For my tribute to Melody, click here.

Now it's Parkmobile

When I went downtown on Thursday, I found no parking meters, not even the new kind that took credit cards. Instead, I was asked to install the Parkmobile app on my phone and activate Apple Pay (which, to my relief, did not require me to get an Apple Card; it enables my phone to be used as a wallet for an existing credit card).

That sounds like a lot to do — as well as a burden on people who don't have smartphones — but it does have one big advantage: Parkmobile operates nationwide. The app that I use to park in downtown Athens also works in some UGA pay lots, Atlanta, Louisville, Los Angeles...

So we're in a new era now. "Penny for the parking meter"? Not any more.

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Is Atlanta still there?

Since I can't drag Sharon everywhere, my new way of life is going to need to include solo excursions to interesting places, such as parks, historic sites, and, of course, interesting shopping areas.

So I started checking how Atlanta's major shopping malls are doing — it might be nice to revisit some of the places Melody and I enjoyed going 30 or 40 years ago.

The answer? Several major ones are thriving (Lenox Square, Phipps Plaza, etc.), but they only sell clothes and accessories, or at most a little more. No longer will there be a bookstore, a record store, a camera store, or (perish the thought) a Radio Shack or any other kind of hobby shop.

As I've noted before, shopping is a very different experience than it used to be. We used to go shopping to get information. I learned quite a bit about photography in camera stores. Bookstores of course were founts of information. In its heyday, Borders, for example, not only sold books and records but also promoted them (that's how I found out about Il Divo). Nowadays, Barnes and Noble bravely hangs on, but we get our reading matter and our information on line, and that's also where we do our specialized shopping.

Clothes are still sold in malls because you have to see them and, often, try them on. At least, usually.

I'll probably go mall-walking in some old haunts soon, just to familiarize myself with the area, but I won't expect to buy anything.

Apparently, the centers of big cities no longer have interesting shopping, or at least Atlanta doesn't. Omni International Center is now merely the CNN Center Food Court — still visitable, but not of much interest unless you have other business in the area. The Engineer's Bookstore is gone.

Some of these areas must be more interesting than they sound from these descriptions. And there's Avalon, a new mixed-use development; a smaller development of the same kind has sprung up on the east side of downtown Athens. I need to get out and explore.

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Progress report

A significant amount of estate administration and also decluttering are now behind me. On Monday I'll pay the bills and order the tombstone. Some legal work remains — re-titling the house and, ultimately, more estate planning of my own — but I'm already feeling relief at finishing things.

Today, I decluttered the mail rack (where we keep our incoming mail, and where a lot of other things had accumulated) and also, more importantly, donated to Habitat for Humanity the huge pile of things we had been accumulating on the hearth for about three years.

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Star clouds in Cygnus

For the first time since June, I've done a bit of astrophotography. This was a low-effort, low-expectations, "does the equipment still work?" kind of session, done to try out a setup that I can easily take to Deerlick. Canon 60Da and Sigma 105/2.8 lens at f/4 on my iOptron SkyTracker. This is a stack of one hundred (yes, one hundred) 1-minute exposures at ISO 800.

But what is it a picture of? Aiming the camera nearly straight up on the SkyTracker is hard, and I missed my target, which was supposed to be the North America Nebula. Actually, you can see a bit of that nebula at bottom center; the bright star cluster M39 above and to the left of the center; and the Cocoon Nebula (IC 5146) as a little red disk in the upper left corner.

But mostly you see star clouds and dark nebulae (dust streaks) in front of them. You are looking right outward along the Orion-Cygnus Arm of our galaxy.

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Science Illustration, by Escardó

A couple of days ago I came across a book in the library that Melody would have loved, and I would have checked it out to bring home for her to see if I could. Instead, I will show it to you. Click on the image to see the publisher's page, with an extensive preview.

The publisher's ad says this book is not yet out; it must be a slightly revised edition, because the Science Library definitely has it, on paper. How Taschen manages to sell this 10-pound, 10-by-14-inch behemoth for US $60, I am not sure. It looks like a $500 book.

This reminds me of two things. Everybody needs to know about the work of Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, etc.). Melody read his books and went to at least one, I think two, of his seminars.

Second, when I was at Yale and Melody was up for a visit around 1981, I had discovered that the Yale library had some editions of Greek and Latin classics that were printed in the 1780s or so, and bound in leather medieval-style, and were available to be checked out as ordinary library books. So I checked several out and brought them for her to look at the typography. Who else among us has seen his beautiful girlfriend sitting in an armchair in his apartment leafing through 18th-century books? We got to do some extraordinary things.

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Baskerville Punch fonts

And another thing Melody would have jumped on with cries of glee — the Cambridge University Library has released a new version of the famous Baskerville typeface, free of charge. Click here to get it.

(I do not know why the "fi" ligature does not appear in that sample; almost certainly the software I typed it with rather than the actual typeface.)

Melody would have been even more delighted if she could have been one of the students (at Cambridge) who actually produced the new typeface based on Baskerville's punches. One of her regrets was that she never got to create a typeface. She was trained in type design (with Ron Arnholm of UGA) and designed corporate logos, which is very similar work, usually involving adapting existing type or creating a typeface for one word.

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As if COVID never ended

In retrospect, one of the effects of Melody's increasing disability is that we never completely came out of COVID lockdown. I did start working in the FormFree office and in the UGA libraries after the lockdown lifted, and we did resume eating out with some regularity (less often than before COVID). But when we went shopping, Melody never walked around big stores, and seldom cruised around them in a scooter; curbside pickup and Amazon remained how we got groceries and almost everything else, respectively.

Nothing actually stopped. Melody still went to the hairdresser; I still went all the usual places. But there was a bias against getting out of the house. Even when Melody was doing comparatively well, getting out of the house had become something we viewed as expensive (in a non-monetary way) and to be done only when substantially needed.

I went to church; Melody usually didn't. My recollection is that she attended my talks on "Christianity and the History of Science" in the fall of 2024, and that all three of us got to church this past Easter. But normally, on a Sunday morning, there was a 50% chance I'd make it there (vs. being needed as caregiver), and Melody did not come along.

All these changes were shifts, not flat prohibitions. We could do normal things, but our preferences had changed.

Besides Melody's increasing disability I do need to mention a digestive problem that troubled me seriously from about 2022 to 2025, and is much better controlled now, and also my cataracts, which were a noticeable problem since about 2023 and were removed in late 2025. Those also kept us out of circulation and kept me away from the Deerlick Astronomy Village, though I have kept paying dues.

And this summer we had another burden, record-breaking hot weather. Highs in the upper 90s have been usual (not just occasional) through July, August, and much of September. We're just starting to get breaks from the heat, but not every day. It's remarkable how cool 92 F can feel when you're used to 100.

What we lost was what I thought COVID might cost us: a particular kind of social connections. As I wrote in March 2023, "I've written several times about how my worst regret was how we would lose, not close friends, but the casual contact with people we see at work, school, church, or in the marketplace, and whose presence brightens our lives, but whom we don't know well enough to seek out socially. For shy people like Melody and me, a congenial crowd is almost more important than a circle of friends. And as normal life resumes, there has been three years' worth of attrition and turnover. We don't know how many people and places from before COVID we will never see again."

I am actively working to build the habit of getting out of the house more often, almost on a whim. As a young adult I felt almost compelled to get out of my house or apartment every day and, if nothing else, explore my surroundings. Time to do it again.

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Cleaning house after Melody

Today UGA had a home football game, so because of traffic, I needed to stay home most of the day.

Accordingly, the main project for today was some major housecleaning, adapting to Melody's absence. I hasten to add we're not getting rid of her things — this house will be my and Melody's house, or maybe the Melody Museum, for the foreseeable future.

What Sharon and I are doing — mainly me, today — is removing the layer of medical clutter that grew on top of everything, so that the house will still contain everything Melody genuinely enjoyed, but not the medicines and equipment that piled up in the past decade or so. It will look much as it would have looked if she were healthy and away on a long trip.

Today's specific project was to round up all the prescription drugs, as well as OTC medications and personal care supplies, and dispose of things that will not be used. Some diabetes supplies are going to someone locally; sealed unopened prescription and OTC medicines are being donated to SIRUM; opened prescription medicines will be disposed of through a pharmacy; and some innocuous items went in the trash. Plenty of toiletries stayed for eventual use by Sharon or me. So this was a quite substantial emptying out of the bathroom and several other areas. Eventually I'll bring myself to start actually using "her" part of the bathroom. Not just yet, though.

A subtask of the medicine roundup was to unpack Melody's handbag. Everything that was in it and is not needed elsewhere has been stored carefully in a box.

We also took down Melody's "med box." This is a clear plastic storage box with a lid, about 18×14×6 inches, that sat on the desk that is built into our kitchen. I made dividers and labels for it so the medicines were in four long rows, morning, evening, morning-and-evening, and bedtime, and it contained about forty medicines, half of them OTC supplements. It dates from at least her 2017 wheelchair-bound period; it was important for her to be able to wheel up to it and take her medicines. More recently, walking with a cane or walker, she would get into her chair at the breakfast table, which is an office chair with wheels, and pull up to the med box.

The med box has been such a fixture here that its absence really makes it evident that Melody is no longer here.

My final project was to bring in all the audio CDs in both cars, shelve them along with all the other CDs that were waiting for reshelving, and select a new set of CDs for each car. Right now I'm choosing music that we shared but which is not extremely significant to either of us. My project for the rest of my life is to go through the whole collection and figure out why Melody bought each CD — it is often one song, or an interesting passage in one song, and certainly does not imply endorsement of the whole album or band.

Melody listened attentively and had a quick trigger finger for the "skip" button; she tolerated CDs on which some of the songs were very disagreeable, simply skipping them. I liked background music that I could start and ignore. That is why I still have so much to learn from Melody's music.

We have a few duplications, where the same CD was bought more than once by accident. And we have a CD by The Lettermen that was bought at Borders in the 1990s and still has its plastic wrapper on, unopened.

Things are looking different, but all of Melody's art, collections, and personal effects are still here. Yet I am almost ready to cry at the absence of all the pill bottles and ointment tubes — for more than twenty years they were the visible sign of her presence! And we miss her! I am thankful that daughter Sharon is such good company.

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First day of the new era?

These are still sad days, but today marked a turning point of sorts.

By way of background, on September 6, I apparently took my brisk evening walk a bit too briskly while out of practice, and my legs were sore the next day. On the night of the 8th, my right leg even hurt while at rest, and I did not sleep well. Accordingly, after a brief work period I spent most of the 9th (yesterday) resting, napping in my recliner and watching unimportant videos. I didn't go to the AI Connect conference in Atlanta on the 9th and did not plan to do so today.

Then, last night I slept better than I've done since May or so, and I finally am starting to get over the exhaustion that had built up during Melody's and Dorothea's ongoing crises. I woke up with some soreness remaining in my legs, but no pain at rest, and the soreness diminished to some extent with walking.

So today, after considerable errand-running, I went to something more useful than AI Connect: a "kickoff meeting on AI and Society" at the UGA Law School, intended to foster interdepartmental collaboration. I was welcomed, and we heard some interesting talks. I did not start any actual collaborations, nor make any new close friends, but effectively today is when I rejoined the University as an academic community after thirteen years of steadily decreasing participation.

It felt good to be riding UGA buses, walking around the campus, shopping at the UGA bookstore, and generally doing more than just working at a table in a library (which is something I had done regularly, though not this past Summer Term because Melody was already needing a lot of help).

To mark the occasion I've added a UGA sticker to my briefcase, to counterbalance the Covington Innovations sticker, so that people don't see me as being from an outside business.

We will see what happens. It's rather like finally having been in a foreign country long enough to get over the jet-lag.

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The hazard of AI is not its intelligence

We're hearing a lot about hazards of generative AI. Gary Marcus points out that...

It's not about AI getting "too smart."

It is about people allowing unreliable software to do things that are dangerous if done incorrectly.

A lot of AI security breaches are like water "finding a way" to seep under your house. It's not intelligence on the part of the water. It's a matter of having something relatively uncontrolled (water) and giving it ways to seep in.

Keep that in mind.

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Melody's last art project

Melody enjoyed not only creating her own art, but also executing other people's designs delivered as kits, and making them come out better than original. Thus, years ago, she made us some beautiful Christmas ornaments from kits supplied by "The Cracker Box" (whose proprietors have just sent me a nice message of condolence).

Her most recent project is this, which hangs proudly in our master bathroom framed between two sheets of glass:

That is a very elaborate jigsaw puzzle ("Mys Aurora Mandala Succulent Plants," details here). Of course Melody made it look better than the original; the photo doesn't do its justice.

I wanted to post this before tidying up the place she put it together, which is this:

Unable to get to her art studio upstairs, Melody had me bring down this drafting board (which was a present from her parents one Christmas early in our courtship — I remember hearing about it in a letter) and the colored pencils. We set them up on the dining table.

What were the colored pencils for? We think they were for the edges of the puzzle pieces; maybe also for touching up flaws in the printing, if any. We're not sure. I know she requested that they be brought downstairs after she started the puzzle. The toothpicks were probably for applying glue, but we're not sure about that either. There's also an X-acto knife and a supply of blades, presumably for cleaning up rough cuts on the edges of pieces.

I see that the puzzle was bought from Amazon on March 16, 2025, and the frame, on June 30, 2025. That's the approximate timescale of the project, although I'm not sure the puzzle was finished when the frame was bought.

Also, we found that she had just started work on another puzzle, an even more elaborate one that is 3-dimensional and has LED illumination. That one is Rowood Glittering Water Lily (details here), a Christmas 2025 present from Sharon if we remember right. Fortunately, so little has been assembled that it can simply go back in its box until the right person comes along to assemble it.

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In my profession, success is not measured in money

This came up in conversation recently, and all my friends and relatives need to hear it:

Professors and academic scientists don't measure success in dollars.

Even a world-famous scientist or professor, working for a university, does not have a rock-star salary, doesn't drive a BMW, doesn't use money to measure success.

Such a person knows that he or she could have earned a lot more money by going into business. But that would mean giving up science or the scholarly profession.

We do research and teaching for the joy of it — for the privilege of spending our days thinking and learning about what we're really interested in and contributing to the world's knowledge of it. The work has to pay decently, of course, and if it didn't, we wouldn't stay in it, but we don't expect ourselves or even our most talented colleagues to get rich.

Money is not the measure of everything!

If the people around you really do judge people by the cost of their car or house, you need to hang out with wiser people.

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Puns from the Standing Collection

Melody and I amused ourselves with puns practically from the day we met. There were some puns that we would pull out and re-use at long intervals; we called them the standing collection (alluding to how much we liked the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art).

Three years ago today I posted the following on Facebook, preserving some of the puns I regularly lobbed at her:

Yesterday [Sept. 2, 2023] Melody washed my clothes. I thanked her by paraphrasing a movie title:

"It's a launderful wife."

When I do the laundry myself, I sing a parody I made up of a German folk song, "Mein Vater var ein Wäschermann"...

known in English as "The Happy Launderer."

And occasionally I allude to the fact that neither of us is good at dancing by singing, to her, a one-line Mozart parody, "Là ci darem i piedi"...

which roughly means, "There we will join our feet."

In fact, as best I recall, I uttered the last one again on Melody's last day, after the infectious disease specialist had come in and we somehow talked about dancing (which Melody would not be able to do even after a good recovery, because she couldn't do it before).

I should add that Melody introduced me to Mozart's beautiful aria "Là ci darem la mano" ("there we will give each other our hand (in marriage)") during my Yale days; she had discovered it when she took an undergraduate music appreciation class. It is a much more appealing love song if you don't know that the character who is singing it, Don Giovanni, is crashing the preparations for a wedding and is trying to make off with the bride!

[Added:] A pun Melody made in our very early days, when almost all students wore blue jeans:

"Of course I have blue genes. That's why I have blue eyes."

This may have been in her standing collection from high school.

Not from the standing collection, but a one-time pun that had Melody almost rolling with mirth:

A year ago, when I was recovering from cataract surgery, I apologized for not getting out of my recliner more, and said, in the style of Elmer Fudd, "Be vewwy vewwy quiet, we're healing eyeballs."

And then, "Could the jokes get any cornea?"

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How to be a good girlfriend

Some wisdom from Melody

When Melody was 12 or 13, her church (First Baptist, Tucker, Ga.) had a study session for the youth titled "How to be a good girlfriend or boyfriend." Her main take-aways were:

• You will spend most of your life with a spouse whom you have not met yet.
• All earlier relationships and experiences are preparation for that.
• Do not do anything that will make you less qualified for the happy marriage you hope one day to have, or less appealing to the right person when he or she comes along.
  
  That's a big one. You can't do wild things at 16 and expect them not to be part of your history and character when you are 20. They will limit what you can do and who will like you.
• Movies and songs are not a good guide; most are about things going wrong.

To these I would add one more, which I've shared with my granddaughters:

• Nobody will want to be your 20th or 30th serious boyfriend.

That is, don't pair up and break up repeatedly as a game. Instead, think of having friends, and a favorite, and eventually a relationship.

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Making a UPS do its job

We've been having power failures, some short and some long, despite mild weather and no known car crash into a power pole or anything like that; I don't know what happened. The UPS on my main desktop computer was a 600-VA model that was very inadequate; its log showed excessive current every time the computer started. So yesterday afternoon I got a much bigger 1500-VA UPS.

I learned along the way that a UPS is no longer called a UPS, at least at Best Buy. You have to ask for a "battery backup."

Anyhow, the purpose of the UPS is not to run the computer continuously through a long power failure. It's to bridge short power failures and to shut down the computer gracefully during a long one, then turn it back on when power comes back.

For that to work, two things have to happen.

(1) The computer has to be set to turn on as soon as power is applied, without waiting for someone to press the button. That is a BIOS configuration setting.

(2) The UPS has to be communicating with the computer (normally via USB nowadays, though it used to be done via serial port). I have APC UPSes and use PowerChute Serial Shutdown software (which is USB-based).

I found that the correct settings for PowerChute Serial Shutdown are:

What this means: When there's only enough battery charge left for 8 minutes (480 seconds), tell the operating system to shut down. Give it 4 minutes (240 seconds, probably much more than needed) to do that, and then shut down the UPS, turning off power to the computer. When power comes back, the UPS will turn on and the computer will boot.

You can (and should) verify all this by experimenting — unplug things and see what happens!

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Some things everybody needs to know about estate law

I'm not a lawyer, and you should consult one for definitive answers to the issues I'm about to raise. But I do have some experience administering estates and am now administering Melody's, and I've been studying personal finance for a long time in connection with RIKI.

If you are an heir — that is, if you stand to inherit something — here are some big things you need to know.

• Someone must go to probate court and file the will or a declaration that there was none. This is not a step you can skip. You can't just gather around and say "Y'all know Mama wanted me to have this" and divide up the property. If nothing else, the names on house and car titles need to be legally changed.
• You should pay a lawyer for a brief consultation; I wouldn't try to do without it. If you are good at business, you'll find everything straightforward, but make sure you get good instructions about how to do things in your state. Don't fumble.
• Most joint bank accounts automatically go to the other person. Melody and I had nothing but joint bank accounts, so now they are all mine. Her will was not involved, nor were there any taxes.
• Life insurance pays immediately, to the beneficiary, and is not taxed. Immediately means within about six weeks, but definitely start the process promptly and don't wait for the will to be probated.
• Don't expect heavy taxes unless the estate is very large and you're in a state that taxes estates heavily (Georgia does not). The deceased person's final income tax return has to be filed, of course. In our case, Melody and I can file as Married Filing Jointly for 2026.
• You can't inherit debt. If Grandpa dies bankrupt, the heirs do not have to pay his bills, regardless of what the bill collectors say. However, they can't get any of his property until the bills have been satisfied; all his property has to be sold to pay as much of the debt as possible. The heirs may choose to pay bills in order for the estate to keep specific pieces of property.
• You can turn down an inheritance, in which case it goes back into the estate to be sold and divided up among the other heirs. If the inheritance is a vacation timeshare or something else with little value and high maintenance cost, turning it down can be a wise move.

Now if you are the person who is going to leave an inheritance, here are things you need to know:

• Do not have a joint bank account with anyone unless you want them to get the entire contents of it upon your death, regardless of what's in your will. Joint accounts are joint property.
• You need to make a will. It doesn't cost much, and you should make it with a lawyer's advice. You don't want anything to backfire.
• Don't store your will in your safe deposit box. The box can't be opened until after the will is probated.
• A "living will" is a different thing. A will says what happens to your property after you die. A living will says what medical treatment you want during your last days. You can make it by filling out a questionnaire provided by a hospital, with witnesses. Melody and I did, several years ago, and filed it with both hospitals.
• Please do not use your will to tie people down. Admit that when you die, your property will no longer be yours and will probably be sold. Don't try to tie someone to the family farm. (If you have someone who really wants it, leave it to him; that's different.) Courts have been known to overturn will provisions that substantially limit the freedom of the heir.
• Do not leave a part interest to a minor. This can easily backfire...
  
      I won't say where or when, but long ago, a brother and sister inherited undivided half-interests in a farm. Neither of them had ever lived on a farm, nor wanted to. The sister was a minor.
      The farm should have been sold immediately, because land prices were unusually high and the inheritors did not want it. But because the sister was a minor, it could not be sold. The brother, meanwhile, was denied a scholarship because of the property he "owned" but could not sell. All they could do was receive a small rental income from it and wait... and wait. Eventually they sold it, over the objections of relatives who wanted it kept in the family, but did not want to buy it. Everyone went away unhappy.
      It would have been better for the property to be placed in trust so that neither heir would own it until both were adults. Or for the will to authorize immediate sale.

So that's what I've learned from experience. Things are going very smoothly with Melody's estate, and the only substantial step is going to be re-titling the house to be solely in my name.

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Sprucing up

To mark Melody's passing and the end of an era, I have changed the color scheme of the Daily Notebook, as I did when I retired from UGA. The new colors are designed to facilitate readability. Web pages as a whole are less colorful today than they were in the early days of the Web, except of course that full-color pictures will be as abundant as ever.

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