Identifying Einstein...

For Albert Einstein, being Jewish and German were not questions of identity but rather mutable matters of identification...

Identifying Einstein
Michael D Gordin
Aeon, April 2, 2020

Germanness and Jewishness have each been impossible for centuries of European history. In a time when political legitimacy meant a nation-state, the Germans were long too big to be contained within a single one, and the Jews long too despised and dispersed to have their own. In the mid-20th century, the murderous atrocities of National Socialism would lock Germanness and Jewishness in seemingly mortal opposition. But before the rise of Nazism and its historic crimes, no inherent conflict stood between Germanness and Jewishness. Ostensibly, bloodline or heritage determined both of these, but in actuality each was an amalgam of confession, language and class, any of which could change over the course of a life.

For centuries in central Europe, being labelled both German and Jewish was commonplace. Often, what individuals meant when identifying themselves as one could reshape how they were understood to relate to the other. Declaring yourself to be German as well as Jewish acquired different valences when your audience primarily understood itself (and you) as one or the other. Identification is part individual volition and part a process of being identified – by states, religious groups and other institutions and communities. An individual’s biography is but one important variable in the equation. Let’s take one example you will certainly recognise.

As quotable as he was photogenic, Albert Einstein can lull us into thinking he was made for the Twitter and Instagram click-a-thon, though it was tabloid vignettes and newsreels that helped to power his rise to global celebrity. Einstein has been massively famous for just over a century, catapulting to worldwide renown in the wake of the 1919 eclipse expedition led by the British astronomers Arthur Stanley Eddington and Frank Watson Dyson to measure how much starlight would bend around the massive body of our Sun while it was conveniently shrouded in an eclipse. Eddington and Dyson declared Einstein’s predictions correct. The newspapers ran with it, and the moustachioed theoretical physicist captivated the public.

It was all a bit inexplicable then, and remains a matter of discussion among historians today. In late November 1919, Einstein had his own take, in The Times in London:

    Today I am described in Germany as a ‘German savant’, and in England as a ‘Swiss Jew’. Should it ever be my fate to be represented as a bête noire, I should, on the contrary, become a ‘Swiss Jew’ for the Germans and a ‘German savant’ for the English.

As with much of Einstein’s humour, there is a barb within the bonbon. He understood that the names commonly used to describe one’s ‘identity’ are not entirely under one’s control.

The crux of the issue is the term ‘identity’ itself. It can be tempting to think that identities are immutable and self-evident. Because neither is quite true, the sociologist Rogers Brubaker and the historian Frederick Cooper would prefer we dispensed with the term ‘identity’ altogether in favour of ‘identification’. As they noted in 2000, the longer and somewhat more clinical term

    invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. And it does not presuppose that such identifying (even by powerful agents, such as the state) will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness that political entrepreneurs may seek to achieve.

Sometimes, you are the one doing the identifying (of self or other); sometimes, you are being identified. The magic comes in tricking you into thinking that those identifications are your intrinsic identity. Appreciating that power shapes how we think of ourselves and others opens up new perspectives on xenophobic nationalism and antisemitism, and new possibilities for thinking about ourselves and others.

Einstein’s changing identifications illustrate the role of power in identification and the mutability of claims to identity. Throughout his life, he was repeatedly referred to as a ‘German’ and a ‘Jew’, two terms that we have come to interpret, since the mid-20th century, as being at odds. Yet Einstein identified as both, albeit with reservations. He resisted attempts by others (especially state bureaucrats) to prescribe identifications to him, while also mobilising assertions of identification to support pacifism, Zionism and other commitments. It is quite rare for identifications to exist in the singular or to remain fixed over time, and so it proved in Einstein’s case.

The first record we have of Einstein’s views on being German involve him denying it. He was born in 1879 in Ulm, in the German state of Württemberg, and he retained that citizenship upon the family’s departure, shortly afterward, to Munich, the capital of the state of Bavaria. As he approached graduation from secondary school, Einstein refused to enlist in the obligatory military service. A month and a half shy of his 17th birthday (and thus still a minor) he asked his father to renounce his citizenship for him. As of 5 February 1896, when Ulm confirmed the decision, Einstein was officially stateless.

He soon settled in Switzerland and eventually enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, later renamed the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), in Zürich. He became a Swiss citizen on 21 February 1901, five years after he had forsaken his German citizenship. Born within the newly formed German Reich, Einstein was happier being Swiss.

He kept his passports in order, but didn’t put much stock in nations. In a manuscript drafted between late October and early November 1915, and eventually sent to a pacifist organisation for publication, he wrote:

    The state to which I belong as a citizen plays scarcely any role in my emotional life; I consider the affiliation with a state as a business arrangement, something like the relationship to a life insurance policy.

So he wrote – and then crossed it out, perhaps because it was rather too strong a statement to be published while Germany was in the grips of the Great War.

Indeed, it was to Einstein’s advantage to keep quiet about citizenship questions. Although he was now a professor at the University of Berlin and a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and thus a German civil servant, his insistence that he was a Swiss citizen meant that he was not approached for war work. He confirmed this status in a letter to the Berlin-Schöneberg Office of Taxation in 1920: ‘I am Swiss, here in Berlin since early 1914.’

Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics proved an inconvenience for his non-German Swissness

Einstein’s cavalier attitude to his Germanness put him at odds with some of his closest friends. Unique among scientist colleagues in the Central Powers, he was not subjected to the boycott and travel ban that the victorious powers of France, Belgium, Britain and the United States imposed after the war. The news of the confirmation of general relativity afforded an excellent occasion to invite Einstein, a well-known pacifist and opponent of the war, to Paris or New York where he might quietly lobby to end the boycott, which he opposed as a manifestation of virulent nationalism. The chemist Fritz Haber and other friends objected to Einstein’s globetrotting as disloyal to the sufferings of Germans. Einstein’s response dismissed the matter of national loyalty: ‘Allegiance to the political image of Germany would be unnatural for me as a pacifist.’ He went on the trip to the US, and then on another to Japan, China and the British Mandate of Palestine, all on his Swiss passport.

In 1922, Einstein declared to Gilbert Murray, the Australian-born British man of letters, that:

    I am not an appropriate representative for German intellectuals, because I am not seen by them in their full number as their representative. My outspoken international attitude, Swiss citizenship and Jewish nationality work together so that I would not be met in a political relationship by the majority of the masses with the trust that a representative of a country must possess to be able to serve as a link with success.

Einstein sketched out an array of identifications here, noting that they worked to make his own Germanness impossible.

In 1922, while in Japan, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the previous year, an event that proved an inconvenience for his non-German Swissness. Nobel Prizes needed to be received in person; if the laureate were not personally able, an ambassador would stand in. Naturally, the Swiss ambassador presented himself for the honour, given that Einstein was at that very moment travelling as a citizen of the canton of Zurich. So did Rudolf Nadolny, the German ambassador to Sweden. The Germans maintained that German citizenship attached to Einstein as a requirement of his Berlin post. Einstein had objected to this clause during negotiations in December 1913, and the Germans had not felt it necessary to contest the point later during the war. With the Nobel Prize, circumstances had changed, and Nadolny accepted the award on his behalf. Einstein at first protested his symbolic de-Swissification, but within a year relinquished his opposition to the state’s narrative, and settled in as a German citizen.

Everything changed on 25 August 1933, when Germany’s National Socialist government rescinded Einstein’s citizenship. He at once became the world’s most famous refugee. He was granted asylum in the US and a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he became a prominent advocate for those displaced by Hitler’s racial laws and the war. In 1935, the Einstein family travelled to Bermuda so that they could re-enter the US on permanent visas. On 1 October 1940, after the obligatory five-year waiting period, Einstein, his stepdaughter and his secretary all took their oath of allegiance as US citizens. Even now – he was perhaps the most recognisable American alive – Einstein’s vocal support for civil rights and nuclear disarmament provoked J Edgar Hoover’s FBI to explore the possibility of stripping Einstein of his citizenship as an undesirable immigrant. The FBI’s quixotic effort against the massively popular Einstein failed, and the physicist died as a US citizen. The question of whether he had ever been ‘German’ remains a matter of dispute.

Einstein’s Germanness might seem to be a matter of a passport or other formal registration, an identification that was externally granted or taken away. One might assume, as a matter of course, that Jewishness is something different, not just externally ascribed but also internally embraced – a matter for identity, not just identification. For Einstein, the interaction between active and passive identification for confession and ethnicity was even more turbulent than nationality.

His reluctance to affiliate with organised religion began in childhood. His parents identified as Jews and, though not devout, adhered to some of the outward customs. As a boy, he became curious about going deeper into the rites, at least for a time. In 1949, he described his evolving youthful identification with Jewishness and, at age 12, his abandonment of religious faith:

    Thus the first escape was religion, which is implanted in every child through the traditional education-machine. So I came – although a child of entirely unreligious (Jewish) parents – to a deep religiosity, which however found an abrupt end at 12 years of age. Through reading popular scientific books I soon came to the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a perfectly fanatic bout of freethinking, combined with the impression that youth was deliberately being deceived by the state; it was a devastating impression.

Einstein chose to forego a bar mitzvah and – in the manner of teenagers – believed that he had decisively turned away from the religion. From when he came of age and could fill out his own bureaucratic forms as a university student in Zurich, and later as a patent clerk in Bern and a professor back in Zurich, he declared himself to be ‘without religion’ or, in the German term, konfessionslos.

In 1911, when he was offered his first full professorship, in Prague, he told the Viennese bureaucrats that he would remain konfessionslos. The Habsburg emperor, however, maintained that one could honestly swear an oath only if it were vouchsafed by a belief in a deity – attested, by proxy, through adherence to a religious confession. Einstein wanted the job, so he made a simple substitution: he replaced konfessionslos with ‘mosaisch’, the faith of Moses. And so, through the unsparing precision of Austrian bureaucracy, Einstein ‘helped myself to my once-again assumed Jewish “faith”’.

When he returned to Zurich in 1912, Einstein again registered as konfessionslos. Seven years later, on the occasion of his second marriage, to Elsa Einstein, in 1919, the issue of Einstein’s legal identity as a Jew returned, and it came with trouble.

Einstein had grown quite vocal about identifying as a Jew and especially with cultural aspects of Zionism

As with most European states at the time, a portion of one’s taxes went to state-sponsored religious institutions by proportion with demographic registration. Registering in a religion therefore had fiscal implications for churches and synagogues, and they came to Einstein to collect. The first such exchange was farcical: Albert and Elsa’s marriage was apparently registered as Protestant. The newlyweds assigned the task of complaining about the error to Elsa’s daughter Ilse:

    Prof Einstein and his wife have never belonged to a confessional community, although they are children of Jewish parents … Since Prof Einstein and his wife have never belonged to the Protestant church, they are naturally not in a position to present you with a certification of their leaving the church community.

A year later, however, in 1920, Einstein had grown quite vocal about identifying as a Jew and especially with cultural aspects of Zionism (most prominently, support of a university in Jerusalem where Jews would not be subjected to bias in either admissions or employment). To others, his views no doubt signalled his identification with the Jewish religion (and thus the official Jewish Community or Jüdische Gemeinde), but Einstein still insisted he was konfessionslos:

    On mature consideration I cannot resolve to enter the Jewish cultural community. As much as I feel myself a Jew, just as much am I confronted by traditional religious forms as a stranger.

Officials from the Gemeinde responded that ‘every Jew is by force of law a member, liable for taxation, of the Jewish Community of the region in which he lives … The Community is therefore not authorised to ignore your assessment according to this rule.’ Einstein baulked:

    I explain to you once again herewith that I do not intend to enter into the [Jewish] community, and that I do not consider it necessary …, but rather remain konfessionslos as I have been up to now.

He continued, more provocatively:

    To your letter I remark that the word ‘Jew’ is double-valued, in that it refers 1) to nationality and origins, 2) to religious confession. I am a Jew in the first sense, not in the second.

Despite repeated pleas from letter-writers that his membership in the Community would assist with Zionist goals, or would improve the status of Jews, Einstein demurred:

    The Community is an organisation for the practice of ritual forms, which lies far from my intention. I must take it as what it now is and not as what one might wish to see it perhaps transformed into.

(Nonetheless, in 1924 he quietly joined the Jewish Community of Berlin.)

States had slapped Einstein with legal identifications such as ‘Jewish’ or ‘German’ (or ‘konfessionslos’ or ‘Swiss’ or ‘American’). Einstein of course was far from powerless, and he too took control of acts of identification for political ends that were important to him. He recognised that what he wanted to do depended in part on who other people took him to be. On pragmatic grounds, identification trumped identity for Einstein.

The discrimination in Berlin against Jewish refugees – the Ostjuden – from the carnage in eastern Europe during the First World War, often on the part of Westjuden German citizens, infuriated Einstein. The persecution of Jews and his antinational pacifism prompted Einstein to endorse some of the cultural goals of the World Zionist Organization (WZO): principally, a university in Jerusalem. It was German nationalism, and its antisemitism, that compelled Einstein to assert his Jewishness in the cause of peace and safety for those identified by others (and often themselves) as Jews.

Einstein told his contact in the WZO, Kurt Blumenfeld:

    I am against nationalism, but for the Zionist cause. The reason has become today clear for me. When a person has two arms and constantly says: ‘I have a right arm,’ then he is a chauvinist. If a person however lacks a right arm, then he must do everything to substitute for that missing member. Thus I am in my general attitude to humanity an opponent of nationalism. As a Jew, however, I exert myself from today forward on behalf of Jewish-national Zionism.

To the extent that Einstein countenanced nationalist identifications, they were identifications with a weak party, one with a deficit. Those identified as Jews qualified.

Einstein also used the facts of his biography and his fame to try to recruit others to oppose antisemitism and murderous nationalism. At the moment that Einstein began to be troubled by the course that Zionism had taken in Palestine in the wake of the 1929 Arab rebellions against the British Mandate – he would later dissociate himself from the movement over the fallout – he spoke out in defence of Jews being persecuted by Hitler’s National Socialist regime. From Princeton, Einstein insisted that ‘the fiction’ of ‘the “Aryan” race’ was ‘invented solely to justify the persecution of the Jews’, a looting that masked the ‘process of cultural disintegration’ in Germany that ‘must alarm anyone interested in the welfare of humanity’. A favoured target of antisemites in Germany for more than a decade, his visible fundraising and moral high ground enraged the Nazi hierarchy, who cultivated a virtual mania about Einstein. He had become the bête noire he had predicted in 1919.

Having been a member of the German minority now informed how he thought of himself as a Jewish minority

From Berlin, Max Planck, the leader of German physics, wrote to Einstein asking for him to moderate his criticism so that those at home opposed to the racial policies would have more room for manoeuvre. Einstein was not swayed. On 6 April 1933, two weeks after the Enabling Act essentially granted Hitler a free hand in running the country, Einstein responded by trying to explain to Planck why he could not remain silent – and why, under different circumstances, Planck would act the same way:

    I ask you to imagine yourself for a moment in the following position. You are a university professor in Prague. A regime comes to power there that robs from the Czech Germans their means of existence, and that simultaneously forcibly prevents them from leaving the country.

Imagine there are border guards to shoot those who try to leave but at the same time the Czech Germans are unable to earn a living at home. The regime, Einstein wrote:

    is conducting a bloodless war of annihilation against them. Would you then find it correct to take this silently, not to speak out for them? Isn’t the annihilation of German Jews through starvation the official programme of the current German regime?

Despite the polite use of the subjunctive tense, Einstein, as Planck knew, had in fact been a professor at the German university in Prague in 1911-12. Here he appropriated fantastical rhetoric about persecuted German-speakers in Czechoslovakia – a favourite trope for National Socialists – to render imaginable to a German civil servant the position of Jews in his country. When he had been a professor in Prague before the First World War, Einstein had interacted with German-speaking colleagues anxious that Czech chauvinism would make life intolerable for local Germans in a city where Germanophones were just 7 per cent of the population. He was filtering his understanding of persecution of the Jews through his own identification as a German, his experience as a member of a minority defined in national, not confessional, terms. Having been a member of the German minority in Bohemia now informed how he thought of himself as a Jewish minority.

Einstein was writing this from Princeton, where he was surrounded by other central European Jews who, like himself, had never particularly identified as Jewish, either as a matter of religion or of bloodline. It had been the state’s identification of them as Jews, not their own, that prompted them to flee. They were the lucky ones. Far from being antagonistic identities, the mutual interpenetration of Germanness and Jewishness as identifications proved definitive for many thousands who were similarly suffering the ravages of fascism.

The point about mutuality of identification is not peculiar to exceptional cases such as Einstein’s, or to the more general 20th-century tragedy of the Jews and the Germans. This is just how identification works. Because there are so many agents doing the identifying – states, religious communities, neighbours, tourists, one’s parents, one’s children, oneself – the multiplicity of identifications is bound to laminate and then amalgamate. We have built manifold identifications for ourselves and others, and anything that has been built can be dismantled and reassembled. None of them has to remain impossible.

Story of the N95 mask...

The most important design object of our time was more than a century in the making.

The untold origin story of the N95 mask
By Mark Wilson
Fast Company, Mar 24, 2020

It’s hard to think of a symbol of COVID-19 more fraught than the N95 respirator. The mask fits tightly around the face and is capable of filtering 95% of airborne particles, such as viruses, from the air, which other protective equipment (such as surgical masks) can’t do. It’s a life-saving device that is now in dangerously short supply. As such, it has come to represent the extreme challenges of the global response to COVID-19.

How did a flimsy polymer cup become the most significant health device of the 21st century? It all started in 1910 with a little-known doctor who wanted to save the world from one of the worst diseases ever known.

The first masks were about stopping smell

Going back even further—long before we understood that bacteria and viruses could float through the air and make us sick—people improvised masks to cover their faces, says Christos Lynteris. Lynteris is a senior lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews, who is an expert in medical mask history.

He points to Renaissance-era paintings where people cover their noses with handkerchiefs to avoid illness. There are even paintings from Marseilles in 1720, which was the epicenter of the bubonic plague, that show gravediggers and people handling bodies with cloth around their faces, even though the plague was spread by the bites of fleas that traveled on rats.

“It was not meant to be against the contagion,” says Lynteris of the practice. “The reason these people were wearing cloth around their mouths and noses was, at the time, they generally believed diseases like the plague were miasma, or gases emanating from the ground. It wasn’t to protect you from another person, they believed plague was in the atmosphere—corrupt air.”

The theory of miasma is what drove the design of the infamous plague masks seen across Europe in the 1600s, which would be worn by doctors who identified the plague and marked the infected by tapping them with a stick. These elongated masks resembled large bird beaks and had two nostril ports at the edge of the mask that could be loaded with incense. People thought that by protecting themselves from the smell of the plague, they’d be protected from the plague itself.

“The stench causes disease. This [thought] continued all the way to the early 19th century,” says Lynteris. (It’s worth noting that, 200 years later, a French physician named Antoine Barthélemy Clot-Bey argued that the bird-like plague masks themselves were responsible for the spread of the plague because they made people scared, and a frightened body was at greater risk for disease.)

By the late 1870s, scientists learned about bacteria. Miasma fell from fashion as the modern field of microbiology emerged. And yet, what came next looked a whole lot like what came before—minus the creepy birds. “We often think of scientific paradigm shifts leading to breaks, but all the technologies used against germs by the end of the 19th century were [riffs] on technologies from miasma.”

A glorified handkerchief

Doctors started wearing the first surgical masks in 1897. They weren’t much more than a glorified handkerchief tied around one’s face, and they weren’t designed to filter airborne disease—that’s still not the point of surgical masks today. They were (and are) used to prevent doctors from coughing or sneezing droplets onto wounds during surgery.

This distinction between a mask and a respirator is important. It’s why healthcare professionals are upset that they’re being instructed to wear surgical masks when respirators are unavailable. Masks are not only made of different materials; they fit loosely on the face, so that particles can come in from the side. Respirators create an airtight seal so they actually filter inhalation.
The first modern respirator is born from plague—and racism

In the fall of 1910, a plague broke out across Manchuria—what we know now as Northern China—which was broken up in politically complex jurisdictions shared between China and Russia.

“It’s apocalyptic. Unbelievable. It kills 100% of those infected, no one survives. And it kills them within 24 to 48 hours of the first symptoms,” says Lynteris. “No one has come across something like this in modern times, and it is similar to the descriptions of Black Death.”

What followed was a scientific arms race, to deduce what was causing the plague and stop it. “Both Russia and China want to prove themselves worthy and scientific enough, because that would lead to a claim of sovereignty,” says Lynteris. “Whomever is scientific enough should be given control of this rich and important area.”

The Chinese Imperial Court brought in a doctor named Lien-teh Wu to head its efforts. He was born in Penang and studied medicine at Cambridge. Wu was young, and he spoke lousy Mandarin. In a plague that quickly attracted international attention and doctors from around the world, he was “completely unimportant,” according to Lynteris. But after conducting an autopsy on one of the victims, Wu determined that the plague was not spread by fleas, as many suspected, but through the air.

Expanding upon the surgery masks he’d seen in the West, Wu developed a hardier mask from gauze and cotton, which wrapped securely around one’s face and added several layers of cloth to filter inhalations. His invention was a breakthrough, but some doctors still doubted its efficacy.

“There’s a famous incident. He’s confronted by a famous old hand in the region, a French doctor [Gérald Mesny] . . . and Wu explains to the French doctor his theory that plague is pneumonic and airborne,” Lynteris says. “And the French guy humiliates him . . . and in very racist terms says, ‘What can we expect from a Chinaman?’ And to prove this point, [Mesny] goes and attends the sick in a plague hospital without wearing Wu’s mask, and he dies in two days with plague.”

Other doctors in the region quickly developed their own masks. “Some are . . . completely strange things,” Lynteris says. “Hoods with glasses, like diving masks.”

But Wu’s mask won out because in empirical testing, it protected users from bacteria. According to Lynteris, it was also a great design. It could be constructed by hand out of materials that were cheap and in ready supply. Between January and February of 1911, mask production ramped up to unknown numbers. Medical staff wore them, soldiers wore them, and some everyday people wore them, too. Not only did that help thwart the spread of the plague; the masks became a symbol of modern medical science looking an epidemic right in the eye.

Wu’s mask quickly became an icon through international newspaper reports. “The mask was a very novel thing . . . it had an effect of strangeness, which the press loved, but you imagine a black-and-white photograph with a white mask—it reads well,” says Lynteris. “It’s a marketing success.”

When the Spanish flu arrived in 1918, Wu’s mask was well-known among scientists and even much of the public. Companies around the globe increased production of similar masks to help abate the spread of flu.

The N95 is made for industries but arrives just in time to hospitals

The N95 mask is a descendant of Wu’s design. Through World War I and World War II, scientists invented air-filtering gas masks that wrapped around your entire head to clean the air supply. Similar masks, loaded with fiberglass filters, began to be used in the mining industry to prevent black lung.

“All the respirators were these giant, gas mask-looking things,” says Nikki McCullough, an occupational health and safety leader at 3M, which manufactures N95 respirators. “You’d wash them out at night and you could wear them again.”

This equipment saved lives, but it was burdensome, and a large reason why were the filters. The fiberglass required a lot of effort to breathe, and the full head enclosures were hot to wear. By the 1950s, scientists began to understand the dangers of inhaling asbestos, but people working with asbestos preferred not to wear bulky respirator masks. Imagine working in construction in 85-degree heat and having your head wrapped in rubber to protect yourself from an invisible threat.

Around the same time, a former décor editor for House Beautiful magazine named Sara Little Turnbull began consulting with the 3M’s giftwrap division. To make stiff ribbons, the company had developed a technology to take melted polymer and air-blast it into a fabric of tiny fibers. Turnbull realized a greater potential for this process, though, and she began experimenting with the material for shoulder pads, leveraging connections in the fashion industry for advice. Then in 1958, she gave a presentation at 3M simply titled: “Why,” which explained why 3M should go into this business of non-woven products in a bigger way. She presented over 100 product ideas for the technology, and was assigned to design a molded bra.

But the late ’50s were tough for Turnbull, who spent a lot of time visiting sick family members in hospitals. She lost three loved ones in quick succession. And out of that grief came a new invention: A “bubble” surgical mask that 3M released in 1961, that yes, takes its inspiration from the cup of a bra. When 3M learned it couldn’t block pathogens, the mask was re-branded as a “dust” mask.

Of course, it was hard to build standards around something that didn’t even exist yet—for medicine or workplace safety. By the 1970s, the Bureau of Mines and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health teamed up on creating the first criteria for what they called “single use respirators.” The first single-use N95 “dust” respirator as we know it was developed by 3M, and approved on May 25, 1972. (Turnbull herself consulted on this line into the 1980s—and for many other corporate clients including General Mills, Ford, Corning, and Revlon.) Instead of fiberglass, the company repurposed that technology it had developed for making stiffer gift ribbons into a proper filter. Under a microscope, “they look like somebody dropped a bunch of sticks—and they have huge spaces between them,” says McCullough.

As particles, whether silica or viruses, fly into this maze of sticks, they get stuck making turns. 3M also added an electrostatic charge to the material, so even smaller particles find themselves pulled toward the fibers. Meanwhile, because there are so many big holes, breathing is easy.

The longer you wear an N95 respirator, the more efficient it becomes at filtering out particles. More particles just help filter more particles. But breathing becomes more difficult over time as those gaping holes between the fibers get clogged up with particles, which is why an N95 respirator can’t be worn for more than about eight hours at a time in a very dusty environment. It doesn’t stop filtering; it just prevents you from breathing comfortably.

N95 respirators were used in industrial applications for decades before the need for a respirator circled back to clinical settings in the 1990s with the rise of drug-resistant tuberculosis. HIV had a lot to do with its spread across immuno-compromised patients, but tuberculosis infected many healthcare workers, too. To stop its airborne spread, N95 standards were updated for healthcare settings, and doctors began wearing them when helping tuberculosis patients. Even still, respirators are rarely used in hospitals to this day because it’s only outbreaks like COVID-19 that necessitate so much protection.

As Lynteris and many others point out, the respirator never really faded from significance in China. Wu went on to found China’s version of the CDC, narrowly miss winning a Nobel Prize, and be featured in many biographies (including his own autobiography). More recently, during the SARS outbreak, people in China wore facial protection to prevent the spread of illness. Then as pollution took over cities like Beijing, they wore respirators to filter pollution.

The N95 respirator isn’t perfect. It isn’t designed to seal well to the face of children or those with facial hair, and if it doesn’t seal, it doesn’t work as advertised. Furthermore, the N95 variants that are worn in high-risk operating rooms don’t have an exhalation valve, so they can get particularly hot to wear.

But the N95 respirator evolved over hundreds of years in response to multiple crises. That evolution will only continue through and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. McCullough says that 3M is constantly reevaluating the N95 respirator, tweaking everything from its filters to its ergonomics. “My mom would say they look pretty much the same [as in 1972], but we want them to look simple so they’re easy and intuitive to use,” says McCullough. “We’re always improving the technology. We have thousands of scientists at 3M working on [it].”

Animals practise social distancing!

Some species, such as chimpanzees and honeybees, enforce strict measures to prevent the spread of disease.

These wild animals also practice social distancing to avoid getting sick
By Sydney Combs
nationalgeographic.com
March 24, 2020

Many people in countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic are struggling to avoid contact with others and stay at home, including millions of Americans ordered by authorities to shelter in place to slow the spread of COVID-19.

But social distancing is not a novel concept in the natural world, where infectious diseases are commonplace. In fact, several social species will expel members within their own community if they are infected with a pathogen.

It’s challenging because infectious individuals are not always “easy to see,” explains Joseph Kiesecker, a lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

However, through specialized senses animals can detect certain diseases—sometimes before visible symptoms appear—and change their behavior to avoid getting ill.

Honeybees and chimpanzees, for instance, can be ruthless when it comes to ousting the sick.

Bacterial diseases that strike honeybee colonies, like American foulbrood, are particularly devastating, liquifying honeybee larvae from the inside. “That’s where the name comes from, that brown gooey mess. It smells very, very foul,” explains Alison McAfee, a postdoctoral fellow with North Carolina State University’s Entomology and Plant Pathology department.

Infected larvae emit certain telltale chemicals that older bees can smell, like oleic acid and ß-ocimene, a bee pheromone, according to McAfee’s research. Once identified, the bees will physically toss these diseased members from the hive, she says.

Since this evolutionary adaptation safeguards the health of a colony, beekeepers and researchers have selectively bred for this behavior for decades. These more “hygienic” bees now buzz across the U.S.
‘Really not that different’

In 1966, while studying chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee named McGregor who had contracted polio, caused by a highly contagious virus.

His fellow chimps attacked him and cast him out of the troop., In one instance, the partially paralyzed chimp approached chimps grooming in a tree; starved of social contact, he reached out a hand in greeting, but the others moved away without a backward glance.

“For a full two minutes old [McGregor] sat motionless, staring after them,” Goodall notes in her 1971 book In the Shadow of Man.

"It's really not that different to how some societies react today to such a tragedy," she told the Sun Sentinel newspaper in 1985.

Goodall recorded other instances of ostracized, polio-ridden chimps during her research, though noted that in some cases, infected individuals were eventually welcomed back into the group. (Read how 50 years later, Goodall’s chimps still reveal discoveries.)

Like humans, chimps are visual creatures, and some research suggests that the initial stigma toward polio-infected chimps may be driven by fear and disgust of their disfigurement—which is itself part of the strategy for avoiding catching the disease that causes such deformations.

‘Smarter than random’

Not all animals are so aggressive toward their ailing neighbors; sometimes it’s as simple as avoiding those who may infect you.

Before Kiesecker started studying American bullfrog tadpoles in the late 1990s, models predicting the spread of disease within wildlife groups assumed that contact with infected individuals was random.

Every member of the population, they assumed, was just as likely to catch the bug as the next.

“But it’s clear animals are smarter,” says Kiesecker.

In his experiments, Kiesecker found that tadpoles could not only detect a deadly yeast infection in other tadpoles, but healthy members actively avoided those that were sick. Much like honeybees, tadpoles rely on chemicals signals to determine who is sick or not.

Caribbean spiny lobsters also shun diseased members of their community, well before they become contagious.

It normally takes about eight weeks for lobsters infected with the deadly virus Panulirus argus mininuceovirus to become contagious. Normally social animals, lobsters began avoiding the diseased as early as four weeks post-infection—once the lobsters could smell certain chemicals released by sick individuals.

Choosing the right partner

When it comes to mating, many species are picky about selecting a healthy mate.

Female house mice, for example, can determine if potential partners are infected with a disease via a good whiff. If the female mouse smells a parasitic infection in the male’s urine, she will likely move along to other, healthier mates, according to researchers at the University of Western Ontario.

Male guppies face similar scrutiny from potential mates. Female fish overwhelming prefer parasite-free partners: A combination of visual clues of infection, like clamped fins and paleness, and certain chemicals released from infected skin give the sick males away.

Overall, it's important to to note that, unlike us, animals don't realize "if they stay home, they might actually reduce the transmission rate," Kiesecker explains. “As humans, we have that ability. It’s a big difference.”

History's deadliest air raid on Tokyo during WW-II

Bombs dropped by the Americans had created tornadoes of fire so intense that they were sucking mattresses from homes and hurling them down the street along with furniture -- and people.

History's deadliest air raid happened in Tokyo during World War II and you've probably never heard of it
By Brad Lendon and Emiko Jozuka, CNN
March 8, 2020

Everywhere she turned, 8-year-old Haruyo Nihei saw flames.

"The flames consumed them, turning them into balls of fire," says Nihei, now 83.

Nihei had been asleep when the bombs began raining down on Tokyo, then a city comprised of mostly wooden houses, prompting her to flee the home she shared with her parents, her older brother and her younger sister.

As she raced down her street, the superheated winds set her fireproof wrap ablaze. She briefly let go of her father's hand to toss it off. At that moment, he was swept away into the crush of people trying to escape.

As the flames closed in, Nihei found herself at a Tokyo crossroad, screaming for her father. A stranger wrapped himself around her to protect her from the flames. As more people piled into the intersection, she was pushed to the ground.

As she drifted in and out of consciousness beneath the crush, she remembers hearing muffled voices above: "We are Japanese. We must live. We must live." Eventually, the voices became weaker. Until silence.

When Nihei was finally pulled out from the pile of people, she saw their bodies charred black. The stranger who had protected her was her father. After falling to the ground, they'd both been shielded from the fire by the charred corpses that were now at their ankles.

It was the early morning of March 10, 1945, and Nihei had just survived the deadliest bombing raid in human history.

As many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed and another million injured, most of them civilians, when more than 300 American B-29 bombers dropped 1,500 tons of firebombs on the Japanese capital that night.

The inferno the bombs created reduced an area of 15.8 square miles to ash. And, by some estimates, a million people were left homeless.

The human toll that night exceeded that of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year, where the initial blasts killed about 70,000 people and 46,000 people respectively, according to the US Department of Energy.

But despite the sheer destruction of the Tokyo air raids, unlike for Hiroshima or Nagasaki, there is no publicly funded museum in Japan's capital today to officially commemorate March 10. And while the Allied bombing of Dresden in Germany in February 1945 roused a strong public debate on the tactic of unleashing fire on civilian populations, on its 75th anniversary the impact and legacy of the Japan air raids remain largely unknown.

The introduction of B-29s

The horrors Nihei saw that night were the result of Operation Meetinghouse, the deadliest of a series of firebombing air raids on Tokyo by the United States Army Air Forces, between February and May 1945.

They were designed largely by Gen. Curtis LeMay, commander of the US bombers in the Pacific. LeMay later launched airstrikes on North Korea and Vietnam and supported the idea of a preemptive nuclear attack against Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

Though US President Franklin Roosevelt had sent messages to all warring governments urging them to refrain from the "inhuman barbarism" of bombing civilian populations at the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, by 1945 that policy had changed.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US was determined to retaliate. By 1942, Japan's empire in the Pacific was at its most powerful. US war planners came up with a target list designed to obliterate anything that might help Tokyo, from aircraft bases to ball bearing factories.

But to execute its plan, the US needed air bases in range of Japan's main islands.

With the invasion of the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal in August 1942, it began to acquire land for that purpose, continuing that mission by picking up the islands of Saipan, Tinian and Guam in 1944.

With that hattrick in hand, the US had territories on which to build airfields for its new, state-of-the-art heavy bomber, the B-29.

Originally conceived to strike Nazi Germany from continental US in the event Britain fell to Hitler's forces, the B-29 -- with its ability to fly fast and high and with large bomb loads -- was ideal for taking war to the Japanese homeland, according to Jeremy Kinney, curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Virginia.

The bombers were the culmination of 20 years of aviation advances leading up to World War II and were the first to have pressurized, heated fuselages, enabling them to operate above 18,000 feet without crews having to don special gear or use oxygen masks.

That put them out of range of most anti-aircraft guns and gave them plenty of time before fighters could rise up to engage them, Kinney said.

"The B-29 Superfortress was the most advanced technology of its time," he said.
And US war planners were ready to unleash it on Japan.

But the B-29s' early attacks on Japan were considered failures.

The planes dropped their explosive loads from the high altitudes -- around 30,000 feet -- they were designed to operate at, but as few as 20% hit their targets. US crews blamed poor visibility in bad weather and said the strong winds of the jet stream often pushed bombs off target as they fell.

LeMay was tasked with finding a way to get results.

His answer was so drastic it even shocked the crews who would carry out the raids.

The B-29s would go in low -- at 5,000 to 8,000 feet. They'd go in at night. And they would go in single file, rather than in the large multi-layered formations the US had used in the daylight bombing of German forces in Europe;

Perhaps most significantly, they'd carry fire bombs, designed to set Tokyo's largely wooden landscape ablaze. Fire bombs, or incendiary bombs, let loose flammable substances as they strike, as opposed to high-explosive bombs, which destroy with concussion and shrapnel.

When US air crews were briefed on the mission, many of the more than 3,000 Army aviators reacted with disbelief.

Going in single file, they'd be unable to protect each other from Japanese fighters. And LeMay had ordered the large bombers to be stripped of almost all of their defensive armaments so they could carry more of the fire bombs.

"Most men left the briefing rooms that day convinced of two things: one, LeMay was indeed a maniac; and two, many of them would not live to see the next day," wrote James Bowman, son of a B-29 fire raid crewman, in a journal compiled from records of the units involved.

Fire from the sky

On the evening of March 9, 1945, on Saipan and Tinian and Guam, the B-29s began leaving their island bases for the seven-hour, 1,500-mile trip to Japan.

Early in the morning of March 10, as the Japanese slept in their low-rise, wooden homes, the first bombers over Tokyo started five sets of marking fires, smaller strikes for the rest of the bomber force to aim it, according to B-29 pilot Robert Bigelow, who recounted the raid for the Virginia Aviation History Project.

Between 1:30 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. the main force of American B-29s unleashed 500,000 M-69 bombs, each one clustered in groups of 38 and weighing six pounds.

The clusters would separate during their descent and small parachutes would carry each bomblet to the ground.

The jellied gasoline -- napalm -- inside the metal casings would ignite seconds after hitting something solid and shoot the flaming gel onto the surrounding surfaces.

Haruyo Nihei had endured US bombing raids on Tokyo before, but when her father woke her up in the early morning darkness of March 10, he shouted that this one was different.

They needed to get out of the house and to an underground shelter without any delay.

Nihei remembers throwing on the clothes, shoes and emergency rucksack she kept by her pillow and rushing out the house with her mom, younger sister and elder brother. The family, who owned a spice shop, lived in the downtown Tokyo district of Kameido. They rushed passed the local fishmonger's and small grocery stores that lined the streets.

In those early moments, she remembers not so much the fire, as the air being sucked into the inferno to fuel it. The fire hadn't reached their district yet.

Her family made it to an underground shelter, but their refuge didn't last long.

"We were huddled inside -- we could hear footsteps overhead fleeing, voices rising, kids screaming 'mom, mom.' Parents were screaming their kids' names," she said.

Soon, her father told them to get out.

"You'll be burned alive (in here)," her father said. He thought the flames and smoke would easily overwhelm the bunker door.

But once outside, the horrors were unimaginable. Everything was burning.

The roadway was a river of fire, with homes and their contents, tatami mats, futons, rucksacks, all in flames.

And people. "Babies were burning on the backs of parents. They were running with babies burning on their backs," Nihei said.

Animals were on fire, too. Nihei recalled a horse pulling a wooden cart loaded with luggage. "It suddenly spread its four legs and froze -- then the luggage caught fire -- then it caught onto the horse's tail and consumed the horse," she said.

The rider refused to leave his mount. "He clung to the horse, and was burned along with the horse," she said.

Flames still raged in Tokyo the morning after the fire bombs fell.

In the sky above, the B-29 fliers were feeling the effects of wind and flames.

Bowman, the son of the raid crewman, in his history quotes Jim Wilde, a flight engineer on a B-29.

"Everything below us was fiery red and smoke immediately filled every corner of our plane," Wilde said.

The hot air rising from the inferno below pushed the 37-ton airplane up 5,000 feet, then dropped it just as quickly seconds later, according to the journal.

B-29 pilot Bigelow recalls the Japanese putting up a defense. "The streams of tracer anti-aircraft fire criss-crossed the sky as if sprayed from garden hoses," Bigelow wrote.

Explosions buffeted his bomber, but the crew focused on their drop.

"We hardly noticed the shrapnel which rattled and tinkled as it rained down on the wings," he wrote.

Bombs released, Bigelow banked his B-29 sharply and headed out to sea.

"We had created an inferno beyond the wildest imaginings of Dante," he wrote.

As the B-29 flew more than 150 miles away from Tokyo over the Pacific, Bigelow's tail gunner radioed the pilot that the glow of the fires was still visible.

'Killing Japanese didn't bother me much'

The destruction wrought upon Tokyo on March 10 only emboldened the Americans.

Further fire raids on the Japanese capital on April 14 and 18, and May 24 and 26 reduced a further 38.7 square miles to cinders -- an area one-and-a-half times the size of Manhattan. 

An image from the US National Archives shows an Army Air Force newsletter from the summer of 1945

Tens of thousands more people were killed, and fire bombs followed on the major cities of Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. The US bombers then targeted "medium-sized towns," hitting 58 of them, according to the official history.

At one point, the B-29s' base at North Field, on the tiny island of Tinian, was the busiest airport in the world.

The official US Army Air Force post-war history puts the scope of the fire bomb campaign matter of factly, saying by June Japan's industrial centers "were finished off as profitable targets."

But the raids seemed to do little to bring Japan's capitulation. Some of the damage only enraged its leaders.

"We, the subjects, are enraged at the American acts. I hereby firmly determine with the rest of the 100,000,000 people of this nation to smash the arrogant enemy, whose acts are unpardonable in the eyes of Heaven and men, and thereby to set the Imperial Mind at ease," then-Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro said, according to an account by Richard Sams in The Asia Pacific Journal.

Still, the harm inflicted on Japan was massive.

By the end of the campaign, hundreds of thousands of refugees were created across Japan.

LeMay would later acknowledge the sheer brutality of it. "Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal," he is widely quoted as saying. Instead, LeMay was hailed as a hero, awarded numerous medals and later promoted to lead the US Strategic Air Command.

"The general built, from the remnants of World War II, an all jet bomber force, manned and supported by professional airmen dedicated to the preservation of peace," his official Air Force biography reads. He died in 1990 at the age of 84.

When the Emperor spoke

Among the dead Japanese on March 10 were six of Nihei's close friends. They'd been playing together in the late afternoon of March 9.

"We were playing outside until dusk. We were playing war role play games," she recalled. "My mom called out that dinner was ready, and we promised we would meet to play again the next day."

Tokyo residents who lost their homes as a result of the US bombing air raid "Operation Meetinghouse" conducted on March 10, 1945. That air raid was later estimated to be the deadlist in history.

That summer of 1945 was tough for Nihei. She and her family -- all of whom survived the March 10 raid -- moved from relative to relative, or other temporary accommodation.

Food was short and Nihei found the powdered acorns mixed with water and grains that were available to eat difficult to stomach.

That August, it was announced that, for the first time, Emperor Hirohito would speak directly to the Japanese people. Nihei's family gathered around a radio to hear his voice.

B-29s had struck devastating blows on Hiroshima and Nagaski, this time using atomic bombs, the only time nuclear weapons had been used in battle.

Hirohito never used the words "surrender" or "defeat" but said "the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb" and Japan would need to accept its enemies' demands to save the country.

Nihei didn't care about Japan's defeat nor did she know much about the new bombs that forced it.

"I didn't care if we won or lost as long as there were no fire raids -- I was 9 years old -- it didn't matter for me either way," she said.

How to remember the past

In a quiet corner of Tokyo's Koto ward a two-story building that has the air of a residential home in fact houses the Tokyo Air Raids Center for War Damages.

Since a group of air raid survivors bandied together to crowdfund its opening in 2002, it has been preserving their memories and also remembering that Japanese air strikes inflicted severe damage on Chinese civilians in Chongqing, killing 32,000 people between February 1938 and August 1943. And that horrible airstrikes continue to this day in places like Syria and Yemen.

Katsumoto Saotome, the founder of the Tokyo Air Raids Center, had pushed for there to be a government-funded state museum dedicated to the raids. Hopes for this were dashed in 2010, when Tokyo's municipal government told Saotome there was no public funding available.

Instead, in that year, the Tokyo government began compiling a list of victims. It established a small memorial in the corner of Yokoamicho Park with their names, next to a charnel house with the ashes of Tokyo fire raid victims and those who died in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923.

But these small gestures of commemoration are not enough for survivors of the air raids.

With over 80% of Japanese born after the war, some fear that younger generations are losing touch with that aspect of the past.

"I'm fearful of history repeating itself," said Nihei, who only found the strength to face up to her own past when the Tokyo Air Raids Center was founded.

At first, Nihei was too frightened to go alone to the center in 2002, so she asked a friend to come with her.

Once inside, two images took her breath away.

One was a painting depicting charred bodies piled one on top of another.

"It brought back memories of that day, and I really felt like I owed it to all those people who had died to tell others what happened that day," said Nihei.

The second image portrays the glistening Tokyo skyline. Just above it, children sit on a cloud.

"They reminded me of my best friends, and it made me think they were still having a good time somewhere else."

Google data centers gobble up billions of gallons of water!

To meet surging demand for online information, internet giant taps public water supplies that are already straining from overuse.

Google Data Centers’ Secret Cost: Billions of Gallons of Water
By Nikitha Sattaraju
Bloomberg, April 1, 2020

In August 2019, the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association built a 16-foot pyramid of jugs in its main entrance in Phoenix. The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day — 120 gallons — and to encourage conservation.

“We must continue to do our part every day,” executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post. “Some of us are still high-end water users who could look for more ways to use water a bit more wisely.”

A few weeks earlier in nearby Mesa, Google proposed a plan for a giant data center among the cacti and tumbleweeds. The town is a founding member of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, but water conservation took a back seat in the deal it struck with the largest U.S. internet company. Google is guaranteed 1 million gallons a day to cool the data center, and up to 4 million gallons a day if it hits project milestones. If that was a pyramid of water jugs, it would tower thousands of feet into Arizona’s cloudless sky.

Google considers its water use a proprietary trade secret and bars even public officials from disclosing the company’s consumption.

But information has leaked out, sometimes through legal battles with local utilities and conservation groups. In 2019 alone, Google requested, or was granted, more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states, according to public records posted online and legal filings.

Clashes over the company’s water use may increase as it chases Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in the booming cloud-computing market. Google has 21 data center locations currently. After pumping $13 billion into offices and data centers in 2019, it plans to spend another $10 billion across the U.S. this year.

“The race for data centers to keep up with it all is pretty frantic,” said Kevin Kent, chief executive officer of consulting firm Critical Facilities Efficiency Solutions. “They can’t always make the most environmentally best choices.”

Google often puts data centers close to large population hubs to help its web services respond quickly.  Sometimes that means building in hot and dry regions. The processing units inside heat up easily and water is needed to cool them down.

“We strive to build sustainability into everything we do,” said Gary Demasi, senior director of energy and location operations at Google. “We’re proud that our data centers are some of the most efficient in the world, and we have worked to reduce their environmental impact even as demand for our products has dramatically risen.”

In Red Oak, Texas, a town about 20 miles south of Dallas, Google wants as much as 1.46 billion gallons of water a year for a new data center by 2021, according to a legal filing. Ellis County, which includes Red Oak and roughly 20 other towns, will need almost 15 billion gallons this year for everything from irrigation to residential use, data from the Texas Water Development Board show.

Many parts of Texas are already seeing high water demand, according to Venki Uddameri, director of the water resources center at Texas Tech University. “With climate change, we are expected to have more prolonged droughts,” he said. “These kinds of water-intensive operations add to the local stress.” 

Water-scarce cities have to make trade-offs between conservation and economic development, and cash-rich Google is a big draw. “It’s a constant battle in Texas because of wanting both,” said Uddameri.

In August, Google filed a petition with the Public Utility Commission of Texas to strip a local utility in Red Oak, Rockett Special Utility District, of its federal right to be the sole water supplier to the property. Google said it filed the petition after Rockett confirmed it doesn’t have the capacity to meet the company’s demands. If approved, the petition would let Google get water from another provider.

Rockett contested this in a legal response and said Google provided little information on how the water will be used, both in its application to the utility and in “vague” conversations involving company representatives. Despite that, Google made “incessant” requests for the utility to assess if it can meet the company’s water needs, Rockett said in legal filings. Google paid Rockett to do a report on whether the utility could provide enough water for the project. That report has not been submitted and the internet company has been pressing the utility to complete it, according to Google.

Rockett brought a case against Texas’ public utility commissioners for refusing to dismiss Google’s petition despite being aware of the utility’s rights. A Google entity, Alamo Mission LLC, is named as a defendant in the case. Lawyers for Rockett declined to comment on the ongoing case. Google says it's not the only one looking for an alternative to Rockett. Another development in Red Oak is also seeking an alternate water supply, according to the company.

The planned data center in Red Oak would be Google’s second in Texas. It struck a deal with the city in July 2019. Red Oak officials told residents about Google’s plans ahead of time, according to Todd Fuller, the city manager. There wasn’t much concern about the impact the data center could have on local resources including water, according to Fuller. “Our water system is pretty robust,” he said, adding that the city doesn’t use its full water capacity.

Red Oak isn’t so laid back about water use on its website, though. On a page dedicated to water conservation, the city says it gets half its water supply from Dallas and encourages residents to reduce water use because Dallas’ six reservoirs are 18% depleted.

Mandatory water restrictions will kick in if those sources become 35% depleted. Fuller did not respond to requests for comment on the matter.

Google said it doesn’t use all the water it requests, but the company must make sure enough is available for periods of high demand, or when the weather’s particularly hot. That’s necessary to keep internet services reliable, according to the company.

Google’s data center water use became a subject of controversy last year in Berkeley County, South Carolina. An environmental group opposed the company’s request for 1.5 million gallons of groundwater a day from what it said was a “historically threatened” source.

The company has also worked with Berkeley County Water & Sanitation to get 5 million gallons a day from the Charleston Water system.

Google said its share of this supply is far less than 5 million gallons a day, with the rest available for the broader community.

Google has been trying to secure the 1.5 million gallons—triple the daily amount it’s currently allowed in Berkeley County — since 2016. The Coastal Conservation League took issue with Google’s refusal to share information on how it will be using the extra water.

Despite the opposition, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control granted Google’s request, triggering a backlash from some residents.

The conservation league called out the DHEC for giving Google so much water while asking a local public utility, Mount Pleasant Waterworks, to reduce its withdrawal from the aquifer by 57% over the next four years. The utility exceeded its previous peak use demand by 25% in May 2019, one of the driest months last year in Berkeley County, according to Clay Duffie, general manager of Mount
Pleasant Waterworks.

“It’s unfair that the DHEC is asking us to reduce our water withdrawal while someone like Google can come in and ask for three times more than their original permit and get it,” Duffie said.

Google eventually backed off its groundwater request and reached an agreement with the league to only use it as a last resort. The deal still lets the company withdraw groundwater if there’s a shortfall, when conducting maintenance, or when demand exceeds available potable or storm water supplies during peak user activity.

The Arizona town of Mesa, where Google plans a 750,000 square-foot data center, gets half its water from the drought-prone Colorado River. A contingency plan was signed into law last year requiring states dependent on the river to take voluntary conservation measures. Still, Mesa officials say they remain confident about future supply while continuing to remind residents to limit their water consumption. “We do not have any immediate concerns,” said Kathy Macdonald, a water resources planning adviser with the city.

In 2019, Mesa used 28 billion gallons of water, according to Macdonald. City officials expect that to reach 60 billion gallons a year by 2040, a demand Mesa is capable of meeting, she said.

Big companies like Google wouldn’t locate to the city if it couldn’t meet their water demands, Macdonald said. Mesa passed an ordinance in 2019 to ensure sustainable water use by large operations and fine them if they exceed their allowance.

Google has toiled for years to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. Today, the facilities churn out a lot more computer power for every watt of energy used. In its 2019 environmental report, the company argued that reducing its energy use also makes it more water-efficient. “Generating electricity requires water, so the less energy we use to power our data centers, the less water we use
as well,” it said.

However, data center experts say there’s usually a trade-off between water and energy use. “If the water consumption goes down, energy consumption goes up and vice versa,” said Otto Van Geet, a principal engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Google relies on “evaporative cooling,” which evaporates water to cool the air around the processing units stacked inside data centers, according to its environmental report. The most common systems, known as computer room air conditioners, are energy intensive. Evaporative cooling uses less energy, but the process requires more water. Operators will often embrace the thirstier approach because it’s less expensive, said Cook from Stand.earth.

“Water’s cheap. In many places, the energy costs are much higher” he added.

In a data center application the company filed in Henderson, Nevada, in 2018, Google’s considerations included utility and real estate costs, tax incentives and availability of qualified workers.

Google has paid more attention to water use in recent years. It relies on recycled water or seawater where it can to avoid using drinking water or draining local supplies. Google also says it saves water by recirculating it through cooling systems multiple times. In Mesa, the company is working with authorities on a water credits program, but said it’s too early to share more details.

From 2007 to 2012, Google used regular drinking water to cool its data center in Douglas County, just outside Atlanta. After realizing the water “didn’t need to be clean enough to drink,” the company shifted to recycled water to help conserve the nearby Chattahoochee River. It’s difficult to use similar approaches for other data center locations because the required technology isn’t always available, according to the company.

“The Chattahoochee provides drinking water, public greenspace and recreational activities for millions of people,” the company said in a blog post at the time. “We’re glad to do our part in creating an environmentally sustainable economy along the shores of the Hooch.”

Saudi Arab Journey of Geraldine Rendel in 1937

While traders, herders, soldiers, pilgrims, travelers and more have crisscrossed the central Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years, it is now possible to identify who was likely the first person to go as a tourist in the modern sense of the word: Geraldine Rendel.  “I was privileged to see and do things forbidden to the men who have explored the heart of Arabia,” she wrote.

Sailing from Bahrain to the east coast of Saudi Arabia, George Rendel took this photo of Geraldine aboard the small wooden dhow arranged for them by Saudi King Abdulaziz Al Sa’ud’s agent.

The Arabian Journey of Geraldine Rendel
Written by William Facey
Aramco, March/April 2020

In 1937, at age 52, she accompanied her husband, George, a British diplomat, on a three-week, east-to-west traverse of the five-year-old Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Along the way, she kept a journal that, though intended originally for publication, remained in her family for 80 years.

She became not only the first Western woman to travel openly across Saudi Arabia as a non-Muslim, but also the first to be received in public by the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz Al Sa’ud, and the first to dine in the royal palace in the capital, Riyadh.

Although she had been preceded into central Arabia by a tiny coterie of female travelers—notably Lady Anne Blunt, Gertrude Bell and Dora Philby — unlike them, she was neither a tenacious pioneering female traveler nor on an official mission.

Rather, she went along for the ride. Her purpose was the journey itself. Her account shows her to be a tourist with the decidedly modern attitude in which her personal responses to what she found form as important a part of her narrative as do her descriptions of, and background on, the places and people she encountered.

I stepped off the quay into the boat. ... It was like slipping into another dimension and finding surprisingly that one fitted in. —Geraldine Rendel

Until the 1930s a journey across the Arabian Peninsula by any foreigner, male or female, was rare. Least frequently visited was the interior region of Najd, where accounts came to the West through the occasional writings of explorers, scholars, political agents, horse-fanciers, English-speaking pilgrims and the occasional soldier, all traveling more on business than leisure. But in the 1930s came the search for oil, quickening modernization and deepening relations with a rapidly interconnecting world.

Diplomats and oil-company representatives came first, aided by the advent of the automobile and wireless telegraphy. With them also came cameras—a part of what became modern tourism in which the Rendels excelled. Both proved keen photographers, and their images, now in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London and St Antony’s College in Oxford, rank among the finest from the period.

At the time of the trip, 48-year-old George Rendel was head of the British Foreign Office’s Eastern Department. He had been responsible for Britain’s relations with Saudi Arabia since 1930, and in 1932 it was he who suggested “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” as the official name of the newly declared sovereign state.

When King Abd-ulaziz invited him to pay a semiofficial visit combining diplomacy with travel, the king included Geraldine in the invitation. “I could hardly believe my good fortune,” she wrote in the journal’s first pages, noting “Permission to visit Nejd is rarely given to foreigners.” The couple kept a detailed, handwritten diary, some two-thirds of it penned by Geraldine. It was this that she refined into her travelog that languished, probably for diplomatic reasons, unseen until 2017 when her grandson, Jonathan Rendel, offered it to Arabian Publishing in London.

Geraldine played no role in planning the trip that she refers to as her “Arabian holiday,” even though, like the best tourism, it would prove a transformative experience. “In so far as it is the first record of a European woman’s impressions of Riyadh and of this particular crossing of the Central Provinces of Arabia,” she wrote of her travelog, “it may have an interest of its own. For, as a woman, I was privileged to see and do things forbidden to the men who have explored the heart of Arabia.”

Her journal begins on February 21, 1937, outside the southern Iraqi port of Basra in a “frontier post” called al-Zubayr. The Rendels were on their way to Kuwait in a car convoy across the desert “with low thorny scrub not unlike gorse.” From Kuwait they took ship to Bushire, Iran, and from there to Bahrain, arriving on March 3.

Her descriptions of meeting women of al-Gosaibi and Al Sa’ud families afford rare insights into the side of Saudi Arabian life hidden from public view.

From Bahrain, the Rendels boarded a dhow supplied by King Abdulaziz’s agent in Bahrain and al-Hasa (today’s Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia), Abdulrahman al-Gosaibi. Upon reaching the little port of al-‘Uqayr on Saudi Arabia’s east coast — “a mere speck of civilisation, lying between the sea and the sands,” Geraldine noted—they were met by Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, the king’s representative in
London. He became “our admirable host, guide, philosopher and friend,” Geraldine recorded.

Such language can be read as an indication of the extent the Rendels were conscious of who they were and where they were going: representatives of the world’s most extensive Western empire invited to travel through the heartland of the only Arab country that had never been subjected to European imperial control. Her tone is correspondingly respectful and unpatronizing.

At the same time, Geraldine also revealed herself a traveler in the romantic mould. Like many European travelers in the East, she proved susceptible to seduction by what she took to be unchanging tradition, the more redolent of The Thousand and One Nights the better, while aspects of modernization and progressive change were often so familiar from home as to be unworthy of comment.

“I stepped off the quay into the boat feeling that adventure had begun,” she wrote upon boarding the dhow for Saudi Arabia. “I was walking right out of my life into another of which I had no real conception … I had passed through a magic door and it had shut behind me setting my fancy free. My everyday world grew dim; it was like slipping into another dimension.”

Even George, a seasoned envoy, reflected similar wonder: “As we left the port at Bahrain … we felt we were passing into another age and another world,” he wrote in his own 1957 memoir, The Sword and the Olive.

From the moment they disembarked in al-‘Uqayr, local dress became obligatory for both. Comprehensively veiled, Geraldine found the experience by turns a nuisance, an acknowledgement of local custom, and a surprisingly welcome screen against unwanted curiosity and, of course, the sun. In a society entirely unaccustomed to the public mixing of women with men, her presence elicited wildly contrasting responses.

“My position all through this journey was a mixture of that of a lady of the harem and of a European woman,” she wrote. “When with the Amir [Crown Prince Saud], I was always … put first in everything. But on some other occasions … I stood without being presented to anyone, and no man would speak to me, or even offer me a chair, because no Nejdi looks at any woman outside his own family circle.”

On the other hand, Geraldine received access to the private quarters of the Saudi elite and the women’s side of society. Her descriptions of meeting the al-Gosaibi women and children and, later, those of Al Sa‘ud in Riyadh and Jiddah afford rare insights into the side of Saudi Arabian life hidden from public view.

As her itinerary unfolded, Geraldine’s enchantment intensified. On reaching Hofuf, about 90 kilometers inland from al-‘Uqayr, she and George were accommodated in comfort in the guesthouse of the palace of Amir Saud Ibn Jiluwi. The ladies of the al-Gosaibi family in Hofuf “looked like figures out of some fine Persian miniature come to life,” she wrote.

Her stay was not without at least one harmless faux pas. The Rendels had arrived after dark, and eager to get a good view of the oasis after breakfast, Geraldine climbed to the palace parapet where she “looked out over a city of flat-roofed houses and little open courts” bordered by the gardens of the oasis and the desert beyond. Rapt by the view, she only slowly became aware of the growing noise from below. One court had filled with “the veiled forms of women and children [who] … looked and pointed upwards towards me, and I realised to my confusion that word had gone round that the foreign lady at the Amir’s Guest House was to be seen on the roof of the Palace.” She dropped out of sight as quickly as she could.

Two days later, on their way to Riyadh, the Rendels spent a luxurious night at Crown Prince Saud’s hunting camp in a “romantic tent, which took one straight back to the Golden Age of Arabian history.” One may raise an eyebrow at her preference for the picturesque, reflecting orientalist fantasies, but this was not a prepackaged, sanitized “heritage experience” so common in mass tourism today.

She showed true fortitude and open-mindedness in taking off into unknown territory and enduring the discomforts, thrills, spills and frustrations of real desert travel with patience and good humor.

Indeed, the evening before, the Rendels’s car convoy had been caught in a sandstorm and separated from the vehicles carrying food and camp gear. “We were tentless and bedless and foodless,” she wrote. “Our car had only a canvas hood and was rapidly filling with sand and we were getting pretty cold.”

Then the trucks began to arrive. “The kitchen lorry, alas, was still to seek; but a camp bed and shelter from the bitter wind and driving sand was immeasurable relief. We turned in hungry but cheerful; and incredibly, in spite of the roaring of the wind and the rocking of the tent, slept sound.”

The Rendels were devout Catholics, but far from alienating them from their hosts and the people among whom they traveled, their own faith, it turned out, predisposed them to deeper appreciation of the all-pervasive religious outlook of Najdi society. And far from being irritated by  relaxed attitudes to schedules, they relished the contrast with their own time-tyrannized lives at home. On the
way to Riyadh, George reflected on the tenor of travel in Saudi Arabia, calling it “a strange liberation from the servitude of European life. … The only fixed points in time are sunrise and sunset and the hours of prayer.”

The group’s halts for prayer en route “won our increasing respect,” he wrote in his memoir, going on to note that many of the Arabs he’d met expressed favor toward those of other faiths over those with none.

In Riyadh the Rendels were received warmly by the crown prince, whom they knew from his visit to London in 1935. As aficionados of traditional architecture, they were thrilled to be accommodated in the height of Najdi style, in the New Palace at al-Badi‘ah, in the nearby Wadi Hanifah. “What a luxury this was after four days with only G.’s small shaving mirror and my own handglass in a dark
tent,” wrote Geraldine.

The king himself was away, on the coast in Jiddah, as the pilgrimage season was in full swing at the nearby holy cities of Makkah and Madinah. The meetings the Rendels had with Crown Prince Saud proved both formal and informal. At a private dinner on the last evening, Geraldine was even able to dispense with her veil. The Rendels left Riyadh for Jiddah on March 12 for what was essentially a
sightseeing jaunt southwest across the rest of Saudi Arabia. The scenic route took them first past al-Dir‘iyyah, the ancestral home of the Al Sa’ud on the outskirts of Riyadh, and their photographs provide an especially valuable record. This impressive and ruined city was capital of the first Saudi state, from 1744 to 1818, and it is now a restored unesco World Heritage Site and a showcase of
new museums and venues for public events.

They continued along the timeworn Hijaz Road, passing through places including al-‘Uyaynah, Marat, Duwadmi, Dafinah and Muwayh, en route to ‘Ashayrah, a wooded area in the Hijaz borderlands used for caravan stops. Next came the highlight: a southward leg to the scenic highland town of Taif and the 2,130-meter Shafa escarpment. There they exchanged cars for horses and donkeys, and — when the sun set before they reached the top—overnighted in a primitive and spectacular escarpment village.

“I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened in an English village in, say, the Lake District, if a train of twenty donkeys, six horses and some forty souls had arrived out of the blue at sundown and proposed to spend the night,” Geraldine wrote. “I am afraid English hospitality would not have stood the test. These folk took it quite as a matter of course … and prepared to kill and roast sheep to feed us all.”

Not only that, but “the best house in the village was placed at our disposal” and “a singsong” staged to honor the couple, with poets riffing to the beat of drums. “Several of [the verses] were about our unexpected arrival in the village. They boasted that they always had bread and coffee for all who might come.”

On March 17 they reached Jiddah, and by then they had traveled some 2,175 kilometers from al-‘Uqayr. As Saudi Arabia’s leading western port, Jiddah was home also to most resident British, American and other foreign representatives. They met nearly all of them, and George discussed political business with King Abdulaziz and Prince (later King) Faisal, the foreign minister.

With them also in Jiddah was a trio working for Standard Oil Company of California (Socal) that had followed the Rendels across Saudi Arabia in two light Ford cars: Max Thornburg, Fred Davies and Lloyd Hamilton. They proved genial, despite George pouring cold water on their hopes of making a major oil strike in the al-Hasa region where Socal had outbid British rivals in 1933 to win a royal
concession to explore for oil. “It is doubtful,” he told them, “whether oil will be found in Hasa in commercial quantities.” He declared the future of Socal’s Saudi subsidiary, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, “uncertain.” (Less than a year later drillers would make exactly the discovery George had ruled out, changing Saudi Arabia — and the world — forever.)

A high point for Geraldine came when the finance minister, Shaykh Abdullah al-Sulayman, arranged a tea party to introduce her to King Abdul-aziz. She sat next to the monarch—the first occasion on which he had received any European woman in public. Like almost all foreigners who met him, Geraldine was impressed by his charm and charisma:

Presently a stir in the vestibule outside announced the arrival of the King … [who] shook hands with us [and] seated himself on the throne. … From his photographs I had expected someone grim and stern. What I found was a combination of sweetness and strength, for which I was wholly unprepared. I understood how he might be loved as well as feared by his subjects. The large scale of his mind and
outlook is at once apparent as he talks. … Like other large-minded men, he seems to bring fresh air into any discussion, to brush away trivialities… [H]e is a man of simple habits; moderate in state, puritan in dress, frugal in food.

When the king “expressed the hope that I had not found the journey too tiring,” Geraldine replied she “had found it of absorbing interest. He answered that he feared it was a poor country, ill-repaying a visit. To this I replied that I should look back on my Arabian journey with the keenest pleasure all my life.”

She went on to visit to the royal harem in the Queens’ Palace. Here, with Prince Faisal and Dr. Midhat Shaykh al-Ard, physician to the royal family, in attendance, she met two of the king’s wives. Um Mansur (mother of Mansur) she described as the king’s “favourite wife,” who “seemed to float rather than walk … with her draperies trailing about her like a figure in a dream.”

The younger Um Talal followed, wearing “a black gold-embroidered deraya. … On their feet they had black patent leather slippers of the English variety known as pumps.” By then Geraldine had made an effort to master some Arabic, but she still needed the two men to interpret. “I expressed my pleasure at meeting,” she recounted, “saying how sadly I had missed the society of my own sex whilst crossing Arabia. At this they laughed, the ice was broken and we talked freely.”

When the king “expressed the hope that I had not found the journey too tiring,” Geraldine replied she “had found it of absorbing interest. He answered that he feared it was a poor country, ill-repaying a visit. To this I replied that I should look back on my Arabian journey with the keenest pleasure all my life.”

She went on to visit to the royal harem in the Queens’ Palace. Here, with Prince Faisal and Dr. Midhat Shaykh al-Ard, physician to the royal family, in attendance, she met two of the king’s wives. Um Mansur (mother of Mansur) she described as the king’s “favourite wife,” who “seemed to float rather than walk … with her draperies trailing about her like a figure in a dream.”

The younger Um Talal followed, wearing “a black gold-embroidered deraya. … On their feet they had black patent leather slippers of the English variety known as pumps.” By then Geraldine had made an effort to master some Arabic, but she still needed the two men to interpret. “I expressed my pleasure at meeting,” she recounted, “saying how sadly I had missed the society of my own sex whilst crossing Arabia. At this they laughed, the ice was broken and we talked freely.”

She closes her travelog with reflections on the position of women. While critiquing practices of seclusion and restriction, she also conceded: "Yet they appear happy and give one a real feeling of peace and content. What is more, a sense of dignity; a feeling that they are right with their world and suffer from no sense of inferiority. It was I who felt at times at a disadvantage and conscious of being somewhat blatant and out of place. … There are points as well as drawbacks to every system."

The Rendels left Jiddah on March 22 by sea “with great reluctance” for “our pedestrian life” in London. The poignancy of departure infuses her brief account: “When I gave [butler] Mukhtar a small present as a souvenir of our common experience I think we both had a lump in our throats.”

Like the best tourists, Geraldine felt enlarged by “three weeks of unique experience which had more than justified my most exaggerated hopes.” She signed off her narrative, “My Arabian holiday was over. … As I leaned over the taffrail and looked back across the water to the fast-fading mainland I thought of the widened horizons of time and space and mentally registered a determination — inshallah — to return.”

She never visited the kingdom again. The following year, George was appointed Minister to Bulgaria and, from there, a multitude of increasingly prestigious assignments followed. World War ii broke out in 1939, precluding almost all travel to the kingdom, and Geraldine kept busy in London as the wife of a high-ranking diplomat, deeply active in charitable work as well. She lived to age 81; George to age 90, and her account as “Saudi Arabia’s first tourist,” lives on.

Corona facts, tips, terminologies, etc

The WHO is urging people to know the symptoms and how they can protect themselves from the disease.

Six key facts you need to know about the coronavirus
Alle McMahon

Here’s what Raina MacIntyre, the head of the biosecurity program at the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney, says you need to know.

1. WHAT IS A PANDEMIC?The simple definition of pandemic is when an epidemic goes global, according to Professor MacIntyre.

“Another definition is when you get sustained transmission of the disease within the community in two or more continents,” she said.

“That’s probably the definition we’re looking at, at the moment.”

2. HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO FINDING A VACCINE?Professor MacIntyre said it could take another year to develop a vaccine capable of successfully treating the new coronavirus.

“Normally it can take years – five to 20 years in some instances. But in epidemics ever since the Ebola crisis, we’ve developed more rapid ways of getting vaccines to populations,” she said.

“The soonest I think feasibly we could see it is 12 to 18 months, maybe a bit sooner.”

3. HOW IS COVID-19 TRANSMITTED?The coronavirus is a respiratory disease that grows in the respiratory tract – your sinuses, throat and lungs.

Professor MacIntyre said it could be spread through the air as well as through infected droplets from coughs and sneezes and via contaminated surfaces.

“We know that the load of virus – the number of viruses you can find – is higher in the lungs, deep in the lungs than in the throat or the nose and that favours airborne transmission,” she said.

“But we also know that like SARS and most coronaviruses, it’s spread by droplets – that’s the large respiratory droplets coming from the throat and nose – but also through contact, so contaminated surfaces.

“If someone has coughed or sneezed on a handrail or a table or a chair, and you put your hand there you can then infect yourself.”

4. HOW DO I PROTECT MYSELF?
Face masks and bottles of hand sanitiser are selling out across the country as people rush to protect themselves.

But Professor MacIntyre said simply washing your hands was one of best ways to avoid transmission.

“Hand hygiene is one of the most important things you can do,” she said.

“Just soap and water is enough. You don’t need to use hand gel unless you haven’t got running water.

“If you’re sick, don’t go to work and if your child is sick, don’t send them to school.”

5. HOW IS COVID-19 DIFFERENT FROM OTHER DISEASE LIKE SARS?The current COVID-19 virus has killed more people than SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that killed more than 700 people from 2001-2003.

But the death rate is lower, Professor MacIntyre said.

“COVID-19 has caused more deaths than SARS now in the world, however the death rate – the case fatality rate or the number of deaths per number of cases – is lower.

“It seems to be more contagious and it’s spread more rapidly around China and other countries, (so) the total number of deaths is higher.”

6. HOW CONCERNED SHOULD WE BE?“It is concerning that while China has managed to control the epidemic and the numbers are going down, we’re now seeing epidemics taking off in other countries,” she said.

“That’s a concern because every country needs to be equally vigilant and quick to respond.”