A Curious Statistical Anomaly

I haven’t posted for a few days and doubt I’ll get to anything before Monday, June 1st. I’m on deadline to get two of the magazines up and live by June 1st (SFRevu and Gumshoe Review). So things always get a bit hectic at this time of the month.

What’s making things even more chaotic than usual is that we moved the magazines from one host to another. That necessitated repointing the DNS (Domain Name Server) and that takes several hours to a day or two to percolate throughout the world’s internet system (very general and not completely accurate but you get the idea).

To make the switch we had to disable administrative functions. Basically, that means that while readers could go to the sites and read the May issue, I (and the other staff) couldn’t enter books, paste in reviews, edit/proof, write material…. In short about a week and a half of work has to be done in the six days before the end of the month. But wait there’s more … the usual six day’s of work also has to be done.

So now I’m down to two days left and about 5 days of work to do. I think I’m going to need a few gallons of caffeine to get me through the run up to our June issues.

So, thanks for dropping in but there probably won’t be anything new here until Monday….

My father was in the Army during WWII. My grandfather was in the Navy. One of my uncles was in the Marines and I think the other was in the Army but he didn’t live in the same state and I hardly know him, so I’m not sure. When I lived in Mexico, Maine we’d go to the cemetery on Memorial Day or the day before to make sure there were flowers and a flag on my father’s grave, and later also on my grandfather’s. I spoke with my mother yesterday and she put a wreath on each of the graves of our family members.

Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day and it was a time to reflect on those who had been lost with an emphasis on those who’d lost their lives protecting their country — a day to remember Veterans. Time passes and now it seems with hardly anyone staying in one place anymore that the graveside laying of wreaths and flowers and leaving a flag have past. My mother was complaining that when she was at the cemetery that there were hardly any flowers on any of the graves. I reminded her that most of the youth have had to move away for jobs, and graves are now handled by the groundskeepers.

I’m in Maryland and my son is in Rhode Island. When my mother moves down here, in the sometime future, there will be little family left in the town I was born in — an aunt,  a niece,  a nephew, a sister-in-law once removed, and their families. The graves will probably then just get the usual groundskeeping and maybe a veterans group will remember to place a flag by the headstones of veterans.

Memorial Day has changed. It seems to me now that it’s a celebration of family. The living — with picnics and bbqs. And, as is usual at family gatherings, remembrances of those who are no longer with us except in our memories and our stories. The newspapers are filled with stories about how the holiday has lost its significance. I don’t think so, I think it has broadened its scope to include remembrances of all the fallen no matter how or when they past from present tense to loving memory.

Each of us, whether a veteran of a war (current or past), must do our part to preserve our nation’s heritage and now to restore our country to one that is looked up to as a beacon of hope and freedom — from oppression, from tyranny, from the misuse of power, and from torture and the abuse of human rights. Over the last few years, those “froms” have becomes “fors” and we, as a nation, need to stand up and put our country back on track. We’ve lost, as a nation, credibility in the eyes of the world and each of us must do our part to see that we never lose sight of the rights and freedoms guaranteed for all in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Those documents have always applied to all citizens of this country and anyone under its jurisdiction and we need to reaffirm our commitment to the principles that our founding fathers saw as the underpinning for our government.

In this fight to regain our status and credibility, we may not all risk our lives but we all have a duty to do our part to watch our elected officials and stay informed of their actions on our behalf and to make sure that we once again become a “shining beacon of freedom” for the world.

Those that gave their lives to defend this country did so because they held that freedom and those principles to be more important than their own lives.  When we remember them on this one day of the year, shouldn’t we also think of the kind of country that held such meaning for them?  Doing the right thing can be hard.  It’s far easier to just let things go and say that there was nothing that you could do.  I think the generations of Americans who have fought to the death against those that would currupt our country deserve a little more.  They gave their lives … is a letter or e-mail to your congress critter really that much of an inconvience?

It’s been a heck of a month. It seems like all month, I’ve been running as fast as I can just to stay in place. There’s been so much going on. So, finally, here is the May Coffee Cup. It’s bright and cheery and I’ve been enjoying it all month. It’s just the right size to fill and sip on at the computer and the coffee stays relatively warm in it. Though I have to admit that I will drink my coffee hot, warm, tepid, and cold. Comes from years of work in IT where often you’d forget to go heat it up if you were deep in the code and on the right track.

We’ve been moving the zines from one host to another. That means transferring the DNS and that means a lot of backups and waits to see when the change would go through and the administrative functions were disabled and all I could do was let the work pile up. We’re nearing the end of the month and tonight the last magazine is being moved and the administrative functions restored. The email addresses are being reinstated on the new server and hopefully they’ll work okay. There’s a bit of a problem with sending email out and I’m hoping that gets resolved before I have to send out the notification to the publishers that a review is now up on our site. The monthly announcement can, if necessary, be sent from another server as a backup plan — hopefully we won’t need it.

So, I’ve been trying to get more books reviewed this month and have managed to do several graphic novels for the June issue of SFRevu, including Jim Butcher’s The Dresden FIles: Storm Front: Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm adaptation by Mark Powers and illustrated by Ardian Syaf (so check out our June issue for the review.

We’ve managed to keep the bird feeder going. We thought the little guys were going to eat us out of house and home but now that it’s getting into late Spring/Summer we’re finding that while they still cluster about the feeder, the birds aren’t eating as much. We do have a Tufted Titmouse that is coming about and fluttering at the windows by where we sit in the living room. Not the window closest to the feeder but the ones where we sit. He’s even been at the kitchen and the dinning room window when I’m there doing something. The hummingbirds are back in force and we’re making food regularly for them. We had to buy a new feeder since they didn’t like one of them and now they’re eating from both of them.

We’ve had some new birds show up also. We started getting Yellow Finches, Tufted Titmouse (Titmice?), Blue Jays, Brown Headed Cowbirds, and a strange looking black bird we haven’t gotten a good look at yet. I’m enjoying trying to identify the birds that stop by and I’m getting a better understanding of why people enjoy bird watching.

I’ve also been knitting. Trying out new techniques and more importantly trying to finish up some projects that have been sitting around for a while. First, I’m trying to keep socks on the go all the time for traveling and away from the house waiting times. I finally tried the magic caston. I watched the youtube video. Well, actually there are several just search on Magic Caston and a long list shows up. I tried several before I found one that worked for my brain. The others were well done but I just didn’t get it until I meshed with the right video.

I used an after-thought heel and did a very loose cast off for the cuff on these toe-up socks. That makes it easier to get them on if they shrink a bit in the wash. Here’s a photo of the needles in for the after-thought heel and another of the finished socks (well, one finished sock though I’ve got both done now).

So, in spite of the fact that I’m running as fast as I can to just stay in place, I might just have accomplished some stuff this month — or rather I hope I will. I don’t know how other people cope with unexpected or even expected inconveniences that through their schedules all out of whack. Luckily for me, I cope with these things by either knitting or reading — too things that I need to do anyway. How do you cope?

Today was one of those days eaten up with little things but satisfying in its own way. I slept late — that great, I slept. I actually closed my eyes and slept through the night. After this latest bout of insomnia that is so wonderful.

Unfortunately, Hyperion was up at 5am with a call from his work that he had to deal with. Later, we went to get some deal with some last minute stuff for Memorial Day. We also did a couple of quick errands and checked out a pet shop’s adoption candidates — some really cute ones. There was a little girl and her mother and they were picking out one of them. The girl was so excited. I enjoyed the joy she radiated.

Then it was home and gardening. We got the rest of the plants in the ground. Well, not the stepables. Then I watered and clipped back some of the dead limbs on the hydrangea and other plants. Hyperion weeded part of the strawberry bed and mulched. Hopefully, tomorrow we’ll finish the strawberries and get working on another project.

We watched Nim’s Island again followed by Stardust. Makes a nice double feature. It was long enough for me to unknit the four inches of my sweater — back down to where I went wrong. Now I’m ready to start this section over again.

I’ve been rushing to finish up the second sock that I’ve been knitting. Well, actually I want to finish up a number of projects that have just a bit left to go  because I want to start several new ones. So, I thought I’ll finish this sock then the sweater, then the next three things and then start the new stuff.

But on the very last row of the after-thought heel as I was turning it inside out to do the 3-needle bindoff — I dropped a stitch. It’s a stripped sock on number 2 needles and the stripe at the end was black… I’m sure you know where I’m going. At the moment, I’m unknitting down to where the stitch ran but it keeps running so I think I’m going to end up at the start of the heel again.

My grandmother had a saying for times like these — “the faster I go the behinder I get.” That’s how I feel right now. This whole day has been like that. Maybe knitting is sort of a metaphor for life. You run along great and then unlike real life you get an opportunity for do-overs. Well, I suppose you get opportunities for do-overs in real life too but they’re much more painful than with knitting. I can unravel knitting and just start over but with life there’s all the other connections with events and people and those can’t be just unraveled as if they never were to start from scratch again.

Yarn might be a bit kinked from being unraveled but basically it’s very forgiving — people, well, not so much. So, I guess I’m lucky that it’s only the stocking’s heel that’s giving me problems. So, I guess I’ve now talked myself into a better state of mind about the bungled heel and the dropped stitch. This is just another of knitting’s do-overs.

I usually keep my eye on global warming related reports and spotted these articles (Google News’s “Sea Rise from Antarctic Ice Melt Overestimated“, Christian Science Monitor’s “If W. Antarctic Ice Sheet melts, how high will sea levels rise?”, and Science’s “Ocean Science: Ice Sheet Stability and Sea Level” (link takes you to the abstract, you can’t read the full paper unless you pay) on the new figures for sea rise if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) melts.

Originally, it was thought that if the WAIS melted that sea levels would rise between 5-7 meters. However, that was based on models that just don’t seem to stand up in comparison to reality. So, once they started looking at the real world and comparing with the models they found that it was more likely that the sea level rise if the WAIS melted would be closer to 3.2 to 3.3 meters (depending on which report you read). So things aren’t as dire as scientists originally thought, although 10.5+ feet is still pretty dire. That’s still going to make drastic changes to the east and west coasts of the United States as well as some other countries.

You see sea level just doesn’t rise; it also runs horizontally. Most people hear that the sea level will go up a foot and they think that won’t bother me I’m above that level. Right, it won’t bother you directly if you’re above that level and not close enough to be bother with storm surges which can be much higher than normal high tides when pushed by a storm. But those people near rivers, streams, and in areas between the current sea level and the new one — even if they are inland — might find themselves having problems with rising water tables, water levels in streams and rivers, and now they sit in a flood plain.

If you look at a map with topographic markings you can see that areas that currently don’t connect with the sea, if the level rises a foot or a yard would suddenly be underwater. That’s the part of sea level rise that most people don’t think about and don’t seem to care about.

It’s the intellectual blindness that caused people to buy houses on the Mississippi between the river and the levees and never consider that the levees were there for a reason and maybe living between a levee and the river wasn’t a good idea. When the flooding occurred a few years back, I was really upset that so many people had lost their homes. Then I saw a live broadcast where they were talking to the homeowners trying to salvage whatever they could from the wreckage of their homes. The camera pans and there are the homes with the river on one side and the high levees on the other. Really, it was a matter of when not if they would lose their homes. I still felt sympathy that they had to go through this terrible experience but couldn’t stop thinking why didn’t they think about their situation logically before buying the home in the first place. People ignore what they don’t want to face. If there’s a levee and your home is between it and the river, that should be a “duh” moment and a no sale.

People have been ignoring global warming for years and now it is not just a nice little hypothetical thought experiment but is changing the face of the world. Still people hear about scientists discussing sea level rise and the possible factors that will effect the eventual change and what the numbers might be and they shrug and go on. Well, I won’t be buying any sea front property anytime soon but if I was I’d certainly be checking out topographical maps. Just maybe that house on the hill with lots of acres will turn out to be a nice private island in a hundred years or so.

The past three weeks have been one big blur. I find that stress for me almost immediately translates into a need for comfort food and sleep. While my insomnia is still a problem, about every three days or so I sleep nearly the clock round. On the other hand, work doesn’t go away just because you’re worried about something. The zines still need to be kept on track. Books entered into the databases. Books sent to the reviewers. Reviews proofed. Reviews sent back to reviewers for revisions. Books read. Reviews and other materials written. Then there’s the added problem that some slimball spammer has forged the identity of one of our domains and is blanketing the world with spam seemingly from us. We’ve checked with the tech support gurus and found we’re not sending the spam out, our servers have not been hacked, our email addresses haven’t been compromised, because so far the complaints from receivers of this spam have not even been in our email database. The worst thing is that we can’t do anything about it except suffer the consequences. Until the spammer moves on to trash another victim’s reputation, we can only suffer and cringe and do our best to continue to protect our databases and accounts. Adding to the frustration is knowing that we did protect our readers and subscribers and our software but that doesn’t stop anyone from pretending to be you… So, if you’ve gotten any of this spammer’s spam, we’re sorry and we truly do feel your pain because it’s nothing to the pain we feel. I just don’t understand the mindset of people who would do this. If they believe they must forge headers to get in under the spam filters, then they have to know they are doing wrong. They must all have faulty morality circuits in their heads and/or hearts. Anyway, in my muddle headed-way I’m trying to cope with getting the next issues of Gumshoe Review, SFRevu, and TechRevu ready to go. Did I mention we’re in the midst of moving to a new host? We are, in fact, one of the zines was locked today, and no work can be done online until the DNS transfer is complete. Hopefully, this will allow me to catch up on the reading part of my job which has fallen a bit behind this month as I occasionally realize that quite a bit of time has past and I haven’t turned the page yet. I think stress also steals time — I’m thinking of putting together a study on that and seeing if I can get funding. However, I’ve been informed that an N of 1 is not sufficient for a good study. Don’t see why not since I notice there’s a lot of funded studies out there with Ns as low as 6 (particulary in medical studies). I think that’s why getting access to the actual research reports is so difficult in many cases (but that’s a long post for another day when I have more concrete time in my days).

Anyway, I’m curious about how others deal with stress — other than to run screaming in the other direction if there is a directional component to stress.

I’ve been keeping my eye out for articles about windmills and Low-Tech Magazine had a great article, “Small Windmills Put To The Test”, with links to information that I haven’t found in other places — such as how many of these small windmills would you need to power your house. Granted I’ve seen articles with pages and pages of step-by-step instructions on the bazillion bits of information you need to collect in order to figure out what your home’s power usage is and how to match that to the output of a windmill…but mostly what I’ve been looking for is a ballpark figure for gross economic calculations. Of course, in our case we have too many trees and no clear space to put a windmill so this is mostly an exercise to satisfy my curiosity…I just like to know about things.

Anyway, in this test twelve windmills of various designs and sizes were tested in an open plain by the Dutch in the province of Zeeland (reportedly a very windy area) and their output measured over a year. The article then lists how many windmills of each type it would take to generate the energy for a typical Dutch household. Depending on the design and rotor dimension it could take anywhere from 47 windmills to 2 windmills. Two is not bad but 47 seems a bit extreme, might as well get a ginormous windmill and get it over with. Anyway, I thought others might be interested in the results of this test.

I’ve also been keeping my eye on the Broadstar Wind Systems, these seem to me to have some very interesting applications since they can go in parking lots and on rooftops. I’m waiting to see how it turns out as they actually put out the systems for use. If they work as advertised small towns could purchase systems to add to their generating capacity or as backup…don’t see why not.

Here in the US there seems to be an all or nothing attitude. Personally, I think that having multiple methods of gathering/generating energy means less chance of everything going off-line for extended period of time — as happens so often around here. (We lost our power today for five minutes. Clear skies, no storms…a puzzlement.) Every alternative method of generating power lowers the cost on the environment and makes us less depending on oil and that’s a good thing.