black balloons for their 30^th and 40^th birthdays. I suppose I’ll have dead flowers or something similar to look forward to.

But back to the subject at hand. When I started on my 50^th year goals, I thought about the number 50. Wouldn’t it be great to do 50 things in my 50^th year? Then I started to list them out and after I got past a few they were getting pretty lame, or they were things I wasn’t committed to.

And I continued to think about Essentialism, the book we read for our company book club earlier this year. There is a line in the book that says something like “if it’s not a Hell Yes, it’s a no”.

2018 is the year of Hell Yes (and plenty heck no). I am stripping away many of the items on my “50 List”. I’m cutting things off my to do list. I challenged my team to come up with their own Hell Yes for 2018 (at least one, no more than three).

And then commit, overcommit, to accomplishing the Hell Yeses. What if you spent the year executing the handful of things you are most passionate about? At work, what would be the impact on your organization if everyone found their Hell Yeses? And what would be positive side effects of all the supporting actions (or inactions) required to execute on your list? Imagine all the crap that would be eliminated.

Hell Yes. 2018 (and 50) is going to be a heckuva year.

The Last Supper

Came across this in a back issue of Plough. The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Salvador Dali.
“not a single philosophic, moral, aesthetic or biological discovery allows the denial of God.”

It's supposed to be a sanctuary

I know it's too soon, but here goes.

Twenty something killed during the church hour at First Baptist Sutherland Springs, Texas. No details yet, but odds are it's another angry white guy with easy access to guns. Same old same old. 

But this time it was in a church, and given the hour, presumably it was in the sanctuary during worship service. 

The sanctuary. Merriam Webster defines sanctuary as "the most sacred part of a religious building; a place for worship; a place of refuge and protection." Today, thanks to the proliferation of guns in our society, the sanctuary in a small south Texas church became the opposite of all that. It was a place for fear and mayhem and death. It's the worst mass shooting in a church. It's unbelievable that we can even have a data point for that, but we do. According to the Mother Jones mass shooting database, this was the 5th mass shooting in a church, with a total body count of 57. 

And the weak, impotent "thoughts and prayers" from our political class (Trump, Pence, Tx Gov Abbot, Paul Ryan) make me want to puke. In my personal image of God, he's pretty pissed too. He demands action. Each one of them holds the power to actually do something, but they won't. 

Death, prayers, nothing, repeat. And so it goes. 

Healthcare is hard.

Health care is hard.

My benefits annual enrollment period opened at work this week. I've always been fortunate to have a good job with a good company that offers employees a variety of benefits options. I have four health insurance companies to choose from with five plans each for a total of 20 choices. Premiums range from $600 per year to $20,000 per year for my family of 5 with varying deductibles, out of pocket maximums and choices of doctors. It comes with an 80 page "Benefits Buyer's Guide", webinars, modeling tools, and regular reminders to make sure we sign up. And I am extremely grateful to work for a company that helps to absorb the cost of my family's health care and tries to offer options that meet their employees' needs.

The choices are complicated and much of it boils down to knowing what expenses you are most likely to have for your current conditions and a gamble on whether you'll get expensively sick, along with how flexible you want to be with your choice of doctors. A somewhat informed roll of the dice. It's a heck of a way to run one sixth of our economy ($3.2 trillion or almost $10,000 per person).

It's complicated. And I'm a pretty sophisticated insurance buyer. I've been in the insurance business for 25+ years. I can't imagine what it's like for someone trying to navigate the process without the benefit of experience, education and the dedicated efforts of an employer committed to ensuring that all of their employees get the coverage we need.

As an aside, health insurance is not the same as the the property and casualty side of the business I've spent my career in. It's a combination of insurance, financing and incentives.

But many people enrolling through the ACA (i.e., Obamacare) exchanges are facing just that. A shortened enrollment period, along with deep cuts in advertising (90%) and funding for Navigators (41%) to help people figure out their coverage needs and options.

Like I said, it's hard, but we make it a lot harder than it has to be.

One of the many good things about the ACA is that it's changed the conversation. When Congress and the president roll out new plans, the CBO looks at the millions of people that will lose coverage and the thousands that are likely to die due to a lack of coverage and most people recognize that as a bad thing. Maybe now is finally the time for a conversation that begins with the agreement that more covered people is a good thing and broader access (ultimately universal) is the goal.

Meanwhile, go to healthcare.gov and get covered.