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I've observed something interesting in my garden and I'm curious if anyone else has seen this, and whether it's a known phenomenon. I'm growing Wickline cherry tomatoes in the same bin as some asparagus, and the tomato leaves are bending around the asparagus stems as if they're tendrils. I've never seen tomatoes do this to their metal cages, and they don't do it to other tomato stems or to string, as far as I've seen. I suspect it's some kind of chemotropism, where the a chemical in the asparagus is either acting as a signalling chemical or directly inhibiting growth in the side of the stem touching it. (As opposed to thigmotropism, where the stem would curl around anything it touched.)

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We need a better approach for pandemic self-isolation in modern America, given our baseline individualism, nuclear families, and nearly nonexistent social safety nets. Neighborhood resilience is an important step, but I think we can build on that to support people who need other people to come in their houses—such as those with other illnesses, those who need childcare, and other situations.

This is inspired by the needs of those with children. Children need other children to play with, the children need to be supervised, and the adults cannot work (from home or elsewhere) if the children are in the throes of cabin fever. And most challenging of all, children are terrible at hygiene, so any families that have children playing together should assume they are all in the same "transmission pool".

Here I propose a model for ad-hoc cell-based resilience. If you have research papers or studies that have bearing on this. please send them my way. If you know any experts on epidemiology or community resilience in epidemics, I would love to get their thoughts on all this.

This is not a guide, it is a discussion prompt. If feedback looks positive, perhaps someone could turn this from a specification into a public-friendly protocol, but this has not yet received review of any sort, so please do not share it as if it is an expert's recommendation.

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