5/3/2020

My dear Friend & President, DJT,

            What’s blooming at Camp David today? I hope you’ll take a few minutes to go out and see. Even better, take some photos & upload them to iNaturalist. That’s what I did last weekend as a participant in the City Nature Challenge. Cape Town won with 34,155 observations where the most photographed species was the elephant bush. DC came in 4th where 255 people observed the Mayapple. Photographing nature can lead to awe, & awe can lead to happiness, & I think happiness would relieve you from some of the angst that misguides you. Does Barron like nature? He might enjoy iNaturalist.

            Another way to relieve your angst is to do some math. I have been inviting folks to do a problem for me, so my group of student teachers have some work to analyze. I call it math therapy. Let me know if you’d like to try the problem & I’ll send it to you.

            Perhaps you have had your fill of math with CV stats being so prevalent these days. The latest info that caught my eye was a fascinating WP article about the “excess deaths” that indicate CV’s damage. We’ve had 37,100 in the past 6 weeks which includes an additional 13,500 that are not in the CV count. Apparently, keeping track of morbidity is complicated & it takes quite a bit of coordination & computation to get a valid figure. In any case, the stats suggest we are still in the thick of this thing so your “Returning to Work – Live FOX News Channel Virtual Town Hall” at the Lincoln Memorial today is quite aspirational. If you want to return a bunch of folks to work, I suggest employing them as contact tracers.

            HYITL,