Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Commentary

Cats!

It feels good to finally talk about this! We got two cats!

The story starts long ago. Tyla and I have had lots of discussions about pets. She especially loves dogs and was heartbroken where her black lab Oskar died in April of 2015. (It’s a long story but he lived with her parents so it was never really “our dog”.)

Lots of people around here have dogs, but when I think about having a dog, I want to have a big property where it can run around.

Years went by. Elijah loves watching the neighbors’ pet rabbit and the guinea pig of some friends from church. He regularly asks for various animals, but finally in the past few months, Tyla and I started talking more seriously about getting cats and decided it was time. Then the question was how to tell Elijah.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing a devotion at school on Matthew 7:7 (ask and it will be given to you.) I’m not sure I really got the point of the devotion, but I went home and asked my parents if we could get a cat. To my total shock they immediately replied with “Yes!” Turns out they had been thinking about it already. I was hoping to say “Yes!” to Elijah but we got tired of waiting and sat him down for a family meeting to talk about getting a cat. We walked through the decision making process together with him and explained all the prep work we’d have to do and for how long this decision would impact our family. With some luck he’ll be in college before the cats die!

We also used this as an opportunity for Elijah to try to keep a big secret, and he did really well! He’d come home every day telling us how hard it was to not tell his friends.

We spent a day shopping the interwebz for cat supplies, learning how every choice was bound to kill our cats, and then had fun watching the packages pile up. Once they all arrived, we got more serious about applying for cats. Some places had 6 page forms asking incredibly personal and probing questions while others just said “call and leave a number.” Cats would appear on petfinder.com and then be taken off in mere hours. It was amazing how quickly they all got adopted!

So when we got a call back on Thursday, we agreed to take Elijah out of school a little early on Friday to drive up to The Noah Center in Stanwood. It was an appointment only situation and we nervously waited in the parking lot for them to come get us. When we walked in, we were so excited to see around 15 cats waiting to be adopted! They put us in a room with half a dozen cats and gave us time to get acquainted.

Throughout this process, Tyla has had her heart set on an orange cat, but she said she’d be happy with anything as long as it wasn’t just a couple of all black cats because those are boring and common. (In this climate I feel bad saying we didn’t want a black cat. But this is ok, right?) So of course, I sat down on the floor in this room and immediately an all black cat comes walking directly towards me, curls up in my lap and starts purring. She sat there the entire time and when I moved her to leave she hopped back in my lap. Meanwhile, Elijah had found a striped cat that he was having fun playing with and Tyla was getting attacked by the most rambunctious cat in the group. We looked at some other cats but we ended up deciding on those the one that sat in my lap and the one that Elijah was playing with.

They’re both females (not sisters) and are about two months old. They got spayed yesterday so we’re supposed to keep the activity level down (HA!) and we have to watch their incisions to make sure everything heals ok. And because they’re so young, the recommendation was to keep them in a small room for a couple weeks. We cleared everything out of the room at the top of the stairs and set it up with food, water, litter box, blankets, a bed and some toys.

They came with names from the shelter but we are probably going to pick new ones. Hopefully we get that figured out soon because it feels awkward to not refer to them by name.

Prepare for floods of cat pictures on our Instagram accounts!

benmartens October 31, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19: Day 230

I said that I was going to stop posting so much about the pandemic, but I do want to keep posting periodically so I can look back at the stats. So here’s a quick checkin on where we are now.

Global deaths: 1.2 million
US deaths: 228 thousand

This has been a rough stretch for the US. Seven states set a record high for daily deaths and the Progress to Zero (P0) metric has fallen from 34% to 0% in the last three weeks. The upper/central part of the country is are getting hammered. The percentage of positive tests are going up too so it’s not just a matter of states doing more testing.

For many states, this is their first big wave. User Gullyn1 on the dataisbeautiful subreddit made a map showing what percentage of a counties total cases were discovered in the last month. This is somewhat similar to the P0 metric and I like these maps because they apply well regardless of the size of the county.

Locally we’re doing a bit better but we’re on a similar upswing. The R-value in King County is estimated at 1.3, the highest it has been in quite a while.

Just to the north of us, Snohomish is seeing more active cases per 100K people than they did in July. (Note that this chart in particular can be a little deceptive since it is directly related to the number of tests. It’s generally safer to rely on this specific chart for local trending more than for comparison of peaks.)

That Snohomish outbreak is particularly on my mind since that’s where Elijah goes to school. The school is amazingly still chugging along with only a couple quick shutdowns of specific classrooms for false alarms. Everyone seems to have fallen into a routine with the daily health attestation, new dropoff/pickup rules and the removal of any intermingling between classrooms. So far so good but I don’t expect it to continue forever, especially with the spike we’re seeing now leading into cooler temps (more people indoors) and holidays (more people getting together in groups.)

My company has said that the workers in this area won’t have to return to the office until July 2021 at the earliest. The previous date had been January so it’s nice to see them push it out to something that is hopefully more realistic. It seems like it will probably move out again but we’ll see how things go with vaccine approval, production, and acceptance by the general population. Personally I’m happy to keep working from home. I feel plenty productive and I love not having the commute! Although I do spend more time looking at opportunities to move out of suburbia if I’m not tied to the commute anymore…

benmartens October 29, 2020 Commentary

My News Source

Staying informed is tough. For a long time, I’ve stayed away from the news because it riles me up. So when I heard about NewsNation from WGN, I was intrigued. They’ve gone to great lengths to take a legitimate shot at being unbiased with a team of rhetoricians that analyze every story. I realize this sounds bogus and lots of other sources say they do similar things, but after using their app and reading their articles for the last month, I give it the thumbs up. The articles almost feel dry… which is a good thing in this case. I find that I’m able to stay up to speed on current events in less time with less emotion. All that means I expect it will fail before too long. You can’t open a brussel sprout business next to a McDonalds and expect succeed, but I’m enjoying my brussel sprouts for now.

I’ve also been running through some candidate quizzes. I don’t necessarily trust any specific ones more than others, but I take a few of them and compare the results. My only criteria is that the quiz needs to have more than just the two main candidates. When I take these quizzes, it’s interesting to see how much the candidates overlap on many issues. It’s easy to think that candidate A is a 100% match and the others are 0% but that’s never the case for me. So I will continue to woosah. It’s going to be ok.

benmartens October 15, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19: Day 201

Here we are more than six months into the lockdown and 99.94% of Americans haven’t died from the disease… but that’s still over 200,000 dead Americans. If you look at all the US military deaths in every war/skirmish/conflict of since the end of World War 2, whether it was in combat or not, COVID has still killed more people and it’s clearly not done yet. We’ll probably be able to throw World War 1 into that equation before we’re done.

I haven’t written a post for about six weeks, but the story hasn’t changed much. Every time I think about writing a post I realize that I’ve already said that. So today let’s look back at some quotes from previous posts and see how they held up:

One challenge is that new data is arriving all the time as the world’s scientific community joins forces to figure this virus out. (March 6)

This quote came on March 6 which is one week before my lockdown counter started, but it’s still true today. There’s a lot we don’t understand and the scientific community is still learning. This is never going to end. We’re still learning about how the common flu spreads and that’s been around for 100 years. The one thing clear about this virus is that it is the perfect mix of incubation rate and mortality rate to be smack dab in that gray area where people can argue about it while the bodies pile up.

Humans aren’t great at absorbing the implications of math, especially in two ways that make this a tough problem. First, it’s hard to grasp the speed of exponential growth. … The second math complication is that humans don’t process probability well. (March 14)

Yep. If people understood the data, why would they be pushing back so hard against the lockdown guidance? I realize that my simplistic engineering-brain logic is flawed, but I ask myself this question daily.

Do we all agree that it’s bad if this spreads unabated? … Do we all agree that this spreads very quickly when we don’t do anything about it? (March 24)

I don’t have these questions anymore because it’s very clear that we don’t all agree on these fundamental issues.

In the end, my bar is “If everyone did this, would it be ok?” You can twist that in lots of ways to make anything seem permissible or not, but when viewed honestly and for lack of anything better, it feels like a reasonable starting point. (April 6)

That ethical bar of “if everyone did this, would it be ok?” isn’t my own idea but it always stuck with me as a good guideline. Are you going to die from COVID if you attend a party? Probably not, but it’s clearly not good if everyone did that. Unfortunately, Americans (and sinful humans in general) focus on optimizing for personal happiness.

Now that there is a glimmer of hope, people are starting to think about when we can lift the bans. Short summary: don’t hold your breath. Let’s look at the data. We just peaking now. We’re roughly halfway through this. (April 15)

“Halfway through this”. Nope. Not even close. My new guess is that either we start getting back to “normal” next summer or we live in some sort of hybrid situation for a very long time. I do believe that science will solve this eventually, but it remains to be seen how good the vaccines are, how long they last, and how many people will take them.

What’s the right balance point? I think all we know for sure right now is that “it depends”. With this heavy social and political push to end the lockdown, it feels pretty inevitable that we’re going to start growing exponentially again. Very little has changed since the first growth period. Social distancing is the only tool we have to fight this. … I do think we’re going to oscillate back and forth a bit until we find the least amount of lockdown that keeps us at some sustainable balance of infections and economic pain. I don’t think anybody has the answers about what that balance point is yet so we’ll have to fail a few times as we get it figured out. (April 29)

We’ve seen this play out across the country as various states go through waves alternating of infection and lockdown. The waves are getting smaller but they’re still coming. Here in King County we’ve been through two waves but it’s looking like wave 3 is starting.

As if deciding how to handle things inside my own family wasn’t enough of a challenge, I’m also an elder at church which means I’ve been having a lot of difficult meetings to figure out how to minister to our members…. My main challenge in this was separating out valid Christian needs and desires from political anger and frustration. (June 13)

Being part of the leadership at church is the toughest job I’ve ever had at church. I’m asked to guide people away from human weakness and sin while accepting viewpoints that differ from my own but still align with the Bible.

So in conclusion, as I look back over all these posts, I see lots of data that explains the spread of the virus and the impact it’s having on our world, but I think there’s plenty of that available now. These are the key ones that I look at to form my opinions:

I feel like I’ve made all the points I can make with data showing the spread of the virus and why we as Christians are bound to comply with the lockdown, but I know I can’t change the world. So if I post on this again, it will be because I’ve figured out how to post about the impact this pandemic is having on our family without getting too far into the “why” of our choices. If the why isn’t clear yet, more posts aren’t going to change that.

On a more positive note, school has been a bright spot in our life. We struggled with the decision about whether to send Elijah or not, but after watching the school go through months of preparation for this year and reading through the comprehensive plan they created to comply with all the guidelines, we’re happy to see it going smoothly. Not only are people following the rules but they seem to be doing so willingly and with cheer. It has been a very positive experience.

I struggle with how to wrap up these thoughts, but I want to mention that Pastor is going through a new Bible study series on the Psalms. While we haven’t gotten to Psalm 62 yet, it felt like a fitting way to end this post:

My soul, rest quietly in God alone,
for my hope comes from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress.
I will not be disturbed.
My salvation and my honor depend on God, my strong rock.
My refuge is in God.
Trust in him at all times, you people.
Pour out your hearts before him.
God is a refuge for us. (Psalm 62:5-8)

benmartens September 30, 2020 Commentary

Homecoming by Jon Schmidt

I’m still chugging my way through this piano book by Jon Schmidt. The latest one I learned was Homecoming (Spotify link). I decided to just record this one at home instead of doing it on the nicer piano at church. I plugged an audio recorder into the headphone jack on the piano and that worked well, but I couldn’t get a good camera angle so it’s more obvious when I change splice two clips together to take out my page turn.

benmartens September 8, 2020 Commentary, Music

Come To Church With Me?

Have I ever invited you to come to church with me? If not, now is a super easy time for you to accept the invitation. Throughout the lockdown, I’ve been working with Pastor and our organists to post full service videos every Sunday morning at 8am.

Our church follows a standard liturgy (order of events) for each service and sometimes it can be tricky to know where we are in the hymnal, but with the online videos, everything you need to know is right on the screen. We even include the pre and post service music from our organists.

By the way, wonder WHY we use a liturgy? There are a few reasons, but one is that even if the Pastor were to give a total dud of a sermon (which would hopefully result in a chat from the elders!), we’d still cover key parts of the service like confession and absolution along with a pre-planned/organized series of readings and prayers.

Here’s a direct link to our playlist of full services on YouTube or you can find them on our Facebook page too. Or if you just want something embedded here, check out this service which talks about how faith grows in our hearts. If you watch any of these and have questions, I’d love to chat with you.

benmartens September 7, 2020 Commentary

They’ll Never Believe Me

I don’t remember the source, but recently I heard some people talking about totally absurd things that happened in their lives. Things where people would struggle to believe it if they weren’t there. I came up with quite a few but here are three of my favorites:

Up the Middle
I spent a lot of my time on the baseball field on the pitcher’s mound. While pitching, one of the scariest (in retrospect) parts was the line drive rocketing back at me faster than I threw it. If you do the math, there’s less than half a second from the time a pitcher releases the ball until it reaches home plate and makes the return trip. It hurts. A lot. I feel like I remember every ball that came back at me but one from high school stands out. It was all I could do to spin out of the way in what I’m sure was a very undignified manner, but once I realized I wasn’t broken, I looked out towards center field to see where it had ended up. But nobody was moving… why were they cheering instead of chasing the ball? One of them pointed at my glove and when I looked down, there it was! As I had spun to the left, my left hand went behind my back and the ball not only hit my glove, but lodged itself in and stayed there. That’s one out, the scary lucky way.

One Down, One Million to Go
When we were kids, Dad built us an amazing treehouse. Over the years, the squirrels got a lot of use out of it. The siding on the treehouse was a smorgasbord for them. From my bedroom window, Google Maps says it was 65 feet to the treehouse. One of my windows didn’t have a screen on it and Dad gave me permission to open it up and shoot squirrels from my room with my BB gun. I could usually scare them enough to make them leave but nothing more than that. One morning, as usual, I spooked one enough that it headed back towards the woods. I quickly put another pellet into my gun, pumped it 10 times and fired as the squirrel was on a dead run across the yard, 85 feet away. My mouth dropped in amazement when the squirrel did a somersault and didn’t get up. I ran to tell Dad and he gave me a .410 to go make sure it was dead. It turns out I didn’t even need the shotgun because I had sent the pellet right through its tiny little skull.

The Kickball Shot
I don’t remember what grade I was in, at some point in grade school, I was walking across the parking lot during recess with the kickball. Someone behind me asked if they could have it. I said sure and instead of turning around nicely and rolling it to them, I punted it backward over my head as I was walking away. I turned around to see where it landed and to our collective surprise, it flew directly over the backboard of the hoop that was probably 20-30 feet behind me and swished through. These were big kickballs so making a basket at all was difficult. Doing it from that far away accidentally with a kick backwards over your head? I could try for the rest of my life and never repeat that.

benmartens August 27, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19: Day 157

https://xkcd.com/2346/

Here are some common questions and statements that you might be hearing these days:

  • It’s probably not going to impact me personally.
  • I don’t feel the need to modify my behavior to help to global situation.
  • Can you even prove that this is really a problem?
  • Making these changes will be more detrimental then just letting it run its course.
  • Maybe we do have a problem, but who cares? Technology will save us.

Oh, did you think I was talking about COVID? No, those were about global warming. Pretty early on it struck me how this pandemic is a different version of the global warming problem on a very accelerated scale. I hesitated to mention it much because people are instantly divided into camps as soon as you mention global warming and I didn’t want to do that with the pandemic but that ship has sailed.

Both issues are these global, long-term, large-scale problems where a single person’s actions have very minimal impact, but it’s very hard to solve the overall problem without help from every individual making changes in their lives.

I realize that the comparison falls apart in many places too. For example, it’s a lot easier (but still difficult) to gather data about COVID. We know how many people are dying with COVID. The problem expands and contracts more rapidly and we’re able to measure it more effectively. We can try different approaches and see results in months instead of decades.

The problems are not the same and many people will have opposite opinions about the two issues, but you have to admit that core conundrum bares a strong resemblance: How do you get people to change their own behavior when they might never personally experience the rewards from their change? It ends up dividing people into angry, dug-in positions where they’re so busy yelling that they’re missing the reality. The truth is out there in no-man’s land and it’s hard to stand up in the middle without getting blasted by both sides.

Ok, enough with metaphors and similes, let’s circle back to that CDC graphic from last time. Remember that image that was going around social media showing how even the CDC says that the death rate is plummeting? I posted a copy of the image in the last post and said we should revisit it in a few weeks. The image was being misused because the posters failed to read the part which said that it takes weeks for the data to arrive. Well the data has arrived and now look at the data from July 4 and the data from August 8 on the right.

You can click into those images to see the timelines but even from a glance you can see how the numbers for July 4 are way higher then when the internet was claiming victory over the pandemic. Unfortunately I don’t know how many people will ever go back and notice the full dataset.

As you’re trying to internalize these numbers and what they mean for you, consider checking out this event planning tool from Georgia Tech. You tell it what county you’re in and tell it the size of your gathering and it gives you the odds that someone with COVID will be present. It’s a tad bit rough around the edges so it’s worth reading through some of the documentation before you have a reaction to it. But as an example, if I go to a gathering of 25 people in my county, there is a 1 in 5 chance that someone with COVID will be in the group. The big question in this data is how many people have COVID but never know it or get tested for it, but the site does allow you to adjust for that if you disagree with the 10 to 1 ratio that scientists estimate today.

Here in Washington, we seem to be plateauing after a second rise in cases started a month or two ago. I pray that people can actually stick with the guidelines and get a better grip on this situation instead of relaxing and letting it creep up again.

Nationally, the anger continues to build. Social media a dumpster fire, and even though we’re making slow progress, our country is falling behind other countries because we can’t get our act together. One of you told me you were at work wearing your mask and someone drove by on the street swearing at you for being a sheep. Even if that was more visible than most emotions, who doesn’t feel judged for the simple act of living their life these days? The mask has been turned into a visible pronouncement of your viewpoint.

Our sinful natures love the feeling of superiority. We love to see somebody doing something wrong and then act like we are able to withhold forgiveness. A recent episode of No Dumb Questions compared that feeling to black magic. You start off with a little taste of it, but you want more. As you get more comfortable with it, it feels better and better. Eventually your heart is consumed by it and you’re angry at everyone. The devil gives you that sweet little taste of hatred and self-righteousness and fans it into a roaring fire. The Bible speaks out against this in many places. For example:

Remember this, my dear brothers: Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. Certainly, a man’s anger does not bring about what is right before God. (James 1:19-20)

It’s possible to be informed about the pandemic without getting sucked into either angry trench but it’s impossible to do it alone. Thankfully, we don’t have to do it alone. God is still in control and he will guide us through this. Don’t let the devil strengthen his foothold in your life through fear and anger.

benmartens August 17, 2020 Commentary

COVID-19: Day 122

I’m changing the title of this series to give a better idea of how long we’ve been in the slog. I’m marking March 13 as the start of our lockdown. I started working from home on March 5 and March 13 was Elijah’s last day of in-person classes.

https://xkcd.com/2330/

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these posts, and frankly that’s because it feels less and less safe to document my thoughts on the topic. I talked previously about how we all started off in the same boat, then we we were just in the same storm, and now I’m not even sure we’re on the same planet. As with most topics on 24-hour news channels, it feels like we’re taught that if you’re not screaming the same thing as me then you must be my mortal enemy. Can we just agree that the truth lies somewhere (undefined) in between the two extremes? Isn’t that almost always the case?

I timed my last post right at the bottom of the trough for Washington. Since then we’ve been climbing very steadily. If you look at the raw diagnosis numbers, it looks like we’re getting infected at a much higher rate than we were in March and April. But the other side screams, “It’s just because we’re testing more!” Look one step further and realize the truth is in the middle. Yes, the numbers are going up, but no the virus isn’t spreading as fast as it was in March and April. So much is unknown about the actual spread back then, but the best estimates show we were at an R (reproductive rate) of 2 back then in King County, and we’re probably around 1.4 now. So should we be concerned about this regression? Absolutely! But do we need to lock everything down as drastically as we did back then? No, not yet anyway. Very early in this series, I wrote that we’re going to go through a series of ups and downs as we figure out the right level of safety precautions to balance a functioning society with not killing off 2% of the population. We’re in for a roller coaster ride of these infection waves because there is no magic cure out yet. We’re just as vulnerable as we were on March 6, but the good news is that we’re in a better position to analyze the spread and jump on it sooner.

It’s encouraging work at a company that is so heavily involved in analyzing the data. There’s obviously a tight partnership with the Bill Gates Foundation and their jobs all revolve around fighting disease on a global scale. Combine the two groups and you have a real powerhouse. Some of the information is still being vetted and worked on but I’ll give you four solid links to peruse if you want to focus on the data and not the media’s interpretation of it:

That first link is probably my favorite as it gives you an apples to apples comparison of the infection rates by US county (or by country). Even that can be a little misleading when you look at very sparsely populated counties where a single case can change the color of the county, but still, when you hear a friend across the country say things are good or bad, you can compare the infection rate in their county per 100k people with your own and compare their statement with your own personal feelings.

The other link that caught my attention this week is the COVID-19 Survival Calculator. As we collect more and more data about the virus and about the people catching it, these kinds of statistical models get more and more accurate. My odds of dying this year (without COVID-19) are around 1 in 700 according to the CDC. My odds of catching COVID-19 and then dying from it are 1 in 400. So while that’s not going to cause me to hide under my bed for the next year, it’s a significant increase. If you’re elderly, lower income, etc those odds can get horrifically bad to the point where if you get COVID-19, it’s like sticking a revolver to your head and being forced to play Russian Roulette.

Getting a good handle on the raw data is an important step in arming yourself to not be taken in by bad information. The internet is aflame with people using “data” to argue their point. For example, this chart was floating around the internet recently.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

That one comes from the CDC so it must be legit, right? Sure, the data is right but read the fine print and you’ll see that it can take weeks for the data to roll in and even if the data was instant, people don’t die from the disease as soon as they get diagnosed with it. So this chart is very much a lagging indicator of what’s going on. Go back and check that chart when you we get into late August and see if it still looks as rosy. You have to be so careful whenever you read the news or peruse social media.

The first step in the battle is just knowing when you’re being manipulated either directly or via a share of a share of a share of a share. I wish I could give more details but we get some incredibly interesting security talks inside the company and they go into great detail breaking down misinformation campaigns post by post and tracing it back to the bad actors running those campaigns. I’ll summarize with this: assume that everything you read is fake. It’s almost impossible that in your internet browsing today, you haven’t read a story, post or comment that is written by someone explicitly trying to game your emotions to push you to one side of the war or the other. Be on the lookout especially for “us vs them” talk. Once they get you screaming at the other side, nothing productive will happen. They want us to hate each other. Destin from Smarter Every Day had some a nice Instagram story about this exact topic the other day. I’m paraphrasing but he said “Don’t let this affect your heart. If you met someone on the street, would you run up to them screaming? Wouldn’t you be able to have a polite conversation even if you disagreed with them? Remember Proverbs 15:1: A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Now’s a good time to rewatch his great series about disinformation on the internet.)

We’re in this for the long haul. We could be 6-12 months or more away from a vaccine but there is still question about if we can produce a vaccine or if it will be effective for more than a few months. And even if we can make the vaccine, how long will it take to distribute to everyone in the world? And how many people are going to refuse it? Sure, 2020 is bad, but it’s not like 2021 is going to be all sunshine and roses. This is going to take time.

So woooosahhhhhhh. Be kind. Seek the truth in the middle ground. Be wary of information presented in arguments. Show grace to those who are struggling with this on both sides. But most importantly:

Above all else, guard your heart,
    for everything you do flows from it.
Keep your mouth free of perversity;
    keep corrupt talk far from your lips.
Let your eyes look straight ahead;
    fix your gaze directly before you.
Give careful thought to the paths for your feet
    and be steadfast in all your ways.
Do not turn to the right or the left;
    keep your foot from evil.

Proverbs 4:23-27
benmartens July 13, 2020 Commentary