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The rule of 72

April 6, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m writing this at my desk, watching the sunset out of my window which faces due west. It’s 8pm on a beautiful Sunday, and that’s only made the quietness and emptiness feel even weirder. Mostly empty antique trams are still clattering by, often crossing each other, but there is very little foot traffic, and any cars are pulled over by the visored, gloved policemen from cars 30433 and 30434. Most drivers are quickly waved on, but the woman in the red Dacia looks like she’s in some hot water.

I’m now doing eight trips up and down the stairs each day. Today I met a very old lady on my second trip down, and I slipped up. I was in a world of my own, forgetting all about physical distancing protocol. I’ve chatted to plenty of lovely older people since I moved to Romania, including several of my students’ grandparents, and I can’t get used to them being potentially dangerous. I managed to get out for a quick bike ride and it was very strange to see the children’s park, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with no children.

The view from the stairs of my block, 7½ floors up
A kid-free kids’ park

I’ve been working my way through the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. Was Naples in the early sixties really like this? If so, I wonder what it’s like now. (I wanted to visit southern Italy this summer, but that will have to wait.) The acceptance and even praise (!) of domestic violence is quite shocking. Almost as hard to grasp is the normality and virtual expectation that a girl will be married at sixteen and pregnant at seventeen. Then there’s the conceit, the backstabbing, the constant game-playing, the pleasure people take from others’ misfortune, the hyper-sensitivity to every little thing anyone says or does. I’ve met several autistic people, and have some traits myself, but in this world people’s brains function in a diametrically opposite way from an autistic person’s. For me it would be an utterly terrifying place to live. These books are extremely character-driven rather than plot-driven, and I really appreciate the “who’s who” of the characters at the front of each volume.

Yesterday I talked about Benford’s law, which is coming into play during the coronavirus pandemic. Now I’ll talk about another useful rule for these scary times: the rule of 72. It’s a rule of thumb that tells you how long it takes for something (money, bacteria, coronavirus cases, basically anything) to double. Simply put, you divide 72 by the percentage increase per time period, and that tells you how many of those time periods it’ll take to double. For example, say you deposit a sum at the bank at an 8% annual interest rate (maybe you’re old enough to remember when you could do that!), then because 72/8 = 9, your money will double in approximately nine years if you just let it sit there. (The rule isn’t exact, but it’s close.) Turning to coronavirus, if the daily increase in cases is 12%, then cases will double in roughly six days. One nice thing about this rule is that 72 has lots of factors. At very high daily rates of increase, which we’ve seen at times in this pandemic in countries like Turkey, the rule does break down slightly, so if cases go up by 36% a day, it’ll take a little over two days before you have twice as many cases.

First thing tomorrow morning I’ll make my weekly trip to the supermarket. Back in 2000, this was the biggest supermarket in the city, but then came the malls and hypermarkets. I’ll be masked and gloved, as will the cashier, who is paid very little for her job but all of a sudden is putting her life on the line. Last week the cashier was struggling to press the keys with her gloves.

Some tentative good news, at last. Daily fatalities in Italy, though still shocking, are on a clear downward trend. Spain too seems to have peaked. France appears to be nearing the apex. Australia’s cases haven’t accelerated as, honestly, I expected them too. New Zealand, remarkably, still has only a single fatality. In Romania, it’s still too early to tell, but on Monday I would have expected the current death toll to be 250 or more; it currently stands at 151. I’ve noticed around the world that fewer deaths are reported at weekends and there is a catch-up early the next week, so I do expect that number to rise quickly.

Romania coronavirus 5-4-20
Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

Benford’s law

April 5, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m going to start tonight’s post with a simple game. If you can guess how many Romanian lei are in my bank account, I’ll give you all of it. (In reality I won’t. I can’t. But just imagine for a second.) Actually, to make it easier, you don’t have to guess the full amount, but just the first digit. Given that there is some money in there, i.e. it’s not zero, what digit (from 1 to 9) do you choose? Maybe you’ll choose 5, because it’s in the middle. Perhaps you’ll pick 7, your favourite number. It really doesn’t matter, because they’re all just as likely as each other, right?

Wrong. With absolutely no other knowledge, you should absolutely pick 1. Always. I can guarantee that around the world, there are currently more bank balances with 1 as their first digit than any other. There are quite a few 2s too, but certainly not as many as 1s. A little further behind are 3s, and so on. Comparatively few begin with an 8, and even fewer with a 9.

You see this pattern over and over again. Population sizes (or areas) of towns, cities, or whole countries, lengths of rivers, volumes of lakes, market caps of companies, speakers of languages, vote counts, and so on. Anything that can exhibit a large range of values will show a very similar distribution of leading digits, skewed heavily towards the lower digits. (Not everything works this way, for instance the ages or heights of the people you work with.)

There’s a name for this phenomenon—it’s called Benford’s law—and it has even been used in forensic accounting. People have completely fabricated figures and come unstuck because what they thought were random-looking numbers started with unnaturally many 7s, 8s and 9s. The coronavirus pandemic—where cases increase exponentially—is a perfect example of Benford’s law in action. Look at the case figures for countries or regions and you’ll see a definite bias towards lower initial digits. Heck, you can even see it on my chart below.

As I was writing all of that, I got a phone call from the elderly lady who lives with her husband on the sixth floor. It was a pleasure to talk to her. She was replying to the note I’d sent her, asking if they needed any help with food or other essentials. She said they have people staying from outside the city (breaking the lockdown rules, but hey). Her prediction for the end of lockdown—1st May—is unfortunately wishful thinking. She asked me what my religion was, because it affects what version of Easter I celebrate. I get that question quite often and I always say that I’m a Catholic.

My aunt called me earlier today. She seemed extremely concerned, as if Romania had 4300 coronavirus deaths and the UK 150, instead of the other way round. It’s never that easy talking to her, because she doesn’t really listen. Still, she was thinking about me, and I appreciated that. She also lives on her own, so I’d better call her next weekend.

Here is the latest chart:

Coronavirus Romania 4-4-20
Coronavirus - Life :)

One-chart wonder

April 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I read an article about Doc Martens on the 60th anniversary of their launch. I own two pairs, both of them bog-standard boots with eight pairs of eyelets. My cherry-red pair from the nineties made it to Timișoara, and in winter they go pretty much everywhere I do. My navy pair, which I bought in 2002 just before they shifted production from England to Asia (booo!), are sadly still in New Zealand. I’d never dream of buying a made-in-China pair. I really can’t stand brands, but for some reason DMs are an exception. They’ve always just been happiness to me. And they last. Best of all were women who wore DMs. They were that little bit (or sometimes a lot) out there. Now they’re probably all depressingly normal – I really have no idea.

What a muppet I was to present Romania’s coronavirus figures on three separate graphs. A real silly billy. So now I’ve got cases, recoveries and deaths, all on one graph. On the separate chart I had a deaths starting at 10, but at such low levels there is considerable volatility, so I’m OK with including deaths only from 25, as with cases and recoveries.

Romania coronavirus 1-4-20

A few words about the chart. It’s a log (logarithmic) chart, which means numbers on the y-axis (vertical axis) don’t go up at equal intervals (100, 200, 300, and so on); they go up exponentially instead. You can see that the distance between 100 and 200 is identical to the distance between 500 and 1000, because you’re doubling in both cases. On a linear (normal) chart, exponential growth is harder to determine, because you bump along the bottom for a while before you quickly skyrocket, giving a J-shaped curve. On this chart, exponential growth would instead be represented by a straight line. If you start to see the line bend downwards, that’s good news because growth is then less than exponential, indicating that all the social distancing and hand washing is starting to make a difference.

A massive problem here is the accuracy of all the figures. If you aren’t testing, you’re massively underestimating the number of cases. What counts as a recovery isn’t obvious, and probably varies from one country or region to another. You’d think deaths from coronavirus would be fairly clear cut, but in Romania dozens of people have (incredibly) been undiagnosed at the time of death. In other countries, some people who have died with the virus have been counted as pneumonia deaths (say) instead of COVID-19 deaths, to keep the numbers down.

The latest report from the UK showed 563 additional deaths in 24 hours. It’s tragic. No other word. The latest one-day tally from the US saw around 900 deaths, and soon they could be facing a 9/11 every day.

I followed Wimbledon quite intensely last year. Today they announced that it wouldn’t be happening at all in 2020, and that hardly even felt like news.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Eerie

March 14, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m talking to my parents every day or two now. This morning Dad said he hoped I’d have a better time up the mountain than last time. I said that actually last time wasn’t bad, and then he reminded me of my hellish sinus pain, or migraine, whatever it was. It’s amazing how easily one can forget horrible experiences. I only have to read back over old blog entries.

So we’ll be setting off at seven tomorrow morning. If we don’t go this weekend, we probably won’t get another chance for a while. Part of me wishes I wasn’t going at all, but up a mountain honestly isn’t the worst place to be right now. And it will give me a break from the wall-to-wall grimness of news channels and websites.

In the last 60-odd hours, things have ramped up to the next level. Eerie is the best word I can use to describe the scenes here. All the trains and trams are still running to schedule, but the usual crowd at the nearby bus stop has depleted by about 80%. As for me, I have avoided public transport for the last three weeks. There are always old men playing games in Parcul Dacia. Always, whatever the weather. But there weren’t today. And neither were there in Central Park. And over large swathes of the world, life is gradually shutting down. This will be no ordinary spring and summer. If we’re lucky, only two grand slam tennis tournaments will bite the dust.

My lessons have taken a battering this week, but I managed four today: the brother and sister who live near Parcul Dacia (they were not enjoying their enforced break from school), then the lady who came here and immediately wiped down my desk, then the guy in the UK on Skype. As a listening exercise with the lady, I went through a 15-minute monologue that my dad had listened to on Radio New Zealand about a Romanian child who moved to NZ in around 2003 at the age of eleven. He talked poetically about the differences between NZ and his homeland, and quite movingly about his phone conversations with his very elderly grandmothers. Listening to that was the highlight of my day, and really an escape from everything else.

When I get back on Sunday afternoon or evening, we’ll have moved a further notch or two up the eeriness scale. My work is likely to be sparse. (I’m encouraging people to have Skype lessons if possible.) There are currently 86 confirmed cases in Romania (make that 88) of what most people seem to be calling simply “the virus”. I expect that figure to double in the next 48 hours. Meanwhile Italy has recorded 250 deaths in the last 24 hours alone. The projections I’ve seen for Romania – cases doubling every second day or so, with a 2% mortality rate – are sobering indeed.

Coronavirus - Life :) - New Zealand

Certainty is overrated

March 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The guy who invited me to go up the mountain came for a lesson this evening. There’s currently two feet of snow up there, so things might be interesting, shall we say. I don’t think we’ll go up Țarcu this time. Perhaps we’ll just potter about in the snow, or play that inscrutable Hungarian card game. Hatvan. That means sixty.

Another 168 deaths from coronavirus in Italy today. The whole country of 60 million plus is now locked down, as if it were a war zone. In Romania, chaos might just be around the corner. A dozen new cases were reported today, taking the total to 29. I’ve heard there might be two strains of the virus, where Italy has been struck by the worse form, which we will undoubtedly get too. Kids here seem quite happy with the situation: they’ve all been given eight days off school, and that could well be extended. This morning Dad called me; he and Mum seemed almost resigned to being stuck in the Southern Hemisphere for winter.

I’m being seriously hassled now to sign the agreement to sell our apartment block in Wellington. This is now urgent. Are you having difficulties because you’re overseas? Some of the other owners are overseas, and they’ve managed, so why haven’t you? Maybe I just don’t want to sign because I think it would be utter madness for me to do so. Maybe I don’t like the idea of guaranteed shit, and would prefer the chance, however remote, of some unshit.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

The latest fodder

March 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’d only just hit “Publish” on my last post when I got an audible red alert from the Biziday app, its highest level of notification. Coronavirus had hit Timișoara. Predictably, the affected woman had travelled from Italy. So far there’s little sign of panic here beyond the occasional face mask.

This morning’s student told me he now wants to move to the UK. It might not be the cure-all that he expects. He comes every Saturday, and at the end of today’s session he correctly pointed out that it was his fifth meeting with me this month. He’ll have to wait 28 years to have the pleasure of seeing me five times in February again. I have vague memories of a maths lesson 28 years ago today (yes, a Saturday – my school was decidedly weird) where my teacher said something about the palindromic date: 29/2/92. I have much clearer memories of 29/2/16 – flying from Timaru to Wellington after I’d seen my brother and future sister-in-law, wandering through the airport at the other end, and feeling sick because there’d be no escape from my flatmate when I got home. It shouldn’t have been anything like that horrible, but it was.

I had a busy evening yesterday: a lesson with the two boys in Dumbrăvița, then a session with the 18-year-old girl in Strada Timiș, then just enough time to have a late dinner before my Skype lesson, which finished at 10:30. With the young woman I played perhaps my favourite game, where I ask my student to bet on whether words are real or fake. “Scurvy?! There’s no way that’s a real word.” Coming up with dozens of fake but plausible words was time-consuming but fun. In the middle of the game, I thought, this isn’t a bad life really.

real or fake game
Isn’t tomfoolery wonderful?

At this time of year the streets are lined with mărțișoare, which are talismans (I want to write talismen but that can’t be right) that men give to women to mark the beginning of spring on 1st March, and all the optimism that’s supposed to go with it. Some of the handmade ones are pretty cool. This year I’ve given a mărțișor to all my female students.

mărțișoare
Street stalls selling mărțișoare
Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Writing a book

Is it time to panic yet?

February 28, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I might have to lose my beard, dammit. I saw my doctor this evening, and he told me all my facial hair isn’t very face-mask-friendly. Yep, it’s got to that stage here. There’s currently a very Romanian headline on Digi24 (a national news site): Watch out in churches! Don’t kiss the icons! Don’t shake hands with other churchgoers! I’d seen all kinds of scare stories about empty shelves at the supermarket, but this afternoon everything was hunky-dory. I did pick up a few extra cans though. Who knows where this will end up. Timișoara is at some risk, because it’s the closest major Romanian city to Italy, Europe’s coronavirus outpost.

At this rate my parents will be cancelling their trip to Europe for the second summer running. Dad also has his latest mini (I hope) health scare. Yesterday he had a scan, and next week they’ll be shoving a camera down his willy, as he put it. In Wellington I worked with CCTV footage of drainage pipes; this sounds like a scaled-down version of the same thing.

The owners of this flat want to sell. They haven’t put my rent up in the three-plus years I’ve been here, while rents on average in Timișoara have soared by at least a third, so I’ve had a good run. But still, bugger. I’ve enjoyed being in this central location, and finding a new place at short notice is always a hassle. It’s possible I won’t have to move out at all, because the buyers are likely to be investors. The sale price is €100,000 – that’s a lot by local standards – and when the estate agent came on Monday to take photos, I could tell she thought it was overpriced. “But there’s no balcony! And all you can see from the window are the cathedral and the park!” If I do have to move, it might be worth forking out a bit extra for somewhere with a space that I can dedicate solely to teaching. For three years I’ve been teaching in my living room.

The book. I met with my Romanian teacher on Tuesday, and outlined to her my idea in what I thought was shocking Romanian. The idea is pretty simple. There are loads of English textbooks (and the like) written by Romanians, and sadly most of them are terrible. There are also plenty of English learning materials written by native speakers living in the UK or America, and these are, on average, eight times better. But they’re not geared towards Romanians and the aspects of English that they, specifically, find difficult. This is where I come in (I hope). I’ve given well in excess of 1500 lessons in my time here, and the same difficulties and mistakes crop up time and time again, often from students who otherwise communicate at a pretty decent level. I want to present each of these big-ticket items with a how-to-do-it page and an illustration. Luckily I know a man who can do rather good illustrations, and he seems willing to help during the times when he hasn’t got a camera stuck up his dick. My Romanian teacher knows the market and has some contacts, so hopefully I’ll be able to make a go of this.

Life :) - Politics

Other Brits exist in this place after all

February 10, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

In the last few days we’ve had a weird combination of icy gales of Wellington proportions, and beautiful cloudless spring-like weather. In a recent lesson we discussed the topic of travel while a plane carved a four-pronged vapour trail across the blue sky. I told my student it was probably an Emirates A380 like the one my parents hope to take when they visit Europe in May. I say hope because my father still hasn’t had the “answer” to the blood in his urine, and there’s also the small chance that the coronavirus will put the kibosh on international air travel entirely.

Yesterday I met my ex-student who lives in Austria but is back in Timișoara for two weeks. I also met her friends, an English couple of about my parents’ age who have lived in Romania since the late nineties and in Timișoara since 2001. This was my first-ever encounter with British residents of this city. My former student thinks it would be good to run English coffee evenings or something along those lines. A good idea, but wouldn’t it really fly in my apartment – there just isn’t enough space. So I’d need to hire a room somewhere and … everything would get complicated. Lack of complications is one of the best things about my job, and I’d like to keep it that way. The book idea of mine though, that’s something I still want to pursue. I had quite a long chat with the guy, and realising he could speak Romanian at an OK level but with a strong British accent – his vowels were waaay off – made me feel a bit better about my attempts at ă and î.

America. What a joke their so-called democracy is. They don’t even allow witnesses at the Trump impeachment trial (seriously?), and then at the Iowa caucuses (which are stupidly undemocratic anyway) they don’t seem to even care about counting the votes properly. Things are going backwards there – even human life expectancy is – and again nobody in authority really cares as long as their team is winning. Yesterday my dad described the potential Democratic nominees as a bunch of has-beens. Yep. Of the six candidates with a realistic chance, four are over 70 and three aren’t far off 80. Pete Buttigieg (37) is the big exception, but he might struggle to expand his base due to his lack of experience and, um, gayness (sadly; I know it’s 2020). Please, please, please, not Michael Bloomberg. If you’re going to vote for this megalithic media magnate you might as well vote for Trump.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis - Travel: Europe

Travel time taking its toll

January 28, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week I had 33 hours of teaching – that’s on the high side, but nothing out of the ordinary. What is exceptional is all the time I spent walking or biking or bussing or tramming to lessons, and I guess that’s why I feel exhausted, a bit like during those few months in Wellington in 2016 when I had that flatmate who drove me into the ground.

Dad sent me a link to some truly wonderful photos of Naples, a city he lived in for a time as a boy, while his father was stationed there. I would like to visit one day. The photographer did well to gain access to the interior of so many homes, and their residents. I get to see the insides of people’s homes here in Timișoara, and at times it can be a fascinating experience. Today I had my second lesson with the ten-year-old boy. I could see into the next room, where a row of two-foot-long (at least) Romanian-style sausages were hanging over the back of a chair. The boy said his grandmother, who also lives there, had made them. On the way out, I saw one of the apartments on the floor below had various religious iconography pinned to the door, with some sort of obscure coded message written in chalk. This was an old apartment block. The expensive new blocks aren’t fascinating in the slightest: inside those clinically white places, you’re met with English signs saying LOVE and HOME and GOOD VIBES ONLY and other equally ghastly decor-shit. SHOOT ME NOW.

Today’s match between Nadal and Kyrgios was a treat. Good job for the spectators, who had paid an eye-popping amount to witness it. That third set, which Nadal won in more than 70 minutes, was the most gripping I’ve seen for a while. I couldn’t quite see the end – as Nadal attempted (and failed) to serve out the match, I had to set off in the rain for my lesson. I warmed to Kyrgios a bit during this match. He will have gained more fans than he’s lost during this tournament, I feel, and for the first time I thought that maybe, just maybe, he has it in him to convert his extraordinary talent into a major title or five.

I was awake just before 4am, so I turned on the TV to see Simona Halep break Elise Mertens in a captivating game to lead 6-4 5-4, and then serve out to love. I then went back to bed.

Language teaching - Life :)

Big nu-nu

January 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I managed 30½ hours of lessons last week, and I might soon have more work than I know what to do with. I’m starting with a ten-year-old boy tomorrow, my Syrian student has a mate who I’ll be seeing for the first time next Saturday, and this morning a woman called me asking if I would give lessons to her twelve-year-old daughter. Once I’d found a gap in my diary I agreed, and then she sent me the location via WhatsApp. I’d say it’s a little out of my catchment area, meaning it’s in a village outside the city, far from any reliable public transport, down a dirt track uncharted by Google Maps. I’ve got a tram ride plus a long walk in store on Tuesday. (I do have my bike, but it’s become very slow of late.) This might have to be a one-off.

Tonight I had my rescheduled lesson with Ammar. He wanted to practise writing and I asked him to write a short essay about a family member he admired. He chose his eldest brother (he’s one of eight, as I found out). I had a go too, and I wrote about my grandmother. In the middle of my attempt I realised it was the eighth anniversary of her death. I often wish she could visit me.

Today I did my shopping at Kaufland. I immediately got into trouble. I entered, looked for one of their wheeled baskets, saw they didn’t have any, and went out the in door so I could get a trolley from outside. Big no-no (or, should I say, nu-nu). Suddenly I had security guards opening all the pockets of my backpack. They eventually let me go. Take two, and I realised how important it is to have the Romanian names of fruit and vegetables down pat at this particular supermarket. Other stores have numbered buttons, but at this place you have to scroll through an alphabetical list, usually with people waiting behind you. Cabbage is varză, so you have to scroll almost to the end, where you’ll find them next to the aubergines (vinete, which believe it or not is vânătă in the singular). Carrots begin with M in Romanian, swapping places with mushrooms (they start with C, as do onions). I’ve been here long enough that this seems totally normal.

It has been a tragic week in Timișoara. Four children were killed in a house fire, close to where I’ll be having my lesson tomorrow with the new boy. Their mother was working at the time – she said money was too tight not to – and she left the children, all aged under seven, in the hands of their 14-year-old brother who lit the fireplace in the younger children’s bedroom.