https://zephoria.medium.com/what-if-failure-is-the-plan-2f219ea1cd62

Normal rule

You can almost hear Anne "everything's fine, everything's normal"

Another Angry Woman. (2022, January 1). A reminder that sometimes “living with it” means taking some mitigations, forever, e.g. How in order to live with cholera we make sure our water doesn’t have shit in it by building infrastructure to make sure our water doesn’t have shit in it. [Tweet]. @stavvers. https://twitter.com/stavvers/status/1477362596097536018

Lawrence Gostin. (2022, January 1). History shows most pandemics last 2-3 years. Covid-19 has been a wily foe #NewYear2022 should see the pandemic’s end in highly vaccinated nations. Strive mightily to access vaccines everywhere But Covid-19 will remain endemic everywhere. The new normal means living with the virus [Tweet]. @LawrenceGostin. https://twitter.com/LawrenceGostin/status/1477087584459370507

Thrasher, S. W. (n.d.). There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID. Scientific American. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-nothing-normal-about-one-million-people-dead-from-covid1/

Seth Trueger. (2021, September 14). Https://t.co/LFZ3xWkYYY [Tweet]. @MDaware. https://twitter.com/MDaware/status/1437780952890191878

The Atlantic. ‘The Most Likely Timeline for Life to Return to Normal’. Accessed 2 March 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/02/pandemic-daily-life-normal-summer-fall/618108/.

‘Covid-19: Normal Life Back next Winter, Says Vaccine Creator’. BBC News, 15 November 2020, sec. Health. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54949799.

Business, A. T., CNN. (n.d.). The economy as we knew it might be over, Fed Chairman says. CNN. Retrieved 18 November 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/economy/economy-after-covid-powell/index.html

’Normal wasn’t working’—John Kerry, Phillip Atiba Goff and others on the new social contract post-COVID. (n.d.). World Economic Forum. Retrieved 12 August 2020, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/great-reset-social-contract-john-kerry-phillip-goff/

Berwick, D. M. (2020). Choices for the “New Normal.” JAMA. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6949

How We Reopen Safely—Covidexitstrategy.org. (n.d.). Retrieved June 17, 2020, from https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/

Maynard, M. (2020, June 15). What I Found When My Favorite Local Restaurants Re-Opened. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2020/06/15/what-i-found-when-my-favorite-local-restaurants-re-opened/

Dr. Van Hyning, V. (2020 May 14) Lessons for lockdown from Early Modern convents | The British Academy. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/lessons-lockdown-early-modern-convents/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=Digital&utm_term=20200518

New Norms And Difficult Dogs: The Week’s Best Psychology Links. (2020, May 15). BPS. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/05/15/new-norms-and-difficult-dogs-the-weeks-best-psychology-links/

Pragholapati, A. (2020). NEW NORMAL “INDONESIA” AFTER COVID-19 PANDEMIC [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7snqb

Stadnytskyi, V., Bax, C. E., Bax, A., & Anfinrud, P. (2020). The airborne lifetime of small speech droplets and their potential importance in SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 202006874. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006874117

Varmus, H. (2020, May 9). The World Doesn’t Yet Know Enough to Beat the Coronavirus. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/lack-testing-holding-science-back/611422/

But what is "normal"?

Ahmad, A. S. (2020, March 27). Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-You-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366

The normal distribution in r

Ocular findings in Congenital Toxoplasomsis:

• 79% patients have chorioretinal scars *Scar may involve macula with significant decrease in visual acuity
• scar may involve periheral area with decreased acuity by dragging of macula

Normal Retina

Chorioretinal scar in congenital toxoplasmosis

Other posterior ocular complications include:

• retinal attachment and active chorioretinitis in 10%
• Optic atrophy in 20%
• Other findings may include: cataracts, microphtalmia, microcornea, nystagmus.

Designed during the first months of World War II, the Canol Pipeline brought oil from Norman Wells near the Mackenzie River to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. Once the oil was refined, it would be sent to Alaska via pipeline to ensure that the Japanese navy could not intercept any transport. The oil deposits at Norman Wells were discovered by the explorer Alexander Mackenzie during the 18th century. In January of 1942, Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, commanding general of the Army Service Forces, ordered James H. Graham, former dean of engineering at the University of Kentucky, to investigate the possibility of harvesting oil from Norman Wells. On April 29, 1942, General Somervell immediately approved the recommendation of Dean Graham to implement a pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse (O'Brien, 1970). The construction began in 1942 and was completed in 1944 by the United States Army. A road was also constructed alongside the Canol pipeline during this time. In 1945, soon after the completion of the Canol Pipeline, the volume of crude oil that was able to be transported compared to the cost of operating the pipeline could not be justified. The Canol Pipeline was shut down and abandoned in 1945 (Wilson, 1991). 

References

O'Brien, C. F. (1970). The Canol Project: A Study in Emergency Military Planning. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 101-108.

Wilson, W. H. (1991). Review: A Walk on teh Canol Road: Exploring the First Major Northern Pipeline. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 114.

In some ways this feels a little too close to the saying "there is no normal." Conversely, because of my interests in disabilities studies, this gets a little too close to the belief that "we are all disabled." How closely does this proposal align with those (verging on banal) mottos?

Normal is a powerful, potent, and potentially pernicious black box. And it is frequently a black box deployed against rhetoric.

Canguilhem also, in Knowledge of Life, notes that humans are unique in their ability to shelter and compensate for the anormal in their society. This further lessens the impact of natural selection in determining the normal and emphasizes how normativity is constructed by the norm.

Canguilhem's basis for this is also pretty interesting. Medicine is the one science that has "good" and "bad" as measurements. He defines health as "a capacity to tolerate variations in norms...The measure of health is a certain capacity to overcome organic crises and to establish a new physiological order, different from the old" ("The Normal and the Pathological" loc 2627)

Paradigm shifts are part of the science that follows (i.e. are filled in by normal science, in Kuhn's terms).

Really useful passage to compare to Kuhn. This is basically an argument about paradigm shifters and normal science as applied to literature.