Florida

 Barb is playing Yahtzee with a good friend in Florida. Her friend goes to bed at 9 pm and then she regularly wakes up at 1 or 2 am, she starts playing Yahtzee again. Barb sees her playing because Barb has been playing all night and hasn't even gone to bed.

Conversations

 Barb and I sit together in the living room all day long. Barb playing Yahtzee on her phone and me doing my COVID analysis on my laptop. Barb gets so excited about winning Yahtzee and is always trying to explain to me all the complicated prizes she is winning. While I work on my COVID analysis and talk excitedly about how great my computer programs are. We carry on two separate conversations all day long and don't care if the other person listens.

Energy Security

 I am mentoring a Nigerian guy who is studying renewable electrical energy. The electrical system in Nigeria is terribly unreliable. Many days he has no power and is working off his computer battery or his phone in the dark. We can only work until his battery dies. I hope his research helps the country solve this serious problem.

Automation

As I work with the COVID data and my models, I have to repeat the same commands over and over in Excel. So I have started trying to automate the process of adding the daily data and doing the analysis. After spending many hours programming and debugging my programs, I finally had some Excel macros so I don't have to repeat the same commands over and over again every day. Now I just have to push one button and my programs do all the work. This took all the tedious work out and made my analysis more fun and so much easier. Now I look forward to analyzing the new data coming in every day. Also I make less mistakes. The only mistakes that occur are the mistakes that my programs make.

Commas

I have been studying the COVID-19 crisis using my modeling and simulation methodology and trying to see where the pandemic is heading. I found data on all the countries of the World, all the United States, all the Provinces of Canada, all the cities in Florida, and all the cities in Ontario. So I have been sharing my work with many of my friends and colleagues in Canada, Florida, and around the World by writing short papers. I am trying to make the model and the data easy to understand and so I tested it out on Barb. She read over my paper and suggested I add a lot of commas because of my long complicated sentences. Here are a few extra commas for good measure ,,,,

Cut and Paste

 

I thought I had to check the daily reports on COVID and then I realized I could download the entire historical record which a big spreadsheet that contains the data for every country in the World. Now I instead of doing a cut and paste for every country, I can automate the whole process.

Our World in Data

 

I have been following the data on the COVID pandemic and developed a System Dynamics model to make projections into the future. I can download data for any country in the World and put it in my computer model and generate graphs. I developed a template report where I can cut and paste the graphs and write some observations of the crisis in different countries. Then I can send my analysis to friends in many different countries around the World.