A friend posted a photo of Woodstock from overhead as a demonstration of what 400,000 people look like. Its a huge number...hard to visualize.

I've been using citites.

For my friends back home, the day after my birthday (November 18) was the day a St Clair County's worth of people were dead. Imagine Belleville, O'Fallon, Fairview, and all the little farmtowns inbetween, empty.
Not even a month later (Dec 14th), you could have upgraded to the population center across the river; imagine the entire city of St. Louis, empty.

But, I've lived other places, and I know people from all over, many of whom have traveled quite a bit.
So, as we hit 400,000 Americans dead, lets put this in perspective.

Yesterday, it was the city of Arlington, 49th largest city in the US.

By the end of today, it will be Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Tomorrow, it will be Tampa, Florida, instead.
By next week probably (at this rate), Oakland, then Minneapolis a few days later.

About two weeks from now Virgina Beach, followed by Colorado Springs, Long Beach, and Miami...theres a few more cities between Miami and the next milestone (500,000), but...
By mid-February (sometime around Valentine's Day) we will have enough people who have died to wipe out the city of Sacramento, the 36th largest city in America.

At some point, large numbers become abstractions for most of us.
Even for those of us that are used to looking at large numbers in data sets, there's a certain distancing that comes from the abstraction of a number so big we can't really wrap our minds around the significance of it. We need a way to ground ourselves with what it really means.
For me, its cities. A death isn't just the loss of a person, its the loss of their memories & knowledge. Its the loss of their love & energy towards whatever it is in life that was their passion. Death empties a home, puts a hole in a family, rips out threads from communities.

More from Trading

Many of you have seen the famous Westrum Organizational Typology model, so prominently featured in State of DevOps Research, Accelerate, DevOps Handbook, etc.

This model was created Dr. Ron Westrum, a widely-cited sociologist who studied the impact of culture on safety


Thanks to Dr. @nicolefv, I was able to interview him for an upcoming episode of the Idealcast! 🤯

It was a very heady experience, and while preparing to interview him, I was startled to discover how much work he's done in healthcare, aviation, spaceflight, but also innovation.

I've read 4+ of his papers, so I thought I was familiar with his work. (Here's one paper:
https://t.co/7X00O67VgS)

I was startled to learn he has also studied in depth what enables innovation. He wrote a wonderful book "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake"


Dr. Westrum writes about China Lake Research Labs: "its design and structure had one purpose: to foster technical creativity. It did; China Lake operated far outside the normal envelope... Sidewinder & others were "impossible" accomplishments,

I love this book because it describes traits of organizations that routinely create and maintain greatness: US space program (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), US Naval Reactors, Toyota, Team of Teams, Tesla, the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Google)

You May Also Like