Sylvester must have been really tired today.
Sly on his back
He doesn’t usually sleep on his back. In fact, I don’t remember seeing him sleeping on his back ever before this.
You can see a little of his blue collar. He finally let us put it on.
Zeke was one sorry dog Monday night.
Not feeling so well, eh?
Late in the afternoon he went out on the deck with me, and saw/heard/smelled something in the woods. So he ran down the stairs, jumped over the gate and disappeared. I gave him a while, because I know from experience that it’s almost impossible to chase him down, and then I went looking for him. No luck. It was way after sunset when I got the car out and began looking up and down Fouche Gap Road. Zeke doesn’t really understand cars, so I was halfway expecting to come home with bad news. Instead I came home with Zeke.
I found him at the side of the road close to the house. I opened the back door and he jumped in. When I got him back home, I noticed that his stomach was absolutely full.
Full belly peeking out from beneath uncomfortable dog
That bulge right in front of his right rear leg is not normal for him, at least not since he lost 15 pounds. What looks like a bulge on his left side is his rib cage, which is prominent because of the way he’s lying.
He was clearly uncomfortable. He moaned and walked around the house. He would lie down next to the front door, which usually means he wants to go outside. I took him out but nothing happened at either end of the dog. Some time before we went to bed, he wanted to go out and sit on our elevated front walk. There he threw up what looked like a couple of pieces of raw stew beef and organ meat, possibly smallish livers.
I cleaned that up and let him back inside. A little while later when we were in the bedroom, he started making the noise that dogs do when they’re getting ready to vomit. I couldn’t get him outside, but at least he threw up on the tile in the dining room instead of the bedroom carpet. It looked pretty similar to the earlier sample, but without livers and with more fat.
Later still (I didn’t get much sleep Monday night), he went out on the front walk again, where he vomited a larger portion of whatever he ate. It still looked like he had found and eaten someone’s stew beef.
Even later, he wanted to go out, so I got up from the bed, put on a jacket and walked him around the house. I didn’t bother to put pants on over my short pajama bottoms. I don’t recommend that. Zeke didn’t do anything other than sniff the air. Looking for more raw meat, I guess.
I am pretty sure he didn’t catch and eat an animal, because there was no sign of fur or bones. All that came out, other than the possible organ meat, looked like fresh, red beef that you might see in the grocery store. I started worrying about someone trying to poison coyotes, but it had been long enough since he ate that, at least based on some Web research, he should have already started showing signs of strychnine poisoning. Whatever it was, he apparently got rid of enough of it that he was able to sleep for most of the night, which is more than I can say for myself.
Today for breakfast he got a few individual pieces of dog food instead of his normal portion. By lunch he seemed more like his old self, and by tonight he seemed almost recovered, although he didn’t eat the two dog biscuits he normally does. He mouthed one unenthusiastically for a while, and then Leah picked up the second and put it away. Right now, he is still lying next to the front door instead of in his bed.
I don’t think he’s quite over it yet. I would like to think he learned a lesson, but that would be fooling myself.
Here in Georgia, it’s almost impossible to avoid regular news reports of how much money the MegaMillions lottery is worth, and with the jackpot at over a half a billion dollars, it’s even worse than usual. It’s like they’re conspirators with the lottery organization, trying to drum up more business. If that’s not bad enough, most of the reports have been full of stupid probability comparisons.
According to the back of the play ticket, the current probability of winning the MegaMillions jackpot is one in 258,890,850, usually shortened to one in 259 million. (You can calculate it yourself. Here it is: 75*74*73*72*71*15/(5*4*3*2). If you want, you can express it this way: 75!*15/(5!*70!) where “!” is the factorial notation.) Lately the news reports have been adding that you are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than win the lottery.
Is that true? I decided to look into it. There are a number of Web sites that indicate that it’s true. For example, Wired says the odds of being hit by an asteroid are one in 250,000 (They should really express odds as 1:249,999, which is one chance in 250,000, but that’s way too abstruse.) But Wired provides nothing to back up that probability.
The Economist quotes the chance of an asteroid impact of 78,817,414/1 (the apparent source is the National Safety Council; National Academies in Britain, presumably, and also presumably an impact that results in one’s death). So maybe that’s a good number.
On the other hand, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab should have a pretty decent idea about the probabilities of an asteroid hitting the Earth. According to their Web site, although the Earth has been hit by quite a few large asteroids (Apparently a body smaller than one kilometer would be a meteorite if it hit the Earth. A larger one would be considered an asteroid. But that’s way too abstruse.), “no human in the past 1000 years is known to have been killed by a meteorite or the effects of one impacting.” They note that there are ancient Chinese records of such a death. The say that as best they can tell, there is no large asteroid (the kind that causes widespread destruction and mass deaths) that is likely to strike the Earth in the next several hundred years. That seems to imply probabilities far, far lower than winning the jackpot, at least when calculated over reasonable time spans, like a human lifetime.
The requirement for calculating over a reasonable period brings up another point. I’ve been trying to decide whether the comparison between the probabilities is right or wrong, but I think the asteroid comparison is not just wrong, it’s worse than wrong. It’s actually meaningless. The lottery is a single event, one that takes place once at a specific time, and so the probability applies only for the event. The probability that I will win the lottery before the drawing is zero. So is the probability that I will win after the drawing. But the probability of being hit by an asteroid can only be specified over a period of time. The probability that I will be hit by an asteroid within the next second is vanishingly small. The probability that I will be hit by an asteroid within the next 20 years is also small, but different. So saying that the probability of being hit by an asteroid is larger than the probability of winning the lottery is meaningless unless a time period is specified. But, for the news media, that’s way too abstruse.
Even if you grant that they actually mean that the probability of being hit by an asteroid over the remainder of your lifetime is greater than winning the next lottery, they’re still wrong. I think you can get a pretty good idea of that from a purely intuitive sense. Consider that the population of the United States is about 314 million. To my knowledge, no one has been killed by a meteorite this year, or last, or the one previous to that, for as long as I can remember. The population of the Earth is about 7 billion, and still, according to the JPL, no one has been reported to have been killed by an asteroid within the last 1000 years. If the probability is greater than the lottery probability, I am pretty sure there would have been reliable reports by now. And since there have been none, I am pretty sure the probabilities are not as great as the news reports are saying.
But still, the probability of winning the lottery is very small. It’s so small that it’s hard to come up with a comparison that has makes any intuitive sense. I always say that your chance of winning the lottery is essentially the same whether you buy a lottery ticket or not. Of course, that’s not really true. But it might as well be.
Admission:
Despite the irrationality of playing a gambling game with odds so absurdly skewed towards the house, Leah and I do buy lottery tickets, and have since we started dating. My mother played the lottery even before that and for a long time I refused to buy her tickets for her. I thought it was just a waste of money. We recognize that it’s basically a tax on the mathematically illiterate, but we explain it on the same basis as a lot of people – it lets us fantasize for a while about what we would do if we won. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Sylvester was doing his tough kitty act, but the crumbs from the kitty treats on his chin kind of spoiled the effect.
Don’t mess with me. I’m already messy enough.
If you watch Fox news or listen to much AM talk radio, you have probably heard of Dave Ramsey. He is a popular personal financial advisor with books, seminars and a call-in radio show. When I was working more regularly in Huntsville and had to drive somewhere around lunchtime, I would sometimes listen to his radio show because there was nothing else on. If you can get past his self-satisfied expressions of his Christian beliefs and right-wing politics, he has some reasonable advice for people who buy cars they can’t afford and run up huge credit card balances. What he tells them to do is to stop using their credit cards, pay off their debts, stop buying things they can’t afford and get onto a budget.
Fine advice, but I sometimes have to turn off the radio when he gets too deep into his personal religion and his politics, which don’t seem too … let’s say, progressive. “Christian financial advice” seems self contradictory to me. I am pretty sure there are no words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament that are favorably inclined towards wealth or the accumulation of it. The verses I can remember are things like Jesus telling the rich man to sell all he has and give the money to the poor, or how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven, or that a man can’t serve both god and money. I never heard Dave Ramsey advise anyone to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor. Not even close, not even once. He is far more likely to advise people to follow the habits of the rich.
But, back to the point.
One thing Ramsey likes to tell people is that if you live like no one else today, later you can live like no one else. Putting aside the weak rhetorical structure, what he is advising is that people should live frugally, eating rice and beans, saving their money and paying off their debts, so that later they can live like rich people.
I have no problem with most of that. Leah and I have no debt. We own our house and pay off our credit card in full every month. We are pretty frugal. And I like rice and beans, although I can’t convince Leah that they make a perfectly good meal, even without meat.
But I don’t like the principle behind Ramsey’s saying. Basically, it’s the old puritan principle of deferred gratification.
My work history, as shown in my Social Security earnings record, looks kind of spotty. I have spent a large percentage of my working life not working. In fact, I have a pretty solid record of quitting whatever it is I’m doing if I don’t like it. I’ve dropped out quite a few times, both from school and from work. Since about 1997 I haven’t even had a full-time job. I have worked as an independent contractor, which has allowed a work schedule more suited to my personality.
For 55 years, or at least the adult part of that, I never gave much consideration to money or what I would do for money in Dave Ramsey’s “later.” When I traveled, I usually spent the nights in the bed of my truck with the dog, and I figured I could always do that “later.”
All of this is just to point out that I am not an ant. It’s not that I have spent all my money, I just never really planned for retirement. That is, until I got married. Leah has never thought it was very funny when I suggested our retirement home should be under one of Rome’s bridges. We’ve been doing some serious work on retirement savings, so I don’t think we’re going to have to do that, but I still don’t believe in Dave Ramsey’s deferred gratification philosophy. I don’t think you should put off doing thing until later, because later may never come. Instead of “live like no one else today”, how about “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” or “carpe diem” or even “there is no time like the present”?
Or, how about one of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy sayings? Charles Schulz died almost 14 years ago, but his comic strip Peanuts has lived on. I’m glad, because I have been looking for one of the Peanuts strips, and it recently appeared in the Atlanta paper. In this strip, Charlie Brown brings Snoopy two bowls of food and tells Snoopy that he will be gone the next day, so he should save one bowl for tomorrow. Snoopy eats one bowl and returns to lie on his doghouse. He resists for a while, but is eventually overcome and leaps on the second bowl and eats it. Then he lies on the roof of his doghouse and says, “I’m glad I ate it … I would have hated myself if tomorrow had never come!”
I’m with you, Snoopy, you and the grasshopper.