“What Did You Do During the Pandemic, Daddy?”

To stem the spread of COVID, Wake Forest asked non-clinical personnel to stay home starting in mid-March. Anne Newman, my friend and editor of Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, tells me that the the rate of submissions has been 50% higher than normal during the pandemic. So I guess some folks are cranking it. I felt bad that I didn’t have a project to focus my attention on during the shutdown.

I found inspiration in a YouTube video entitled, “How to Mix Every Cocktail.” New York bartender Jeff Solomon shows how to make 51 classic cocktails. It struck me as a good idea to set out on a quest to make all of them. I completed the quest in early July (500 XP). It was harder than I thought. In North Carolina, spirits are sold through state run stores. This makes exotic ingredients hard to get. Sam, my son and questing companion, made a side quest to the Plaguelands of South Carolina to secure some of the more exotic spirits like cachaça and crème de viollette (2oo XP). Some ingredients we just couldn’t find (rum agricole), and so we had to make substitutions or omit. It was kind of expensive: the varieties of spirits and other ingredients add up. Beyond that, I decided that I needed proper jiggers, shakers, a muddler, a mixing glass, a swizzle spoon, and the appropriate glassware (collins and coupe glasses). These I acquired with the help and forbearance of Nannette, my internet-purchasing advisor and spouse. It turns out that ice is a big deal. It needs to be fresh and of the right size. Our refrigerator makes lousy crushed ice, but we had to go with that for several creations. I got some some special trays to make ice specifically for drinks served in collins and rocks glasses.

Two Hemingway Daiquiris in Coupe Glasses

The cocktails on the video are supposed to be the “classic” versions, but sometimes the video showed ingredients but not amounts. There are at least a dozen websites for looking up recipes, but the recipes frequently differ on proportions and sometimes on ingredients. There is a daiquiri called the Hemingway (one of Sam’s favorites & shown in the picture). The story is that Ernest Hemingway hated added sugar in his cocktails and the Jeff Solomon version has none, but there are several online recipes calling for simple syrup (sugar dissolved in water). The drier version is better.

Best and Worst Cocktails

I have long been a fan of the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan. These remain favorites of mine. Aside from these two, here are the nine cocktails that I especially liked.

1. French 75. This is a cocktail with gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup, topped with champagne. It is the consensus #1 hit at my house. Even my wife, who doesn’t often like mixed drinks, likes this one. There is a version which uses cognac instead of gin, but I like the gin version better.

2. Corpse Reviver Number 2. This is a gin, lemon, triple sec, Lillet blanc cocktail, with the glass getting an absinthe rinse. Very refreshing with interesting complexity.

3. Tom Collins. Gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup in a collins glass with club soda poured over. A great summer drink and very refreshing.

4. Bramble. Lemon juice, simple syrup, muddled blackberries, and gin over crushed ice. Wonderfully intense berry flavor.

5. Vieux Carré. This is a Manhattan variant from New Orleans that also includes cognac and Benedictine.

6. Margarita. A classic, and better with Cointreau than triple sec.

7. Boulevardier. This is a Manhattan variant with Campari. It’s on the bitter side which favors sipping, and it’s nicely complex.

8. Sidecar. Brandy, lemon juice, and Cointreau. The classic version rims the glass with powdered sugar. I didn’t do that. Still very tasty.

9. Gimlet. Lime juice, simple syrup, and gin.

Honorable mention to: the whiskey sour, the Sazerac, the Jack Rose, and the Monte Carlo.

Among my least favorite cocktails were the Aperol Spritz, the Moscow mule, the daiquiri, the Presbyterian, the Negroni and the 20th Century. I learned that rum-based cocktails are not my favorites, and I don’t really enjoy “buck” drinks, which have lime, spirits, and ginger beer/ale.

Things I Learned On The Way

If you’re only mixing different alcohols, then you stir them together. You shake when you’re mixing alcohols with non-alcohols. So when James Bond asks for a martini that’s “shaken not stirred”, it shows how rarefied his discernment is. I now know the difference between a Hawthorne strainer and Julep strainer, and why Boston shakers are better than Cobbler shakers. I know what a whip shake is, and the “reverse dry shake” which sounds like something you do to maintain social distancing.

Ingredient quality matters a lot. Several cocktail recipes call for either triple sec or Cointreau. They are both orange flavored and sweet, but Cointreau is more expensive, higher proof, and more intense in flavor. I ended up trying different brands of triple sec: the worst is little more than sugar water with a slight hint of orange. Regardless, drinks made with Cointreau were better than the versions made with triple sec. Similarly, when I made some drinks with cheap grenadine, I couldn’t imagine why these were considered “classic cocktails”. I remade them with a better brand, and it made a big difference. Bitters are magical. Bitters are intense aromatic tinctures that add body and complexity to drinks. It’s amazing how of a difference a few shakes makes to the overall drink experience.

Drinking cocktails might cause health problems, but scurvy isn’t one of them. The quest required bags of limes and lemons and the occasional grapefruit. A typical cocktail might ask for 0.75 – 1 oz of fresh lime juice which is about what you’d get from 1 lime. This provides about 33% of you daily vitamin C requirement. So, you might drink three just to make sure you’re getting enough vitamin C. Simple syrup is slightly less simple than you’d think. Simple syrup is 1 cup of sugar dissolved into a cup of water usually over heat to make it all go faster. You have to be careful not boil it because the sucrose breaks down to give fructose and glucose and has an off-flavor that you don’t really want.

Many of the cocktails in the video date from the 1930s. One can imaging that most folks didn’t have the resources to buy the variety of spirits and related ingredients to try very many different drinks. Also, most households did not have refrigeration until after 1940, and the capacity to make a lot of ice was probably even rarer. One can see how it made sense for bar owners and restauranteurs to invest in these items to attract patrons for the novelty of spirit concoctions that they couldn’t create at home.

I’ve tailed off in the number of drinks I’m mixing, but I will continue to build my repertoire. There are many standard drinks that weren’t on the video (e.g., White Russian, Bloody Mary) and I’m making promising newer cocktails (e.g., Enzoni, South Slope) that show up in my YouTube feed. On a positive note, my family has a deep well for Father’s day and Birthday gift ideas for quite some time.

The Half-Life of Junk Mail

A year ago I catalogued every piece of junk mail addressed to my mother in June 2019. She received 546 piece of mail – 47 pounds worth. I promised at the time to see how much she receive a year later. Here is my report. In June 2020, she received 277 pieces of junk mail weighing 19.25 pounds. This is about a 50% reduction from the previous year. The distribution of topics seems about the same as last time except there was much less in the way of Medicare/Social Security scare mail. The number and degree of cash inducements fell way off. In June 2019 she received over $28 in enclosed cash. In June 2020 the total was $2.96 and $4 in checks. There were still quite a few gifts, but they also tailed off. In 2019, she received 7 full-size calendars, this year only 2. The picture below shows all the gifts enclosed; quite a few note cards and miscellaneous stuff including a pair of kids socks and a Tibetan prayer flag. The plants are ours.

Mailings to hawk various pills and creams were frequent. Joint pain was the most common target. Here is a list of things “your doctor doesn’t want you to know about”: Organic Silica; Geranlygeranone; Lavendula Oil, Menthol, Turmeric, Aloe Vera, Cetyl Myristoleate; Copper, Bromelain, Gingko, Green Tea, Ginseng, Rosemary, Blue/green algae; Celadrin (?), Acetyl myristoleate; Boswellia serrate gum; curcumin; Andrographis paniculata extract, hyaluronic acid; CBD + terpenes; collagen; Telocell(?); and methyl salicylate. 

Based on these two points, the half-life of junk mail is 1 year. If the trend is linear, the number of pieces of mail received in June 2021 should be around 140. I’ll try to continue this exercise to see if the data is consistent with the hypothesis.

Gifts in my mother’s forwarded junk mail in the month of June 2020.

A Month of Junk

My mother was quite generous and made small donations to many, many organizations. I didn’t quite realize the implications of this when I agreed to receive her forwarded mail after her death in January. The amount of junk mail she received in one week was about as much as all the mail I receive in a year. To provide a flavor of this deluge, I’ve summarized the month of June. Included are unsolicited mailings including petitions, donation requests, catalogs, and advertisements. Not included are magazines to which she subscribed, business or personal mail.

June’s mail delivered over 47 pounds of junk mail in 546 individual pieces (21/day). The number of unique correspondents was fewer than number of pieces since many senders sent multiple pieces. If you never want to feel forgotten, sign up with the Bradford Exchange (cheap jewelry) or the Danbury Mint. Together they sent 23 pieces of mail in one month. The major thematic areas were: veterans organizations, animal rescue, habitat protection, disease-oriented foundations, political action for both liberal and conservative causes, “anti-aging breakthroughs”, cultural/historical preservation, medical or food relief, Social Security preservation, support of police, and Native American schools and service organizations. Here are some highlights…

Seniors of the World Unite – You have nothing to lose but your COLAs!

“Without your completed 2019 Survey of Retired Americans and your $18 donation, greedy politicians and special interests looking to get their hands on more of our Social Security money will target senior citizens.”

Council for Retirement Security

There were 11 different organizations with the word Senior or Seniors in their names, all of them aimed at preserving or enhancing Social Security:
The Senior Citizens Association of America; Senior Security Alliance, Senior Citizens Alliance; Senior Citizens Association; Senior Citizens League, Senior Coalition; The Senior Center; Council of Seniors; The National Seniors Council; Seniors Advocate; and the Seniors Trust. Add to these the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the Council for Retirement Security, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and the American Association of Retired Persons, and you have quite the line-up of advocacy organizations trying to preserve Social Security and advocate for favorable cost of living increases. Many of these mailing have “surveys” and mailings pre-addressed to U.S. Representatives and Senators. I wonder how many recipients end up sending them and what the staffers think of them?

All Creatures Great and Small and Oddly Specific

“It’s a bad day to be a horse, Evelyn …”

Dream Chaser Horse Rescue and Rehabilitation

My mother clearly had a soft spot for animal rescue endeavors. She received solicitations from 23 different animal rescue organizations. Some of these were national or international in scope (Doris Day Animal League,elephant poaching and chimp rescue), but most were local. The groups target horses (e.g., Red Bucket Equine Rescue; Front Range Equine Rescue; Life Savers Wild Horse Rescue, Arabian Rescue Mission, Izzy’s Love Equine Rescue), Dogs (e.g., Best Friends Animal Society, Second Chance for Blind Dogs, Semper K9 and Wounded Paws Project [for military service dogs]) or both (Hooves and Paws Animal Rescue). Some of the groups are pretty niche – Wolf Paws shelters wolf-dog hybrids; there is Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue, and my favorite – Little Long Ears Miniature Donkey Rescue.

The Thin Blue Line

“Screw this politically correct crap!”  “… these cop killers have been more empowered than ever since their Democrat friends took back the house”

Cops Direct

There are quite a few organizations supporting local police. Some of the rhetoric tends to make one think that civilization is on the edge of collapse (Cops Direct, In-Vest USA). Donations to these groups, along with the U.S. Deputy Sheriff’s Association, are used to purchase bullet-proof vests for local law enforcement. Other organizations tend to support wounded officers and their families (National Police Association, National Association of Police, Team Blueline, National Association of Chiefs of Police). The mail also included a few solicitations for the legal defense of police officers accused of using undue force.

My mother received mail from 14 organizations supporting veterans (e.g., Help Heal Veterans, AMVETS, Native American Veterans Association, Blind Veterans, Wounded Warrior Project, Paralyzed Veterans of America), deployed troops or their families (Operation Home Front, Adopt a Platoon), or veteran animals (Paws of Honor). The most persistent group was the U.S. Veterans Hospice Committee, which sent seven different solicitations in the month.

Pseudo-Science for Fun and Profit

“The remarkable story of how a Norwegian cleaning lady discovered an anti-aging breakthrough in a fish tank, .  . .”

Immuderm

The month of June brought 22 solicitations for different products targeting aging or age-related symptoms. An outfit called Primal Force, Inc., sent 4 different mailings for the brain, hair, sleep, and energy. The claims can be breathtaking. One of the components of the product Focus IQ, “enhances neural pathways by a stunning 211%”(whatever that means). Two of the products were activated charcoal, and two provided organic silica. Did you know, “. . . that our health and longevity depend on our level of Organic Silica?” Now you do. There is some science behind some of the components (Beet Root Juice, L-arginine), but some are pretty dubious: eggshell membrane and sea cucumber extract. You could spend a lot of coin on this stuff. The typical price for a month’s supply is about $40 + S&H, though some of the prices exceeded $80/month.

Giving To Get

Sorting through 546 pieces of junk mail is not without rewards. In order to engender a feeling of obligation in the recipient, many solicitations included either cash, negotiable checks, postage stamps, or various kinds of gifts. Over the month, I received $28.62 in cash amounts ranging from 3 cents to $2 ($2 bills were popular) or negotiable checks in amounts ranging from $2 to $7. I estimate that I spent about 14 hours sorting through the mail, which comes down to about $2/hour. I’ll keep my day job. The gifts range from the common and mundane (return address stickers) to the peculiar (one child’s sock, grass seed). These groups should coordinate with each other: no one needs seven calendars every month.

Here is a list of the gifts received:

  1. Sheets of return address stickers (20)
  2. Bumper stickers (3)
  3. Window stickers (5)
  4. Individual sock (single not a pair)
  5. Pair of kids socks
  6. Car / Refrigerator magnet (2)
  7. Poster
  8. Calendar (7)
  9. Wrapping paper
  10. Notepad (7)
  11. July 4th napkins, cake plates, and table cloth
  12. Note cards (5)
  13. Decorative stickers (4)
  14. Angel medallion
  15. T-shirt
  16. Tote bag
  17. Bookmarks (3)
  18. Pen (2) 
  19. Birthday cards (1 pack)
  20. Pop-up thank you card
  21. Grass seed packet (2)
  22. Jacket patch (2)
  23. Coasters (2)
  24. Dream catcher key chain
  25. Gold flakes in a vial
  26. Founding sponsor medallion
  27. Flashlight

Show Me Who Your Friends Are, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are.

A person’s junk mail provides an unexpected insight into their life. The make-up of my mother’s junk correspondents is undoubtedly biased, because some of them may have purchased her name from organizations she was committed to. Nevertheless, the kinds of charities she donated to addressed needs that I was unaware she had an interest in, like veterans health, Native American education, and animal rescue. Growing up, I can’t remember discussing charity with my parents, so I was unaware how she felt about it. The sheer volume of mail speaks to her interest and generosity. Towards the end of her life, my mother had worsening mobility problems which curtailed her most beloved activities and led to her becoming somewhat isolated. I wonder if keeping up with this volume of mail reflected a desire to stay connected, relevant, and occupied.

Will It End?

When my mother took trips, she would tell us not to call her until a few days after she got back so she could get caught up with her mail. Now I understand. It’s mind-boggling to think what this kind of mail volume amounts to in a year: over 500 lbs. and 6,500 pieces of junk mail, return address stickers sufficient for several lifetimes, 84 calendars, and over $300 in cash and checks.

Junk mail is clearly big business, and I assume that there is empirical data supporting the frequency of the mailing, the inclusion of gifts, the format of the mailings, etc. In a survey sampling course I took in graduate school, we learned that to get the best response rates for mailed surveys, we should hand address the envelopes, use stamps rather than a postage meter, include a postage-paid return mailer, and send up to six times until we got a response. (I actually ran a small survey using these tips and achieved a > 60% response rate, which was about as good as it gets with mailed surveys.) My mom’s junk mail included many envelopes with stamps and the use of fonts that looked like handwriting. The business clearly got the message on repeated mailings. But one can’t help but be impressed by the waste. Is it really necessary to contact the same person 7 – 13 times in the same month? Aren’t there steep diminishing returns? Is this a strategy to take advantage of older persons who may not be paying full attention or are memory- impaired? I suppose that the gifts might be appreciated if there were only one or two places sending junk, but with well over 200, it gets to be kind of a joke. Also, given the age we live in, the implicit carbon footprint of the entire enterprise is distressing. I hope to see a gradual tailing off of the volume. Already some envelopes are emblazoned with “final notice”, “last chance”, or “we want you back”. I’ll post next June’s tally, and we’ll see how it goes.

The Strength of Weak Ties

I just read The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark Granovetter (Am J Sociology 1973; 78:1360-80). It is a classic paper in sociology which I saw referenced in a business-oriented book discussing networking. The paper discusses interpersonal networks commenting that, “In one way or another, it is through these networks that small-scale interaction becomes translated into large-scale patterns . . . ” Granovetter points out that wide disseminate of information or innovation is unlikely if you focus on people with whom you are tightly connected (i.e. strong ties) because they probably already know one-another. Your strong-tie network is sort of a closed circuit with respect to information flow. For dissemination, people who serve as bridges to other networks are critical. Your relationship with such people is almost by definition a weak tie, because if they were a a strong tie they would be in your network. Thus, “. . . whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger number of people, and traverse greater social distance, . . . , when passed through weak ties rather than strong.” (p. 1366).

Weak ties are important for learning about new opportunities. Granovetter asked people who recently got new job through contacts how often they saw the contact at the time the information about the opportunity was passed to them. Only 17% heard this information from someone they interacted with at least twice per week; 28% heard this information from someone they interacted with at most once a year.

Over the course of my mentoring of early career scientists, I’ve increasingly emphasized the importance of networking, which I now understand as way to build weak ties. This is most easily done through work, participation in scientific societies and scientific meetings. Casual interactions are a great way to learn about opportunities such as jobs, grants and research projects. They are also a way of introducing the world to your interests and goals which may lead to additional opportunities in unexpected ways.

Putting Physical Capacity in its Place: New Editorial

I wrote an editorial to accompany this article by Diana Kuh and colleagues for Circulation. The article shows that NT-proBNP levels in community-dwelling older adults predicts declining physical function. The editorial remarks on how notable it is that an article with a physical function focus was being published by Circulation, and discusses the fact that the markers evaluated by Dr. Kuh and her team are also being considered as indicators of biologic age.

A Mentoring Key

I co-authored an editorial with Kevin High for the Journal of the American Geriatric Society commenting on two articles describing mentoring programs for clinical researcher in aging. Both programs address the issue that there are many clinicians who are not geriatricians but are finding that they need guidance from researchers in aging to develop programs relevant to an increasingly older clinical population. These brave souls need professional mentoring to thrive within their specialty and work environments, but they also need guidance in gerontologic / geriatric approaches to research. There are few senior scientists who can provide all of this in one package. The articles discussed present strategies to fill this gap.

Kevin brought my attention to a conceptual model of mentoring proposed by Manson in 2009 which holds that self-efficacy, a person’s judgement that he or she has the ability to reach a specific goal, is critical to staying in research and success over the long-term. Strong self-efficacy is important to persistence, which is probably one of most important attributes of successful scientists. Manton contends that self-efficacy stems from a conceptual model for one’s path forward which also weighs occupational risks and benefits. Those just starting out usually don’t have a clear model of a way forward nor do they have sufficient experience to identify, let alone weigh, risks and benefits, especially how they play out over the long-run. A key goal of mentoring, therefore, is to, “. . . build self-efficacy by providing plausible models for forward progress and access to better knowledge regarding likely occupational risks and benefits.” [quoting the editorial]

My father would have been 99 yesterday

My father, David Kritchevsky, was a famous biochemist and a renowned wit. He taught himself to play piano and entertained his colleagues by writing lyrics set to well-known tunes that spoofed his field. He set the synthesis of cholesterol to the tune of Jingle Bells. In honor of his birthday, here is one of my favorites set to the tune, Torno Sorrento.  It was probably written around 1965.

In Italia molta bella
Every forty-year old fella
Has less lipids than the quota
For business men in Minnesota.

Life for them it don't go fasta
Drinking vino, eating pasta
And they have no strains or stresses
Leaning on their olive presses.
Let me add in this connection
They don't have much disinfection
So they don't have coronaries 
Just TB and dysentery.

Life for them ain't beer and skittles
They work hard for all their vittles
And rich foods, they can't afford'em
Consequently they don't hoard'em
While the theories roar free on
One thing that they all agree on
It takes living like a peon
Me? I'll die with my TV on.

So farewell, farewell
Mia Italia Bella
You die of your disease
I'll die of mine.

Team Science: Some Tips for Early Career Investigators

We are in an era of team science. It’s hard to identify important problems that can be solved by applying the techniques of a single discipline.  The translation of biologic insight into something that can actually help someone is a long road requiring more knowledge and skills than any single person can master.

I recently participated in a Workshop sponsored by the Research Centers Collaborative Network that convened researchers from many disciplines to discuss  behavior change for older adults.  The participants ranged from neuroimagers to economists.  The slides and a recording of the proceedings will be available at RCCN-aging.org soon.  The Workshop included a session for early-career scientists to help them understand the challenges of multidisciplinary investigation and provide team-building skills. Those slides will not be posted.  I shared my observations on how to approach scientists from other disciplines.  These are some of the points I made.

  1. Every scientific discipline has its own culture, and it pays to understand the differences between your culture and those of your collaborators.   What constitutes success in another field is useful to know.  In medical science, articles in well-cited high prestige journals are a measure of success, but what qualifies as a high prestige journal differs by discipline.  Journal articles aren’t as important in informatics where the inclusion in the proceedings of important conferences may be more highly valued.   Epidemiologists don’t really care that much about patents, but they are strongly regarded in engineering fields.  Differences can come down to the order that authors are listed in published articles.  My culture values first and last author placement.  But that valuation is not universal, and in some fields publishing works as a sole author is most valued.   It’s important to know what counts as a success for your teammates to ensure that team participation results in products that advance everyone in their discipline.
  2. Even the standards of what constitutes science can differ across disciplines.  When I was a graduate student, I was invited to observe a multidisciplinary meeting where my Department Chair and noted cancer epidemiologist, Barbara Hulka, presented an overview of how epidemiologists link environmental exposures to health outcomes.   In the Q&A that followed, a physicist stood up and said that epidemiology wasn’t a science and would lead to no useful knowledge.  The standards of evidence and inference were so alien to him that he couldn’t accept their conclusions.   This is a stark example, but scientists who manipulate animal models sometimes denigrate clinical science because human studies can’t prove mechanistic hypotheses with the certainty of animal studies.  Similarly, clinical scientists can denigrate animal research because they feel that animals models don’t relate well to the human condition.
  3. Every discipline has a set of tacit / assumed knowledge.   A sign that you’re maturing in a discipline is that you develop an understanding of the things your colleagues take as given and the things that require logic or evidence to be accepted.  On a multidisciplinary team, your teammates will not share this understanding of your field.  I’m often asked to provide the rationale behind epidemiologic concepts that other epidemiologists would accept without question.  I never respond, “Oh, that’s Epidemiology 101, everyone knows . . . ”  Condescension poisons the team.  A well-functioning team is a safe place to share and learn.  Similarly, a role I can play as a senior member of a team is to ask “stupid” questions to unpack the accepted knowledge in other fields. There is a good chance that other team members will benefit from an explanation, and as a senior scientist I’m not especially concerned about what others will think of me based on such questions.
  4. Every discipline uses some words that you think you know in precise and controlled ways.  When you’re on a team, it’s useful to identify and ask about the meaning of these words to reduce the chances of misunderstanding.  For example, many people I work with say the proportion of people with a disease in a population is the “risk” of that disease.   Not to an epidemiologist: the risk of disease is the proportion of persons at risk for a disease who develop the disease over a defined period of time.  Statisticians have claimed the words “significance” and “power” and given them technical meanings.  Misusing words can mark you as a noob and get you dismissed out of hand.  I participated in a grant review where the applicant stated that they were going to study post-menopausal mice.  I think the applicant meant they were going to study female mice in the last third of their lifespan.  The reviewer stated that mice didn’t experience menopause, and by virtue of that mistake the application received no further consideration.  Ouch.  You can develop a sense of assumed knowledge and how specific words are used by reading in other fields, by hanging around folks in other fields and attending their conferences.  But you can’t do this for all fields, so it pays for team members to be aware of these issues to facilitate communication and engender mutual respect.
  5. It’s important to either elicit or be expressive of: a) What you see as the long-term pay off of a collaboration.  Collaborations will drift into conflict if members of the teams are pulling in different directions.  b) What your role on the team is going to be.  Is it as a full collaborator, or is this a work-for-hire assignment? Lack of clarity on this point is a source of frustration, especially among early-career team participants who may be overlooked as collaborators due to their junior status. c) How credit will  be shared.  Early-career scientists can be asked to do the lion’s share of the work on a project only to receive minimal credit. It’s best to have this stated in advance to stave off frustration later on.

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