The One Percent Almanack

Wit and Wisdom on Investing, Business, and Life

Vishal Khandelwal

📚 The Body : A Guide for Occupants

In recent months, as the world’s second-best healthcare system (Italy) got crushed with the corona pandemic, the doctors faced an unprecedented dilemma that they were never trained for — triaging the Covid patients, i.e., deciding who gets a bed in the hospital and who’s left to die.

A news article reported in March —

The most devastating medical crisis in Italy since World War Two is forcing doctors, patients, and their families to make decisions that Marco Resta, a former military doctor, said he has not experienced even in the Kosovo war.

How do you decide who gets the ventilator and who doesn’t? How does one measure the value of human life? I have no clue how even to begin answering this question. But as Daniel Kahneman observed that humans, while thinking about a tough problem, often replace the original question with an easier one.

Bill Bryson, in his book Body: A Guide for Occupants, starts the text by exploring the easier question – what is the value of a human body?
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Behaviouronomics: Exponential Myopia

On March 24, in his address to the nation, when our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi announced the 21-day nationwide lockdown, he drew the country’s attention to an alarming fact about the spread of coronavirus.

He informed us that it took more than two months for the number of coronavirus cases to go from zero to one lakh. But it took two weeks for the next one lakh cases. And then the subsequent one lakh cases came in less than one week.
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The Grave Consequences of Misunderstanding Probability

In 1996, Sally Clark, an English Solicitor, gave birth to her first child. Unfortunately, her infant son died at the age of 11 weeks. Doctors reported the cause as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) — a diagnosis when an infant dies unexpectedly and postmortem doesn’t reveal anything.

SIDS usually occurs during sleep and affects infants under the age of one year, with the peak incidence occurring when the infant is at 2 to 4 months of age. As an aside, Elon Musk’s first child had also succumbed to SIDS in 2002.

Clark’s life took a nasty turn when in January 1998, Clark gave birth to her second son, and the baby died at 8 weeks, again reportedly of SIDS. It’s hard to imagine her situation but her plight worsened when a month later, she was arrested and accused of smothering both her children.
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Spotlight: 20 Ideas to Make 2020 a Life Changing Year – Part 4

This is the concluding part of the series I started at the beginning of this year.

As I compile my final thoughts on making 2020 a life-changing year, I realize that the recent events (coronavirus pandemic) have already made this year a life-changing one for almost everybody in the world.

Lifting my gaze a bit, the view from my 13th-floor window isn’t much different from what it was a few weeks ago. The sky is the same, albeit a little more clear. The tall apartments and artificial lights coming through the windows — look all the same. But for the people living inside, life has already taken an uncertain turn and the world isn’t going to be the same a few months down the line. By the time the iron grip is loosened, Covid-19 may have already left an indelible mark.

I was speaking to an ex-colleague who works as a director in the IT department of an airline company.

“We’ve already been slapped with a 60 percent pay cut,” he said.
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Special Report: Of Desperate Times and Creative Desperation

On August 5, 1949, at 4.10 pm local time, a crew of fifteen Smokejumpers — United States Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters — parachuted into Helena National forest in the state of Montana.

The fire started when lightning struck the south side of Mann Gulch at the Gates of the Mountains, a canyon over five miles, running along the Missouri River. A gulch is a topographic structure with slopes on both sides running down to a ravine.

First spotted by Jim Harrison, a firefighter himself, the fire was spread over an area of 50-60 acres wide.

By the time the smokejumpers landed on the top of the north side hill, Harrison had been fighting the fire alone for the past four hours.
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