Paradise ponders: sprinkler malfunctions, birthdays, clear skies, animals in hurricanes, and different assumptions edition... After I finished my shower this morning and was toweling off, I heard something most unexpected: the sound of large volumes of water running outside. I threw on my robe and ran out to see what it was – and discovered that our sprinklers were running. I've no idea why they were running, but right now, with no grass, all they're doing is making a nice field of mud. I logged onto the controllers web site and suspended the schedule for a month – and a few minutes later, the sprinklers shut off. I thought that was the end of that. But ... when Debbie started her cat chores this morning, she discovered that one room in our basement had been flooded, about 50 square feet in all. She and I moved everything out of the flooded area and mopped up; no permanent damage, I think.
Today is my birthday. Feels just like any other day to me. Try as I might, I can't feel anything different about it...
Our skies are mostly clear of the smoke that's been plaguing us. Yesterday was the first relatively smoke-free day in a week or so. There's still a teeny bit of haze visible, but no more stinging eyes or awful stench. Very nice, that is...
I've been reading multiple stories (one example) of animals being abandoned by people fleeing the hurricane zone. At least some of these appear to be legitimate stories, and not Twitter-fueled hype or outright fake news. I just can't wrap my brain around people being so cruel or thoughtless – and especially when the disaster is a hurricane that people had several days warning for. They could have gotten themselves and their helpless, dependent pets out of harm's way, but they chose not to. People who would abandon their pets like that ... must be dangerous to their fellow humans as well. Long prison sentences at hard labor sounds quite appropriate to me...
This morning as I walked out to my barn it was light outside, though the sun hadn't quite risen above the mountains to our east. I could clearly see Venus in the blue sky, nice and bright. This made me think about a similar morning a few years ago, not long after I moved up here, during the period I was alone here to remodel our house. One of the construction workers was out working on the barn, and I remarked to him about how bright Venus was that morning. He said “I don’t know what that is, but it’s not Venus.” I asked him why he thought it wasn't Venus, and he showed me an app he had on his phone. The app used the phone's orientation sensors to figure out what piece of the sky the camera was aimed at, and then it showed where bright objects should be. It showed Venus on its map, but not exactly where the real Venus was. That's because the phone's sensors aren't all that accurate. The worker's default assumption, though, was that the phone's sensors (and the app) were perfect. If there was a bright star near where the app said Venus was, that couldn't be Venus – it had to be some other star that the app didn't know about. I could not convince this fellow that the phone and app were imperfect. I'm fascinated by that assumption, which is just the opposite of my own. I tried it on a few other people over the next few days (having loaded the app onto my own phone). I found several other people who reacted exactly as that worker had, and a couple whose first reaction was to think the app was lame (but even they didn't realize it was likely the phone's sensors). I think what's going on here is that most users of things like smartphones and apps have no idea at all how they work. For them, it's effectively magic. And who ever heard of lame magic? So if the real world didn't match what the magic said – why then, it must be the real world that's at fault!
