Grigory Lukin.com

Thursday evening.

You know, this will sound incredibly wrong and possibly insensitive, but this lockdown year has been my best opportunity for ongoing self-improvement. It all sort of sneaked up on me: just in the last 24 hours, aside from work and sleep (happiness is when you do more sleep than work; I am not happy), I worked out, studied some Spanish and French, made some homecooked meals, rediscovered the formula on calculating the odds, fell in love with and purchased a rather dense (but funny!) math book, read the author’s entire pandemic blog, read a few long-form articles, participated in some civilized political discourse online (quite rare these days), came up with a fun business idea, analyzed some stocks, worked out a bit more, and treated myself to an episode of Schitt’s Creek. And, of course, I blogged.

This makes me sound like an overprivileged showoff who has the time (that most precious commodity) and energy to do all these things, and I don’t disagree. Nonetheless, I can’t remember another time in my life when I did so much self-directed learning, and with a bit of self-directed physical activity as well. My university years come close to matching this, but the learning that happened there was mostly assigned: my only choices consisted of selecting which classes to take, and not all of them were very educational. (Some of my professors were the most brilliant people I’ve ever met; others were the pettiest and cruelest.)

On the balance, I’d still very much like to have avoided this plague year, please and thank you. But if that’s not an option, I feel like I’m making the most of this long lockdown, or fairly close to maximizing that potential, in any case. (I’ve yet to experiment with my ocarina/harmonica/guitar collection, use my small hoard of art supplies, or open that beginner circuit kit I bought last year… Heh.) To clarify, I don’t expect everyone to do something comparable during this pandemic, nor do I think less of them for not doing so. There’s no right or wrong way to make use of this sudden overabundance of time: the only victory condition is staying safe and responsible until you get vaccinated, and there’s no right or wrong way to get there. The middle part is irrelevant, whether you’ve turned into a couch potato or a marathon runner.

The blog I mentioned earlier is run by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. There are only 42 entries on covid thus far, but they date all the way back to mid-March. It was wild to read someone else’s perspective: not only because he approaches things from a mathematician’s perspective but also because everything has changed so much, so relatively fast. From his earliest entries where he, just like everyone else, was intrigued and/or excited by hydroxychloroquine (spoiler alert: it’s worse than useless) to careful optimism about the virus’s spread pattern, to the acknowledgement that he was wrong about a few things… Reading it took me all the way back in time, to the innocent days of the early 2020.

I wonder sometimes: if any baseline news-reading pandemic participant (such as myself) could go back in time to January, what would you even say? How manic and crazy would you sound to everyone when you try to warn them that the strange virus from China will kill 1.6 million people worldwide, including over 300,000 Americans before Christmas? Those are the numbers we live with nowadays, but before all of this, they were unimaginable. A particularly bad mass shooting might kill 20 people. 9/11, with its almost 3,000 dead, resulted in two wars, a fundamental shift in the US government’s structure, and trillions of dollars spent trying to fight terrorism. And here we are, with more than 100 times more casualties than on 9/11, and many more to come… All that, in less than a year since covid first appeared in the US.

The final tally in the US might exceed 500,000 – hell, that’s probably likely at this point if you include all the excess mortality. Or will the numbers get even higher? What strange mad prophecy would a time traveler from 2021 bring us, and would we believe it?

In covid news, the US has crossed 3,000 deaths per day for the first time. There were 3,264 deaths, if I’m looking at the right portal. I think I wrote something similar about the death toll a few days ago, but that was for 24-hour period. This is for an actual calendar day, without any shifting boundaries. This looks like the Thanksgiving spike – it was exactly two weeks ago, and this matches the incubation/hospitalization timeline, from what I understand. If that spike came from all the travelers and Turkey Day enthusiasts, it may continue. Hopefully, it’ll drop to “only” 2,000 deaths per day, but Christmas is just two weeks away, and that means another spike two weeks after that… A lot of bad stuff is already priced in, and will almost certainly happen. It’ll be so much more tragic to have avoidable deaths when mass vaccination is just around the corner.

Stay safe, y’all.

Wednesday evening.

If you’re reading this in any sort of sequential order, I sincerely apologize for being so damn repetitive, but holy cow, it’s Wednesday evening already? The speed with which everything flies by is actually terrifying. My life is so filled with routine that I suspect a poorly programmed robot could do what I do at this point.

I keep daydreaming about all the things I’d do once I get my vaccine shots, once I finally feel safe to go outside… Just the museums alone: they are everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Sure, some of them aren’t all that impressive, but you won’t know that until you go inside. Have you visited every museum in your city? I haven’t, but I aim to do so in 2021. There’s just so much to see, to try, to experience out there… And lest you think of me as a completely irredeemable geek – raves. Raves are fun too. (Do you have any idea how stir-crazy an introvert needs to get before reminiscing about raves? Heh.)

At some very recent point, my hair passed some informal delineation separating a merely shaggy hairdo from legitimately long hair. I have a crown of it now, like some sort of human-lion hybrid. I’m curious how far I can push it. (No hair salons or anything until my turn to get a vaccine about three or four months from now, of course.)

Here is a disturbing experiment proposal: if you’re biologically inclined to grow facial hair, shave it and your head (leave the eyebrows) on December 31st, and then grow it all out over the course of the year. You’d go from being a goofy-looking egghead to looking a bit shaggy, and sometime around August, you’ll probably start attracting security’s attention while shopping. (I have no clue how wild you’d look after 365 days of zero shaving or trimming.) I’m not saying I’d volunteer to do that myself, but I’d probably do that if there were a financial incentive.

Current escapism project: reading more about the people who found mathematically flawed lotteries (and won them all mwahaha), and starting to binge-watch Schitt’s Creek, a beloved Canadian sitcom that’s downright hilarious. There are 80 episodes over six seasons – that should last a while…

In covid news, today is a great day – Health Canada has approved the Pfizer vaccine after a two-month review. Somehow, someway, there was no inventory on hand, but it’s coming: the first batch will arrive on Monday, and the vaccinations will begin next week. I’m obviously not anywhere near the front of the line: my first aid training and my flat feet make me neither a medical professional nor a high-risk individual. (Though I do own a rather snazzy labcoat.) Even so, this is progress: after months of cowering, we can, um, continue cowering – but with the end in sight! Almost. Kind of. My guesstimate is maybe April until I get my vaccine shots. Pfizer will get 249,000 dozes to Canada by the end of the month, so it’ll be slow going for a bit.

Of course, all this excitement is more than a little bit privileged, since there are lots of smaller, less rich countries out there that don’t have vaccine deals, and will get theirs only due to the charity of other, richer countries. The fact that I live here, in Canada, is a lucky break as much as anything else. This is a strange dichotomy: celebrating the rollout of the vaccine while simultaneously being aware just how many people around the world won’t get their vaccine anytime soon, if at all.

Hope can be dangerous, but it’s one hell of a spice. The hundreds of thousands that will get vaccinated in the next few weeks will be safe from the virus. If not for this vaccine, statistically speaking some of them would’ve caught covid in the near future. Some of those would die, especially among the elderly. With every single vaccination, with every saved day, with every new shipment of vaccines, lives are being saved and needless deaths are being prevented. This is the beginning of the end, y’all.

Tuesday night. It’s been nine months now.

Another day filled with a whole lot of nothing. (Are you seeing a trend here?) Not for the first time, I wish I could get a finder’s fee for all the savings I drive at work. A one-page proposal I created today will save $25 million CAD over the next five years. Oh well.

Somewhat related to that, I did some reading in the “Real Life” section of the Awesomeness by Analysis page on TVtropes. (Fair warning: this site is extremely addictive.) I already use my math skills outside of work to help with investing, saving, finding great travel deals, as well as a few fun hobbies which will remain unsaid. But then there are those who take their knowledge of mathematics to a whole new level: hacking game shows, finding flaws in casino games, occasionally finding a lottery that cannot be lost… So many possibilities, but only after a lot of serious study and preparation. Still, that’s one stylish shortcut. Not that it can replace dumb luck and/or insider information, such as when Kodak’s stock went up by 2,717% over the course of two days in late July, when it suddenly decided to become a pharmaceutical company and got a government loan.

Dreams and aspirations, eh?

In covid news… There’s a lot of covid news. The UK started its vaccination campaign today. The second old-timer to get vaccinated was none other than William Shakespeare. The bloke waited a bloody long time. Other countries are on standby, awaiting their own emergency approvals. Russia said it’s best to avoid smoking and drinking for six weeks while getting ready for the Sputnik V vaccine and the follow-up shot three weeks later. As someone who grew up in Russia, I find that absolutely hilarious, as well as their suggestion that people will stop at just one glass of champagne. (All of Russia goes on a binge-drinking spree between Christmas and January 14th, aka Gregorian – no relation – New Year.)

In Florida, the patron saint of data scientists, Rebekah Jones, had several cops barge into her home and point guns at her while they confiscated every hard drive, flash drive, computer, and her phone. Jones is a former data scientist for the state of Florida. She left earlier this year after allegedly being asked to fudge the covid numbers. Since then, she created her own unofficial dashboard. The search warrant was allegedly because someone hacked the state’s messaging system to send a message encouraging the state employees to release the real numbers. (Florida has been awfully shady with the veracity of their covid data.) Realistically, it’s likely that this was a retaliation attempt – and if so, it’s not impossible that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, knew about this or was involved. A homegrown tyrant…

And apparently the White House declined to purchase additional Pfizer vaccines last summer, which means there won’t be enough for all Americans. Because of the FIFO system, any orders placed now won’t be fulfilled till maybe May-June. Given the logistics of mass vaccination campaigns and the three-week delay between the shots, this means a lot of Americans might not get vaccinated until well into 2021. Some dealmaker, eh?

There’s so much more going on, but so little time to document it all. I hate that I live in this bizarre soap opera, where petty villains and Peter Principle avatars wreck things left and right, and all the rest of us must trust our luck or keep a damn close eye to see which way to dodge when things start crashing. Someday, there will come a time when I’ll be able to go for weeks or even months without checking the news. I look forward to it…

Stay safe, friends, and stay the hell away from Florida just on general principle if you can help it.

Monday night. The end of yet another grey beginning.

Today was blissfully uneventful, spent pressing buttons on my work laptop and reading the e-book I mentioned yesterday. It really is quite good, which is unfortunately an exception in the superhero novel genre.

I’ve finally inspired my landlords to get their own Instapot. (An early present from their relatives, I believe.) Now it’s just a matter of time before they fall in love with it and convince even more people to get Instapots. Our cult will keep on growing mwahaha

I would write more, but really, the most interesting new development in my life right now is trying out that castor oil for my eyebrows, starting tonight. The cost/benefit on this little experiment is pretty good: $20 vs finally having normal eyebrows for the first time in my life. I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

In covid news, Russia launched its mass vaccination campaign two days ago. They’re going with their homegrown “Sputnik V” vaccine, which hasn’t had its data analyzed or peer-reviewed yet. They’re kind of flying blind with that, partly because they hadn’t conducted any large trials on people older than 60. That’s why their approach consists of vaccinating medical, social, and educational workers. I wish them luck: who knows, their mystery goop just might work.

And in India, a mysterious new illness hospitalized several hundred and killed at least one person. The symptoms include nausea; the man who died showed epilepsy-like symptoms. They haven’t figured out the root cause yet. This could be just plain old water contamination. If that’s a new virus, it might not be as contagious as covid. But if that is a virus, and if it’s just as contagious… Well, I call dibs on “indid-20” – and here is hoping we won’t get another year of lockdowns, eh? The whole world is watching the city of Eluru right now: it’ll take days or even weeks to get more detailed information. Here is hoping it’s not the beginning of another pandemic.

Saturday night.

Today, for once, was marginally productive. I bought a bunch of maple syrup at the local grocery store and spent about an hour at the post office, filling out 10 address labels and customs forms. The little presents will go to my five family members in the US. I also bought them each a wacky singing card with a dancing moose because this is Canada, eh. (Financial stability is not having to worry about the price of shipping or novelty greeting cards.)

That was my first grocery run in two weeks. It was a lot less manic there this time, a lot more empty. They were playing old-timey Christmas songs throughout the store. Normally, I’d be mildly peeved about the cheesy holiday music so early in December, but this time around it was almost comforting. An echo of the world from the previous century, from before the pandemic, when life was a little bit easier. Sure, they all lived under the constant specter of nuclear annihilation, but you know what I mean.

Today would’ve been our one-year anniversary if xgf and I hadn’t broken up. Ye gods, I miss dating… Any human contact or interaction, really, but dating… It mildly gladdens me to know that there are others in the same boat. When vaccines roll out and when the world reopens, there will be so much catching up to do for everyone that it should more than make up for this lost year. Until then, though…

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know that I fluctuate wildly and rapidly between all sorts of indoor distractions: books, video games, health experiments, music, comics, TV shows, learning new languages, etc. That hobby carousel sounds chaotic, and it probably is, but that’s also the only way to keep from getting the dreaded cabin fever. I won’t run out of things to do anytime soon, but it’s important to keep distracting myself, to find new ways to ignore and depersonalize from the endless stream of ever more horrifying news.

And so, new project: growing out some damn eyebrows. I’m not sure if that’s some sort of genetic mutation or if my three big sisters pinned me down and plucked out my eyebrows when I was a kid, but there’s not much going on there. You can kind of see some hair trying to grow, but it mostly blends in with my skin tone, to the point where strangers on the Internet ask “what the hell happened to his eyebrows?” when they see my picture. Heh. A bit of online research has led me to organic castor oil, which allegedly helps folks regrow their eyebrows if applied routinely and consistently. Well, it’s not like there’s anything else to do, eh? If it fails, it fails. If it works, the way I look is going to change rather dramatically, and for the better.

In covid news, I’ve just found out that my step-nephew (my New York sister’s adult stepson) caught covid two weeks ago. He’s an extrovert and probably got it from his cousin, who felt sick but never got tested. The nephew was really sick for two days before recovering, but he’s still testing positive. Fortunately, no one else got sick. With any luck, that should convince my sis and her husband not to fly to Miami for the holidays. (Literally any other sunny place in the world would be better than Florida at this point.)

And a good friend of mine in Reno had to wait eight days to get her covid test results back. Good news: she doesn’t have covid. Bad news: ye gods, it’s been nine months, and it still takes them over a week to process covid tests. That’s tardiness to the point of uselessness. This is, admittedly, just one anecdote, but I don’t think it’s an outlier. This isn’t merely inefficient and counterproductive: the delay in processing also takes a mental toll on those who have to wait and worry all that time. There is no way to quantify or even estimate the full impact of something like this happening to millions of people all at once…

Try to stay safe out there, y’all.

Friday night. I blinked, and it was Friday night once more…

My landlords surprised me today by setting up an artificial Christmas tree with some lights and decorations in the living room. It’s cute. Thinking back, I honestly can’t recall the last time there was any sort of Christmas tree under my roof. It’s possible that never actually happened even once since I left Russia in 2003. Huh.

Speaking of my landlords: they’ve just discovered a get-rich-quick scheme: somehow, it’s taken them this long to find out about cryptocurrencies. (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) When I ventured downstairs to make a dinner snack, they very excitedly told me that crypto is the future of money, and that it’s an unstoppable investment that can’t possibly lose. Heh. I politely tried to walk them back from the edge of that particular cliff, but I doubt it worked. A few months earlier, I successfully convinced them not to hand over several thousand dollars in exchange for some sketchy course that would teach Mr.Landlord how to use Excel and set him up with a relevant job. (Or so they promised.) The thing sounded as scammy as you might imagine. Oh well, I just hope they don’t get a second mortgage for their newfound crypto dream.

And speaking of pyramid schemes, an online acquaintance mentioned a podcast that sounds absolutely riveting. “The Dream” explores MLMs and pyramid schemes by interviewing the organizers, the regular people who got scammed, the outside experts who study these things, etc. I typically don’t have the time to listen to podcasts, since that requires a big chunk of my attention, and doing little else, but I gave this one a try. The very first episode got me hooked. I look forward to sitting in one place and absentmindedly browsing Twitter for about 16 hours while I listen to everything they ever recorded. I’m relatively good at catching these scams myself, but the more you learn about your enemy, the better off you will be: there is no such thing as too much information when there’s an army of highly charismatic scammers out there.

…a long time ago, shortly after college, when Nevada’s economy was still in god-awful shape, I almost got involved with an MLM scheme. (They were selling sports drinks, I think.) I quickly gathered that my wannabe-recruiters (a young good-looking couple) were broke as a joke when we met at Starbucks, and they ordered plain hot water and made lemonade with their mystery powder. Heh. Or there was the time in Vegas, when I almost joined a little company that was selling some unorthodox type of retirement account investment. (“It never fails 95% of the time! Don’t ask us about the other 5%!”) It was a pretty exciting and interesting day, shadowing a guy who looked just like Nathan Lane in The Producers, until they had a big huddle with all their salespeople later that night. There were about 20 of them, with approximately 200 years of sales experience between them, and only one of them scored a sale over the previous two weeks. I’m not the wisest person out there, nor am I blessed with a lot of common sense, but I knew enough to skedaddle and never return their phone calls. I get a feeling I’ll fall in love that podcast.

In covid news, things are getting ugly with the vaccine prioritization. The American Bankers Association is lobbying the CDC to designate financial workers as essential workers, aka those who would get the vaccine right after the medical personnel and folks over 65. That essential category is not defined, and the process of defining will get messy. For now, the ABA’s proposal is to designate bank tellers and rural bank workers as essential. Given my innate cynicism, I’m positive that a lot of Wall Street traders will suddenly procure paperwork showing they volunteer at a random rural bank in their spare time. I’m curious how this will play out: will they actually go through with this? And if so, will people actually riot, or just accept that as yet another unavoidable humiliation? (Not sure if you know this, but not a single banker spent even a day in jail in the aftermath of the 2008 housing bubble.) Or maybe, just maybe, the ABA will withdraw their request and return to the back of the line. Low odds of that, but who knows. That’s unlikely but not impossible.

As the vaccine rollout gets closer, we’ll see a whole lot more of this. The upside is that future generations of sociologists and anthropologists will get plenty of research fodder on group dynamics, greed, and possibly the origins of riots. The downside is that we’ll all live through this mess here and now, without any chance to fast-forward, nor the luxury of distancing ourselves the way we always do when a historical event from decades past makes us feel just a little bit too uncomfortable.

Stay safe, folks, and enjoy your weekend, eh.

Wednesday night. And just like that, 60% done with the workweek.

The big exciting thing today was me filibustering about my two cool (and huge) projects to my 20 coworkers for a solid 30 minutes. That went quite well, if only because I’d prepared the presentation script in advance and spent the entire half-hour just reading it off my phone. (Can you tell that I’m a prepper? Heh.)

More of that white crap outside. I can conceivably hold out a few more days until I’m all out of vegetables for my instapot rice, but meh, that’d just be sad. Gonna brave the elements (and god-awful drivers) tomorrow evening. (Isn’t lockdown life exciting?)

My love affair with comics is proceeding well: I’m slowly but surely gobbling up more and more old issues of The Walking Dead comic. That issue #48… Wow. The room was really dusty when I read it. Reading these things on my laptop through Comixology isn’t anywhere as fun as having the actual comic in your hands but, you know, plague. All the local libraries are closed, and will stay that way for quite a while. (I’m trying not to hoard things at this point in my life, so buying physical trade paperbacks of different comic books is not an option: they start to take up a lot of space sooner rather than later.)

Another fine day for the stock market today, and for my covid-battered portfolio in particular. …I’ve stopped tracking at what precise point my growing stocks started making me more money than my day job. That momentum will not last, of course: 2020 was just filled with opportunities for a certain risk-tolerant, bargain-seeking, analysis-loving type of investor. 2021 will likely be a lot smoother. Until then, though, at least the financial aspect of my life is pretty good.

In covid news, the UK made history – they’re the first country to grant emergency use approval for a covid vaccine. In this case, it’s the Pfizer vaccine, which needs to be stored at -70C (-94F). On the upside, it’s 95% efficient, and that’s worth the logistical headache. The UK will get their first shipment of 800,000 doses within days, and will start vaccinating folks next week. The first vaccines will go to people over 80, nursing home residents, and healthcare workers. When that happens, it’ll be a truly historic moment: from start to finish, it’ll have taken less than a year. Nothing like that has ever been done before, and if that doesn’t feel you with genuine awe at humanity’s capabilities – well, just take my word for it. That was pretty damn amazing.

Good night, y’all.