The Sentinel #28: Lakes and Longterm Problems
October Country and Idleness
It has been a long time, friends, since I took an unanticipated break from writing the newsletter. Occasional email reminders and those worried check-ins have made me feel deeply grateful. Thankfully, all is fine. I am glad to be back. Sorry for missing my weekly electronic missives. - Senthil
October Country
In the interim, time has marched us on into October. It always reminds me of October Country, an observation of Ray Bradbury, whom I loved reading a lot when I was an undergrad.
...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain..."
In my years here in the US, I feel like Octobers have changed a lot. The shadowy long evenings are now long-gone memories. Everything is brightly lit. Even in the Northeast, it doesn’t seem to incessantly drip and drizzle anymore. The forlorn fall, the bone-chilling surprise dips in the thermometer, and a vacant anticipation of the snow to arrive have now changed to a long wagging tail of summer. An unseasonable warmth envelops the air, and the Gen-Z on campus are out in their t-shirts and tank tops. October is now an increasingly warm, raucous celebration of horror movies and Halloween, in its steady transformation from a childly indulgence into an adult revelry and cosplay.
Before the pandemic, I was once in upstate New York to see the Fall colors, in a beautiful region dotted with glacial lakes and nestled waterfalls, I was having breakfast at a friend’s place. His wife made some delightful Pesarattus. It was a crisp fall afternoon. We walked around and then played some leisurely badminton. We went to watch a recital at the nearby College of Music. To discuss the recital, I first need to begin with the most exciting of topics: maintenance.
Problem of Maintenance
Very few fields outside Operations and Medicine are concerned with deteriorating assets. You know, the problems that fester, like ailments in human bodies. If not repeatedly employed, like during the lacunae in this newsletter, things rust and gradually disappear.
One of the well-known cases of slow deterioration to ecosystem collapse is the Aral Sea. From the 1980s (picture below) to now, the Aral Sea shrunk to 25% of its original size (see the lovely gif that illustrates how much it has shrunk) and an associated increase in salinity also made extinct most of the diverse flora and fauna.
Of course, it is a tragedy. It is not just the Aral Sea that has shrunk over time. Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia, the highest navigable lake in the world, and the largest lake in South America, is also drying out.
Big Problems and Slow Problems
During the summer of 2023, Bloomberg reported that the Panama Canal was clogged up. There are two reasons. First, a well-known fact, container transit ships have become bigger over the years. Most readers of the newsletter remember the story of Evergiven being stuck in Suez for several days (picture above). The Panama Canal is even tighter in capacity compared to Suez. A quick comparison of Panamax and Post-Panamax vessels shows that recent vessels are both longer and wider compared to Panamax.
The second reason is climate change. Even without damming, the Panama Canal is getting dryer just as seasonal rainfalls have been failing. The Panama Canal expects extreme drought conditions to persist through next year into 2024 winter. Low water means slower transit and longer waits.
The waiting times shown in the chart below seem flat over time but note the minima: We are never seeing anything close to 20-hour transits anymore. In fact, throughput has expectedly come down. Since the end of July 2023, the daily vessel transit capacity has also been reduced from 34-38 ships per day down to a maximum of 32 vessels per day, according to the American Journal of Transportation.
Panama Canal Authority is pushing for several steps to cut waiting times. Mainly there is an increased push towards transit reservations which is not always possible due to the typical complexity of some routes. The waiting has only worsened. As of October 2023, there is an increased waiting times of up to 10 days mostly for vessels without reserved transit slots, –with as many as 135 ships stuck in queues at both ends of the key waterway versus around 90 normally, resulting in shipping delays that have hit the global supply chain. (Source: ISS).
All these problems are hard problems to solve. One of the reasons it is difficult to solve the problem is that it is not easy to break down the problems and see the small wins that we all crave in our lives. It also doesn’t help that many of these problems are collective action problems, requiring solving “feelings” (messy) in addition to solving for “facts” (er, non-messy), which leads to the question.
Why do We Ignore Slow Problems?
One of my favorite essays from Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) by Yoshida Kenko, a world-wise Japanese monk from 1331.
Kenko writes:
When I went to see the horse racing at the Kamo Shrine on the fifth day of the fifth month, the view from our carriage was blocked by a throng of common folk. We all got down and moved towards the fence for a better view, but that area was particularly crowded and we couldn’t make our way through.
We then noticed a priest who had climbed a chinaberry tree across the way to sit in its fork and watch it from there. He was so sleepy as he clung there that he kept nodding off, and only just managed to start awake in time to save himself from falling each time. Those who saw him couldn’t believe their eyes. “What an extraordinary fool!” they all sneered. “How can a man who’s perched up there so precariously among the branches relax so much that he falls asleep?”
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Any of us may die from this one instant to the next”, I said, “and in fact we are far more foolish than this priest — here we are, contentedly watching the world go by, oblivious to death.”
“That’s so true”, said those in front of me. “It’s really very stupid, isnt it?” and they turned around and invited me in, and made room for me.
Anyone can have this sort of insight, but at that moment it came as a shock, which is no doubt why people are so struck by it. […]
It is lovely, ironic, and equanimous, how he dismisses this insight outright and then goes on about his life. We are just contentedly watching the world go by — until disasters strike in our personal and public lives, as we see in our tumultuous days now — then we notice the problems.
Public Joy and Private Tears
That’s how life is — we all spend time just relaxing, chilling, and celebrating our small successes. There are many such celebratory posts on LinkedIn. There is simply nothing wrong with celebrating small wins.
Our joys are public but our griefs are private.
Everyone likes to celebrate success. Its fragrance is in the air everywhere. Thousands of adoring tweets celebrated when Dr. Katalin Kariko deservedly won the Nobel Prize, and many also chided my employer Penn for not recognizing her achievements earlier. The counterfactual is unnerving. If there was no pandemic, perhaps the society at large (including the committee) would have known even less of her to be able to express any of the moral outrages. Her tireless work would have been no less valuable and would have still saved millions of future lives.
Such is the nature of our struggles. Our griefs are internal. There is no spotlight and there is no listener to our own Hamlet soliloquy. Everybody hurts, as the pop group REM says, but the night is yours alone. When not hurting, like the monk on the tree in Kenko’s story, we spend dozing as things decay all around us, and then sudden events (deaths and disappearance of lakes) take us by surprise opening up the wounds.
Back to the recital story. At the college, a young teen, her face now a blur in my aging memories, was playing a Baroque piece by Henry Purcell on the cello. She was playing well, and she made an error but elided over it and continued. But, the second time she erred, she paused and pursed her lips as if to chide herself and restarted but soon stopped. Her recital teacher gently tried to coax her into continuing, but she was already inconsolable. After a difficult attempt to recompose, she finally gave up and walked off the stage what must have been a slow mile for her, to a pitter-patter of sympathy claps.
As she sat down and cried and mourned, my friend was saddened and noted morosely that the attention had already shifted to rejoicing and clapping for the other performance. The cruel world had indeed moved on, leaving her to her private grief. There were new joys and new accomplishments. Some more quick things on the checklist.
Postscript
Ending with a personal note. My friend, Nagesh Gavirneni, with whom I spent that beautiful fall day at the concert, unexpectedly passed away this summer. He was a fellow CMU graduate, not much older than me, and who without hesitation, reached out to me early in my career. He was a thoughtful soul who cared about things that people tended to ignore in a hurry — like the cello player’s tears and the disappearing lakes.
Nagesh cared about sustainability and development in a scientific, methodical way — writing inventory papers, but also working on things like Onion Prices in India or optimizing food menu operations for senior citizens in assisted living.
Nagesh was attuned to understanding the tragedies of human lives and the optimism of a better life. In his research, and in his life, he helped people tackle their problems better. He worked with many colleagues regardless of status, rank, and age. He was an early supporter of this newsletter effort. I lost a dear friend who not only patiently read things a friend wrote, but always listened to anyone who needed help. I miss him dearly, and this post is in memory of him.