Category Archives: General

Come Back, Little Zoe

Posted on by

Our cat Zoe has disappeared. Leah let him out Thursday night around 11. He ate a little dry food in the garage and we haven’t seen him since. Normally when he stays out overnight, he’s at the door first thing for his food. But not Friday morning.

We’ve looked in all the places he frequents, but there is absolutely no sign of him.

We’ve had cats that stay outside ever since we moved up here, and, although there are potential predators around, there have never been any problems. I have seen coyotes in the woods and on Fouche Gap Road some distance away, but we have never seen one anywhere near the house. I don’t think foxes are responsible; they have eaten cat food in the driveway with the cats looking on, and the cats and the foxes never bother each other.

Zoe doesn’t stray far from the house, so we don’t think he has wandered off and found a new home. Besides, all of our closer neighbors know who he belongs to, so they would let us know.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

So far he has been missing for 24 hours. We haven’t completely given up hope that he will show up again. He hasn’t been the most rewarding cat to own, but Leah is really attached to him.

The mirror paradox, and the lightness of air

Posted on by

The “mirror paradox” (why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down?) has been around for quite a while. I think I first encountered it reading a Straight Dope book back in the 1970’s. My advisor asked several of us the question when I was in graduate school in the ‘80’s. If you Google “mirror paradox” you will get a fair number of hits (like this, this and this) that explain the paradox. Most of the explanations are long and involved, far longer and more involved than they need to be.

I should note that I enclose mirror paradox in quotes because it’s not really a paradox. It’s another case in which the problem is stated in misleading terms.

First, here’s the answer: A mirror does not reverse left and right, or up and down; it reverses in and out. To prove that to yourself, take and arrow or anything else with a pointed end, and stand in front of a mirror. Point the arrow to your left. The mirror image of the arrow also points to your left. Point it up, and the reflection also points up. Point the arrow in towards the mirror and the reflected arrow points out, towards you.

I sent this explanation in to the Straight Dope people, and they responded that I was right (or course) but that the explanation wasn’t satisfying. I think they wanted more philosophy.

Looking at left and right hands is confusing, because you tend to assign leftness or rightness based on the assumed perspective of an individual. In the case of the mirror paradox, you assign leftness or rightness to your reflection based on what an actual person would perceive if the mirror image were an actual person. But just ignore the imagined person in the mirror that seems to be raising the wrong hand. It’s not really a person, it’s just a reflection. Use an arrow to avoid confusion.

And now the last of my trick questions. This is not really a trick question, but it is kind of a nerdy question. Everyone knows that air is light and water is heavy. In fact, water is more than 800 times heavier than air. Most people have heard a weather forecaster talk about relative humidity, and understand that “humid” air contains water vapor, or water molecules, mixed in with the air. The question is this: is humid air heavier, the same weight, or lighter than the same volume of dry air?

The answer, and another question

Posted on by

Here’s the answer to the question I asked in the last post: There is no place on Earth where the sun will not shine on the north side of a house.

It’s possible to answer the question with a little fairly common knowledge and some observation. The knowledge you need is that close to the poles in the summer, the sun does not set but instead goes all the way around the horizon, South, East, North and

West. The observation you need is to notice that in the northern hemisphere summer, the sun rises north of East and sets north of West. That means, of course, that the sun shines on the north side of a house in the morning and in the evening. Given that, it seems reasonable to me that you might assume that since the sun shines for part of the day on the north face of a house in the midlatitudes, where most of us live, and for part of the day at the North Pole, there probably isn’t anywhere in between those where the sun doesn’t shine on the north face of a house at some time in the day. And if you assumed that, you would be right.

You can demonstrate it mathematically, but there really isn’t any reason to do it.

Remember, I said it was a trick question.

Most of the information I gave was true but misleading. I mentioned that the sun stays below the horizon all day long for some winter days north of the Arctic Circle. And I mentioned that the noon-day sun is north of the zenith when you’re in the northern tropics. I didn’t mention that the sun never sets on some summer days north of the Arctic Circle, and t didn’t say that the sun has to shine on the north face at noon, only that it must never shine on the north face of a house.

Here’s another trick question.

If you look at your image in a mirror and extend your right hand towards the mirror, the image in the mirror seems to extend its left hand towards you. But if you extend your hand up, the image does the same. So, why does a mirror reverse left and right, but not up and down?

Catching up

Posted on by

A few things have happened in the last week, so this is a catch-up post.

First, we had to call an ambulance last Friday, October 17, because Leah was having severe abdominal pain and vomiting. This is the second time we’ve had to do that. The first time was in 2011. That resulted in surgery to fix an intestinal blockage. The blockage was the caused by adhesions and scarring from the colon cancer surgery she had back in 1999.

Leah has had relatively minor episodes several times this year. An x-ray in July had shown what was characterized as a chronic, partial blockage. A colonoscopy in early September (Leah’s second this year) did not show anything in the colon, so we (and presumably the doctors) were left not really knowing what was going on.

This time there was no question that something bad was happening. Fortunately, Leah began feeling better fairly quickly and the blockage, if that is, indeed what it was, resolved with no surgery. She had one CT scan and an x-ray while she was in the ER, and at least two x-rays after she was admitted. The first scans they took during this stay seemed consistent with the July x-ray, but a later scan where they followed an x-ray opaque liquid through her small intestine showed quick passage, indicating no blockage in the small intestine. At one time her surgeon thought it might be gastroenteritis, but that did not seem to be the case.

In any event, Leah came home on Tuesday and has been on a liquid/soft diet since. They told her at the hospital that it might take two weeks to get back to normal.

That means two weeks without huevos rancheros.

Once Leah made it home, I started tramping over our new property to find the middle of the lot, which is where we plan to build. The most work I did was clearing a wide enough path to drive our side-by-side 4-wheeler (a Kawasaki Mule) up to the site with a chainsaw and other tools. There are lots and lots of trees, ranging from small enough to cut with large lopping shears to large enough to require a lot of planning before cutting with a chainsaw. Clearing for construction will take a bulldozer, and the operator said he wants the trees uncut so he can uproot them with his dozer. That’s fine with me.

And, finally, on Thursday I performed an experiment with a free-range dog. Leah has been telling me to take Zeke with me and let him roam freely while I work. She thinks it will let him get all his wandering urges out of his system. So I put him up in the front of the Mule and we rode up to the lot.

Zeke wandered around while I worked, and gradually left orbit. I didn’t see him again for about two hours, when he plodded up my newly-made path to greet me. One a scale of one to 10 (with one being perfectly clean and 10 being completely covered with mud and cow manure) he was about a three. Not too bad, but he needed a bath.

He was tired. Here he is resting after Leah and I went back up so I could show her what I had been doing. The tree with the yellow ribbon around it is the approximate center of the lot.

zeke_at_the_lot

Later in the evening we began hearing some noises from Zeke’s direction. He was lying on his bed at the end of the sofa. And then a revolting odor wafted up in my direction. I wasn’t sure which end of the dog it came from, but eventually we figured out that he was burping. That continued through the evening. I had to keep a box of matches nearby. He woke Leah up at about 5:30, and Leah woke me from a dream (I didn’t mind; I was dreaming about writing reports at work.) I had to take Zeke outside to relieve himself. He has been having intestinal disturbances of his own all day today (Friday), and his burps can still cause paint to peel. I’m hoping he can work this out of his system.

The good news is that he came back to me. That’s encouraging. But I don’t think the wanderlust is over, and when he wanders, it seems he’s living up to the omnivore name. I’ll try this experiment again. Maybe Leah’s prediction will be right.

 

Truck retrieval on the mountain

Posted on by

Monday afternoon around 4 Zeke, who was out on the front walk, let us know that a young woman had come to our front gate. She was panting from exertion and looked ready to cry. She told us that she, her mother, and her baby sister were stuck in the woods down at the end of Wildlife Trail.

They had been looking for scrap metal to earn money and had decided to drive down the overgrown road that leads into the woods and down to the bottom of the mountain. The girl said they were about a half mile in and that they had driven over a dirt hump and then got stuck on the other side. I was hoping it was not the “dirt hump” where I turn around on the infrequent occasions when I walk the dogs that way, but, of course, it was. I turn around at that point because beyond there, the road becomes so much rockier and steeper that it’s hard even to walk. The truck was truly stuck, probably closer to a quarter of a mile in. When the girl tried to back it up, all it did was spin a tire in a cloud of rubber smoke, even with me on the back bumper.

I thought for a while, and the only plan I could come up with was to see if our neighbor Gary would be willing to use his tractor to pull the truck out. Fortunately, he was at home and was willing to give it a try.

The road close to the truck was too steep for the tractor, so we pooled our chain resources and got sufficient length to stretch from the back bumper of the truck to the back of Gary’s tractor.

tractor

The picture doesn’t do justice to the slope here. The younger woman said it was 90 degrees, but in reality, it might have approached 30 degrees. Not vertical, but steep enough.

Gary and I thought if we got the truck up to the dirt hump, the truck would have enough traction to back out by itself. That was not the case. Gary had to drag the truck almost all the way out of the woods. The road was covered with damp pine needles and leaves and even when the slope was not as bad, the truck still couldn’t get enough traction to back up on its own.

truck and tractor

All of us eventually ended up back in civilization. Gary drove his tractor home, the older woman pulled into our driveway, and I followed. I think their truck was running well enough for them to make it back home.

Gary and I had left the young woman and the baby with Leah while the mother (We are unclear about the exact relationship among these three) accompanied us to drive the truck. That gave Leah and the dogs a chance to spend some time with them. She told Leah she thought most people would have told them to go away. The life story of the three was not happy. It involved a double-amputee husband, drug use, jail time, and health problems, along with a lack of money to pay for treatment and not qualifying for Medicaid (probably as a result of our governor’s refusal to accept federal money to expand Medicaid).

The girl told Leah she wanted a job doing something to help children, like being a pediatrician. While they talked, she got a phone call from someone who said that she could borrow money and make a career, all she had to do was first send them some money.

They seemed like nice people who had never had much of a chance, just the kind that vultures like to prey on. I suspect that if they had had to call a tow truck, it would have been a financial catastrophe for them.

The older woman (Leah thought the young woman said the older woman was 39 or so, but she looked older) fell in love with Zeke. She got down on the floor with Zeke and wanted to take him home.

She had already hugged Gary and shaken my hand in thanks. When they left, she asked if she could bring Zeke a bone for Christmas.