I've been super lucky during this pandemic-related stay-at-home time, because I had just finished setting up my home gym in Dec 2019, mere months before this lock down was imposed. So I got all my home-gym equipment at regular or even discount prices, as opposed to the premium that many other people had to pay just a few months later, assuming you even succeeded in finding stuff that wasn't sold out.

It took me quite awhile to work out how to DO a home gym in a practical way that didn't require something huge/expensive, like a squat rack. I've also slowly evolved the workout itself over time, in response to things I've learned. All of which is to say, it took me a long time to get to where I'm actually happy with my overall fitness routine, and I'm actually seeing significant gains now, which tells me that I'm on the right track. I also feel safe now with all of the exercises, which is important.

This is a long post, so here's a bit of an overview. There are three sections: equipment, routine, and recovery.  Equipment is about the weights, the resistance bands, and the other "things". Routine is about what I actually DO, including yoga, pilates and two different weight training days. And recovery is about how to make sure my body can properly grow in response to all of this work. We'll start with recovery FIRST, because it's the most important, it's basically the why.  Whereas routine is what, and equipment is how.

WHY = RECOVERY: Why do any of this? Well, I want to be healthy, flexible, strong, and live a long time. Centenarian Olympics: "In your 90s-100s, you should be able to:

• Get up off the floor under your own support
• Pick up a child that’s running at you (or, similarly, do a 30-pound goblet squat)
• Walk up and down 3 flights of stairs with 10 lbs. of groceries in each hand
• Pull yourself out of a pool
• Lift a 30 lb. suitcase over your head (i.e., when you’re putting your luggage in an overhead bin on an airplane)"

If you're going to do all that at 90, then it immediately follows that you need to be stronger than that at 80, stronger again at 70, etc. Obviously it's never too late too get fit, but given the other obvious benefits, I think it makes sense to pursue fitness your whole life.

This section is actually called recovery, and that's about all the time you spend NOT working out, living your life, and it's when your body is rebuilding from the workouts and actually getting stronger. The most important part of that is diet: you need to be eating enough of the right kind of stuff that your body can actually recover/rebuild. And that basically means protein, you need ideally several hundred grams per day, plus other calories too. So, in a fore-shadowing of what's to come, you should basically be sacrificing real chickens to your metabolism, or the equivalent. I've found the only way for me to consume enough is via liquids - trying to get more and larger burritos was just impossible. But drinking a litre of milk a day? LoMaD. EASY! Protein powder can help the balance (more protein, so less fat/sugar for the same target), but isn't essential.

And the other thing is just to make sure that you're not going too hard. Your body needs many days of rest after a hard workout. And during a workout, you need time between each set to let your body recover to aerobic exercise (rather than anaerobic).

Another thing that has to be said here in recovery is: always listen to your body. If something is painful, stop. Period. I know it's hard. Just stop, immediately, and end the entire workout. You can always come back tomorrow, and your "pride" or "motivation" or whatever ISN'T WORTH GETTING HURT. Also, if it's not feeling good, figure out why, adjust, etc, until it's feeling good. There is quite a large zone between an exercise which your body doesn't find challenging, to one which is, and then beyond that to one which will injure you. You need to be paying close attention during a workout, so that you can hear those signals, and judge correctly: you want to it to be challenging, even hard, but you don't want it to be painful, or to injure yourself. It takes time and experience to become a good judge of this balance. But given that you shouldn't be in any rush, I'd say that a good strategy in general is to immediately stop doing anything that seems risky to you, and figure out a new way to do it, or use less weight, or whatever, until it no longer seems risky.

On a super practical front, here's some numbers around this for me: I generally need between 90 and 150 seconds of recovery between sets, depending mostly on what it is (squats needs more, shoulder press less). And I need at least 3 complete days between workouts - used to be 2, but as I get stronger, I need more. I generally try to drink 3-4 glasses of milk on workout days, and the day after too, but I don't try so hard on the other 2 days.



HOW = EQUIPMENT. I'm putting this in the middle, since it's hard to understand "what" without the details from how. Also, how is still slightly philosophical, so I'm going to start this section with a sci-fi short story: 0wnz0red by Cory Doctorrow, which contains this very transhumanist rant:

"But your meat, it's not under your control. You know you have to exercise for 20 minutes before you start burning any fat at all? In other words, the first twenty minutes are just a goddamned waste of time. It's sacrificing a chicken to your metabolism. Eat less, exercise more is a giant chicken-sacrifice, so I say screw it. I say, you should be super-user in your own body. You should be leet as you want to be. Every cell in your body should be end-user modifiable." 

Working out is what humans currently have to do in order to get our bodies to DO and BE the things that we call "fitness", and fitness is the foundation not just of your body, but also of your mind. As long as we lack real ownership, we're going to have to keep sacrificing chickens in this messed up dance. That said, we don't have spend HOURS doing this stuff, like almost everything in life, there is an 80/20 Pareto Distribution, meaning: you can get 80% of the benefit by doing the right 20% of the work. This also combos well with the "High Intensity Interval Training" HIIT attitude and research - same sort of idea, just a different frame. Nearly everything in the real world is distributed by a Power Law, so once you sort of catch the wave on this, you start to min/max all parts of your life...

The trick to min/maxing weight lifting is: what's essential and what's not? Sadly, what's utterly essential is to strongly activate the biggest muscles in your body, in order to release all the good signals (HGH, etc) that will make your body do what you want it to do, which is: build muscle. So that means leg exercises, with a LOT of weight, there is no way around that logic. And that means, you need equipment which can actually let you achieve that.

After thinking about the problem for quite awhile, and doing some little experiments at home, I eventually settled on a 3-part solution:

1. BowFlex SelectTech 552 Adjustable Dumbbells. Each dumbbell can be adjusted to vary from 5 lbs to 52.5 lbs ("552"). So total possible here is 105 lbs, and it's super versatile. I liked the design & look & ease of use of these better than their main competitor, the Power Block adjustable dumbbells. And of course, either one is way superior to sets of real dumbbells, which would be a lot more expensive and take up a lot more room, and probably have less options for weight in the end too. I got the BowFlex 552 for $300 CAD, I see they are more than double that now...
2. For additional weight: 20lb weight vest plus 10lb wrist weights. AND, two sets of resistance bands - 10 inch. I measured the actual resistance those bands very carefully, and though the varies (more resistance the longer they get), you can think of it quickly like this: 2x yellow = 15lbs. 2x red = 20lbs. 2x blue=25lbs. 2x green=40lbs. 2x black=50lbs. They combo up too, of course.
3. Ancillary equipment: 6mm yoga mat (I like this thickness, it's enough to cushion my bony knees, but not too much to make it spongy). Adjustable weight bench, for bench and push press. And I have a yoga block, 2x 4lb dumbbell for pilates, workout clothing, a small table to hold everything, and a notebook.

For squats and deadlifts, I have to combine the weights and some of the resistance resistance. Other exercises vary. I decided on this after seeing the absolutely outrageous prices and sizes of thing like squat racks and olympic bars & plates, which is the kind of stuff I used to use in the gym. I DID look at the SelectTech 1090 (10lbs - 90 lbs for each dumbbell, i.e. not quite twice as heavy) for quite awhile, but they are unreasonably expensive - it wasn't double the cost, it was quadruple. I may eventually end up there anyway, but maybe I can figure out a cheaper way somehow...

Another important thing in the how though, is to worry about balance. You don't want become one of those muscle-bound people who can hardly move, and their arms don't straighten out, and they teeter cause their legs are undeveloped... I discovered the hard way (INJURY!) that it's super important to keep up your core strength, and also, your flexibility. So in addition to the 80/20 HIIT stuff, I do pilates and yoga. These help keep my core strong and my flexibility maximized, and this actually takes longer, much longer, than the workouts. But I think it's really important, especially as I get older, in order to avoid injury, but also to keep being able to exercise properly. So much of doing a concentrated, optimized workout is being able to do it correctly, with proper form, and sadly the optimized workout just isn't balanced enough to properly train all the small muscles of your body (e.g. the ones that literally maintain your balance), so you need to do something else, and of course, stay active. Anyway, all of that finally bring us to:



WHAT: ROUTINE. Now we're into the real nitty gritty :-).  I don't have a strict schedule, but there are basically three things which alternate around:

1. Yoga classes. During the pandemic, I've been using YouTube: Alo Yoga is a great channel for some pretty advanced yoga. Obviously you should find some at whatever level you're at. I can't actually DO some of the more advanced stuff, but I love being given a motivating example, so I can strive to one day be there. I've found 30 minutes is enough at that level; I feel like this is more than sufficient for flexibility, but longer can also be good for your mental health and getting in better touch with your body. Once the lockdown is over, I'll go back to my local studio.
2. Pilates classes. I hate them, actually. Due to a very old injury (congenital, actually, but it's still mine), my core has some permanent scarring and bruising, and so a lot of core work is somewhat painful for me. For years I just skipped it, but that's NOT a good idea, as I learned from a very painful back injury period about 9 months ago. So, I keep my core strong by doing pilates, my local studio has actually been offering virtual live streaming, and I need that over trying to watch it on youtube, since, as I said, I hate it. Gotta have someone I know keeping a eye on me, or I don't do it.
3. Workouts. As above, HIIT, 80/20 rule, let's just do what will make my body actually grow muscle. Like most people I find lifting weights somewhat boring, so I try to keep up the entertainment by ramping up the intensity, and making it about really challenging myself. I've done a lot of different weight programs, had several different personal trainers, read quite a number of books, and honestly, just spent way too much time trying to iron this routine down to it's absolute minimum, shaving mere seconds somehow appeals to me, even if it takes me hours of thinking to manage... that's obviously somewhat insane. Anyway, here's where I am now:

DAY A	warmups	sets (always r3x5)	note
Squat	2x25 r10 and 2x45+vest r6	2x52.5+wrist+vest+red+black	equiv. 205 lbs
Deadlift	2x25 r10	2x52.5+wrist+black	equiv. 165 lbs
Pelvic floor		intermixed with Bench - set of holds, set of fast, set of holds
Bench Press	2x20 r10	2x45
DAY B	warmups	sets (always r3x5)
Squat	2x25 r10 and 2x45+vest r6	2x52.5+wrist+vest+red+black
Pelvic floor		intermixed with bodbr - set of holds, set of fast, set of holds
Bent over dumbbell rows	2x15 r10	2x50
Push press	2x10 r10	2x35

r is the number of reps. So e.g. r3x5 means three sets of 5 reps each. The 2xNN is the adjustable dumbbells, i.e. 2x25 means each dumbbell is set to 25 lbs. From there I add the wrist (10 lbs), vest (20 lbs) and various elastics, always in matching pairs. e.g. for deadlift, a black band for each dumbbell, which runs between the dumbbell and the bottom of my foot - I stand on them. You can think of two black bands as adding 50 lbs total (see above), but of course, it's actually quite a different experience, since it's variable and a bit annoying to setup. I strongly prefer to use real weights whenever possible, but you just can't get nearly enough weight on a dumbbell to do squats or deadlift properly.

Pelvic floor is basically me just pulling up my pelvic floor while sitting in a chair, it's a core exercise. I'm hoping to get strong enough core to eventually do a real exercise there, but I'm not there yet.

Also note that traditionally, you'd be doing more weight in deadlift than in squat, but I've just found that because of my weak core, I can't right now. It IS getting better, slowly, but I'm being very cautious as I add weight - e.g. not using the vest now, since I found it really caused discomfort, something about the cantilevering of the weight, since the vest rests pretty high. Maybe I'll try it again in another month or two, or maybe I'll just add more elastic resistance, I have lots of bands...

I have in the past done more days, many more exercises, more frequent workouts, etc.etc. I'm pretty sure the routine is very close to absolutely minimal now.  In fact, as I said, I feel like without the yoga and pilates, this routine is not sufficient. Everything that remains is certainly necessary, there is no more fat to strip.

In terms of how it goes schedule wise, I basically do something like this:
Yoga + DAY A
one or two days off
pilates
one or two days off
Yoga + DAY B
one or two days off
pilates
one or two days off
repeat.

But I'm not religious about that, if I need an extra day for recovery, I need an extra day. Generally speaking the workouts end up 4 or 5 days apart, occasionally 6. Pilates classes actually only happen twice a week, so I try to time the things to make it workout, but that isn't always possible, and sometimes I'll end up doing two workouts in a row instead of alternating.

You can read a lot of stuff about warmups and cooldowns, stretching, etc, and the advice is widely variable and conflicting. I've found starting with yoga makes for a great warmup, and puts you in the right frame of mind for paying attention to your body during the workout too. I asked three exercise professionals about which way they would do it: yoga+workout, or workout+yoga, and I got two for this way, and one for the other. Which just goes to show that these things are not written in stone, and I have tried it both ways, just to test. If you do the workout first, you DO come into yoga with a kind of energy and intensity that's awesome, you can really feel your body glow while you are breathing. But overall I think it's safer this way, and another upside is that because you're already warm all over, you don't need to do as many warmup sets in the workout. When I used to do JUST the weight lifting, I had an extra warmup set for every exercise, i.e. there were three warm up sets for squats, and two for all the others - it made the whole routine quite a bit longer. On the other hand, I DO feel like you slightly reduce the maximum possible weight on each set when you do the yoga first, which is a real price, will slow your progression. I don't do anything special for cooldown - I just take a fairly cold shower.  Keep me active for 10 more minutes, and helps to prevent me from later sweating into my clothing too much - though on a warm day, even a cold shower won't prevent me from sweating for 2h after a good workout, I'm just a sweaty guy.

In terms of progression, I increase the weight if the exercise is too easy. Obviously that's super subjective. But generally, if I'm not struggling on the last rep or two of the last set, it's time to go up. I'm a bit more gun-shy about increases for shoulders and deadlift, due to old injuries, but the rest of them, I'm not scared to go up and then actually have sets where I can't quite make 5. 4 is totally fine and that's how you know you're really pushing it too. I've seen my weight increase from about 100 lbs on squat to over 200 in the six months I've been at this, so that's feeling great. Bench has been more moderate, from 70 to 90.

I use the notebook for recording all the details of each workout, i.e. what exercises, weights, reps, etc.  Plus any notes - if it was hard, I put a little h. If it was too easy, I put an up arrow, which tells me to try more weight next time. If I had to stop for any reason, I note that. I record my weight every couple of weeks too. It's quite dense - I get 4 full workouts on a page (5"x8"), plus again on the back, so all my workouts since starting in Dec fit on only 5 pages. That's a lot of sweat for such a small amount of ink :-)

I think that covers it, though of course, I haven't said what any of those exercises actually are, but you can google them, and go deep into the rabbit hole of hundreds of variations of each, lots of other similar exercises, exercises which focus on other muscles (e.g. biceps, always popular, but basically vanity in my opinion). I don't want to hear about your favorite pet exercise, and my routine basically just goes with the basics...

That obviously was super long winded, but it's nice to have it all down in one place for once. I hope other people can find some value in it.

Most regions in Ontario outside of the GTA are moving into Stage II opening! I've read it over in detail and I'm pretty happy with it from a policy perspective. Probably the most interesting bit is that restaurants and bars still can't have any indoor service - but they are allowed to do outdoor service, e.g. on improvised patios, etc. Plus delivery & takeout. Will that make it economical for them to actually open? Hard to say, perhaps...

Anyway, I'm glad it's finally happening.  After the Phase I opening, we had a LONG period of flat or even slightly increasing numbers of daily new confirmed cases, which was alarming. I've read some great stories recently about successes with the Contact Tracing in Ontario, which is awesome, we need to hunt down and eliminate this virus, and that's how it gets done: springing wide-spread testing on whole buildings where you know there was a case, to catch anyone else who might be infected, before it spreads further. Great article: Coronavirus: How to Do Testing and Contact Tracing. Also this one: Social Distancing Is Not Enough which is about how we will ever feel safe inside, and has some amazing floorplan of infection from various contact tracing teams in South Korea and China, very informative!

In bad covid-19 news elsewhere, it seems many places outside of Canada (which is doing quite well) are NOT doing very well. Closest to me would be California, where I used to live. See chart to the right (click for bigger version), or my spreadsheet. Apparently northern California (San Francisco, San Jose, silicon valley, etc) is doing sort of OK, but southern California is really fucking it up, so much so that the state as a whole has seen steadily rising new daily confirmed cases, to an alarming level of almost 3000 per day now. And yet, like a lot of places in the USA, they are talking about opening up. Which obviously just means MORE cases. It looks more and more like Canada and the USA are going to really diverge from here - USA has had about 2x the cases per capita that Canada has, so e.g. California had been a good "sister country" to Canada, in terms of having a sort of similar epidemic profile. But that's NOT true anymore, Canada is way down from peak, to like 500/day (from 1500), whereas California still sets new highs on a regular basis. Pretty clearly the Canada-USA border is going to have to remain closed, and Canada is going to be able to open up internally risk free (we'll be like Australia), whereas the epidemic and the deaths are going to continue in most of the USA. Why have our outcomes diverged? It's hard to say, but obviously, comes down to micro-behaviours: people in the USA have continued to infect each other, not maintaining social distance. Whereas people in Canada somehow managed to avoid doing so. Our R0, the number of people each new case infected in turn, was perhaps 0.8, while China was 0.3 or so (that's why China was so much faster to reach 0 cases), and the USA is hovering around 1. 1 means new cases don't decline over time, so that 0.8 vs 1 is a huge deal, much bigger than the difference between 0.3 and 0.8 in the long term. I wish Canada (or Ontario) had locked down a little harder, so that we could have opened up sooner (most of China was out of lockdown after only 60 days, whereas we're still only at Stage II on day 87!), but compared to California, I'm feeling pretty good about our outcome...

Also, I rarely comment on this kind of stuff since I figure I'm just another well-meaning clueless rich white guy (so take this with a lot of salt, always be suspicious when somebody has no skin in the game! or worse, might even have incentives to perpetuate the status quo), but I can't stay silent this time - I really hope something like this happens: Defunding the police isn't radical. It's so lucid it's a wonder it took a movement to catch on. 90% of the things that cops get called to, it shouldn't be an officer trained to deal with violence, that's totally inappropriate. It should be a social worker, or a therapist, or a negotiator, or an addiction specialist, etc. Heck, I don't think cops should do speeding tickets or parking tickets either, there should be some other service which handles that. Really, cops should be used only for things like: murders, breaking and entering, stabbings, etc: violent crimes. I wouldn't send a cop for a rape case even, unless the perp was somehow still there - I'd send an expert on how to help the victim, who incidentally collects some evidence that gets referred to the cops (assuming the victim wants that). We perhaps need a new name/organization for the 90% of police "business" which we're hiving off here, something like "Community Support". And 911 should send that rather than cops or firemen most of the time. Obviously we can't make this change overnight, but I'd like to see it move quickly - 25% of the current police budget in the new org(s) starting next year, 50% in two, 75% in three. And we can see how much further it can go from there. I'm somewhat optimistic that many cities are actually going to at least start on this, but there are lots of reasons to be skeptical, that's for sure. I mean, we SHOULD have been doing all of this already, for decades... I also hope that police organizations are forced to dispose of all their "military" type equipment (the riot gear, the non-lethal crowd control weapons, etc), cause frankly, that's insanity, it should not be stuff they even own. Asking cops to shut-down protests should not be an allowable task in a democracy, and doing so CREATES the violence it's nominally supposed to prevent, arms-race style... Anyway this is clearly a bit of a rant, so I'll stop now...

You'd never know by this blog so far, but I'm a huge space nerd. I co-organize the Toronto Space Club, which grew out of my Venus Labs project. I follow all the awesome "new space" stuff very closely.  Anyway, all of this is just lead up to: I'm VERY excited for tomorrow's SpaceX Crew Dragon "Demo 2" Launch. Of course, NASA and SpaceX will be streaming it, and I'll be watching. Launch at 4:33:33pm EDT (exactly, they need this precision to rendezvous with the ISS), but I'll be tuning in starting at noon to catch when the Astronauts actually board the vessel - full schedule.  I'll probably also be checking in with the stream at Everyday Astronaut, in addition to the official NASA streams, that guy is living his (and my) dream!

There hasn't been anything like this IN MY LIFETIME, humans boarding a new rocket to space for the first time. And IMPORTANTLY, under the new "NASA is just a commercial customer" scheme, anyone (rich enough) can book tickets to space, though obviously you'd need permission if you e.g. want to go to the ISS. I expect to see humans land on both the moon ("to stay", as Jim Bridenstine says) and Mars in this decade, i.e. before 2030. It's an exciting time to be alive; I'm hoping that humans on Mars will reset the world a bit, in the same kind of way that "pale blue dot" did.

Thanks to Elon for the image of the rocket & payload we're talking about, he posted a huge version on twitter and it's now my desktop background image.

Ontario is making some very small moves to "open up" the economy again, because we are seeing consistent downward trends in the number of new cases & deaths (see chart right, from my tracking spreadsheet). That's great, and I'm super happy about the finally declining numbers (only several weeks later than I predicted), but what's the new normal actually going to be LIKE?

I guess first, a quick roundup of what we actually accomplished with our very expensive lockdown:

• Kept number of cases low enough that health care system was not overwhelmed. This alone is absolutely massive in importance - places which failed at this saw case fatality rate double (from lack of treatment), plus of course, just a LOT more death due to higher case numbers... we could easily have been there ourselves, remember, just two doublings would have put us over capacity, and two doublings is less than a week of pre-lockdown normal behavior...
• Got people to take it seriously. You need to do something major to even get the attention of some significant percentage of the population (who, rightly, are busy minding their own business/family/etc). Everybody learned how to social distance, and why.  Everyone started washing their hands. Everyone changed their routines to isolate themselves and their families.
• Bought time to get enough personal protective equipment to equip not just front-line medical staff, but also front-line service personnel in general, e.g. at my local supermarket. Even at the beginning of April, many of those hard working people STILL had nothing, whereas now, they all have masks and face shields.  Even if they choose not to wear them sometimes, that's a lot better situation that before the lockdown!
• Also bought time for treatments to advance. Doctors have better ideas now on what works for treatments, and what doesn't. Early hopes for repurposed drugs (*cough* hydroxychloroquine *cough*) seem to have mostly not panned out, but best practices are emerging. Related, several vaccine candidates are also now in (stage 1) trials, which is awesome. Expect most to fail, that's a reality for vaccine development...
• Bought time for all business, etc to regroup and think through their strategy going forward. For instance, there is a big movement now in Toronto for restaurants to be allowed to open up patios on streets and sidewalks that wouldn't commonly be used, so that there can be more ROOM for spaced out seating. This kind of work is complicated, since the BIAs, the city, and the businesses around each other all need to coordinate. But I think it's a good plan for what a summer that doesn't destroy 50%+ of all restaurants (or 0.2% of all people) might actually look like. 
• Bought time to staff up and train contact tracing teams.  As of 6 days ago, Toronto reportedly had 500 public health people doing that, which was still not enough to hit provincial targets of 90% of cases and contacts traced and contacted in one day, but it's awesome! Imagine how few people there were doing that 2 months ago...

Coming out of the lockdown, and into the "new normal", here's some more thoughts:

• I continue to think that we should all wear masks in any kind of situation where we have even the chance of exposure to strangers.  So basically, all indoor enclosed environments except your home, like grocery stores, like buses, like elevators, like offices, etc. I don't understand why Ontario hasn't ordered that yet, it looks like 75% of people are compliant already (even absent an order), so surely this is worth nailing down?
• On a similar note, anybody with even the least bit of sickness / cold symptoms needs to stay home. This is a bit harsh for people with allergies, but it obviously makes a world of sense, and if we have to change employment law to make it OK for people to take more sick days, I think that's a great change.
• Contact tracing is key. What few infections DO continue to happen, we need to jump all over them to prevent them from turning into more. As Tory says, the last thing anybody wants is another wave and another lockdown.
• To that end, I think large gatherings (>100?) are basically out either until as we have vaccine which everyone has taken (at least a year from now, likely more), OR we get some good evidence that with masks and other precautions, such events are not explosive disease vectors. And that kind of evidence isn't impossible to gather, I can imagine a sort of "testing before and after" festival which is allowed to happen precisely in order to test this, with attendees staying in self-quarantine until the after test can be conducted (5 days of incubation time enough?) and results come in.  Heck I'd volunteer to participate in such an event, it'd be a welcome break from home-all-the-time-world... Anyway, expect to see sports and similar things basically focus on broadcast only - live crowds are OUT. Are those things financially sustainable broadcast only? Probably not, but maybe they can figure a new financial model out somehow?!?
• On a similar front, I've seen quite a bit of action recently in conferences going fully virtual. Typically for a much smaller ticket price than we're used to seeing - but as an organizer, I know that actually, venue and food are always the biggest costs, so if you can strike those, the price really can be a LOT lower. Whether these so-called "conferences" are actually any good is something I have no idea about, I'm actually tempted to try one out not so much because I am compelled to go by my interest in the subject (i.e. in normal times, I wouldn't have gone), but because I want to see it in action, and the new lower price is a lot more attractive too.
• Many things like restaurants and yoga studios/etc are going to figure out social-distanced and enhanced-cleanliness equivalents to their normal operation. And sure it "won't be the same", but it'll be a LOT better than nothing, and perhaps with some real allowances by the city, and by customers, it'll actually be something we can all do on a regular basis, to keep those businesses viable. I'd KILL for some Ethiopian food right about now, that's for sure!
• A lot more cars, bikes and scooters on the streets, and a lot less people on public transit. I know I have less than zero desire to get on a bus, or enter a subway station, even if they are not crowded, and I'm sure nearly everyone feels the same way. I expect we'll see downtown Toronto become a traffic nightmare as we open back up - well, even MORE of one than usual, since it was already bad even before this. My housemate is getting into biking and even buying a skateboard. I'm dusting off my old electric scooter. We're probably going to see a lot more automobile accidents later this year, after having seen less in the last few months. Hopefully all this will actually leave public transit so uncrowded enough for the people who HAVE to take it that it's not a menace to public health...
• Meetup.com and it's various meetups, which is dear to my heart (since I basically run 4 of them!) just seems problematic to me.  I think IN GENERAL people will be allowed to socialize with friends without wearing masks (i.e. you'll be able to hug your friend and have dinner/drinks together), but things like meetup, where nearly the entire idea is to meetup with strangers, that's another level, and I don't know if it's wise, or frankly, if people would come out even if I posted an event in e.g. September, when we're "fully unlocked" and in the new normal. We may just be in a world where all that kind of thing gets done virtually for a long long time.
• As an interesting suggestion for how to make that a bit more workable, there needs to be a way to make contact tracing work even as you interact with strangers. So perhaps the organizer needs to collect contact details for all people who attend? I've heard this is being done at e.g. restaurants in Washington State, controversially. Obviously it doesn't prevent meetups from being a crossing / breeding grounds, but it does mean that they are more controllable in the case of an actual positive test than they would be otherwise, and perhaps that makes them more allowable?  On a related note, I was also thinking that the gov requiring us each to carry around a little black notebook, where we note down the details of who we interact closely with each day, might be a pretty good idea in terms of how to speed up and make more through the contact tracing. Nobody need ever see it unless you get infected, so it basically amounts to a journal in 99% of cases. Even if 25% of the population did it, I can see it being pretty helpful, and I bet an announcement of it plus free distribution of materials (pads, small pencils) at e.g. library branches could get us to 25%...
• International travel and borders are likely to remain basically zero'ed out for many more months. In fact, people are finally beginning to clue in that travel isn't going to rebound any time soon.  Air tickets are going to be 2x to 3x their old prices, to compensate for extra spacing on the planes and decreased flight schedule (meaning, increased overhead). That kind of price increase is going to destroy demand, perhaps even more than the fear of traveling - the combo of those two AND the increased famailiary and acceptance of video conference call for business may leave the long-term need for flights at less than half of pre COVID-19 levels. Many of the "discount" airlines are going to go out of business before a recovery in travel can even begin. Boeing said some stuff along this line and then had to walk it back to avoid some customer backlash, but it's the truth, and honestly Boeing itself may not survive - certainly their passenger aircraft division is going to bleed for a decade or more.
• There are lots of people speculating about our geopolitical futures as well, but I'll hold off on those for another post :-)
• I also feel like this post just sort of bounces along the obvious, and there are many many more things which we all need to work out locally. We're in a weird world where we need to reinvent how we do EVERYTHING, and that level of uncertainty is a bit bewildering. We're not all dealing well with it either. Maybe I also need a post about COVID-19 psychology and sociology?!?

Here's a behind the scenes look at what goes into making a painting. There are basically four big steps:

1) Image selection. This step actually takes a potentially unlimited of time, and it's all digital for me. I come up with an idea ("robots!") and then I start using google image search, looking for interesting candidate images. Or a combination of images, or whatever (this is the "creative freedom" part - so far I've mostly confined myself to picking ready made images). I collect a whole bunch of options ("save image as..."), and then I basically stare at them and try to figure out how hard they might be to paint. How many different colors are there? Are there any blended areas where colors fade into each other (this is hard to do with paint)? How much detail is there? Any weirdnesses? (like bokeh, also difficult with paint). Is the color palate appealing / does it have enough contrast to look good? Is the source image high enough resolution) to make it work at canvas scale (even HD really isn't sufficient, I need a BIG image)? Finally I'll pick one that I think is doable at just beyond my current level of skill (i.e. will require a bit of a stretch on my part, trying something new). My skill level has been increasing rapidly, so recent images are much more complex than initial images. Pictured is the unaltered image of Wall-E that I choose this time.

2) Digital image preparation. Once I pick an image, then there is usually a problem with aspect ratio or framing. The image aspect ratio has to match the canvas exactly! And, it needs to at least give a nod to the "rule of thirds" for proper framing - this is super important for the overall look of the painting! So I'll have to either crop, or extend in a direction which doesn't require too much detail (e.g. for The Return, I cropped the sides AND added some sky to the top). I'll print one copy of the final image in full color (8"x11" is ~1/4 scale, if you fill the page). And then I'll "edge-detect" the image (reducing it down into a series of lines), make it 4x as big, and print that out for:

3) Tracing. I'll cut & tape together the four edge-detect pages, and press them into the back of the canvas. Then using a DIY light-table, I'll trace the outline into the canvas. Typically this is pretty inexact - the papers move around, the edge-detect lines are not perfect / even present sometimes, my pencil strokes don't match those, etc. So there will also be a whole second phase where I remove the edge-detect papers, and compare traced image on the canvas to the smaller printed image, and correct the trace, region by region, adjusting lines and adding details as required. This step is essential, as I learned on Strider Alpha, where I didn't do it, and things like knees, shields, and the boat just were not correct (or even present) from the tracing, but I didn't notice until I had way to much paint on the canvas to fix it...

4) Painting. Really the painting process is the easiest part, though it's also longer than image prep or tracing. The most challenging part of the painting is the color mixing, it's quite difficult to end up with the color you want starting only from the primaries (blue, yellow, red, white, black). Some colors in fact seem to be impossible - I could not make a teal, despite trying for an hour. And of course metallic is impossible - I later obtained a silver base color to make metallic possible. The other hard part is to get the detail in, my smallest brush was previously still pretty large, and getting a fine line is difficult - though I have seen other people accomplish way better lines using the same equipment, so obviously it's PEBBAF (problem exists between brush and floor)... one of the upsides to painting is, you really can go back and fix a lot of mistakes. Just paint over it in white, and then paint it again. If you have to match colors on the borders, that increases the challenge, but it can still be done. Anyway, most of my paintings to date are basically paint-by-numbers, trying to fill in the various areas with color & texture that makes them match the target image. It's inexact, and especially for texture, there is a lot of experimentation and failure (see: water for The Return), but it's typically fun, and progress is fast - the entire painting can be done in 3-5 two hour sessions, each of which adds satisfying levels of new awesomeness. I've never been a perfectionist, so for me, typically the painting is DONE when all the white of the canvas is gone. Obviously other people could continue to obsess about the details for several more session beyond that, but I've learned already that I'm as liable to make it worse as I am to make it better, so that will have to wait for when I have higher skill!

And that's how a painting gets made. And then of course, the all important:

5) Blog about it :-)

Lots of people are talking now about when and how we're going to be able to unlock and get "back to normal", so I figured I'd join that corus.  Some interesting links first:

• California’s coronavirus reopening: Gov. Gavin Newsom spells out six criteria - some of them seem like they will be really difficult to do!
• FlightRadar - shows that commercial flights are at about 30% of their previous level, and at least half of those that remain are cargo. In fact Air Canada is actually retrofitting several of it's passenger planes into cargo planes, to help carry PPE from China to Canada.
• World-o-Meter Coronavirus - has some great sortable tables of coronavirus stats for most countries in the world.
• COVID-19 in Canada: Using data and modelling to inform public health action - slide deck (PDF) used to lay out Canada wide models. It was released on the 8th, with some predictions for the 16th - we're actually coming out a few thousand more than their middle scenario, but well below the worse-case scenario. More about this below.

In my previous post, I predicted Ontario would end this phase mid May with between 8-12k cases. Sadly, in the last few days, we HAVE NOT seen the kinds of declines in numbers of new infections that I was hoping for. Here's a table of how it's been going:

Reporting Date	Confirmed	Daily new confirmed	Daily Growth Rate	Compound 7 day rate	Daily tests done
Wed, Apr 15	8447	494	6.2%	7.0%	6010
Tue, Apr 14	7953	483	6.5%	7.7%	4852
Mon, Apr 13	7470	421	6.0%	8.0%	5065
Sun, Apr 12	7049	401	6.0%	8.3%	6844
Sat, Apr 11	6648	411	6.6%	9.0%	2050
Fri, Apr 10	6237	478	8.3%	9.7%	5573
Thu, Apr 9	5759	483	9.2%	10.9%	4097
Wed, Apr 8	5276	550	12%	12.0%	3237
Tue, Apr 7	4726	379	9%	13.3%	2568
Mon, Apr 6	4347	309	8%	14.3%	3750
Sun, Apr 5	4038	408	11%	17.2%	3708
Sat, Apr 4	3630	375	12%	17.9%	4585
Fri, Apr 3	3255	462	17%	18.5%	4020
Thu, Apr 2	2793	401	17%	18.4%	4859
Wed, Apr 1	2392	426	22%	19.5%	6245

You can see that it's been basically flat in terms of the number of new cases per day, with the "peak" such as it is on Apr 8th, itself several days later than I would have predicted based on our lockdown date. And recently it hasn't even been declining in percentage terms, let alone absolute, which is terrible.

Basically, we're looking at a decline here more like they have in Italy than they have in BC (or Australia, or Korea, etc), and that means that (a) it'll take a lot longer to get to a place where we can open up and (b) we'll end with a far higher number of cases.

Why is our tail longer? I think it's basically two reasons: (1) our testing has been somewhat crappy, so some of the cases we're reporting now actually come from earlier, i.e. our peak is actually larger than it looks (this crappy testing is also evidenced by our fairly high case fatality rate, currently at 4.6%) and (2) our lockdown has sucked, in the first week we didn't properly close most businesses in Ontario, and even now, our social distancing isn't great (I can see how crappy it is in Trinity Bellwoods Park, and also at the local Metro).  I think we ARE getting better over time, e.g. with actual proper PPE on the staff at Metro now, and more people taking the distancing seriously, but it's taken way too long to get here, and we're seeing that in an extended flat period in the cases, rather than a decline as we all hoped to see by now. I think we WILL see it start to decline eventually (hopefully in a few more days, once we work through the testing backlog again), but it's clear that we're in for a lot more cases than a quick decline (like happened in BC) would have predicted.

Anyway, the net-net is, my prediction now is that we're going to need to stay locked down until the end of May, and that we're likely to have 15-20k cases by then.

Beyond the end of May, a few Reopening thoughts:

• We're going to need to massive amounts of PPE in order to open up. Especially here in Toronto, I feel like everyone who wants to ride the TTC is going to have to properly wear a mask. Because it's just not possible to socially distance on a bus, streetcar, or subway when it's even half full, let alone at rush hour. So if we're going to go back to even half of the people commuting to work, those people are going to have to wear PPE, there just isn't any way around it. That in turn implies that we CAN'T open up until literally tens of millions of masks are available in Toronto, and obviously that isn't going to be true for a long while... Here it is in the news, just moments ago: New York Orders Residents to Wear Masks in Public.
• Supporting the above, we have to continue to socially distance, because we're not going to be able to keep the number of cases at zero. We border New York State, the most infected place in the world, and even just essential travel and goods to and from there are going to give us a certain amount of unavoidable exposure to active cases, even assuming that NY gets their own epidemic under control (they did seem to be doing OK, but numbers today had them shooting back up again, so it's a bit hard to tell!).
• We're going to have to keep travel bans / border closures in place to lots of parts of the world, and also, make sure that people are not just connecting via some third place in order to hide their origins from places that are still heavily infected. Trudeau announced recently that travelers now need to have a "credible plan" for how they will self-isolate (rather than just promising that they will do so), I hope this actually gets more strict, for countries of origin that have current epidemics
• We also need to really get our shit in order on testing and contract tracing. I feel like I'm actually echoing Doug Ford here, which is creeping me out a bit, but it's true - the foundation of "the dance" is the ability to rapidly identify cases, and isolate all of their recent contacts until such a time as they too can be tested (recent infections don't actually show, you need to wait two-three days before the virus breeds enough to be detectable).  Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology - is actually a privacy respecting way to do it, but I'm hugely skeptical that it'll get enough adoption to actually be useful. I think we're going to have to rely on old-fashioned contact tracing via interviews and sheer man-power. I read that China built up 1800 teams of 5 people each to do contact tracing in Wuhan - we won't need that many once we've got this under control, but I still think Ontario as a whole will need scores of such teams for the foreseeable future, and it'll be similar in all provinces.  This is perhaps a job for the Canadian Military? It's gonna require some dedication (read: monotony, doing the same thing over and over), and considerable attention to detail, and some authority ("please tell me everything about your life for the last week, sir"), so I think military personnel are pretty well suited to it.
• Libraries and Museums, e.g. the science centre, are probably going to have to really restrict capacities. Those kinds of "crossing grounds" where lots of people who would otherwise never interact potentially spend hours in each others presence are the worst kind of super spreader things, other than large scale events like festivals. Perhaps they will even have to stay closed, but I hope it's workable to open them with very low capacity limits, i.e. literally a guard at the door who makes sure that there are no more than X people inside, where X is probably 1/20th or less of the usual fire capacity. It'll give those places a totally different kind of vibe too, and it's not clear that it'd even be economic for e.g. the ROM to be open. With ticket sales forced to be that low, it is worth having the staff keep the place open? So much will have to be figured out.
• On a sort of similar front, I've been thinking about elevators. It's clearly a bad situation, especially in a lot of the new condo buildings, where I know that rush hour often sees the elevators (and lobbies) be worse than the subways in terms of crowding. Is even good PPE sufficient in such a confined, stagnant air situation? Maybe we require lots of people to climb stairs? That's obviously not super practical above about 20 stories, but SOMETHING needs to be done. Heck it's probably bad even now, with lots of people staying home (i.e. do you get in an elevator if there is already another person in it?), but it'll be just impossible once we open up... I'm glad to live in a house in a fairy low density (for downtown Toronto) area, that's for sure.
• Plus all the things I mentioned in the last post - no large gatherings, restrictions on density at restaurants, continued working from home by whoever can do so, special measures at schools and other dense places.
• All these types of restrictions will hopefully be able to be released slowly, as the number of new cases, and the danger from travelers, etc, gets lower over time. But that's ONLY true if we avoid another epidemic. If cases go up again, and reach another epidemic, we'll have to do this whole thing all over again, and obviously nobody wants that... that's the number one reason why we can't open up anytime soon. We need to start from a super low number (ideally zero, but that's not practical), so that we have good odds of just keeping it down using testing and contact tracing/isolation, rather than doing this all again in Aug/Sept/etc...

After my last two attempts, I decided that I've become skilled enough to stop painting on art paper, and move to actual canvas. I have a total of six canvasses (and plan to give at least one to a housemate too), so these things are precious! I've completed two, and I have plans now for a third.  Click images for a larger version.

First painting: I call it "Outbreak", it's the planet Earth, with a coronavirus infection! My layering idea (paint the background first, etc) worked really well here. Overall I'm super happy with the painting, it totally conveys the sort of emotional tone that I was going for, and my artistic choices (making the landmasses bigger than they really are, making a crescent moon even though that's not physically possible if the Earth is fully illuminated) I think worked well.

Second painting: I called it "The Return", it's the famous dual-booster landing from the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch: Feb 6th, 2018. I'm super happy with how well the trees in the foreground worked, and the flames (which I was super worried about!), but the boosters themselves are a bit underwhelming. The framing is correct though - I'm totally glad that I added way more sky than the source image had, in order to get the 'rule of thirds' working. Probably the most disappointing bit of the painting though is the water; I actually repainted the entire water after the first very bad take, but even this second attempt is still not very good. All the "texture" waves that I tried to add really can't be seen, and it ends up looking more like a wall of blue than like the ocean. But I decided not to do a third attempt on the same canvas, it's clear to me that I don't know how to make it look like an actual ocean yet, so probably need to do a study or something. Anyway, overall, I think this one was decent, but it lacks the punch of the first painting, that's for sure.

Now working on a third canvas painting, which will feature Pixar's "WALL-E" robot! And special bokeh background.