Paradise ponders: rock, ignorant Americans, leaky tires, and plumbing errors edition... Yesterday evening I got a call from Randy B., the mason who built our fireplace two years ago. He's got a couple of days available, starting tomorrow, and he wants to get our filling station done. Yay! He should be here this morning at 7 am, so he and his helper can work in the (relatively) cool morning air...
The great sprinkler project continues apace. There are now 13 complete zones covering the entire area south of our paved driveway. Complete, that is, except for the wires leading to the control valves for those 13 zones. We're running those wires through a conduit installed under the bridge over the irrigation canal running down the eastern edge of our property. That sounds easy, but it's not – the conduit has to traverse, underground, about 15 feet of abutment on both sides of the bridge. The trench for that conduit has to be dug amidst a wild rose thicket. The sprinkler guys lopped off all the rose canes above the chosen path – but the rose roots are incredibly thick in there. Digging that will be a major challenge. I'm glad
I don't have to do it! Once the conduit is in place, I'll be helping the sprinkler guys pulling the wires through it. That's something they're not very familiar with, nor do they have the right tools...
My friend (and former colleague) Simon M. passed along
this article, I'm sure just to tweak me. :) Among other things, it discloses that 1 in 4 Americans surveyed believe the sun revolves around the Earth, not the other way around. I'm actually a little surprised at this – I'd have expected that to be more like 1 in 3. It reminds me, though, of an article I read a few months ago on a tangentially related topic: technological ignorance. The focus of this article was a single survey question made at widely separated points in time. The first survey was in 1940, and it asked men (no women) in their 20s how many actually
did a set of routine maintenance on their cars, and how many
could do them if they didn't have the money to pay someone. The answers were 81% and 96%, respectively. The same survey, of (again) only young men, taken in early 2017 gave much different answers: 7% and 14%. The 2017 survey also asked men who answered “no” to briefly describe
why they couldn't do the routine maintenance – and the dominant answer was some variant of “Because I have no idea how cars work.” I haven't seen any similar survey for computers, but it's trivial to observe that the vast majority of computer users have utterly no idea how their computer actually works. My dad remarked in several of our conversations that he and my grandfather (his father) knew how
everything on the farm worked, and could maintain and repair it. These days it's common for people to own things whose workings are completely mysterious. In the space of one man's life we've gone from a norm of understanding one's belongings to
not understanding them. I wonder how far that trend can go?
Yesterday I took my Model X in to the good folks at
Hyrum Tire to get a slow leak in my left rear tire fixed. I'd made an appointment so I could wait while they fixed it. However, when they actually
saw my car, they realized they had a problem: their tools only work with rims up to 21" in diameter, and I've got 22" rims on the Model X. Dang! So they sent me up to Logan, to the
Les Schwab location there. I drove in, walked up to the counter, and in under two minutes one of their people went to work on my car. They had me drive into one of their service bays, and in short order they had the wheel off the car. That left the axle and disc brake visible, and several people there noticed something odd about the disc brake: there are
two calipers on it! The red one is the main brake; the gray one is only for the parking brake. Ezra, the tech helping me, found my tire's problem in seconds: a 2" deck screw right through the exact center of the tread – the easiest possible repair. When he got the tire off the rim, he discovered something he'd only seen once before: a foam ring around the inside of the tire, opposite the tread. That foam is there to reduce the tire noise; he's seen it only in a relatively quiet car (a high-end Mercedes) where the tire noise becomes dominant. In about ten minutes the repair was all done, and the wheel mounted back on the car. We had to look up the wheel nut torque (129 ft/lbs) on the web, as his chart didn't have Tesla on it. I went to pay up when he was finished, only to be told that the repair was free. All they asked was that when it was time to buy tires, I'd give them a chance for my business. Nice!
Yesterday morning I discovered that I'd made an error in my plumbing work for the irrigation pump. Fixing it correctly requires some new parts – including two that aren't available locally. I put both on order, but they won't get here for a week or so. Dang it!
