Monthly Archives: August 2019

The Paris Gang

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Ever since my Uncle Tommy died not long ago, Leah and I have been meeting Aunt Micki for lunch almost every Wednesday. A couple of cousins also come to our lunches. We have not had this much interaction with my relatives in a long time, and both of us enjoy it.

On Friday, we met Micki at a chicken place. She brought along one of her long-time tennis partners. It turns out her long-time tennis partner is my cousin. Her grandfather was my father’s grandfather, and her mother was my father’s aunt. She brought along family photos of her grandfather and his eight sons, and her grandfather and grandmother with their four daughters. One of the sons was Grady V. Paris Sr, my father’s father.

The bearded fellow in the front row is her grandfather, and all the rest are her uncles. Leah and I think my grandfather, Grady Sr, was the second from the right in the rear. Here is a photo that I think is my grandfather with his dog.

Here is the photo of my great-grandfather with his wife and their four daughters.

The poor, little lady sitting next to my great-grandfather was the mother of those eight boys and four girls. It’s no wonder she looks played out. The sister with her hand on her mother’s shoulder was my newly-found cousin’s mother.

I have met only one of the people in the picture of the men, and I do not know which one it was. He was called Ab. Apparently he was a riverboat gambler at one time. Today there is no way to verify that story, since anyone who could know of it is long dead.

The men are not named on the photograph. My cousin said hers is a just a copy that she got from her brother (now in his 90’s). She hopes her brother’s possibly original photo has names on the back. If so, we can identify my grandfather and Great Uncle Ab for sure.

It seems that the Paris family is pretty big. It also seems that I am descended from a dog lover. No surprise there.

Clematis reborn

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My parents had a clematis growing on their mailbox. It was a healthy and profusely overgrown. We wanted one for our mailbox, so we planted one last year. It was small, but it grew. Early this summer it began to bloom. It had large, lavender flowers.

And then one day I noticed some of the leaves had turned brown. I cut the branch off. Then a few more leaves turned brown. Then they all turned brown and shriveled up and died. I looked up the symptoms, and it seems we had a fungal infection, called clematis wilt.

There is apparently no treatment for clematis wilt. It eventually kills the plant back to the ground. So where we had a nice vine with a good bloom before, we ended up with a bare trellis and mailbox. The information I found gave some hope that the roots would survive, so we thought maybe the clematis would come back next year.

Surprise. It came back this year. I noticed a couple of bright green leaves at ground level first. I wasn’t sure it was actually the clematis, but it kept growing. Fast. So fast it seemed that if I turned my back on it, it would grow two inches by the time I turned back around. And it had lots of buds. One of them bloomed some time between Thursday evening and Friday morning. It rained lightly overnight, and a the flower was still wet when I took this photo.

Clematis comes in various forms, some shrubby and some climbing, like ours. There are some varieties that can grow quite tall, up to maybe 20 feet. Ours is not one of those, although it would be nice to have one like that. They are fast growers, as I can attest from ours. They are deciduous in our climate, so ours will lose its leaves over the winter, assuming it survives. If it keeps going as it is now, we should easily get a dozen or more blooms before cold weather.

Dishwasher revived

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I mentioned in an earlier post that our dishwasher had died. I did some online research, which recommended a diagnosis routine, which indicated that our dishwasher was brain dead. So I ordered a new brain.

The brain came. I did some more online research and found a video that showed how to do a brain transplant. As usual for such things, the video instructions were both complete and incomplete.

The instructions showed a disembodied hand opening the front panel and removing some screws. I opened the front panel and found more than one screw in the indicated location. After one false start I identified the correct screws.

Then the instructions said to remove two more screws, after which the brain pan would drop down, conveniently exposing the dead brain. I removed the screws, and the pan did not drop. I had to pry, which was not easy. But eventually doable.

I removed the old brain and installed a new one. I closed, and then turned the power back on. Of course I had flipped the circuit breaker before touching all those electrical connections between the brain and the rest of the dishwasher. Lights appeared on the control panel, a good indicator, but not conclusive. A test dishwashing was required. Fortunately, we had dirty dishes. I set the washer to come on at 2 am and got up the next morning to clean dishes. Victory!

Here is the offending circuit board and all of the tools necessary to do the repair.

By the way, the floor is hard.

Sam runs

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I have been able to walk outside with every dog I have ever had and trust them off the leash, except one — Zeke. We have had Zeke so long that I had forgotten what it was like to have a dog off leash and not have him immediately run away.

That’s why it feels so odd when I let Sam off leash. We have had him for about three and a half years, and in all that time I have walked him and the other dogs on a leash. Recently I decided to let him off the leash and see what he did. What he does is act like a normal dog. He doesn’t run away. But he is very happy to be off the leash. I take both dogs into the front yard and then let Sam loose. He usually runs around for a while like he’s crazy. He runs figure 8’s around the yard. I wanted to video him doing that, but this is the best I could do.

The bare ground where he stopped for a second is one of the sections of the yard I prepared for grass but never got any grass to grow. The dirt is well tilled and soft, so the cats consider it a perfect toilet. Dogs, as you may know, sometimes eat cat poop. I have read a bit about that particular disgusting habit, but I can’t say for sure why they do it. But they do. And Sam does.

One afternoon last week as I was sitting at my computer, Sam came in a laid down beside my chair. Then he threw up a big mess of liquid, a few pieces of dog food, and a couple of pieces of still-recognizable cat poop. Now you may think dog vomit smells bad, and you may think cat poop smells bad, but you don’t know the meaning of “smells bad” until you smell the two together.

I keep an eye on him now to make sure he doesn’t get too interested in rooting around in the loose dirt. It is fortunate that he minds reasonably well, like all of my other dogs except Zeke.

And now, as to Zeke. A little after lunch on Thursday Zeke got out. I immediately started driving around to try to find him. I actually saw him in a neighbor’s yard almost right away, but he disappeared before I could get to him. I drove around for about a half an hour with no luck, and then decided to give up for a while. As I drove up the driveway, I saw him lying in the shade of our pet maple tree. This was just as Leah was coming down the front stairs. By the time I parked my truck and came back around to the front yard, he had disappeared down the driveway. Leah said he was not moving too fast, so I gave chase.

In my case, “chase” is a charitable way to describe the way I followed him. I couldn’t go much faster than a fast walk down the driveway because it’s too steep for my knees. But I saw Zeke and I was gaining on him. He looked behind him, saw me, and quickened his pace. Not long ago he would have easily left me behind, but not today. When I reached the road, I managed to speed up and catch him. I don’t think he actually heard me because of his hearing problem, but he stopped as soon as I put my hand on his back.

Fortunately for me, I had taken a naproxen the night before, and it really helps my knees. Otherwise I could probably not have managed the “run”, and my knees would have been hurting afterwards.

But how sad for Zeke that an old man with bad knees could catch him.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson and mass shootings

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He has a PdD in astrophysics. Although he has published research papers, the last one I could find was in 2008. These days he is known for his popular books on science, and as a science popularizer on TV, radio and online. That in itself is not a bad thing; in fact, it is a very good thing to do, assuming it’s done well.

As a famous person (at least in some circles), Tyson apparently often makes public statements regarding current events. One of his recent statements, delivered via Twitter, has been the object of criticism. Here is Tyson’s tweet:

“In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings. On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

  • 500 to Medical errors
  • 300 to the Flu
  • 250 to Suicide
  • 200 to Car Accidents
  • 40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.”

I have a PdD in atmospheric science. I am neither a working scientist nor a famous public figure. You won’t find any research published by me after my dissertation. None of the work I did for nearly 30 years was pure science, and none of it will ever be published in any open literature. Not that anyone would be interested. But I, too, have opinions about current events, although I seldom publish them on this blog. I make an exception in this case. Here is my response to Tyson’s tweet:

Tyson’s statement isn’t even nonsense. It’s basically just a list of facts followed by a non sequitur. A list of facts is meaningless in itself without a relevant conclusion. It reminds me of something I saw in graduate school. A doctoral candidate does research (hopefully original), analyzes the data and then draws a conclusion in his dissertation. Then the dissertation must be defended before a reading committee. I attended the defense of one of my fellow students. At that meeting he went through his data, and there was a lot of it. He then applied a lot of statistical analysis. And then he stopped. One of the committee members asked what his conclusion was. He had none. They told him to go back, finish his work, draw some meaningful conclusions, and then come back to defend his work.

I was surprised that his advisor had allowed him to reach that stage without doing the very thing that a dissertation is supposed to do, which is draw conclusions.

All the data in the world is meaningless without some kind of analytical conclusion. Tyson gives us “Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data”? What does that even mean? Does it mean that mass shootings are spectacle? Does it mean that we should look at lists of data rather than reports of a mass shooting? Does it mean that the deaths of 34 people from one cause is not important because more people have been killed from other causes? Is it merely an academic observation on the failings of human nature? Is it a Delphic pronouncement from on high?

He issued an apology on Facebook with some explanation for what he intended. His apology was even worse. Here it is:

“My intent was to offer objectively true information that might help shape conversations and reactions to preventable ways we die. Where I miscalculated was that I genuinely believed the Tweet would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America. What I learned from the range of reactions is that for many people, some information–my Tweet in particular–can be true but unhelpful, especially at a time when many people are either still in shock, or trying to heal–or both.”

This is not nonsense, but it is bullshit. I assume that his list of causes of death is accurate (it seems to be reasonably accurate, although it is not an exhaustive list of preventable deaths), but in what way does that help shape conversations and reactions? In what way could it possibly be “helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America”?

He says “for many people some information … can be true but unhelpful…”

Really? Subtle dig there, right? I guess “many people” are not smart scientists like he is. Perhaps he should not have been so subtle.

Since he can’t seem be bothered to give us any conclusions, we are left to come up with some meaning on our own. In that case, why does Tyson even bother to tweet? It adds nothing to the public debate about a serious health and policy issue. It adds nothing to the problem of suicide. It adds nothing to the problem of medical errors. It adds nothing to our understanding of causes of mass shootings, or any of the other causes of death, for that matter. It tells us nothing about what we might think or do about any of these causes of death. It adds nothing because most of those causes of death are completely unrelated, and efforts to reduce those numbers would also be completely unrelated. Trying to reduce medical errors has nothing to do with trying to reduce the incidence of mass shootings. What is the flu doing in the list? How are we supposed to relate deaths from car accidents to deaths from mass shootings? Are we supposed to tackle all of these causes of death one at a time, starting with the biggest numbers and proceeding to the smallest? Can we not work on, let’s say, two at a time? Or even three? Or maybe even all of them?

I think Tyson has fallen prey to a weakness that other scientists have. It’s the idea that because they know, understand, and can speak authoritatively about some particular subject, they must be able to speak with authority about any other subject. There are enough counter examples that a science popularizer ought to be familiar with the dangers inherent in that belief. I guess he felt like he had to say something, and it had to be sciencey. Unfortunately, it seems that even coming up with something that reaches the level of nonsense is beyond him.

My understanding is that Neil DeGrasse Tyson does not do actual scientific research any more. If this tweet is an example of how he would apply his knowledge and analytical skills to science, then it’s probably a good thing he’s no longer a scientist.