On your side

If you ever feel like no one is on your side, consider this: there's an army of white blood cells inside you right now, greater in number than the entire population of the planet. This army, some 100 billion strong, patrols your body at all times, ready to protect and defend you. Everywhere you go, they’re with you. You can't forget to pack them, you can’t misplace them. It's truly fascinating to watch.

So remember, you’ve got an army of 100 billion on your side.

Second takes

Have you ever tried recording a video message for someone? Perhaps you’ve used Loom to record a message for a colleague or for a sales lead. Do you always send your first take? If you’re like many people you have an occasional false start and try a couple of takes, or even more. Why? Because you can.

The option to easily start over is fertilizer for seeds of doubt. “Was that good enough?” “Could I have said that differently?”

Yet, in daily conversations with those same people, how many times do you stop the conversation to give it a second take? Many decisions are best treated like daily conversation, but we can easily end up treating them like a prerecorded video riddled with false starts, second takes, and second guesses.

Size and scale

As someone that finds the size and scale of things fascinating, this research from PNAS stands out. It's titled “The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions”.

According to the research: “…each infected person carries an estimated 1 billion to 100 billion virions (individual virus particles) during peak infection, their total mass is no more than 0.1 mg. This curiously implies that all SARS-CoV-2 virions currently in all human hosts have a mass of between 100g and 10 kg. (about the weight of a bar of soap to about the weight of a toddler). Multiply their math out to 1 billion infected persons and the total weight is something around 200 pounds. In other words, all of the virions (individual virus particles) in all of the human hosts of that pandemic would weigh something like a few hundred pounds.

The size, scale, and weight of certain things are remarkable.