Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision

Writing about September 11th is always hard for me, and I almost skipped it (again). Maybe just a tweet or two? No, too much to say.

Twenty years has some extra significance to me as I think about the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was 5 on that anniversary, and I don’t recall it being treated as special though I’m sure it was. What I realize now, what I’ve come to realize in general as I’ve aged, is the view my parents and grandparents must have had when I was a child. World War II wasn’t history to them, it was yesterday. The Korean War wasn’t history to them, it wasn’t even over (and technically it still isn’t, there is just an armistice). We can talk about Afghanistan, and it being America’s longest war, but WWII led directly into the Cold War. From Pearl Harbor to the end of the Cold War was 50 years. The U.S. had troops in Germany and Japan for more than 46 of those 50 years. Did my parents and grandparents realize on December 7th 1961 that they’d been in endless war, a war that would not end for another 30 years? For completeness we still have troops in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Our botched exit from Afghanistan is not the subject of this post, its just part of the context. We’ve been fighting against, or helping to defend, Germany for 80 years. Mind boggling. But back to 9/11. When I was a child my parents wanted nothing to do with Germany or Japan. No German or Japanese cars for them, for example. Eventually they forgave Japan for Pearl Harbor, but as Jews they could never forgive Germany. When I was very young I could not understand this at all, as it seemed the transgressions they were reacting to were ancient history. Now on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 I truly understand, for them the WWII trauma was still fresh.

On 9/11/2001 Microsoft CVP Lewis Levin and I were in Minneapolis on a customer visit to the St. Paul Companies. We’d flown in the night before, our fist stop on an investigation tour of what “BI Applications” Microsoft might build. The local Microsoft account rep picked us up and took us to the customer’s offices. An assistant picked us up in the lobby and escorted us to a conference room. Along the way there was a sign announcing that former President George H.W. Bush was to speak at a company event that afternoon. Everyone was excited about President Bush’s visit. As we entered the conference room the assistant said “Did you hear a plane hit the World Trade Center”. I was surprised, but not shocked, to hear this news. My head immediately went to the thought of the occasional idiot private pilot who screws up their aerial tour of NYC and manages to crash into a building. Someone flying along the Hudson and getting too close to the WTC was not that hard to conceive. The assistant said nothing else about it, she had mentioned it somewhat nonchalantly, and went off to get us coffee. The next couple of hours are somewhat of a blur to me.

I can’t remember if the assistant delivered the coffee and then returned with the next bit of news, or if she just came back with it and no coffee. The reason I raise this is that normally I recall shocking amounts of detail, so I find these gaps disconcerting. Of course, they deserve to be there. To put it simply, she walked back into the room and said “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center.” I don’t think I said it out loud but my brain went “that can’t be a coincidence” and a kind of disorientation overcame me that I have not experienced before or since. She also said they were evacuating the building and escorted us out. Once back to the account reps car we could listen to the confusion on the radio, but by the time we were back at the hotel we still didn’t really know anything. We walked up to a TV just in time to see the South Tower fall. Lewis and I stayed glued to the television the rest of the day.

I’m a native New Yorker, so I took the attack really personally. Moreover, it took about a day to confirm that no family or friends were lost in the attack. There was a close call, a cousin who worked at 22 Cortland Street directly across from the towers. 22 Cortland, the Century 21 Department Store building, was severely damaged when the towers collapsed. Other family members were also in lower Manhattan at the time, but not in the WTC, and made their way north to safety. For weeks afterwards I would monitor High School and Technology related distribution lists for news. People from an office I’d worked at in the 70s were at a meeting at Windows on the World and perished when the North Tower collapsed. When their names finally came out I was relieved that it was no one I personally knew had perished, but it was only two degrees of separation. And that applied across the board, no one I knew personally but only two degrees of separation.

What I realize on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is that it will forever seem like yesterday. It will forever be a little raw. The horrors of the attack itself are prevalent in my thoughts, but the freedoms lost as we sought to prevent another such attack are not far behind. 9/11 altered the trajectory of our society (and of the world) in ways that those who weren’t adults (or at least close) at the time will never understand. To many of my readers, and certainly for their children, 9/11 is ancient history.

Which brings me to an observation that is both humorous and sad. I have seen complaints that 9/11 is not taught in schools. So let me tell you about World War II, the Korean War, and the education of the Baby Boom generation. We were not taught about those wars in school either. I remember an incredible level of frustration that history pretty much ended with World War I. Only now do I understand. Twenty years isn’t enough time for something to become history. It took almost a decade to track down and kill Osama Bin Laden. The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is still not scheduled. The Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan. There is no closure. The history books aren’t done yet. No wonder 9/11 itself feels fresh and raw.

I want to end with something positive and forward looking, but to do so we need to look to the past. At the end of the Vietnam War the U.S. absorbed large numbers of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the the communist government. They added immeasurably to our society, becoming a major contributor to the late 20th Century melting pot. Now we have an opportunity to absorb a large number of refugees from Afghanistan, refugees who were our supporters, friends, and allies in the years after 9/11. 9/11 may be fresh and raw to me, but that also means it is Al-Qeada and their supporters in the Taliban that I see as the enemy. If we can refresh the American Melting Pot at their expense, that will be quite the victory.

Ian McDonald recently posted a retrospective in honor of the 20th anniversary of the release of Windows XP. Because Windows XP didn’t age well in the era of exploding Internet security threats we have a tendency to demean it. But if you are looking at it in 2001 is was a sea-change release that strongly met customer needs. It would take over 8 years until a worthy successor emerged in the form of Windows 7. It would still take years for Windows XP to fade from general use, and it is still used in some embedded systems. BTW, Ian was still one of the leaders of Windows, though on the separate Windows Server team that released Windows Server 2008 based on the same Core as Windows 7. He was still plugging away at Windows Server when I left Microsoft in 2010.

Since I didn’t start blogging until after leaving Microsoft I never got to write all the good things about Windows XP. My first real blog about Windows XP was decidedly negative. It was a decade after release and XP had become the whipping boy for bad Internet security. I’m not going to try to go back and give Windows XP the glowing review that it deserved at the beginning of the century. But let’s all acknowledge that Windows XP, more than any other software, signaled the transition to 21st Century client software.

To all my friends who were on the NT5/NT5.1 team, congratulations on the 20th anniversary.

I didn’t really know what to call this posts, but it is about the resistance to using masks in public to fight Covid-19. Whenever this comes up there is a tremendous amount of name calling on both sides of the question. So it’s important to remember how we got here.

The message from the professionals, the scientists for all of us who almost religiously follow science, back in late February and early March was “The only masks that will help prevent coronavirus are N95s, you can’t have them because hospitals need every one they can get their hands on, and if you could get them you are too stupid to use them properly”. Seriously that is what they were saying. What about surgical masks? “Nope, won’t help”. What about…. “Nope, the virus is teeny tiny and just goes through anything other than an N95 like a red hot knife through butter. Now go away and hide out in your basement, and send any spare N95 or surgical masks you have to us”. Ok I’m being snarky, but this is the message that was being sent out to the public.

A few weeks go by and suddenly the message changes to “Wear masks in public, but not N95 because we still need all of those for us”. “Cover your nose and mouth with a bandana, or sew one from pillow cases, or….” So a homemade mask or surgical mask will stop the coronavirus? “Not exactly” Huh? “<insert lots of mumbling about droplet sizes> So the virus travels on droplets? “Yes” And surgical masks and home made masks can stop droplets? “Yes” So the mask will protect us from the coronavirus? “No”.

I interrupt this frustrating exchange for a “commercial” message. The vast majority of the American Public are not scientists, but they are also not stupid. At this point a huge percentage of the population will see mask wearing as a “go fetch a rock” exercise, while some other large percentage of the population will blindly follow what the experts and leaders say, and some modest percentage will seek to further understand why it makes sense to wear a (non-N95) mask even if the conversation has so far made little sense. Now back to our regularly scheduled scientist/leader gibberish exchange.

So if these homemade masks won’t protect me from the coronavirus, why wear them? “You’ll protect other people”. Huh? “<lots more mumbling about droplet sizes> WTF?

Sorry, another “commercial” interruption. You’ve just told everyone who isn’t fascinated by the topic of droplet sizes that droplets can go one way through your improvised mask but not the other way, which makes no sense. Those who thought this was a rock fetch have now doubled down on that conviction. The blind followers of guidance now have altruism added to their reasons to wear a mask. And those outside the medical community that really have the patience to understand the whole droplet thing, which I’m convinced is on the same order of magnitude as my Twitter followers, actually get why this might help. I’d go back to the conversation, but I think that’s pointless.

The only hope for mask wearing is to make N95s available, because then you get a redo on all the other nonsense. Yes they will block the virus, and thus the value in wearing them is unquestionable. Well, except for all the other wishy washy and contradicting information out there. No, not from random sources (like me!) but from “the experts”. According to the CDC things like getting the disease by touching a surface and then your face comes under the heading “The virus does not spread easily in other ways”. And what about the eyes? The CDC says “possibly” when you touch your eyes with hands that have the virus on them, but is silent on what happens when droplets or aerosolized virus get in your eyes. Meanwhile some ophthalmologists think transmission through the eyes is being underrated. If that’s the case it means that an N95 mask won’t protect you sufficiently either. That’s just another trustbuster revelation coming down the pike. What we don’t know about coronavirus is undermining trust in every piece of guidance provided by scientists and government.

There is a lot of other stuff before you go all negative on those who don’t wear masks, because their experience is not your experience (remember over half the counties in the U.S. have had zero cases). Now when I run into these people (and I’m always in a mask when I do) I think they are being terribly inconsiderate; it wouldn’t hurt them to wear a mask even if it turns out that has little impact on the spread of Covid-19. But I actually understand their position, at least the general version of it. If you don’t generally trust government (and I don’t BTW), and then government and (in this case) the scientific guidance they are promoting is confused, contradictory, and non-sensical, you are going to reject it. And over the last few months that’s exactly what the guidance on masks has been, confused, contradictory, and at least seemingly non-sensical.

UPDATE: As of May 13th 2020 the World Health Organization continues to say “If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.”

Because of Covid-19 the CDC is recommending that those over 60 (and anyone with chronic medical conditions) stock up and prepare to stay at home for the foreseeable future. Some articles have gone so far as to equate foreseeable future with being through 2021. While I am sure that is sound conservative medical advice about Covid-19 given current data, it also ignores the reality of being over 60.

By your mid-60s you are looking at a life expectancy of around 20 years. Moreover, at some point in your 70s your physical (and perhaps cognitive abilities) will likely decline significantly. So the CDC guidance is to flush 10% of your remaining life expectancy, and perhaps 20% (or more!) of your remaining fully active life, down the toilet to reduce the chance that you will die from Covid-19. Using some current data (and all data about Covid-19 is, at this point, suspect) that means giving up 20% of your active life trying to avoid a 4.6% chance of dying if you contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

To put a slightly different spin on it, if you are in your 60s and contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus you have a 95.4% chance of survival. But while you are busy trying to improve on that 95.4% survival rate by following the CDC’s advice to be a hermit, the ills of aging are racing at you like a train in a tunnel. Let me give one example, the rate of new cancers rises dramatically as you age. It roughly doubles from your late 50s to late 60s. The all cancer 5 year survival rate is 69.3%. Now imagine trying to improve on that Covid-19 95.4% survival rate by following the CDC’s advice to be a hermit only to find, when you are finally free to start living your life again, that you’ve developed cancer and only have a 69.3% chance of survival. And that’s the all cancer rate, what about stomach (30.9%) or esophageal (18.7%) cancer survival rates? And even if you survive, you will have given up another year or more of your life to fight the cancer. Now do you want to start talking about Alzheimer’s and Dementia? Starting at age 65 the risk of contracting Alzheimer’s increases at 23% per year of age. I’m going to stop looking at data now, because I’ll make myself horribly depressed.

The truth for those of us in our 60s is that our mortality has become real even if, for the moment, we are healthy and active. Becoming hermits for a year or two means, quite literally, giving up the few remaining good years of our lives. I’m pretty sure this is not the right trade-off. Certainly it isn’t for me.

Although not specifically part of my point I do want to add one thing that has been pointed out to me by others. The health risks, particularly mental health risks, of long-term isolation are significant. So while I’m making the point that you could be giving up the few remaining good years of your life, they were making the point that extended social distancing could actually accelerate your decline.

Please don’t think I’m advocating against most measures to avoid and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Wash your hands frequently. Avoid crowds. Try not to touch your face. Stay home if you are sick. Etc. But if the CDC thinks that people in their 60s should hide in their homes for many months or even years then they aren’t looking at the big picture.